Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Brian Wilson and Sly Stone were two titans of the music world. Stone and Wilson both emerged in the 1960s in California-based family bands that went on to shape the future of popular music. The Beach Boys introduced innovative recording techniques to the world of rock and roll and music that incorporated class, classical and jazz influences throughout. Intricate vocal harmonies like on this song.

[MUSIC- The Beach Boys: God Only Knows]

Alison Stewart: Sly and the Family Stone blended rock, funk and soul in organic ways. Its membership was radical, interracial and mixed gender at a time when either one was unique. Their songs expressed optimistic themes about brotherhood while also tackling serious racial issues in the latter parts of the civil rights era. Here's one song.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Following career highs and decades of chart topping albums, Stone and Wilson both struggled with addiction and mental health issues later in their lives. Wilson and Stone died this week, both at the age of 82. I'm joined now by Alan Light, a music journalist at Esquire, to celebrate their music. Hi Alan.

Alan Light: Hi, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Anybody? Everybody, we want to hear from you. Tell us your favorite Beach Boys song, your favorite Sly and the Family Stone song. What did their music mean to you? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Brian Wilson, born in 1942. Sly Stone, born in 1943. Both grew up mostly in California. Stone, originally from Texas, went to California. Tell us a little bit about the music world they each grew up in and how they found their way into music.

Alan Light: Well, I think first of all, everything that you just noted in introducing these two characters is so astonishing that within a couple of days, these two guys passed. These truly brilliant, truly tortured, both at the Same age of 82, both so California-identified. Both identified with these family bands. It's unbelievable all of the parallels, very different musicians, but all the parallels between these careers that came to this end essentially at the same time. The family element is a huge piece of what both of these figures came from.

For Brian Wilson, obviously the Beach Boys became him. Two of his brothers, a cousin, trained very much at the feet of their father, their very ambitious and frustrated musician father, creating harmonies and sounds and realizing this genius that Brian had for hearing incredible melodies and incredible sonic concoctions that he alone was able to pursue. Sly Stone, initially coming out of a family gospel group, and how much again, those harmonies, the relationship between those voices, the relationship between those sounds, continued to inform everything that he did. Even as he continued to expand and extend into all of these different styles that he was bringing together.

The influence of these guys is immeasurable. Paul McCartney says, "No Beach Boys, no Sgt. Peppers." He has always said, "No, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band without Pet Sounds." Whole schools of indie rock. We see this week, people from Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, everybody talking about these melodies that Brian wrote. For Sly, what happened to the music of Stevie Wonder, to the music of Miles Davis? There's still Prince, but a very different Prince. [crosstalk] Sly and the Family Stone. There's still d'Angelo, but a very different d'Angelo. All of the samples-- It's so many directions that these guys leave an impact that it's really breathtaking.

Alison Stewart: If you had to be able to describe the genius of each one, what was the genius of Brian Wilson? What was the genius of Sly Stone?

Alan Light: I think in both cases, it really comes down to this idea of synthesis, in different ways. I think, for Sly, it was really bringing these different musics together. That it was rock and pop and soul and funk, and the funk that he invented and bringing in electronic rhythm machines, shifting the way that rhythm and the rhythm section operated even within R'n'B. It's all of the stuff that he is drawing from and bringing into this music. For Brian Wilson, it's a little bit more insular because he wrote these incredible melodies. Everybody talks about the pure- how he put notes together.

Beyond that, what he did in the studio, that he was able to take these sounds in his head and find the orchestrations and the arrangements and the sound that brought them to life. When you see some of the footage of him that exists in the studio, putting the Pet Sounds record together, putting Good Vibrations together. Nobody was making these songs that had these different parts and elements that were almost these orchestral suites that were using oboes and strings and rock bass, and harmony group singing. It was bringing to life and realizing these sounds that we'd never heard before. For both of them, it was the way that they were combining these elements, even if they were different things they were working with.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Justin, who's calling in from Brooklyn. Hey, Justin, thanks for making the Time to call. All Of It. You're on the air.

