Jessica Winter Staff writer

We may never fully understand why a billionaire fairy princess decided to stage her dream wedding in a windowless gymnasium lodged in the herniated bowels of midtown Manhattan. But perhaps what Madison Square Garden offered to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, who exchanged vows there on July 3rd, was a unique match of maximum conspicuousness and maximum security. Inside James Dolan’s panopticon fortress, the celebrity lovers could stage an event both inescapable and almost entirely unseen.

More than fifty years before the Swift-Kelce gala, the soul-funk star Sly Stone had a somewhat different set of considerations when he chose M.S.G. as the venue for his wedding to Kathy Silva, a sometime actress and the mother of his baby. Stone’s band, Sly and the Family Stone, kept shedding members, their record sales had waned, and Stone was slipping into a thickening cloud of drugs. (The marriage didn’t last long.) By May, 1974, he was an entertainer in search of a career-resetting publicity stunt when he called up his handler at Epic Records and left a to-the-point message: “My name is Sly, and I wish you would make my wedding the biggest event this year.” An event at M.S.G., that is, with a Sly and the Family Stone concert to follow. (“I could be my own opening act,” Stone quipped.)

A few months after the fact, The New Yorker’s George W. S. Trow delivered a meticulously detailed and often dryly funny account of what it took to make Stone’s wish come true: fog machines, costumes by Halston, a reception at the Waldorf-Astoria, rings sourced from a five-and-dime. Trow captures an erratic genius at a precipitous moment in his life and career, but his story is as much about the innumerable functionaries, craftspeople, and assistants who can turn a maestro’s flight of whimsy into an actual event—into a wedding, even. (Or close to one: there’s a very late snafu involving the officiant’s credentials.) “The strength of people who favor extravagance, eclecticism, and humor,” Trow writes, “is that they can find satisfaction in awkward situations as well as in sublime ones.”