Jack Sweeney was on tour with Sly Stone, and business was slow. His Chicago-based seven-piece, One Eyed Jacks, had accepted a job as the erratic pop star’s backing band in late 1982. Long past his Woodstock-era prime, Stone had all but abandoned live performance seven years earlier. He was now attempting a comeback via small club shows, playing a series of one-night stands.
One Eyed Jacks were used to gigging six nights a week on their own. When Stone was booked on Late Night With David Letterman, Sweeney encouraged him to pitch more performances. “I told Sly ten times, ‘When you go on Letterman, tell them we’re looking for work!’” Sweeney says.
In response, Stone gave out Sweeney’s home phone number on national television. Sweeney definitely hadn’t expected that—but then again, he hadn’t expected to be living and touring with the former superstar in the first place.
Sweeney had formed One Eyed Jacks in 1981, the group’s name inspired perhaps by the playing card or a late-60s band from Champaign, Illinois. The lineup consisted of Sweeney on keys, his high school classmate Frank Wiencek on guitar, Santos Dominguez on bass and vocals, Todd Brooks on drums, Peter Neumer on saxophone, Tom Decourcey on trombone, and Don Tenuto on trumpet, and they performed full-time around the midwest with a repertoire of originals written by Sweeney and Dominguez.
The band also did covers. “We were a group of funky white boys that played a Sly medley,” Sweeney says. Sly & the Family Stone’s run of pop hits coincided with the band members’ teen years; Wiencek went to Grant Park on July 27, 1970, for what turned out to be an infamous Family Stone no-show. It devolved into a riot that injured more than 160 people, and Wiencek left downtown when he heard gunfire.
In late 1982, Sly Stone was digging out from under years of missed shows, middling albums, and negative headlines, including those arising from a drug and weapons arrest in Los Angeles that summer. He was in need of a new band, and One Eyed Jacks’ agent surprised the group by bringing the singer to one of their shows. “As if Sly’s gonna come out to Elkhart, Indiana, to a motor lodge to hear us play,” Neumer says. But they could, in fact, believe their eyes. “We walked offstage, and this guy in black leather pants and coat said, ‘We got a match.’”
It was that simple. “We became the Family Stone, so to speak,” Sweeney says. The band was billed accordingly, as Sly & the Family Stone, Sly & the New Family Stone, or sometimes just Sly Stone.
Stone soon moved into Sweeney’s home in Marquette Park, sharing it with Wiencek and other nonmusician roommates. Such an arrangement “was out of the ordinary for a Black guy when Marquette Park wasn’t the best place to be,” Wiencek says.
“I believe it was really a lot of Jack’s generosity, helping him out at the time, that allowed us to have his attention as long as we did,” says Brooks. Despite Stone’s fame and his famously turbulent past, he was a genial roommate, a “regular guy,” according to Sweeney.
“I wake up in the morning, I go downstairs,” Wiencek says, “and there’s Sly Stone behind the piano.”
One Eyed Jacks still had other engagements to finish, which left them time for just a few rehearsals spread out across two weeks in a practice space on Kedzie to nail down their set with Stone. “Rehearsals were fun,” Wiencek says. “No pressure, because we already knew his songs.”
Stone focused on maintaining a groove and building dynamics, and he “drove it home like it was a new religion,” Neumer says. Stone would modify arrangements on the fly, dazzling his bandmates. “He could take ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and make it incredible,” Neumer says.
Stone also gave borderline incomprehensible instructions. “He called a meeting before a job and told me to just forget about two,” says Brooks—“two” meaning the second beat of the bar. The drummer still doesn’t know what Stone meant.
The group also worked on a few new tunes, among them “All I Wanna Do Do,” its juvenile wordplay likely inspired by Stone’s collaborator George Clinton. The song was never recorded professionally, but Neumer remembers performing it as “dramatically rip-your-face-off funk.”
One Eyed Jacks would play their original songs as an opening act before Sly Stone took the stage. “Crowds would chant, ‘We wanna see Sly! We wanna see Sly!’” Brooks says. “What was cool was being able to deliver on that and have him come out.”
Stone didn’t have any of his own gear and would use Wiencek’s black Les Paul to open the show with 1969’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” Stone would frequently break keys on Sweeney’s Hammond B-3 organ, until his management provided him with a newer, more durable keyboard. “When he was on, he was on,” Neumer says. “It was an experience to be onstage with the guy for 400 or 4,000 people.”
The band played their first show with Stone in fall 1982 at southwest-suburban restaurant and club Prime ’N Tender. Chicago journalist Dave Hoekstra attended the show, along with about 200 other fans.