Justin: Hey, Alison. Hey, Alan. Great to be here with you. I'm a huge, huge fan of both these artists, but especially Sly. I wanted to talk about There's a Riot Goin' On and how not only influential and important of an album it is, but how it represented such a shift in tone. Not only for Sly, but I feel like for pop music in general. The layering, how complex it was, and the heaviness of the subject matter. Sly was able to take something that was so beautiful and so blissed out, yet sad at the same time. It's an album that I still turn to time and again. I've been listening to it quite a bit over these past few days.

Alan Light: You're absolutely right, Justin. The way that album holds up in a modern world is unbelievable. It's another thing that's amazing with both of these guys. There's a very clear break within their careers. If they only did the first thing, if the Beach Boys had only done the surf music, that's a Hall of Fame career on its own. I mean, they created this mythology and vision and sound and image of California, took that out to the world in a way that changed everything. Similarly, for Sly and the Family Stone, the early stuff you played Everyday People, Everybody is a Star, I Want to Take You Higher' at Woodstock.

The optimism, the mixing race and gender, and all the stuff that they display. Then both of them take this darker, more interior turn. For Brian, he says, "I'm not touring anymore. I'm going in the studio." He makes Pet Sounds. Nobody cares about Pet Sounds, but it turns out to be recognized as one of the greatest and most influential records of all time. For Sly, it isn't about this big, explosive band thing. It's what Justin is talking about. There's a Riot Goin' On becomes much darker, more serious, more interior. Then they do some of the greatest work of all time in that next chapter. It's really amazing that even if it's just the one piece that's already historic, and then they go on to do something arguably even greater.

Alison Stewart: Brian Wilson and Sly Stone, two music titans who passed away this week, both at the age of 82. We're discussing their impact. Call in or text us. Join the conversation. Tell us what their music means to you or your favorite song from either one. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. My guest is Esquire music writer Alan Light. Let's go way back. Let's go back to when they were in high school. For Wilson, he joined the Beach Boys. They were called, I think, the Pendletons at first. Then for Stone, he was part of the Biscaynes, a doo wop group. I'm going to play a little bit on each side-by-side. This is the Viscaynes with A Long Time Alone. Let's listen.

[MUSIC- The Viscanynes: A Long Time Alone]

Alison Stewart: Then we play a little Surfer Girl.

[MUSIC- The Beach Boys: Surfer Girl]

Alison Stewart: All right. We heard the similarities between the two.

Alan Light: Just a little bit.

Alison Stewart: Just a little bit. Where did Wilson and Stone's influences differ?

Alan Light: Well, I think with both of these guys, and really when you talk about almost anybody at this altitude, when you talk about a Bob Dylan, when you talk about a Bruce Springsteen, when you talk about these guys, talk about James Brown. They're such scholars of the music that precedes them. I mean, for Brian Wilson, the way that he would talk about George Gershwin, he made an All-Gershwin record late in his career. The Four Freshmen were his idols, coming up for those harmonies that they sang. The ability to identify which are the things out of that that work for me.

What do I do with the models that have been set? With Sly, it was coming out of this gospel tradition. It was coming also out of a doo wop thing. All of his study of pop music, where he became a DJ in San Francisco.

Alison Stewart: That's right.

Alan Light: Playing not on an R'nB, on a pop station. Mixing, playing, white pop records, R'n'B records, surf records. Starting to produce for rock bands in San Francisco. These are not people who were thinking in terms of of narrow category. You hear that. I was listening to one of the later-- I think it was on Small Talk, one of the late Sly records where there's a straight up doo wop song.

Alison Stewart: Really?

Alan Light: That he cuts on there. That's never gone. Those relationship of voices we hear when he does I Want To Take You Higher' and introduces each of the instruments, and they play, and they each sing, and you hear each of the voices. Well, that's from harmony groups and from doo wop groups. that's. Those things stay in there. As you go on to innovate, you're taking all that stuff forward. You're not ditching it as you as you move ahead.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Karen, who's calling in from Gowanus. Hey, Karen, thanks for calling All Of It.

