I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (12 page)

Sly himself wielded the bass on "You Can Make It If You Try."
The propulsive, intoxicating "I Want to Take You Higher" only
made it to number 60 on the singles charts (on the flip side of
"Stand!"), but it was to return to prominence later, on the strength
of its inclusion on the set list at Woodstock.

The Stand! album itself, which reached number 13 on the Billboard pop charts in April '69, held experimentations and revela tions beyond what was manifest in its individual chartable hits.
They included Sly's use of the vocoder, an early synthesizer that had
the effect of making his a voice sound like an eerie, trippy electronic
instrument. The album's second track began with the dual advisory, Don't call me nigger, whitey /Don't call me whitey, nigger. This
polemical reference to racism, very rare in Sly's lyrics, effectively
blocked airplay, but the song highlighted Rose in a soulful plaint,
partnered by Freddie's roiling wah-wah guitar. An atypically dense
evocation of Hendrix-like blues rock, it sounded a rightful reaction
to recent strife, including the assassination of Martin Luther King
Jr. a year earlier. "Sing a Simple Song" broadcast a very different,
sunnier sentiment in funky syncopation. The psychedelic blues
instrumental "Sex Machine," at fourteen minutes, far outlasted
most rock album tracks of the time, and prefigured the jam band
format of coming years. Freddie reflected later that he'd rehearsed
laboriously for this jam, but ended up being allowed to improvise
on the spot.

Stand! contained yet more remarkable tracks and held on to
the charts for over a hundred weeks. It served to solidify the Family Stone's unique synthesis of vocal-centered R & B with guitarbased rock. "Oh, man, that was the greatest-our greatest album,
without a doubt," Freddie later opined to Guitar World. "It's my
favorite because we were still fresh and hungry and sharp." If the
band had disbanded at this point in time, it would have already
scored a secure place in rock history.

Over what fans perceived as a long two years before the advent
of another album, the Family Stone watched itself be illuminated
and ultimately transfigured by the spotlight of success. Jerry commented on the peaks of this period for The Skin I'm In, saying,
"The feeling that we'd gone Big Time made us feel really good.
First-class tickets, limousines, instead of Sly and I driving the truck and Big Daddy in back with the van." How the band members
moved through this phase of their youth was of course affected by
their celebrity. Those who were married experienced strains on
those bonds, and whether married or single, there were increasing
opportunities for carnal indulgence, as referenced in Life's final
track, "Jane Is a Groupee": She's got a thing for guys in the band /
Every musician's biggest fan ... Claps her hands, without a doubt /
Has no idea what the song's about.

There are reports of other females in Sly's life whom he may
have considered more significant. The reunions with his first love,
Ria Boldway, are accounted for later in this story. It appears that
Anita, Sly's fateful companion from the Pussycat in Las Vegas,
accompanied him to New York and on some of the group's early
road trips. Stevie Swanigan, known as Stephani Owens when she
was later interviewed by Joel Selvin, was brought in by David
Kapralik in the fall of 1968 to work as secretary and personal assistant to Sly and the band. She revealed to Joel, "We had some intimate times, I will say that, but I was never [Sly's] girlfriend, I was
more his conscience. I never took on the attitude of being his
woman, because it would have made me less effective in the things
I was supposed to do.... I was in and out a lot, because he wanted
our relationship to be one where he could control me as another
individual, as a woman. [But] I wanted him to respect me for what
I could contribute, and for my mind."

Another perspective on Sly's love life appears in the pages of
an autobiography by Deborah Santana, Space Between the Stars.
Debbie, long married to (and more recently divorced from) guitar legend Carlos Santana, devotes a half dozen chapters to her
early relationship with Sly. It had begun on the San Francisco
street where Deborah, then known as Debbie King, lived, in the
summer of 1969, with her parents, black jazz guitarist and band leader Saunders King and his Irish American wife, Jo Frances. Sly,
who'd been staying in his parents' Urbano Drive house nearby,
stopped his vehicle in the middle of the street to make conversation with the attractive eighteen-year-old, eight years his junior,
who had just a few weeks earlier viewed his televised appearance
on The Ed Sullivan Show. By the time Sly and the band flew east in
preparation for the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair a few weeks
later, the teenager had begun an intense, long-term liaison with the
rising rock luminary, and it lasted through the spring of 1972.
(Stevie Swanigan's professional services to Sly began slightly
sooner, but were more or less contemporaneous.)

