Sly & the Family Stone were an American rock band from San Francisco, California. Active from 1967 until 1983, the band was pivotal in the development of soul, funk and psychedelia. Headed by singer, songwriter, record producer, and multi-instrumentalist Sly Stone, and containing a number of his family members and friends, the band was the first major American rock band to have a multicultural lineup, giving African-Americans, White Americans, males, and females all roles in the band's instrumentation. In the preface of his book on the band, For the Record: Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History, Joel Selvin sums up the importance of Sly & the Family Stone's influences on African-American music by stating that "there are two types of black music: black music before Sly Stone, and black music after Sly Stone". During the early 1970s, the band switched its sound to a grittier funk sound, which was as influential on the music industry as their earlier work. The band began to fall apart during this period because of drug abuse and ego clashes; as Sly Stone and his bandmates delved deeper into drug abuse, the fortunes and reliability of the band deteriorated, leading to its dissolution in 1975. Sly Stone continued to record albums and tour with a new rotating lineup under the "Sly & the Family Stone" name from 1975 until 1983. Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sly_%26_the_Family_Stone _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1861: With Italian unification almost complete, Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont, Savoy and Sardinia assumed the title King of Italy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Emmanuel_II_of_Italy) 1861: Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the first (and only) President of the Confederate States of America. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Davis) 1932: The Empire of Japan established Manchukuo, a puppet state in northeastern China during the Sino-Japanese War. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchukuo) 1943: Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister, delivered the Sportpalast speech to motivate the German people when the tide of World War II was turning against Germany. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech) 2003: An arsonist in Daegu, South Korea started a fire aboard a subway train, killing two hundred passengers. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daegu_subway_fire) _____________________ Wikiquote of the day: The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical. -- Nikos Kazantzakis |Year=2006}} (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nikos_Kazantzakis)