By November of the same year, Sly Stone seemed to pose an answer: “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.” At the time that album was released, Stone, who died this week, at the age of eighty-two, was facing a make-or-break career inflection point.

Behind it all was Sly Stone, the visionary who died Monday at 82 after a long battle with the lung disease COPD. He wrote, produced and arranged the music, winning acclaim as the author of invigorating anthems and an inventor of new,