I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (2 page)

This world is different, but it's the same difference with
another name. If I didn't play music from now on, I wouldn't be a
musician-and I'm gonna hang in there whatever happens. I'm
still doing music, and still representative of the truth. I like playing with everybody, but I can only harmonize with a few. If everybody from the old band could afford to get together and stay
together for about a month and then go to play gigs, that would
be cool. We do love to play with each other.

I don't read much of what anybody writes about me, but I
know that it's mostly secondhand stuff that looks like it's supposed
to be firsthand. I don't know nobody, and nobody knows me, and
they don't know what they're talking about. But I see why they say some things that they consider negative, especially when it has to
do with what will sell their damned things.

I like the way Jeff tells my story. It seems level, and it seems on
the level. He keeps how I look at things separate from anybody
else's looking at things. I'm only craving fewer pieces of paper,
fewer words in my letters and fewer letters in my words, in order
to say what I gotta say. The rest of it, like this book, happens natural, and everything's good after that. My opinion about things is
still the same, and I'm pretty aggressive about making sure people
hear it. They accept it easy, or they gotta accept it hard.

Thank you, Jeff.

-SYLVESTER STEWART/SLY STONE
From inside his '58 Packard
Napa County, California
February 2008

AVID KAPRALIK CAME TO SEE
my group at the Sugar Shack in
Boston and he was blown away.
He was ready to sign us as soon as possible.

I was overwhelmed. This was the dude-at the time he was a
well-known Columbia Records executive.

Three weeks later, I walked into his office in New York and he
was frantically rushing around. He laid some pictures out on the
floor, on the table, all over the place, while giving me advice on our
show-he talked about me being the center of attention, about
being brighter and wearing brighter clothing, etc. He was comparing me to the guy in the pictures.

I had heard this comparison before-it was Sly and the Family Stone.

He said, "I better be right, because I am betting my life on this.
I am my leaving my job here at Epic to manage him." At the same
time, he was pulling out records and putting them on the turntable
for me to hear, and he said, "Remember, it's different."

I said, "You're damn right it's different!" They were a mixed,
beautiful group. Black, white, and big Afros. They looked like Funkadelic on Motown! We were very similar, but dark. They
looked like a polished version of us.

When the first record played, I didn't know what to think.
Were they a white group? They had a strange pop sound. Their pop
songs, like "Stand" and "Everyday People," were as pop as you
could possibly get, but the black songs was as black and funky as
Ray Charles and James Brown. They had the biggest Afros in the
world. I thought it was a Bay Area thing, like Huey Newton.

"Sing a Simple Motherfucking Song" was the bomb! This was
it. This song hit me just like "What'd I Say" by Ray Charles. It was
the funkiest thing I had ever heard in my life, from Motown to
James Brown to the Beatles. I knew then David knew what the fuck
he was talking about. They were the complete package: they could
play, sing, write, and produce, and all superior to anybody I'd ever
seen or heard before. David had to pull me away-I was so into
Sly's records that I forgot I had gone up there to sign a deal for
myself.

David told me I would see for myself that night-he was taking me with him to see Sly.

The show was going to be at the Electric Circus, a small club
in the East Village in New York. As showtime approached, I realized David had his hands full dealing with tickets, backstage
passes, people, so I told him I would be okay, I would just get a
seat.

I walked down to the West Side to a store called Paul Sergeant
and got me some funky haberdashery for the night. I knew I had
to represent. So many people had compared us.

I showed up at the Electric Circus by myself. I got some acid
and I was so high, everything was beautiful, which was not unusual for the East Village on a tab of sunshine. When I arrived at the
front door, they saw the look on my face and let me right in. This
was a special night. It seems like everyone was high and happy.

It was a psychedelic club, with black lights, posters, side rooms
with couches and dens. Everyone was sitting down, relaxing. All of
a sudden there was a big commotion. People had been waiting for
a good while, and all of a sudden all hell broke loose-I had never
heard bass like this before, and one of our bass players, Billy Bass
Nelson, would have eight cabinets, so I knew what bass sounded
like! Larry Graham was loud as hell! They had the clarity of
Motown but the volume of Jimi Hendrix or the Who. They literally turned this motherfucker out. That would be the impression
that Sly left on me for the rest of my life.

"Jane Is a Groupee," "Plastic Jim," "Underdog," "Don't Call Me
Nigger, Whitey"-whether political, social, or party songs, you
always thought they were speaking directly to you personally. Not
unlike Bob Dylan or Smokey Robinson.

David introduced me to Sly and told me that Sly had a new
record label called Stone Flower, and would we like to be the first
group on the label? Sly gave me a look, the one that I would recognize in time to mean he knew something was cool.

We signed with Stone Flower Records. The label folded after
they put out just one record, by Sly's sister, but we stayed in touch.
It would be years before I would see him again.

He came and spent a year with me on my farm, and we had a
great time, writing songs and everything else. I inducted him into
the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. I only saw him for a few minutes
then, and then it would be years and years before I saw him again,
to team up with him on my album George Clinton and Some Gang sters of Love. I don't know what it is about our chemistry, but we
are always cool with each other. At the very beginning of the Mothership tours, he played four shows with us. Other than myself, he
was the only person ever to come out of that spaceship!

