June 11th
Wednesday, halfway into June. Sly Stone is dead, but hate is still alive.
I didn’t know the difference... at least not then. It was 1972 and I had just turned six. All I wanted was to be on Soul Train and grow an afro.
Even at that age, I knew Black folks were different from me, but I hadn’t learned to hate them yet. I had the advantage of innocence. I knew Bill Withers, Al Green, Lou Rawls, and Curtis Mayfield. Their voices poured out of the television in my parents’ frunchroom. Where a chubby white kid like me turned the carpet into a SoulTrain dance floor.
I didn’t realize then that the teens that I was copying on TV weren’t allowed to drink from the same fountains as me and I wasn't allowed to dance on their television show. I just thought if I nailed the dance line on Saturday, maybe we’d all just be… ordinary people.
The man passed this week, but the hate didn’t. It is still clinging to corners, fed on fear, thriving in echo chambers. I still can’t grow an afro, but I can still glide like a 747 when the beat hits just right.
Sly and the Family Stone didn’t just play music...
...they were the message.
Black, white, male, female, all in the same band. They smiled at each other. They had the funk. I still believe that if more of us had the funk, there’d be a lot less hate.
I’d go back to 1972 in a heartbeat, if all that divided us was a hair comb.
I’ll never know what it was like to be Sylvester Stewart and he will never know what it was like to be John Shepley.
Don’t call me Jumbo.... Sly Stone.
Don’t call me Sly Stone.... Jumbo.
If you know the words, you know the message to that last impersonation.
Like my old man told me right after punching me in the mouth for saying the N-word when I was fifteen.....
“Get it through your thick fucking head, son. Eventually, we will all be together in eternal fucking love. Not eternal fucking hate. ...and don’t ever let me hear you say that word again.”
He never did.
I never got Don Cornelius to make me the first chubby white eight-year-old to dance on his stage. But here I am, still dancing. Still promoting JumboLove.....
Rest in funk, Sly. We will still keep moving to the music without you...
...and if we keep our hearts clean, maybe, just maybe... we will all funk out together in heaven someday.
June 12th
Brian Wilson died yesterday. Sly Stone just a few days before him. Two giants from the soundtrack of the '60s and '70s.... now silent. Both battled their demons; drugs, depression, the heavy cloak of genius and somehow, both lived to 82.
That, in itself, is a miracle.
I think about that song, "God Only Knows." People say it is a love song. Maybe it is, but for me, it's always been a message about life.
God only knows what I’d be without the choices I made.
Never had George, Fritz, and Hazel?
What if I never walked onto the Board of Trade floor nearly 40 years ago?
What if I’d gone another way... become a teacher, a mechanic, or some columnist writing a daily piece for the Chicago Tribune?
What if I married that girl from the late '80s, early '90s? The one I daydreamed with about having kids named Iggy, Augie, Maggie, and Aggie… and a mutt named Ziggy?
What a noisy, happy house that would've been. But I didn’t. I married someone else and I got the ShepKids that I was meant to get.
And despite everything....
....thank God I did.
That’s the thing. God only knows and I don’t want to know.
All the paths we didn’t take?
The lives we didn’t live?
God only knows...
And like Hugh Grant said in Love Actually, when the world feels bleak, I try to remember the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. Love, in all its mess and awkwardness, is still all around. Parents, kids, old friends, broken hearts. It’s there. Quiet and enduring.
When the planes hit the towers, no one called to say they hated anyone. They called to say “I love you.”
So yeah, the music fades, the legends die, and the years pile up.
But the love, the real love... it doesn’t vanish.
God only knows what I’d be without a life without love?
Without many of you?
God only knows what I'd be like if I put ketchup on my hotdog. (spoiler: it would not be pretty.)
2025 will be our first summer without Sly and Brian. God only knows what we would have done without hot fun in the summertime and California girls.
Be true to your school and be astonished by what you already know.
