Sly Stone Is Homeless in Los Angeles

Sly Stone performing at the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California.

Charley Gallay/Getty Images

Troubled funk legend Sly Stone has been living out of a white van in Los Angeles following a long downward spiral of drug abuse and financial mismanagement. "I like my small camper," Stone told the New York Post. "I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving."

Stone, 68, is typically parked on a residential street in Crenshaw, a rough neighborhood in the city that is best known as the setting for Boyz N the Hood. A retired couple in the area provide the singer with food and a restroom, and their son serves as his assistant and driver. Despite his circumstances, Stone still works on music and records new material on a laptop computer. He recently released his first album in two decades, I'm Back – Friends & Family.

Photos: Random Notes

Stone, who sold his music publishing rights to Michael Jackson in 1984 for a reported $1 million, was forced out of his Napa Valley house in 2009 when he stopped getting royalty payments as the result of a conflict with his former manager Jerry Goldstein, who he has accused of fraud and embezzlement. A lawsuit against Goldstein is pending.

Earlier this year, Stone pleaded not guilty to possessing cocaine when his van was pulled over for a minor traffic violation in Los Angeles.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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