In 2019, Sly Stone’s doctors presented him with a stark ultimatum. An addiction to crack that stretched back decades had ravaged his body, potentially to the point of no return. “They told me that if I kept smoking, I would ruin my lungs or I might die,” he says today.
In fairness, this couldn’t have come as news. It was, he says, the fourth time in recent years he had been taken to hospital in an ambulance, suffering from breathing difficulties: the most recent had occurred a mere two weeks prior to his meeting with the doctors. On each previous occasion, a doctor had presented him with the same ultimatum, which Stone had declined to believe, discharging himself from the hospital against their orders, going home and calling one of his many dealers, even if it took him an hour to struggle from his room to the hospital car park. After all, he was the legendary Sly Stone, and at least part of his legend rested on his disinclination to do anything he didn’t want to do.
