Frederick Forsyth and Sly Stone, RIP

Obituaries for the creators of "The Day of the Jackal" and "Dance to the Music."

Best known for The Day of the Jackal, British journalist-turned-novelist Frederick Forsyth, who has died at age 86, also wrote the bestselling novel The Dogs of War. In it, European mercenaries spend the first 380 pages engaging in lavishly detailed logistical planning of how to obtain the guns needed to overthrow a badly ruled West African country modeled on Equatorial Guinea to provide a national homeland for the Nigerian Igbos, the losers in the brutal Biafran secession of 1967-1970. Then, the last 20 pages of the book consist of sketchily written bang-bang-boom-boom about the coup.

It’s a weird balance for a bestselling action thriller, since 95% of the pages consist of highly realistic non-action about how to forge a bill of lading for a weapons consignment and the like. It’s almost as if Forsyth had lived the first 380 pages, but not the last 20 pages.

Later on, a story emerged that Forsyth really had tried to organize the overthrow of Equatorial Guinea to provide his Igbo friends with a country, but had never gotten to the point of pulling the trigger. So, he used his experience to write his novel.

Currently, the story appears to be that Forsyth just pretended to be organizing a coup in order to research his novel. But that might just be a cover story to keep Forsyth out of legal and diplomatic trouble. You aren’t suppose to try to overthrow sovereign states.

Maybe Forsyth gave his lawyer a copy of the final story behind The Dogs of War for release after his death?

I’d also recommend Forsyth’s 1982 book of short stories, No Comebacks. At least six of the ten stories have sensational plot twists, typically about not particularly formidable-seeming middle-aged men outsmarting their foes. My father enjoyed it tremendously. We read Forsyth’s “The Emperor” about a tourist going marlin fishing in Mauritius the night before we went marlin fishing in Cabo San Lucas in 1985:

In other news, Sly Stone, leader of Sly & the Family Stone, has died at 82.

I wrote a long, partly paywalled Substack post in March responding to a woozy Washington Post article comparing documentaries about Stone and Led Zeppelin:

Sly & the Family Stone vs. Led Zeppelin

The Washington Post celebrates black genius while lamenting the ease of creating white generational wealth.

Here are excerpts from before and after the paywall focusing more on Sly than on Zep or on the African-American Studies professor’s racist resentment.

The first ever Top 40 singles I bought myself in 1969-1970 included Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl,” The Beatles “Hey Jude / Revolution,” Sly & the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) backed with “Everyday People,”

Gary in Gramercy responded in the comments:

Steve: You may have misremembered the Sly & the Family Stone single you bought in either late 1969 or early 1970. (I bought it then, and I'm a few years younger than you.) The B-side was "Everybody is a Star," not "Everyday People," which came out in 1968 and was Sly's first number one single. "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" was the second; 1971's "Family Affair" was the third and last #1.

Back to my March Substack:

(Granted, “Everyday People” is kind of childish, but I was age 10)

and, if I recall correctly, Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.”

Lately, there are documentaries out about Led Zeppelin and Sly Stone, which I haven’t seen:

… The movie about Sly Stone by Questlove devotes attention both to his spectacular rise and then to his decades in the wilderness after he ruined his short but brilliant career with drugs and subsequently squandered countless attempts by his many admirers to help him out.

In a Washington Post review of the two documentaries, a black studies professor expresses comic heapings of anti-white animus and black ethnonarcissism. Like I’ve been saying, in the front of the newspaper, the Racial Reckoning has been memoryholed for being bad for the Democrats, but in the back of the paper, nobody seems to have gotten through to the culture writers that it’s not June 2020 anymore and racist anti-white hate isn’t the fashion of the hour.

… Or, less ethnonarcistically, Stone couldn’t withstand cocaine, which is, I am informed, a helluva drug. (Happily, it appears that Stone finally got sober in 2019 and is now enjoying a normal old age, but way too late to make music.)