-GEORGE CLINTON

OODSTOCK AND THE
music that led him there
four decades ago are still
alive for Sly Stone. "There could be a Woodstock on this very hill,
out there," he suggests, gesturing toward the sun-kissed acres of his
rented property in Napa County, up the road a piece from his
childhood home in Vallejo, California. "That's what I'm working
up to now, again, something like that," Sly continues, in reference
to his perennial late-night sessions in his private studio, eking out
new tunes and lyrics for a public still caught up in the hits from
long ago. Of course, it will never be "like that" again, and it
doesn't need to be. Too much has changed for Sly, for the Family
Stone band in which he played at Woodstock, and for the fans they
shared that world with.

The spirit that had floated over the half million hippies
sprawled across Max Yasgur's pastureland in the wee hours of
August 17, 1969, was made from those times, redolent with marijuana, psychedelics, youthful hormones, and an adrenaline pulse
of protest against the old, the tired, and the just plain wrong. The
groups booked throughout the weekend of the Woodstock Music
and Arts Fair had already helped set the accompaniment for the late sixties and the coming early seventies. The motley but consistently exciting and often rebellious acts included Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, and Carlos
Santana. But Sly & the Family Stone stood out against the happy
haze. They not only played to the times, but they actually looked
like the ideals held dear by their fans: black and white, male and
female stood side by side on the stage, arrayed in fantastic fashions
and hairdos, rallying the crowd to get "higher." All their songs, in
fact, were rhythmic and uplifting, bass and drums providing an
irresistible foundation for the flights of horns, guitar, and keyboards, and for the catchy vocals of sexy sister Rose and her sibling Sly-part shaman, part preacher, part trickster, part soul
brother. His lyrics raised messages that might serve as musical
picket signs: up with love, down with racism, turn on, free your
mind!

To seek out the story of this man and this band, we need to
look beyond the brief, bright glow of Woodstock. We go back to
Sly's beginnings, as Sylvester Stewart, in gospel music, and through
the Family Stone's start as a rhythm-and-blues cover band in San
Francisco. And we continue past Woodstock on to a confusing
time with darker messages, influenced by drugs and the other
indulgences of celebrity, by the dissolution of the band, and by
Sly's subsequent struggle to keep his gifts and his person from
being extinguished by his loneliness and bad judgment.

There's much mystery and apparent contradiction in this
story, not all of which can be resolved within any literary discourse
on it. Sly is a black man, whose scrutiny by and punishment under
the law may have been prejudiced by his race. Yet he rarely testified to his ethnicity or to contemporary civil rights struggles. Sly
formed one of rock 'n' roll's most vital and visible ensembles, and partnered them in a set of high-energy performances and in hits
that continue to live in movie soundtracks and commercials. Yet
Sly was party to the premature end of that ensemble, and opted
instead for a solitary, synthesized sound and a succession of pickup
groups.

And now, after decades in which Sly & the Family Stone's
legacy helped fertilize the blossoming of rock, jazz, funk, rhythm
and blues, and urban musical styles, the mystery persists. The sexagenarian Sly has outlived some of those rockers who shared and
succumbed to the same bad habits, among them Jimi Hendrix and
Janis Joplin, as well as those like Marvin Gaye and John Lennon,
who were victims of violence. But Sly has been slow to deploy the
Family Stone in the sort of successful comeback enjoyed by such
other veterans as the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and the Police. Sly's
own appearances with several Family Stone spin-offs have usually
fallen short of the standard set by the original band. Yet he keeps
making music and maintaining, "It'll all come together, and there
will be a lot of help."

This suggests the story is still playing out. Old hits and old
crimes must be examined for what they suggest about the people
directly responsible and about the times in which they occurred.
But this book is also about relationships, a sort of extended "Family Affair," and about how the good and bad vibes of some of these
relationships continue into the present alongside the music.

My own first contact with Sly & the Family Stone came over
the radio during my first months covering topics like civil rights
and antiwar protests as a student journalist at San Francisco State,
in the year of Woodstock. I loved every one of their new, surprising singles that made it onto the airwaves over the next few years:
"Dance to the Music," "Stand!," "Sing a Simple Song," "Everyday People," "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," "Family
Affair," "If You Want Me to Stay," and so forth. Soon after the last
big hit, like many fans, I lost track of the man and the band. So it
was exciting and easy, many years later, to accept the assignment
to put the story of Sly & the Family Stone in print.

Making it happen was a slower, tougher process. Although
there were feature pieces and reviews in periodicals from the
band's heyday, there had been little since, and no biography per se
aside from Joel Selvin's Oral History, a compendium of quotes
published in 1998. I went through this material with a skeptical
eye for bias, recognizing that there was little to be found in the way
of substantial interviews with Sly himself. I did interview those few
persons intimately involved with the story who were still alive and
willing to talk about it, and I eventually got to Sly.