“A smiling Stone wore crisp white slacks and a matching white jacket, accented by a flowing white scarf dotted with black piano keys,” Hoekstra wrote in a 2021 blog post (he remembers the show as happening in spring 1983). “Stone and the One-Eyed Jacks covered all the Family Stone hits ranging from ‘Stand!’ to ‘If You Want Me To Stay.’ He botched some of the words to ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’ but he was in a place that made him happy.”
Photos of One Eyed Jacks from Jack Sweeney’s collection, with Sly Stone second from left. Also pictured are saxophonist Peter Neumer, trombonist Tom Decourcey, and trumpeter Don Tenuto.Credit: Courtesy Jack Sweeney
Milwaukee-based musician John Sieger saw Stone and the band perform at a Shakey’s Pizza Parlor-turned-nightclub on Green Bay Road in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “It was a lazy-ass show, maybe half an hour, started and ended with ‘I Want to Take You Higher,’ and it was one of the greatest shows I ever saw,” he says. “If that was [Stone] phoning it in, I want to see him when he’s inspired.”
The band performed in Champaign, Illinois, in early February 1983, and Sweeney sent Stone home behind the wheel of his van. The band arrived back in Chicago separately and encountered an unwelcome development. “We heard on the ten o’clock news that Sly was busted in midstate Illinois, and I thought, ‘Oh great, that’s my truck,’” Sweeney says.
Stone had been stopped by police near Paxton, Illinois, on February 7. They’d found a sawed-off shotgun and what they thought was cocaine in the car, and Stone was booked on weapon and drug charges. Some news articles inaccurately identified the other four passengers as Stone’s band members, prompting Neumer’s parents to give him a concerned call. Stone’s arrest created a media circus, and the authorities decided to discharge him. He drove home to Marquette Park, and within a couple weeks the charges were dropped. “I asked him what was going on,” Sweeney says. “I don’t recall any definitive answers.”
Stone appeared on Letterman on February 21, 1983. The band had traveled to New York City but hadn’t been invited to perform, so they watched the show from the Milford Plaza hotel. Stone sat onstage in a gray sweatsuit and white sneakers, riffed about being tired of being retired, and dismissed his recent arrest as a misunderstanding. Letterman noted that Stone was “early, well-dressed, and courteous,” to laughter and applause from the studio audience.
Boasting about his recent run of club shows, Stone mentioned One Eyed Jacks and said, “Jack wanted me to give his phone number out.” Letterman and his producers worried aloud that Sweeney would be flooded with prank calls. “That’s OK,” Stone said. “Jack’s prepared for that.” He rattled off Sweeney’s home phone number. Sweeney wasn’t prepared at all; though the network muted half the number, he jokes that he received a thousand phone calls from intrepid lip-readers looking for Sly Stone.
Stone developed a good rapport with the band, whom he called “AAWB,” short for “Above Average White Boys.” He nicknamed Neumer “Baby Boy.” They’d all go out for drinks or breakfast after shows. Stone’s birthday was a few days before Neumer’s mother’s, so he took the family out for a steak dinner. When the waitress asked how he wanted his steak, he answered, “Quick.”
But Stone also continued to test his bandmates. Ten minutes before they were due onstage at suburban club Haymakers, he insisted that Neumer drive him back to the house to retrieve something. They stopped at a gas station while returning to the show, where Stone purchased bologna, baking soda, and a Coke. To Neumer’s dismay, Stone began smoking crack out of the soda can in Neumer’s new ’82 Camaro as they passed a police substation. “Couldn’t have been a worse place,” Neumer says.
In spring 1983, Stone and One Eyed Jacks switched to a new booking agent based in Atlanta, leading to more shows down south and out east. At Flaming Sally’s in Macon, Georgia, Stone walked offstage after two songs and didn’t come back, infuriating the club owner and the crowd. Neumer stormed backstage with the rest of the band in tow and asked Stone why he did it. “He kinda giggled,” he says. “I think he was shocked, because I was the quiet one in the band.”
“Well, if you don’t like it, Peter, why don’t you quit?” Neumer remembers Stone saying.
“I’m not a quitter. You are,” Neumer recalls himself saying. He reminded Stone that the singer owed him $100 for the outfit he wore on Late Night.
“He came back with a hundred-dollar bill, threw it at me, and slammed the door,” Neumer says. “The next morning it was like, ‘Baby Boy, off to the next show.’ Like nothing happened.”
The shows were successful as long as the rest of the band ensured that Stone made it to the stage and stayed there. He was managed in part by a large bodyguard who would “plow open a hotel door if we couldn’t get him up,” says Brooks. But Stone’s high profile and mercurial behavior meant that “drug dealers would always find him,” Wiencek says. “We had to keep him away from drug dealers.”
“He’d have a couple grand in his pocket, and then the next morning would be borrowing money for breakfast,” Neumer says.
