In 2023, Sly Stone published his memoir. He called it Thank You. Falling me mice elf a title of the song that had been a hit in 1970. It was his account of his own life, the extraordinary career, the addiction, the years of withdrawal, the survival. In the Woodstock chapter, he wrote about what happened before Sly and the Family Stone took the stage.
He wrote, “Janice Joplain was on before us, and then there was a break, and it was like the sky split open with rain.” Read that sentence. “She was on before us, then there was a break, and it was like the sky split open with rain.” 54 years after Woodstock, Sly Stone described Janice Joplain’s performance in 10 words that do what great descriptions do.
They make you hear something you were not there to hear. The sky splitting open with rain. This is that story. August 16, 1969. Woodstock Music and Artf Fair. The program for that evening listed in sequence. Grateful Dead. Credence Clearwater revival. Janice Joplain. Sly in the Family Stone.
The Who, Jefferson Airplane. It was a Saturday night that went through Sunday morning. The Dead played a set that lasted for hours. Credence played at 3 in the morning. Janice performed sometime after the dead and before Sly. 400,000 people in a field in upstate New York. Two years since Mterrey, two years since Ball and Chain stopped the world for the first time. She performed.
She gave what she had to give. And then there was a break. And then Sly and the Family Stone took the stage. Sly Stone in 1969. Sylvester Stewart had been making music professionally since he was a teenager. He had produced records for the Bo Brumls and Bobby Freeman and others in the San Francisco music scene.
He had worked as a disc jockey. He had formed Sly and the Family Stone in 1966, the same year Janice joined Big Brother, the same city, the same scene, the same world, but they were doing completely different things. Sly in the Family Stone was unlike any band that had existed before it. It was racially integrated in a music industry that divided its genres along racial lines.
Rock was white, soul was black, and slies band was both, and neither. It was gender integrated in a music industry that put women in supporting roles. The family stone had women playing instruments and writing songs alongside the men. It mixed funk and rock and soul and psychedelia in ways that nobody had mixed them before.
Everyday people, dance to the music, hot fun in the summertime, stand songs that did not fit any existing category because they had been made by a person who was not interested in existing categories. Janice Joplain was also not interested in existing categories. She was a white woman singing black blues in a rock band at a time when the industry had specific ideas about what all three of those things meant.
She took what she had absorbed from Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton and Otus Reading and put it through the specific filter of Port Arthur, Texas and San Francisco, California. And what came out was something the industry had no box for. Both of them were making something that had never existed before. And on the same night at the same festival, in front of the same 400,000 people, they performed back to back, the sky splitting open with rain.
That is the image Sly Stone chose for the transition between Janice’s performance and his own. Not she was good, not the crowd was ready for us, not we had to follow a tough act. It was like the sky split open with rain. The specific violence of sudden weather, the transformation of atmosphere, the moment when the temperature changes and everything that was possible one minute before is different the next.
That is what Janice Joplain did to the air at Woodstock. She performed. The air changed a break rain. And then it was Sly’s turn. He has been carrying that image for 54 years. He put it in his memoir because it was the most accurate description he had. What did it mean for Sly Stone to follow Janice Joplain at Woodstock? His set is considered one of the greatest performances in the history of rock music. I want to take you higher.
Everyday people stand, dance to the music, the audience on their feet for all of it. the specific electricity of a band that was playing something new, something nobody had quite played before for the largest concert audience in American history. He did not have trouble following her.
But he noticed what she had done. He filed it. He described it to himself in the language that a musician uses to describe weather, the sky splitting open with rain. And 54 years later, when he wrote his memoir, that was the description he used. Not because he was trying to honor her, because it was what happened.
Janice Joplain died on October 4th, 1970. She was 27 years old. Sly Stone did not die at 27. He lived. He kept making music. But the specific destruction that Janice had been doing to herself, the heroin, the alcohol, the giving of everything every night without saving enough for the person doing the giving.
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Sly Stone knew about that from the inside, too. He had his own version of it. Not the same version, different details, but the same territory. A person who had something extraordinary, who gave it to the world, and who discovered that giving everything requires having something left. He struggled. He withdrew. He went through years of addiction and isolation that took him off stages and out of studios for long stretches. He survived.
In 2019, he appeared on stage at the Grammy Awards for the first time in decades. In 2023, he published the memoir. In the memoir, he wrote about Woodstock. He wrote about the sky splitting open with rain. He is 80 years old. He is still here. Here is the specific weight of what it means that Sly Stone was there at Woodstock and Janice Joplain was there at Woodstock.
Both in 1969, both at the same festival, both at the same peak, two people who were making American music into something it had not been before. Two people who paid a price for it. One of them died at 27. One of them survived into his 80s and wrote a memoir. In the memoir, 54 years later, the most vivid image from that night is not his own performance.
It is what happened before. Janice Joplain was on before us and then there was a break and it was like the sky split open with rain. Here is what this story asks you. Have you ever witnessed someone do something not to you just near you in the same world that stayed with you so long that decades later when you tried to describe it the best language you had was weather.
Sly Stone watched Janice Joplain perform at Woodstock in 1969. He was 25 years old. She was 26. Both of them at the beginning of what they would become. She finished. The sky split open with rain. He took the stage. She was gone 13 months later. He kept the description for 54 years and put it in his book.
The sky splitting open with rain. That is the best 10 words anyone has ever used to describe what it was like to follow Janice Joplain at Woodstock. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you
