Forever No. 1: Sly & the Family Stone’s ‘Family Affair’

Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor Sly Stone, who died on Monday (June 9) at age 82, by looking at the final of Sly & the Family Stone’s three Hot 100-toppers: the joyous but fractured “Family Affair.”

True to its name, Sly & the Family Stone had been the ultimate musical family affair. Of course, it literally comprised multiple siblings — Sly Stone (originally Sylvester Stewart) was of course the band’s brilliant leader and de facto frontman, while brother Freddie sang and played guitar, sister Rose sang and played keys, and sister Vet even occasionally filled in for Rose on tour. But it was the band’s familial spirit that originally sparked its jump-off-the-stereo brilliance, a palpable sense of shared love, excitement and unity. The on-record and on-stage product reflected the band’s real-life late-’60s closeness, as a Bay Area-based unit that happily did everything together: In 2025’s Questlove-helmed Sly Lives documentary, the group waxes nostalgic about how they’d all ride bikes together, watch movies together, even buy dogs together. “I think we spent more time together than we spent with our family members,” recalled trumpeter and singer Cynthia Robinson.

By 1971, the band was decidedly no longer doing everything together, and much of what they did was less than happy. As the band became superstars in 1969, and Sly Stone one of the leading voices and faces of popular music, internal pressures and tensions mounted, outside demands intensified both about their recorded output and their political positioning, and Sly began to retreat. He moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, self-medicated heavily with drugs, came late to gigs or no-showed altogether, and generally began to isolate himself from the rest of the group. The group’s final single of the ’60s, the double-A side “Thank You Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin”/”Everybody Is a Star,” had been a 1970 No. 1 hit, but already displayed a growing disillusionment with the skyrocketing success of the band’s Stand! and “Everyday People” days. It would be the previously prolific outfit’s final release for nearly two years.

When Sly & the Family Stone returned in late 1971, it was with “Family Affair,” an R&B gem that was at once of a piece with the celebratory pop-soul anthems the group had made his name with, and sounded like a different outfit altogether. Though the song still felt warm, soothing and hooky as hell, the group’s earlier spirit of triumph, jubilation, defiance, energy and above all, togetherness, had largely disappeared. Even “Thank You,” for all its creeping darkness, still felt like the band was all in the fight together; by “Family Affair,” they barely sounded like a band at all.

In fact, the most bitterly ironic thing about “Family Affair” — which served as the lead single from that November’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On LP — is that Sly is the only member of the Family Stone to actually play on it. (Probably, anyway; the Riot sessions were so messy and hazy that no one seems 100% positive of exactly who did what.) Rose does sing the song’s iconic chorus, but instrumentally, the song is nearly all Sly, with additional electric piano by star keyboardist Billy Preston and some guitar croaks from rising soul hitmaker Bobby Womack. The Family Stone’s leader most likely provided the rest, including all the verse vocals, bass and additional guitar.

The final instrument played by Stone on the track was the newest and perhaps most important to the musical direction of “Affair” and Riot in general: the Maestro Rhythm King MRK–2. Drummer Greg Errico had gotten fed up with the discord within the group and left earlier in ’71 midway through the Riot recording; rather than immediately replace him with a new stickman, Stone decided to fill out the remaining tracks with the rudimentary early drum machine and its genre presets. But he allowed the machine to work for his purposes by essentially slotting its canned bossa nova rhythm askew within the song’s groove — like J Dilla might have done decades later — giving the liquid-funk shuffle of “Family Affair” a little extra slipperiness. Even Errico, with every reason in the word to take offense at essentially being replaced by an underqualified robot, had to give it up to the bandleader for his innovation: “[He] took the rhythm that [the machine] was producing and turned it inside out,” the drummer raved in Sly Lives! “It made it, ‘Oh, that’s interesting now.’ And he actually crated an iconic thing with it. It became a game-changer again.” 