Debbie's account provides a rare look at a period of Sly's personal life by an intimate insider. There are images of the Urbano
Drive homestead, with Debbie petting one of Sly's earlier pet dogs,
the Great Dane called Stoner, "while Sly played the piano, writing
lyrics on yellow tablets and setting notes and chords onto staff
paper." Debbie goes on to write, "Mama [Alpha Stewart] made the
[rehearsing Family Stone] play softly because of the neighbors.
Mama was usually in the kitchen cooking, or sitting at the table in
the window, reading her Bible. She was sweet, with a twinkle in her
eyes. Her heavy body moved slowly, and Sly danced around her,
running back downstairs [to the basement], where she never went.
I would sit with her and answer questions about my family and
church."

Space Between the Stars goes on to describe Debbie's escape to
New York with Sly, where they shared a courtly romance enhanced
by marijuana and LSD. Debbie didn't follow the band to Woodstock, but saw Sly often, after she'd enrolled at California State College in Dominguez Hills and he'd relocated to a mansion in
Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles, not far away. She refers to Sly's
sharing cocaine with her, to help her maintain her academic schedule. She also reports that by 1971, she'd dropped out of college, and that Sly's cocaine use drove him into occasional medical
emergencies. Within a year, she writes, Sly had subjected her to a
couple of episodes of physical abuse, and she'd left L.A. and their
relationship, soon to start the study of yoga and a new romance
with her future husband and rock-legend-in-the-making Carlos
Santana.

A separate reflection of the benign glow in which Sly and Debbie had begun their affair is heard on Ben Fong-Torres's recording
of an interview he conducted with Sly in Los Angeles in the fall of
1969 for the then-new Rolling Stone magazine. "Debbie's smart,"
Sly told the young reporter, "the brightest girl that has ever been
associated with me in any way like this. She lived right around the
corner from me and I didn't even know it.... I went to England
and all over the place, all I had to do was go up the street and it
would have been cool." The young lady in question was heard to
reciprocate his esteem. "What Sly has in his head, he knows is
right," she advised Ben, "so it doesn't excite him to read somebody
who agrees with him."

A few months earlier, in July 1969, impresario George Wein
expanded the lineup at his Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island
by booking rock and blues acts along with expected jazz greats
such as Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and Rahsaan Roland
Kirk. Among the youth-oriented bookings were Jeff Beck, Blood,
Sweat & Tears, James Brown, B. B. King, John Mayall, Frank Zappa,
and Sly & the Family Stone. The rock roster inevitably attracted a
different, difficult demographic. On two successive nights, crowds
breached the fences during the rock portion of the program, which
on the second night featured Sly and company. George was billed
for overtime law enforcement and replacement of the fence and
was ordered not to book any more rock acts.

A month later, Sly & the Family Stone were among the cultural
heroes invited to entertain a half million paying and (mostly) nonpaying throngs of youth swarming over a bucolic farmstead in
upstate New York.

THE WOODSTOCK MUSIC AND ARTS Fair was a point of mass
affirmation for a generation heady with rebellion, experimentation, hedonism, and the occasional breaching of fences. In retrospect, it stands out as a showcase for a very healthy period in the
development of American popular music. More than three
decades later, youthful energy sparkled in the eyes of the nowmiddle-aged members of the Family Stone as they invoked the
experience in the documentary The Skin I'm In. Greg recalled reveling with Janis Joplin at a nearby Holiday Inn, before his band's
scheduled appearance on the early morning of August 17. Freddie
reported that in the wee hours of their performance that Sunday,
"It was dark when we went on, you could see nothing but candles.
And, man, when the sun came up! We began to see how many people there were."

"When we got there, at three o'clock in the morning, we were
tired, we were grouchy, we were all full of mud," added Jerry. "We
got out there and looked at the audience, who were all in their
sleeping bags, and when we started playing, they all jumped out of
their sleeping bags. We felt the vibe between the audience and the
band, and honest to God, all the hair on my arms stood straight
up." Was this evidence of a reprise and validation of Rich
Romanello's prophetic reaction to the band at its birth three years
earlier?

