Dreadful... Sly Stone at last year's Grammy awards. Photograph: Mark J Terrill/AP
As California's Coachella festival comes to resemble an alt-rock Jim'll Fix It ("Dear Jim, can you fix it for me to see Rage Against the Machine and the Jesus And Mary Chain?"), it's worth remembering how irredeemably naff reunions were once considered to be. In the 1990s, the Sex Pistols and the Velvet Underground comebacks both prompted mocking comments of the "stop it, you silly old men" variety.
But that was before the nostalgia industry really took off. Reunions alter our relationship with the past, making feasible experiences that were once considered impossible. In 2000, I had resigned myself to never seeing the Pixies, the Stooges, Brian Wilson, Blondie, Soft Cell, Gang of Four or Love in the flesh. Now I've seen them all. Some were staggeringly good; others, not so good. If Queen or the Doors are your cup of tea, you can watch them too, albeit in Stars In Their Eyes form. For many people, it was Wilson who opened the floodgates. If this infamously damaged individual could make a comeback, then anybody could.
But next month sees reissues from two great bands that remain tantalisingly out of reach: Sly & the Family Stone and Magazine. Sly & the Family Stone represented all the best dreams of the 1960s: an insanely talented multi-racial, multi-gender revue, which soldered the best of soul and psychedelic rock into rhetoric you could dance to. Watch this performance from the Ed Sullivan Show in 1968, and you can practically see them inventing Prince and OutKast on the spot.
As with many 60s dreams, Stone's indomitable optimism was steadily eroded by cocaine and paranoia. After one claustrophobic masterpiece (There's a Riot Goin' On) and one last upbeat classic (Fresh) came a series of disappointments with increasingly needy titles like Heard ya Missed me, Well I'm Back. Since 1983's dispiriting Ain't but the One Way, Stone has been a recluse, barely recording a note. When he popped up amid a dreadful all-star medley at last year's Grammy awards (three words you don't want to hear during a tribute to Sly Stone: "Here's Maroon 5!"), it was reassuring to see him still breathing and upright, but you couldn't call it a comeback.
Magazine, meanwhile, died of neglect, splitting up in 1981 because they were tired of playing the same-sized venues and never breaking the Top 40. Legend has it that they were the first band ever to go down in the charts after a Top Of The Pops appearance, although their 1978 performance of Shot By Both Sides looks murderously compelling to me. Rocking the Brian Eno brainiac androgyne look, frontman Howard Devoto looks as if he wants to kill everybody in the crowd, starting with the berk on the gantry.
But although punk was a golden age for misfits, Magazine were the wrong kind of misfits. To hardline dunderheads, their flagrant musicianship and love of the synthesizer made them practically counter-revolutionary - throwbacks to the days when prog dinosaurs walked the earth. They were too grand, too melodic, and, in their icy, artful way, too intimidating. These days, Devoto works as a photo archivist. Despite occasional recordings - Luxuria in the 1980s, ShelleyDevoto in 2001 and a witty cameo in Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, he shows no desire to reconvene Magazine.
Both bands could tour again if their frontmen so desired. Three of Sly's old bandmates are currently on the road as the Original Family Stone. True, Magazine's mercurial guitarist John McGeoch died in 2004 but considering his admirers include Jonny Greenwood, John Frusciante and the Edge, somebody could theoretically take his place. Stranger things have happened.
The question is: do you want them to? Is seeing a chunkier, wrinklier, incomplete version of a favourite band better than never seeing them at all? I'd like to be purist about it but I'm not that disciplined. I'm also tempted by the idea of Brian Wilson-style happy endings. Magazine could play to the kind of big, adoring audiences that they were denied at the time, while Sly Stone could exorcise 30 years of wasted potential. But maybe Devoto and Stone's idea of a happy ending is, like Captain Beefheart's, a peaceful and private old age, and it's pure selfishness that makes me want to drag them back on to the stage.
At their peak, both Magazine and Sly & the Family Stone came closer to perfection than most other bands. For that reason, they should probably remain in the past and I should content myself with a few YouTube clips. I know that. But if either of them re-formed tomorrow, I'd buy a ticket.
