I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (11 page)

"At a time of great social unrest in this country, this man came
forth with an integrated band, the members of which got on
famously, as brothers and sisters, and never had a problem anywhere they went," notes Epic's Al DeMarino. This feature broadened the band's appeal across racial lines in audiences and among
older liberal-minded fans of Al and David Kapralik's generation.

David explains his personal perspective on race and American
culture. As children in Plainfield, New Jersey, in the 1930s, he and
his siblings had been "among the only Jews in our elementary
school, and we were subjected to a lot of prejudice, and it was hurtful.... I didn't play with the other Caucasian kids, but during the
lunch hour the Negroes, as they were called back then, took me in,
and we related." As an aspiring Broadway actor in the next decade,
David and black actress Jane White founded Torchlight Productions "to integrate Negroes into theater, movies, and the media."
Switching to a day job at Columbia Records, David bonded with
legendary producer John Hammond in bolstering the label's commitment to rhythm and blues, resurrected the Okeh label as a
showcase for black music, and had, with Jerry Brandt, brought several swinging black acts to Columbia from Harlem churches. With
this history of dedication, David was perhaps bound to hitch his
star to what he thought he saw in the Family Stone and heard in the music created by its black leader. "I saw Sylvester as a vehicle
for expressing, lyrically and socio-dynamically, his bringing the
races together at this juncture in history," declares David. Sly's own
high hopes were not quite so altruistic.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and
philosophy, it is the wine of a new procreation,
and I am Bacchus, who presses out this
glorious wine for men and makes them drunk
with the spirit.

-LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Nothing is more singular about this generation
than its addiction to music.

-ALLAN BLOOM, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER

HE SEEDS OF FAME FOR SLY &
the Family Stone had been planted,
but it took a while for the band to
reach extravagant blossom. A third Epic album, Life, was recorded
in May 1968, while the band was still sampling its Dance-driven
success. A new kind of confidence was perceptible in the LP's
opening track, "Dynamite!," which engineer Don Puluse says was
tangible in the studio. Confidence notwithstanding, nothing on Life ever shared its predecessor's success, although in retrospect it's
hard to hear why not. Several of the album's cuts, particularly
"Fun," "Love City," "M'Lady," and the title piece, bear much of the
trademark energy and listener-friendly impulsion of the group's
earlier and later hits. The title cut opened with Sly imitating the
sound of Laffing Sal, a mechanical clown from Playland at the
Beach, San Francisco's erstwhile amusement park. This helped set
the tone of the track's (and the album's) life-is-a-circus sentiments, reflective of the good vibes the band was still enjoying.
When I party, I party hearty, the band declared in "Fun," and blasts
of horns from Jerry Martini and Cynthia Robinson helped celebrate the sentiment, which took in family members-brother, sister, daddy, and momma-and a trademark canny commandment
to the congregation of fans: "Socketh unto others / As you would
have them socketh to you."

Larry Graham led the exuberant "M'Lady" with some of the
bassist's fattest, fuzziest runs heard to date, augmented by Freddie's fast, chunky funk chording and Jerry's giddy clarinet. The
bassist's thump-'n'-pluck style had grown more fluid, and his lines
on various of these tracks, notably "Dynamite!," would be adapted
into innumerable disco bottoms boogieing over dance floors in the
'70s. Record sales indicated that the public was not yet buying into
all this artistry and delight, but they would with Stand!, the fourth
album, whose several singles began bombarding the hit parade the
following year.

Over the relatively brief period of gestation of its first three
albums and of the public's reaction to them, Sly & the Family
Stone were transformed from best-kept secret to an inflating commercial success. Along the way, on the road between coasts, the
band was less recognized and more challenged. "I remember that
Sly and I drove the equipment truck," says Jerry, "and Daddy [Sly's father K. C. Stewart] followed behind us in a huge station wagon.
Drivers changed every hundred miles or so. Sly and I changed
when we felt like it, [but] I usually drove and Sly wrote [music].
We talked lots, which kept us awake. These were great times, when
there was not very much hard drugs. We enjoyed wine, a few
drinks, and some weed, but not too much, as it makes you too tired
to drive.

"There were no roadies at first, the band was the roadies," Jerry
continues. "Daddy was the road manager. We learned the hard way
how to read maps correctly. The straight line is not the fastest
when it comes to highway travel. We learned it was so much faster
to take the Ohio Turnpike and major highways, as opposed to driving through some scary backwoods towns."

The larger community of Detroit, where racial tension had
erupted in 1967, provided its own drama. "There were riots going
on, there was a curfew, it was three in the morning, and we got lost
in the back streets somewhere," Greg remembers. "And all of a sudden the National Guard pulls us over. And here they look in the
van, and it's black and white hippies, and that's challenging. But
when they pull us out and line us up, Sly starts mouthing off, not
accepting certain things. We didn't have any weapons, [but] we're
up against the wall, they have machine guns, there's a race riot
going on, and this is a very tense situation. And [Sly is] treating it
like it's Sunday afternoon: `Don't say anything, 'cause you're gonna
hear it back from me.' That was challenging to the point of dangerous, and we're literally yelling at him to back off." In Greg's
opinion, this incident (and others like it) was less a reaction of the
authorities to the band's racial makeup than to its leader's personality, "'cause he had a very sharp and defined attitude about what
he represented and what he was saying. I think that challenged
more people than just the fact that he was black."