Cynthia described the scene for People magazine: "It was pouring rain. Freddie got shocked. The equipment was crackling. But Sly was like a preacher. He had half a million people in the palm
of his hand." Larry told Vanity Fair, "It's like when an athlete like
Michael Jordan realizes the extent of his gifts and goes, `Oh, I can
do that.'"

Michael Wadleigh's Oscar-winning documentary film about
Woodstock (edited by a pre-Mean Streets Martin Scorsese) and the
associated three-LP soundtrack served both as souvenirs of the
generation's peak experience and as an extension of Woodstock's
legend to those who couldn't, or wouldn't, be there. Sly & the Family Stone played one of the festival's best sets, including "M'Lady,"
"Sing a Simple Song," "You Can Make It If You Try," "Stand!," "Love
City," "Dance to the Music," "Music Lover," and "I Want to Take
You Higher," but only the last three made it onto the film and
record. It's not the band's best performance, but it is one of their
most celebrated, and the powerful current between stage and captive audience is tangible.

David Kapralik, though still managing the group, didn't witness the Woodstock gig until he saw the documentary. Now, with
the benefit of hindsight, he views the indelible image of Sly, his
arms raised in salute to the throng, with long white fringes trailing off the jacket, as a harbinger of hard times. "I knew that this
was Icarus, his wings made of wax, and [the spotlight] was the sun
he flew too close to," David opines. His characteristically visionary
metaphor is drawn from Greek mythology, but he refers to a reallife meltdown that would increasingly weaken his bond with Sly,
Sly's bond with the band, and David's hold on his own well-being.

On the surface, it looked like Sly & the Family Stone's career
was in full flight, with the Woodstock film and recording helping
to uplift and sustain the band's popularity. Without a new album
in the works, though, Columbia decided to launch a couple of singles. The laid-back and jazzy "Hot Fun in the Summertime," released in August '69, rose to the number-2 spot on the charts in
the fall of that year; early in 1970, "I Want to Take You Higher" was
released as the A-side of a single ("Stand!" was on the flip), and its
success this time around was supercharged by the song's strong
placement in the Woodstock set. It sounded a rousing call for various means of enhanced experience. The Woodstock media
quickly elevated the festival and several of its star acts, including
Sly & the Family Stone, from the status of peak but flawed experiences to the status of myth. And the public is always hungry for
myth, even when it obscures any clear-eyed view of what's really
going down.

THE BIG MONEY SLY MADE after Stand! and its follow-ups
helped him establish luxurious and well-protected bicoastal command points between 1969 and 1971, including an enviable suite
on New York City's prestigious Central Park West. (As for the city
of his early success, Sly was witnessed delivering a diatribe from
the stage to a Bay Area audience in late '69. "You're over," he told
the stunned crowd. "You thought you were cool, but your arrogance was your undoing, and San Francisco is now over, officially."
"He didn't explain it," noted spectator Joel Selvin. "He was just
pissed off.")

Down in Los Angeles, Stevie Swanigan was assigned responsibility of locating domiciles after Sly and David Kapralik had established an office for their new Stone Flower Productions in
Hollywood. From an apartment in the Griffith Park area behind
Hollywood, Sly moved to a larger, more removed rented property
on Coldwater Canyon. Along with Topanga Canyon, Beverly Hills,
and Bel Air, this was one of several select areas favored by L.A.'s
rich and famous because they offered verdant hillsides, relative isolation, and spacious structures on large lots. Debbie King lived
at the Coldwater Canyon property during that period of her connection with Sly, and Stevie and some of Sly's bandmates and
acquaintances used it as a crash pad and base of operations, with
a caretaker named Louis abiding on a more permanent basis. Joel
Selvin, who made a visit to the property on behalf of his college
paper, notes that "K. C. and Alpha [Stewart] were down at Coldwater Canyon a lot. They were somewhere between figurehead
parents and kitchen staff." An expanding collection of dogs added
to the visual and olfactory signs of life.