Karen: Hi, Alison. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Karen: I wanted. I wanted to tell a story about the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson. They were my first concert when I was three years old in 1980, and I grew up in Southern California, so I saw them at the Ventura County Fair with my family and neighbors. Aproposed to your last segment, my dad likes to tell this story. That concert is where I got my personality. It was the first time that I was dancing and really came alive. The Beach Boys have always been really special, and I've been fortunate to see them probably four or five times in my life, including in the '80s at Dodger Stadium. Really sad this time.

Alison Stewart: Oh, thanks for calling in.

Alan Light: Listen, seeing the Beach Boys in Southern California is-- What do you say? That's as close to the source as you can get. That's full saturation.

Alison Stewart: Well, when you think about their fan bases, who are the people who were listening to the Beach Boys, and who were the people who were listening to the Family Stone? Did they cross over?

Alan Light: Well, I think they did cross. I think the timing is a little funny because the Beach Boys, the golden era of the Beach Boys, slightly precedes the emergence of the Family Stone. The Beach Boys are so Southern California identified, and the Family Stone were so Northern California identified. Look, there's a lot of intermixing. If you look at the charts in 1967 and you see, again, rock groups and psychedelic groups and emerging harder rock groups and Motown, and all of these things are coexisting. Always, The Beach Boys pointed to-- They were offered, and they did not take the offer. to play the Monterey Pop Festival, which was really the first big new model festival that leads the way to Woodstock and always lamented.

That could have been the thing that would have kept us cool. By not doing that, it identified us with the old guard and not the new guard moving forward. By the time you hit Woodstock and you hit Sly Pinnacle, the Beach Boys are old news at that point and a little bit retrogressive. The reality is, the Beach Boys continue to exist in the consciousness and in the culture beyond that moment. There's obviously a lot of interplay. Let's not ignore. We haven't really said. Brian Wilson and Sly Stone. These are American tragedies.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Alan Light: The music is forever, and the music did all the things that it did. These were deeply, deeply troubled individuals who really paid a cost for the success and the visibility and the prominence and the expectations and the pressures. In different ways, it broke them. They're, in some ways, both stories-- It's not fair to say unfulfilled promise, because once you've changed the world of music, by the time you're 30, what have you not fulfilled? Both had that sense of thinking, in a different universe, in a different climate, given different opportunities where they could have continued to take this music.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Both Wilson and Stone suffered with substance abuse and addiction, mental health problems later in their lives. How did it show up in the music they were making?

Alan Light: Well, I think it's this insularity, which is a great positive and a great negative. The ability to completely go inside yourself and create this stuff that only you can hear in your head and nobody else can really understand or translate. That's an incredible thing to achieve, but also an impossible thing to live with. For Brian Wilson, it was these stories of he put his piano in a sandbox in his living room so that he could feel the sand when he was composing and find that inspiration. For Sly, we had a caller mention There's a Riot Goin' On, which basically he closed himself in a room in a mansion in LA and created that record and that sound that nobody had heard by himself, and turned that over.

The sense of that completely unparalleled vision and dream results in incredible work, but also results in, how do you go and walk around and live in the world with that? For both of them, you hear them hit a wall. Brian gets a little bit of a second chapter. In the late '80s, he does return, he makes the Love and Mercy album. There's the I Just Wasn't Made for These Times documentary. Pet Sounds, which had disappeared, is reintroduced to the world. The Smile record that he had scrapped, walked away from, had a breakdown, and never finished. That was supposed to be his masterpiece.

He does finish as a solo project in the early 2000s. Though it was fragile, he was able to get back out there, was able to tour, was able to see some of those projects through. Sly, at a certain point, is gone. There are these occasional moments. They did that Grammy tribute to Sly. Apparently- I was having this conversation with somebody who was there. The rehearsals were great. He was really into it. He was excited to be there. The show came. He was not feeling it. He came on set for 30 seconds and walked off. All of that reinforced this sense of, "Sly's not present." Now, happily, before he was gone, his memoir came out.