… But, unlike with Sly Stone, with Zeppelin there’s little sense of them self-destructing before they had their say. Their body of work is obviously among the most formidable of the second half of the 20th Century. …

Artists aren’t timeless, they are very much the product of their times, as the entire field of art history exists to demonstrate. And young popular musicians are less timeless than any. And the pop musicians of 1965-1969 seem perhaps the least timeless of all artists because their time is so famous. …

But Sly Stone burning out after just three years and spending the next half century as a derelict is a tragedy. Give him five more years at the top of his game and Stone might have established his genre of black & white funk-rock as an enduring tradition the way that Led Zeppelin, in their decade, made metal a massive feature of the musical landscape that continues to this day.

Stone is said to have sold approaching ten million records, which is a lot. But Zeppelin sold at least 20 times that number. Hence, the what-might-have-been question comes up a lot more when you think about Stone than about Zeppelin…

Ehhhh … more than a few white musicians have messed up their careers about as quickly as Sly Stone. For example, Donovan’s years at the top were about the same length as Stone’s, although the post-stardom Donovan has been less of a public spectacle.

… Likewise, the upwardly mobile Sly Stone, whose parents were from Jim Crow Texas, grew up middle class in highly diverse Vallejo in Northern California. He was recognized as a musical prodigy by age seven. In high school, he sang in a doo-wop band that was all white except for him and a Filipino friend. He quickly found employment in the radio and music business in the San Francisco Bay area, working with both whites and blacks during the Grateful Dead-Jefferson Airplane hippie era.

Stone’s music clearly benefited from being exposed to a famously creative white culture at its Summer of Love peak. …

Stone and Page, who were born a year apart during WWII (yet more extremely loud members of the so-called Silent Generation), enjoyed about as similar of an early trajectory as you can expect of guys of different races living 6,000 miles. …

Look, I understand that it’s embarrassing for a black supremacist that a lot of great 20th Century popular black musicians screwed up like Sly did. But so did lots of white popular musicians: e.g., Charlie Parker (dead at 35) vs. Bix Beiderbecke (dead at 28); Prince vs. Tom Petty (both enjoyed long careers but died somewhat prematurely around the same age of roughly the same drug); Sly Stone vs. Donovan (both are still alive, but neither has had a hit in almost 55 years).

Sure, blacks tend to screw up more than whites, but black pop musicians tend to be credits to their race while white pop musicians tend to be the blacker whites. (Granted, some musicians survive a long time through simple superiority of genes. Perhaps some of my younger readers will live long enough to be informed of a headline via NeuralLink: “With the passing of Sister Juanita Benitez, a Carmelite nun who has died at age 119, the title of World’s Oldest Human passes to Keith Richards.”)

… The funny thing is that the Washintgon Post reviewer’s wish that Sly Lives! had been focused only on the happy upward part of Stone’s career like Becoming Led Zeppelin is focused on good times, not bad times is not an unreasonable one — after all, we are interested in Zeppelin and Stone not because they messed themselves up with drugs and alcohol (quickly in Stone’s case, more slowly in Zeppelin’s), but because they initially made themselves into remarkably innovative musicians. We’ve all seen Behind the Music documentaries about bands screwing up.

Gary in Gramercy goes on:

Sly Stone was prodigiously talented -- he could sing, write songs, lead a hot band, play virtually any instrument and operate a recording studio. Sort of like Prince, except that Prince was also a virtuoso guitarist and could write perfect pop songs for other artists. He was a unique talent, combining Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix and Sly with the songwriting chops of the great Motown hit factories, like Holland/Dozier/Holland, Norman Whitfield/Barrett Strong or Smokey Robinson.

The new documentaries aside, why would anyone juxtapose Sly Stone and Led Zeppelin? A better comparable for Sly is the other great rock act to come out of the Bay Area in the late '60's: Creedence. Each was tremendously successful for a few years before the wheels fell off. For Creedence, it wasn't drugs, but a combination of an insane work schedule (six studio albums in three years, 1968-70) and infighting generated by the disparity of talent between John Fogerty, the band's singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer, and the other three members.