Sly & the Family Stone, Forever No. 1: “Everyday People” (1969) / “Thank You Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin” (1970)

The song’s untraditional groove was matched by a near-unrecognizable Sly Stone vocal that almost felt like just another instrumental texture. Previous records had featured his clear vocal piercing through his productions with shout-along sentiments, or as one voice among many in delivering strength-in-numbers statements. This was new: a heavily filtered Stone seemingly singing from a remote corner of the studio, feeling more like a disembodied narrator than a leading man. What’s more, his singing register had dropped, as if he’d aged multiple decades (or gone through a second puberty) in between Stand! and Riot, with the result landing Stone somewhere between crooning and sing-speaking.

The vocals were jarring, but so were the lyrics. In 1969, a “Family Affair” would be an occasion for joy and revelry, but by 1971, it was a little more complicated — and the family portrait painted by Stone was of a largely dysfunctional unit, with siblings who head in different directions, newlyweds with maybe-straying eyes, and fraught emotions running high all around. “You can’t leave ’cause your heart is there/ But, sure, you can’t stay ’cause you been somewhere else,” Stone sings of his own conflicted feelings in the song’s most revealing passage. “You can’t cry ’cause you’ll look broke down/ But you’re cryin’ anyway ’cause you’re all broke down.”

But downers don’t usually become No. 1 hits — and indeed, despite the heavy dynamics of this “Family Affair,” the ultimate feeling is still more one of welcoming than of alienation. Partly, that’s because of the gleeful boogie Preston’s plush keys and Sly’s aqueous guitars do around the song’s rain-slicked beat, and largely, that’s because Rose’s “It’s a family affaaiiiiii-iiiiirrrr…” callouts — the first vocals of any kind you hear in the song — are so comforting and inviting that it can’t help but rub off on the rest of the song. But it’s also because, even with Sly’s clearly mixed feelings about his own place within the family, he still feels audibly connected to it; it’s a complex relationship, but still a loving one at heart. “Blood’s thicker than the mud,” he proclaims early in the song, and despite everything, he sounds like he means it.

Unfortunately, the Family Stone had already begun to splinter. Errico was the first out the door, the next year, bassist Larry Graham followed. As the band began to lose its center and as Sly’s productivity and reliability both stalled, so did its commercial success: the long-awaited There’s a Riot Goin’ On topped the Billboard 200 and is hailed today as a classic (despite drawing mixed reviews at the time for its murky production and disjointed jams), but “Family Affair” was its only single to even reach the Hot 100’s top 20. Fresh, released in 1973, saw the band returning to greater accessibility, and kept up its streak of classic lead singles with the slithering “If You Want Me to Stay.” But even that song missed the top 10, and as acolytes like the Ohio Players and Parliament-Funkadelic had replaced the band at funk’s forefront, the Family Stone’s relevance continued to slide until officially splitting in 1975.

Considering Sly Stone was just 32 when the Family Stone dissolved for the first time, it feels both deeply sad and highly improbable that his career never really found a proper second act. But Sly’s subsequent attempts throughout the late ’70s and ’80s to launch a solo career or revive the Family Stone with a new lineup largely fell on deaf ears; even a seemingly world-stopping (or at least potentially career-re-sparking) collaborative endeavor alongside P-Funk leader George Clinton fell into disarray and resulted in an album that was mostly dismissed critically and commercially. Drug abuse continued to take its toll on an increasingly reclusive Sly, and despite sporadic reappearances over the last four decades, a true comeback was never really in the cards for the music legend.

But even if his own presence was minimal over the past half-century, the impact of Sly Stone’s music remained seismic. Outside of setting the early standard for what would become funk’s golden age in the early ’70s, the Family Stone’s catalog remained one of the most well-mined sample sources across the ’80s and ’90s for N.W.A, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, Beck, Janet Jackson and countless other game-changing acts. And that impact certainly endured into the 21st century: In the first couple years of the ’00s alone, D’Angelo released the massively acclaimed and heavily Riot-inspired Voodoo, while OutKast referenced that album’s bullet-ridden American flag imagery on the cover to their universally beloved Stankonia, and Mary J. Blige had a Hot 100 No. 1 with a “Family Affair” of her own. As messy as things could ever get with Sly Stone or his legacy, the blood would always remain thicker than the mud.