Three music icons...gone

Three voices, three visions, three music icons of my generation, all gone in the same month. Sylvester Stone, Brian Wilson, Lou Christie. On paper, they couldn’t have been more different. A psychedelic soul guru from the San Francisco Bay Area, a fragile pop savant from suburban California and a falsetto firecracker from a small town in Pennsylvania. But each, in their own way, twisted the limits of what popular music could sound like and what it could say. And they all left behind echoes louder than their lifetimes.

I first got to know of Sly Stone through the Woodstock movie. I didn’t know what to expect, but the moment he and his band appeared onscreen, I was mesmerised by the energy and the rhythm. He lit up the stage. That performance of I Want to Take You Higher still crackles with life. Sly and the Family Stone were doing something radical. Black and white musicians, men and women, playing together like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was funk and it was soul. Didn’t have to understand the context. I just felt it.

Then there was Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. He sketched symphonies in his head. He created the soundtrack to summer. Pet Sounds, God Only Knows, Good Vibrations. Pop turned inside out. Pop built on emotion. And when it all got too much, he crumbled. For years, he disappeared into himself. But somehow, he returned. Older, more fragile but still chasing the perfect chord. He never quite shook off the darkness but he learned to work with it. In doing so, he shaped some of the most radiant pop music we’ve ever known.

Lou Christie was not quite a teen idol. That falsetto voice, sharp and urgent, sounded like heartbreak one moment, high drama the next. Lightnin’ Strikes, I'm Gonna Make You Mine, Two Faces Have I, Rhapsody in the Rain were songs of lust, guilt, thunder and longing, all wrapped within three minutes of music. He wasn’t fashionable but he outlasted the fashion. He sang what he felt, and he kept singing, long after the screaming stopped.

All three are gone now. Brian Wilson, just shy of 83, finally freed from the noise in his head. Lou Christie, 82, taking his falsetto somewhere higher. And Sly Stone, the youngest of the three, still 82, but always the coolest in the room. Their styles were nothing alike, but their commitment was the same. They believed in the power of pop, not just to entertain but to make you feel something real.

They didn’t just leave behind records. They left a space for others to fill with their own voices.