Sly Stone:
Pisces Pied Piper of Funk

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Legendary funk artist Sly Stone recently filed a lawsuit against his former manager Jerry Goldstein for “fraud, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and conversion for diverting, converting and misappropriating” his royalties and assets for over 20 years. Goldstein swindled Sly using a myriad of redundant companies and collaborators to defraud him of tens of millions of dollars. In fact, in an act of musical colonialism, Goldstein even legally expropriated the name, “Sly and the Family Stone” and has been borrowing money against Stone’s future royalties, reducing the artist to pauperism. In short, It looks like Sly got royally screwed by the proverbial shyster music producer.

Wherever Pisces is present, there’s always a danger that art will spill over into artifice, and that’s an invitation for avarice. Pisces people are experts in the art of illusion, and they also run the risk of ultimately taking the fall when the bubble bursts, and reality strikes. The illusion can be so strong and compelling that Pisces can fall under their own spells, and thus provide fresh meat to the predatory elements prowling around them.

Sly Stone had a meteoric career, the gravelly voice of an explosive, militant, multi-racial generation of young hipsters who would have followed him into revolution had he lifted his finger. But he did not give that or any other direction, instead recoiling from the monster he had created with his soul-stirring exhortations and sliding into a drug-induced nether world of self indulgence and self-negation.

Sly started out as a radio DJ in Berkeley, California, and decided that he and his family could make better music that what he was playing. By 1969, Sly and the Family Stone, his sibling-based band, was rocketing to fame around Dance to the Music, Stand! and Everyday People. His appearances were sellouts and often led to riotous crowds attacking police after the concerts ended in street battles.

By 1975, however, Sly’s cocaine habit made his behavior so erratic that concert organizers gave up on booking him. Now, crowds rioted because of cancellations or delays, making Sly a pariah in the business. His avid followers eventually moved on, and his band followed, leaving Sly poverty stricken and physically sick. He limped through the 80s with sporadic appearances but never regained the audiences or the impact he had on popular music.

Sly is a Pisces by less than one degree; he exhibits an extreme version of his sign. Yet he is also blessed by the most beneficial of aspects, the Grand Trine, that, like a Genie in the bottle, made his climb to fame effortless and his fall from grace, enervating. With his Moon in trifling, emotionally quirky Gemini, words turned him on, and were his playthings, but not the political slogans that his audiences wanted. With a Capricorn Mars, Sly was actually politically very conservative by upbringing, and was shocked to see people acting out lyrics he had written as commercial jingles, creating a furor that had many people believing he was the Pied Piper of revolution. Very similar to what his colleague, quadruple Pisces Gil Scott Heron had done, Sly repudiated the unruly mob of dissidents he had inspired, and fled the center stage, losing himself in a miasma of contradictory motives and debilitated by his own demons, vanishing from sight as if he had vaporized.

In his relationships, Sly was more passive than a participant, with his Venus in Pisces making him twice as hard to possess and depend on; his audience left him because he was unreliable, his wife divorced him to marry Carlos Santana, a triple Cancer Man, who offered security, leadership, consistency and reciprocity. Loving a Piscean Man can be a total waste of time, since he is mostly in love with himself.

Above all, Sly was really lucky. His Grand Trine helped him thrive and survive a blast-and-crash timeline that had murdered many of his musical contemporaries, like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and John Lennon. The pressures on Sly were tremendous, he answered them by running away to his personal Pisces hidey-hole, a dark, secure place where he could escape the cacophony of a crazy world and its crazier expectations of him.