Altitude sickness
The high times and crashing lows of psychedelic pioneer Sylvester Stewart.
By Danny Eccleston.
Living the high life: there’s a fatalism about Sly Stone’s memoir.
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Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir
★★★★
Sly Stone with Ben Greenman
WHITE RABBIT/AUWA BOOKS. £25
SETTING THE tone for what’s to come, even the Prologue of this book is hairraising. Sly Stone is talking about the first, second, third and fourth time he tried to quit crack cocaine. Hospitalised, barely able to walk or even breathe, he has been warned by doctors that, “If you go home and smoke again, you could die.” Perhaps, you think, this event is in the middle-distance – maybe the ’80s, when crack devastated America’s R&B community, but no, this was 2019. The crackgorging Sly Stone would have been 76 or 77.