Alison Stewart: The documentary came.

Alan Light: A few months ago. The documentary that Questlove made came out. He was able to at least see telling his story in those ways, or seeing his stories told with that appreciation happen right at the end. Good for that. There's also, everything that was in between that really was lost decades.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Marianne. Hey, Marianne, thanks for calling, All Of It.

Marianne: Hi. This is so great, this, this piece. I was 15 years old, 1969, Madison Square Garden, and I'm going to see Sly and the Family Stone. it was like, I don't know if they were their most popular, but it was. I knew every song. I was crazy about Sly and the Family Stone. Then the opening act was Richard Pryor. Richard Pryor was-- I don't think I knew who he was. He had the entire Madison Square Garden in tears, laughing before Sly and the Family Stone came out. That was a very memorable time. I absolutely loved music.

I did wonder over the years. Every time-- I still have a CD of theirs, and every time I play it, it's like the same feeling. I always wondered what happened. Now, understanding a little better what did happen with him. As a parallel thing, I also liked the Beach Boys, but my sister, who was 3 years older than me. When she was 14, we lived in the Bronx, she took the bus to Fordham University and got to see the Beach Boys. At a gymnasium at Fordham University. It's so funny that you could have done that. You see them in that context.

Alan Light: Seeing both of those bands, that's at their peak, if we're talking about mid-'60s Beach Boys and 1969 Sly and the Family Stone. You can't do much better. Let it be said, the Beach Boys continued to tour after Brian, and then when Brian came back. If you go back and look, there's the famous film, The Tammy Show, that was the documentary with early big rock and roll all-star show that was put together in LA with all these amazing acts. That's footage of the early Beach Boys playing. They were a great live band early on.

That's a fantastic document of that. Sly, in 1969, that's when he played the Harlem Cultural Festival. That was in the Summer Of Soul film from Questlove, and then a couple of weeks later, plays at Woodstock and steals it from virtually everybody. I mean, when the Woodstock movie comes out, Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner and Sly's performance really are the things that took that into the stratosphere.

Alison Stewart: You have seen an outpouring of praise from Bob Dylan to Questlove. Chuck D, Kiss front man Paul Stanley have all written about these two gentlemen. When we're listening to the radio, to songs, who should be saying thank you to Brian Wilson and to Sly Stone?

Alan Light: It's hard to say. It's hard to separate out who should not, one way or another, be saying thank you, because that impact is so intense. What the hip hop samples have meant to Sly's career. That whole phase. What the Beastie Boys did with that sample on Paul's Boutique. Again, what artists like d' Angelo and Maxwell and those guys. The neo soul thing that came so much out of Sly. Again, what he meant to Prince and then what that meant to everybody who follows that. Sure, there's stuff that is in a direct line. As you said, from Bob Dylan to Sting, we're hearing the Brian Wilson tributes, showing that you could make records that way.

Showing that you could use the studio and as an extension of a rock band, is something that transforms. There's music before those Beach Boys. There's music before something like Good Vibrations, and there's music after.

Alison Stewart: Alan Light is Esquire's music writer. Thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Alan Light: Thank you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: I'm running-- I'm doing roulette. I'm going to go out on It's a Family Affair. That's what we're going to go out on.

Alan Light: It was a number one hit. Nothing wrong with that choice.

[MUSIC - Sly and The Family Stone: It's a Family Affair]

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It. All Of It is produced by Andrea D, Duncan Mao, Kate Hines, Jordan Loft, Simon Close, El Malik Anderson and Luke Green. Megan Ryan is the head of Live Radio. Our engineers are Juliana Fonda, Matt Mirando and Irene Trudell. Our interns this season are Francesca Bazzi and Sam Schmia. Luscious Jackson does our music. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you. I'll meet you back here next time.