Back in New York, the group relished the satisfaction of being
presented by Bill Graham, who a year earlier had refused to book
them at his influential Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. In
March 1968, the West Coast impresario had opened the Fillmore
East in New York's East Village, and a few months later, he received
a call from Epic's Al DeMarino. "Rumor was afloat that Jimi Hendrix was coming in," Al recalls. "Now, Bill Graham, at Fillmore East
and West, had a three-act format: opening act, supporting act,
headliner, and would very seldom think of deviating from that. So
I called Bill ... and I said, `Look, why don't we try this: why don't
we have a hundred-percent-equal star billing. Below Jimi, special
guest star: Sly & the Family Stone: He said, `Let's go with it!"'

What they'd created was a night to remember in rock history,
with classic comparisons and contrasts. Both Sly's Family and
Jimi's Experience were multiracial bands led by charismatic black
men, but Jimi's music at this point was much more blues-based,
though he'd soon find that approach restrictive. Jimi was having
to contend with the reputation he'd created as "The Wild Man of
Pop," prompting audience expectations of his guitar acrobatics,
inverting the instrument, licking the strings lasciviously, and
maybe destroying the guitar onstage, all the while coaxing hallucinogenic wails of feedback from stacks of amplifiers. It may have challenged Jimi that Sly and his up-and-coming act were being
perceived more as entertainers and musicians than as a psychedelic
freak show. This contrast may have helped influence Jimi, in his
last years, to turn away from the pure guitar theatrics that helped
launch his career and move toward the more soulful palette displayed on Electric Ladyland and Band of Gypsys.

"And what Sly did, the first show on that Saturday night," Al
reminisces about the Fillmore face-off, "he literally marched the
band off the stage [while doing the hambone], through the aisles, and marched the entire audience out onto Second Avenue before
the second show was about to begin.... Traffic had to be halted
for about an hour." In addition, Jimi had to allow for a forty-fiveminute interlude instead of the usual twenty-minute break before
he took the stage, to give the crowd enough time to cool down.

During a period where he and Jimi were dating the same
woman, Al had a chance to assess the guitar legend's personal take
on Sly. "I think there was some competitive spirit within," says Al,
"but I know there was great respect....I know that [Jimi]
admired Sly's music and wanted to go beyond the power trio [the
configuration of his Experience act."

The Family Stone's reputation for eye-and-ear-filling entertainment justified a booking in London in September 1968. But
hints of troubles to come ended up dooming the mini-tour. Sly
refused to begin one show when he was offered what he considered an inadequate substitute for his own keyboard, delayed in
transit. Then Larry Graham got busted for possession of a joint,
which he'd taken from Jerry, despite Jerry's warning to dispose of
it before passing through customs. The flustered group returned
to the States and to the recording of the optimistic "You Can Make
It If You Try," the earliest track of what would become the fourth
album, Stand! Production of the record continued on into the first
part of 1969, with the band shuttling between New York and San
Francisco, partly to work at the latter's Pacific High Recording Studios and partly for the Stewart siblings to keep in touch with their
genetic family and its local church.

The first hit off the new album, released in April '69, was
"Everyday People," an anthem in which Sly clearly stated that My
own beliefs are in my song, seemingly inspired by the ethos of '60s
San Francisco. Referencing awareness of the era's variety of race,
class, and lifestyles-different strokes for different folks-the song maintained that I am no better, and neither are you / We are the
same whatever we do. Larry sustained a one-note pulse under the
message, later telling Guitar World, "I'd never done that before....
That's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that
we'd be allowed to do that." The song's sentiments matched the
hopes of the generation they were aimed at, to expand and maintain egalitarian ideals and tolerance. And with this song, the band,
which seemed to be not only singing about these hopes but actually living them, was rewarded with its first-ever place at the top
of the pop hit singles chart, for a month.

The title track, "Stand!," was the next to land on the charts,
though not as high. It opened with a dramatic roll from Greg
Errico and featured yet another of Larry's powerfully percussive
bass figures. In a rare move, the coda for this song was recorded
separately by Sly with studio musicians after he decided it needed
more brassy drama, befitting its lyrical declarations: You've been
sitting much too long / There's a permanent crease in your right and
wrong and There's a midget standing tall /And a giant beside him
about to fall. Sly was beginning to distinguish himself among pop
songsmiths for the subtlety, imagination, and sometime humor of
his music writing as much as for his musical virtuosity. "You could
hear the songs getting stronger, the melodies getting stronger,"
Larry told Guitar World. " We were becoming a better band, better musicians, and [Sly] was becoming a better writer."