I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (13 page)

Hamp "Bubba" Banks, who'd provided Sly with rowdy company and something of a template of toughness on the streets of
San Francisco, reconnected with Sly after spending some time in
prison. He found his friend mutated by fame and fortune, and
more desirous of services Bubba and some of his streetwise colleagues were quite ready to provide, including facilitating and protecting Sly's indulgences. "When I got to Los Angeles, he was the
cocaine king," Bubba recalled. "Now he could really do what he
wanted.... If I was in the house, he could do what he wanted." Joel
reveals that Bubba was disappointed with K. C. 's relationship to Sly
during this period, because "his son was irresponsible, disrespectful, a piece of shit, and K. C. let him be that way ... 'cause the guy
was cleaning toilets until his son had a hit record, and when they
bought that place on Urbano Drive, Daddy didn't have to clean toilets no more.... So he'd put up with anything."

Bubba himself deserves some thanks, or blame, for letting Sly
be himself, or what he'd become, a dynamo of both creativity for
occasional public consumption and of extravagant private indulgence. The latter, of course, came to compromise the former. "He
didn't have to ask for it, he didn't have to buy," Stephani Owens
told Joel about the easy availability of substances for those with the right amount of cash and/or the right connections. "There
were some drugs around that were bought, but not as much as
were given to him.... Life was drugs, and it was music." While
recording at the Record Plant, near San Francisco, "They would
spend so many hours, thirty-six to forty-eight hours in a stretch,
wearing out the engineers. But they were doing drugs too."

Freddie told Joel that PCP, aka angel dust, was introduced into
the array of stimulants at his brother's L.A. digs as early as New
Year's Eve 1969. PCP (phencyclidine hydrochloride) had been
labeled a "dissociative anesthetic" and removed from its original
use in human and veterinary medicine because of its threatening
and unpredictable side effects, including psychotic reactions and
a speculative link to permanent brain damage. But some of its
effects, including a removal from bodily and environmental reality and a desensitizing of reactions to pain, had brought the drug
back into recreational use.

Freddie recalled that on that drugged New Year's Eve, two PCP
users had to be rushed to the hospital. Over the next year, Hamp
"Bubba" Banks observed the effects of PCP on both of the Stewart/Stone brothers: " [Sly] and Freddie walked around the house all
day, like zombies," he told Joel. "That is where it all fell apart."

Drug use and self-indulgent behavior were becoming common
among successful musicians. Their lifestyles were substantially
financed by advances paid to them against their future earnings,
and recording companies were only too ready to provide the cash
and to tolerate indications of excess. "The more popular you get,"
Sly pointed out to Spin magazine in 1985, "the more people there
are around you who say they will make everything work. So more
people make money off your hide, like from traveling arrangements.... When you're much younger and on top, they tell you,
`Don't worry `bout nothin'. Hey, you're an artist, just worry about your music.' . . . I'd get a lot of contracts crammed in my face. I'd
be getting into a Learjet, on my way somewhere, and they'd say,
`Before you get to the next place, can we see you, sweetheart? Sign
this right quick.'" Along with the cash, it became ever easier for
Sly to acquire roadies, personal assistants, and luxury vehicles.
Ultimately, of course, it became more difficult for him to fulfill the
terms of those contracts and to put aside any part of the money
toward his financial future; most of it disappeared in the short run.

With a more hopeful approach to finances, Sly and David
Kapralik's Stone Flower Productions was set up in an office opposite the distinctive cylindrical headquarters of Capitol Records in
Hollywood. Drawing on the producing skills he'd first honed as a
teenager at Autumn Records, Sly helped launch a brief but successful career (on Atlantic Records) for Little Sister, the group named
for his youngest musical sibling, Vet. She was joined by two other
vocalists, Mary McCreary and Elva "Tiny" Mouton, with whom
she'd attended high school, performed gospel music (as the Heavenly Tones), and later provided backup on her older brother's
albums. In 1970, Little Sister placed on the pop and R & B charts
with two of Sly's compositions, "Somebody's Watching You" (a
cover from the Family Stone's Stand! album) and "You're the One."
Stone Flower also produced less successful recordings by R & B
artist Joe Hicks and the proto-funk group 6iX. Notable in these
productions was Sly's novel use of a prototype drum machine, a
harbinger of developments in Sly's own later recordings and in
popular music in general.

Sly made several carefully selected concert appearances across
the country in 1970. One of those stops, for a free concert in
Chicago's Grant Park on July 27, resulted in what was described in
subsequent national reports and in legend for decades to come as
"a riot."