The tour continued through Florida, Alabama, and North Carolina. Stone and One Eyed Jacks played April 29 and 30 at the Kaywood Theater in Mount Rainier, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., with former Motown band Rare Earth opening. “He told the whole crowd, ‘Come back to my hotel room and party!’” Neumer says.
Sly Stone largely ignored his 1983 album, Ain’t but the One Way, in live sets, but Peter Neumer of One Eyed Jacks says they did sometimes play the track “Who in the Funk Do You Think You Are.”
“Once we got up near Washington, he knew people who got him too messed up,” Brooks says. Brooks was enlisted to drive Stone and George Clinton to New York City while they freebased in the back of Stone’s Winnebago. It was Brooks’s first time visiting the city (he’d been out of the band briefly during the Letterman episode), and he found himself driving a vehicle the size of a bus into downtown Manhattan. He dropped the two stars at a motel and left the RV parked on a side street.
The band played hip New York warehouse Red Parrot on May 4, 1983, with Yoko Ono and Journey’s Neal Schon in attendance. A New York Times review by Stephen Holden offered faint praise for Stone’s “competently performed set of oldies” with “what was apparently a pick-up band.” But amateur recordings posted to YouTube reveal a locked-in ensemble ripping through a brief set of classics with verve and postdisco precision, led by Stone as an energetic emcee and wailing singer.
The chemistry would not last. During a performance at New York club Fun House a few days later, Stone showed up intoxicated and kept switching between songs without warning the band. He even tried to get Brooks to move his drums in the middle of the set.
“Sly looked back to me, then waved me forward, wanted me to come up closer to him,” Brooks says. “We’re playing! How do I move my drum set?” After about five minutes onstage, Stone played their usual closer, “I Want to Take You Higher,” then walked off.
“The place was packed. The stage was in the middle of the room—they could grab your leg,” Wiencek says. “People were getting fidgety because they had paid to see Sly.”
“I thought we were going to get mugged getting our equipment off the stage,” Sweeney says.
Stone did not appear for their second show, planned for later that night. “Of course we were wanting to make a good go of it, and he was making it difficult, so arguments ensued,” Brooks says. “It was a good time, wish it had lasted longer, but it was a very volatile situation.”
The band made a hasty decision to end their tour with Stone and return to Chicago with their gear, leaving little time for goodbyes. Neumer overheard Stone through a hotel door on the phone with management. “I’m not gonna say he was crying, but he was broken up,” he says.
Stone moved on quickly, though. Within a few weeks, he’d relocated to Florida and begun playing with a band called Starshower. He was arrested on drug charges in Lee County in June 1983, then bonded out a day later by two anonymous fans.
One Eyed Jacks regrouped after a few months and returned to their old routines. “It was a great group of guys with strong camaraderie, no animosity going on,” Sweeney says. The band stayed together for another few years, touring 38 states in total, including a lengthy stint in Florida from September 1983 to May 1984.
After the band dissolved, Brooks worked in drum rentals and in audio engineering for public radio and The Steve Harvey Show. He now lives in Crown Point, Indiana, with a home studio. Neumer played freelance with the likes of Martha Reeves, Daryl Stuermer, and Del Shannon, and he recently moved to Florida, where he still performs. Dominguez relocated to Texas. Trumpeter Don Tenuto formed the Chicago Rhythm & Blues Kings with former members of the Mellow Fellows. Trombone player Tom Decourcey became a schoolteacher, but he passed away in Naples, Florida in 2011, survived by his wife and two daughters. Sweeney settled down with his wife and two kids and started an environmental cleanup business in northwest Illinois. He and Wiencek watch the Bears together every Sunday.
Sly Stone made few public appearances in the ensuing four decades. The pop visionary showed up at a 2006 Grammy tribute in Los Angeles, and in 2009 he made a surprise cameo onstage at the African Festival of the Arts in Washington Park with George Clinton & P-Funk. Stone finally got clean in 2019 with support from family and management, and last month, at age 80, he published his memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir. It includes a few pages on his time with Sweeney and One Eyed Jacks, but his publishers couldn’t make him available for comment.
Despite the chaos of the tour, the members of One Eyed Jacks look back with pride on their experience with Stone. “It was a real nice ride. It was interesting, it was educational,” Wiencek says. “I enjoyed it. Everybody in the band enjoyed it.”
“You’re playing with somebody who’s well-known, and you think a lot of things are gonna go on from there,” Brooks says. “It was more a life-learning experience in dealing with the realities of the road and all the other sins out there.”
Brooks hopes to jam again with his former bandmates soon. “I’m glad to see many of us that are in the band still thriving,” he says. He’s also relieved that Stone has dealt with his addiction. “I’m just amazed that he went that long still doing it, and I’m glad to hear that he had that victory. Because he deserved what he created.”
Originally published in Chicago Reader.