Music Features

Ben Fong-Torres was one of Rolling Stone’s first star writers, interviewing iconic subjects like Bob Dylan, Ike and Tina Turner, Linda Ronstadt, Marvin Gaye, and more. His first cover story was in May 1969, on Joni Mitchell. “For whatever reason, my byline was dropped,” he says. “I can’t exactly say …

It was just about 10 years ago when singer-songwriter Ryan Humbert had an epiphany, one where he realized what he was doing musically wasn’t exactly where his heart and soul wanted to be. “When we started this band it was literally like a bolt of lightning shot through my body,” …

In the wake of Sly Stone’s death at age 82, Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid made the case for why Sly and the Family Stone deserve a place at the top of the canon of American bands. Here it is, in his own words. I would make the argument that …

Thank you for the party, but Sly could never stay. Sly Stone was always the ultimate mystery man of American music, a visionary genius who transformed the world with some of the most innovative sounds of the Sixties and Seventies. With Sly and the Family Stone, he fused funk, soul, …

Public Enemy‘s Chuck D grew up listening to the music of Sly Stone, who died Monday at age 82 — and that music became a major influence on his own work with Public Enemy and beyond. He reflected on that legacy in a new interview with Rolling Stone. I’m a …

In the lobby of a Manhattan hotel, I’m waiting with Clipse’s publicist to be let upstairs to talk to the Virginia duo. Surprisingly, Pusha T walks up on us, wearing all black. He’s in a chipper mood, talking to us about the rollout for Let God Sort Em Out, the …

Sly and the Family Stone didn’t have an easy task in front of them when they stepped onstage at Woodstock. It was 3:30 AM, several hours past their scheduled start time, the grounds were soaked and muddy after a pissing rainstorm earlier in the day, and they were terrified to …

This story was originally published in the November 11, 1971 issue of Rolling Stone. The moment I stepped into Sly Stone’s room at the New York Hilton, the expression “holed up” sprang to mind. The room had the stagnant, stock-piled look of a fugitive’s hideout. It was the middle of …

I t was the kind of tragedy that happens all too often in a city of more than 8 million: a body found, beaten and bloodied, in the back of an ambulette in a far-flung corner of the Bronx. Skeletal branches created a cathedral over the lonely vehicle where the …

When one of his eyes doesn’t feel as if it’s wobbling up and down, or he doesn’t feel so depleted that he has to nap, Matthew Sweet still has moments of hope. Until last fall, one of the downstairs rooms in his Omaha, Nebraska, home was his music room, filled …