As reported in the New York Times, "several thousand youths"
battled police and vandalized the city's Loop district after the Family Stone refused to perform at the concert. Presented by the city
as "a way to bridge the generation gap," the concert featured Sly as
a form of apology to fans who'd been disappointed when he'd
welched on dates earlier in the summer. The band, however,
refused to begin playing for the free concert until the crowd quieted itself, which it didn't. The Times piece didn't lay blame on Sly
for the Chicago riot, but other parts of the press and the rumor
among the public nationwide did. It didn't help that Sly & the
Family Stone were accumulating blame for showing up late for
gigs or missing them altogether, trying the patience of young audiences. Besides, the health of rock concerts in general had become
suspect, after the fatality and chaos of the Altamont Free Concert,
featuring the Rolling Stones, in December 1969.

Epic's Al DeMarino is still eager to clear the record about the
Chicago fiasco. "There was racial tension against the police force
well before this day was scheduled," he claims. "In fact, bricks were
found, chains were found, bats were found, prior to the band coming out. So they didn't cause it by not performing, it was caused by
tension before.... And Irv Kupcinet, a great writer in Chicago [for
the Sun-Times], was the only one who came forth days later and
said, listen, this has nothing to do with Sly & the Family Stone....
I gave a radio interview to Gene Loving, a major disc jockey ... and
explained everything to him, because he cared enough and wanted
to know the truth. And I referred to Irv Kupcinet's column."

Later that summer, Sly left the accusations (but not his selfindulgent habits) behind and made an extensive sweep through
Western Europe, including a stop at the Olympia, Paris's oldest
music hall (where he would stage a comeback, with Vet, thirtyseven summers later). The expatriated Ria Boldway was alerted to Sly's visit and got to experience him in a context very different
from the hometown boy she'd hung with; Sly was now an ascending international celebrity.

Ria had moved to Paris in 1968 to study at the American College, learn French, and start a performing career. Attractive, talented, and quickly bilingual, she landed a role in the
French-language production of Hair: The Tribal-Rock Love Musical, which had been luring younger audiences to Broadway with
its pop-oriented score and episode of onstage nudity. For a long
time, Ria kept herself deliberately ignorant of the Family Stone's
path to fame and fortune: "I didn't buy any of his stuff." Even now,
"I've still never read any books written about him, because I
thought it would hurt way too much," she says. But back in Paris,
"I remember one day going over to my friend Paul's flat, we were
all going to study music for this anthropology course. And Paul
said, `I got this new album, let's put it on. And I almost died! It was
Dance to the Music.... I thought it was wonderful."

Ria thus came to Sly bearing kudos, but she noted that after
she told him about being featured in Hair, there was no complimentary reciprocation. "You know, what really hurt was he never
said he was proud of me for being in the most successful play in
Paris, which was comparable to being on the New York stage for
three and a half years. He just didn't acknowledge it.... The whole
[Family Stone] band was invited to come and see our show, we
gave them tickets and treated them like royalty. I was given [a variety of roles] to perform that night, specially for my friends. And
he didn't come."

The disappointed Ria had to admit to herself how far Sly had
wandered along the metaphorical road she'd seen him moving
down four years earlier, in the white convertible with Carol Doda. Still, the old flames spent much time together during Sly's week in
the City of Light. "He was fairly unreachable, as far as depth of
emotion and real contact went," she reports. "He was that way with
everybody.... As far as I could tell, he didn't have private conversations with anybody anymore. He didn't hang out with the group,
stayed by himself, pretty much a different person." The rest of the
Family Stone, in turn, "was looking down in the mouth, the whole
band." Nevertheless, despite a now-familiar hour's delay in starting, Sly and the ensemble were able to mount "a damn good show"
at the Olympia, with Ria cheering from the audience. "The staging was beautiful, the costuming was excellent," she says. "Very
much the whole Hair thing, the whole hippie movement thing.
And the vocals were excellent."

Looking back on the after-show activities at Sly's hotel, Ria
realizes how naive she was then about the chemical influences on
his behavior. "Sly said, `Hey, Ria, can you get me some coke?' And
I said, `Man, it's kind of late, but I'll try.' I called up the frigging
concierge and was trying for about an hour to order Coca-Cola at
around two in the morning.... He'd always told me I was lame,
and I guess he was right." During that week, Ria noticed that Sly
"would spend so much time in the bathroom with different people. Not girls, guys. They'd go in there, and I had no idea what it
was about."

There was a parting of the ways when Sly moved on to tour
dates in Holland. He returned to the States, to deal with the
volatile mix of celebrity and infamy that he and the press had been
stirring up. Ria herself crossed back over the Atlantic two years
later, with a husband (who wanted her to give up show biz) and
their two children. Another reunion with Sly awaited, further
down his hard road.

No one understands another's grief, no one
understands another's joy.... My music is the
product of my talent and my misery. And that
which I have written in my greatest distress is
what the world seems to like the best.

-FRANZ SCHUBERT

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does
so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol,
or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he
disguises himself.

-JEAN COCTEAU

HILE WAITING OUT THE
two years for a new album
after Stand!, Columbia gave
fans a recap of what they'd already learned to love about Sly & the
Family Stone. Greatest Hits, the band's first compilation, was
released in 1970, and its tracks were almost consistently positive
and uplifting.