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Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorne. Sly Stone died about a month ago. He was 82 years old.

Sly, of course, founded and sang for the Funk and Rock and Roll Act Sly and the Family Stone,

one of the biggest and most consequential bands in the history of modern music.

If you know Sly for anything,

it's for hits like Thank You, Dance to the Music, Family Affair, and about 12 dozen more.

Between 1968 and 1973, Sly and the Family Stone went on a nearly unparalleled run. Then, the faucet started to shut off. He got a handful of other records in the late 1970s and early 1980s, stopped showing up to shows and eventually quit

performing altogether. He eventually faded from the public eye. After a brief reappearance and a Grammy performance in 2006, he eventually faded entirely from the public eye.

By 2011, blogs were reporting that Sly was living out of a van in Los Angeles.

What happened?

Was it drugs, mental illness?

Maybe just a need to have some peace and quiet?

Maybe some of those things may be all of them. Sly was a hard guy to reach and an even tougher

one to read. But when he passed last month, nobody talked about the dropped gigs and tabloid

stories. Instead, we listened to his music. We danced and cried and felt a little better.

Ricky Vincent is a music historian who has made a career out of studying funk music. He teaches at

UC Berkeley. In fact, when I was a teenager, I took his history of the funk class at San Francisco

State University. I got to meet George Clinton.

He came to our class. Ricky is also known as the O'Huru Maggot, the host of the History of the Funk on

...