I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (21 page)

But toward the end of the decade, there were healthy signs that
Sly, or maybe Sylvester, was preparing himself properly for the new millennium. In 1997, he extended a rare summons to a young MIT
graduate student named Jon Dakss, who'd established the slyfam-
stone.com Web site. Jon went to Los Angeles in April of that year
to help Sly learn how to make use of his computer and the Web:
"Though he assured me it was nothing personal," Jon related on his
Web site, Sly"insisted on observing all that I did with his computer,
and asked that I explain whatever I was going to do before I did it."
Jon pronounced Sly to be in good spirits and in good health, living
with a pair of sisters as aides. "They set up his equipment and perform on his songs. If Sly has lyrics, they write them down." For his
trouble and devotion, Jon was given a spontaneous display by Sly
on keyboards, to which he reacted, "I think he hasn't made a comeback because he doesn't want to. He could take the world by storm
right now if he wanted to."

In 1998, Joel Selvin released Sly & the Family Stone: An Oral
History. It presented a collection of interviews with Family Stone
veterans, Stewart family members, and business and personal
acquaintances of Sly, though the man himself did not share any
thoughts with Joel. "Most of the people interviewed for this book
have never spoken about their experiences before and many of the
others have never publicly discussed some of these matters," ran
Joel's introduction. "It's easy to understand their reluctance."

Alas, some of them became more reluctant after the publication of Joel's book. Jerry counted himself among the several people less than pleased with how they'd figured in Joel's handling of
the story. Jerry stated to this author, in 2006, "I am not going to
have any kind of negative comments to make about Sly & the Family Stone, because I've already been misquoted so much.... Everybody's been bit so much. So you are coming along at a time when
I have scars on my heart." "That's the dirty laundry, the trash," said Greg about Joel's book. "And that's not what [the group] was
about, really."

In 1999, documentarians Nina Rosenblum and Dennis
Watlington were engaged by New York Times Television to create
a film about the careers of Sly and Jimi Hendrix, which took its
title, The Skin I'm In, from one of Fresh's lesser known but more
soulful tracks. Reflecting on the project, director Nina allows that
the view through her lens was rosier than that through Joel's
glasses. "We really think that Sly Stone was a complete unadulterated genius ... the likes of Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Mozart," she
avows. As for Sly's diversion from artistic purpose, "He was like a
reed, so in touch, as great artists are, with the times he lived in,"
says the filmmaker. "When things get repressive, [artists] really suffer, and I think he really suffered. The times went one way, and he
went a different way.... Now, everything that that generation won
is with us, in terms of civil rights and women's rights and understanding-the world will never be the same. But I think Sly paid
for it.... He was taken away from us."

Among its many high points, the film, now available in the
form of a director's rough cut, included footage shot at brother
Freddie's Evangelist Temple Fellowship Center in his hometown of
Vallejo, affiliated with the Church of God in Christ. His mother,
Alpha, who had carried her family's connection to that denomination from her native Texas, spoke to the filmmakers from one of
the temple's pews, bedecked in her Sunday finery, just a few years'
before her and her husband K. C. 's passing. "Freddie came home
[to Vallejo], and I was so glad," she testified. "I thought he might
draw Sly. And maybe someday he will." She remembered that Sly,
her older son, "just really was good in church ... people would be
hollering." Flashing forward, she commented, "I don't know what happened to him. It has to be the drugs." The Skin I'm In also featured input from music teacher David Froehlich, ex-manager
David Kapralik, Bobby "The Swim" Freeman, and Billy Preston,
as well as every member of the Family Stone except its leader.
"The production company tried every which way [to reach Sly],
but it wasn't to be," admits Nina. "We went to Beverly Hills, we
tried to stake it out, we went to his front gate, we rang the bellnothing. His family tried on our behalf, but it was difficult for
them, too."

Dennis Watlington, the African American author and filmmaker who conducted most of the documentary's interviews,
secured the Stewart family's input. "He came from the church, so
when he showed up, they knew he was one of them, from them,
by them, so we had much more access than we would ever have
had," Nina points out. On camera, Jerry and Greg made reference
to the deleterious effects of drugs, and record exec Steve Paley
pointed out that Sly "loves being the Howard Hughes of his generation, he loves being inaccessible, he loves the idea that nobody
knows who he is, where he is, or what he's doing and what his
music is like. He loves being a legend." From a slightly different but
equally amiable angle, George Clinton referred to his fellow performer and substance abuser as a "funny, witty, crazy, clever, halfass would-be pimp," and noted that "he had to be what he was:
father, preacher, he had the best of all the things they needed to do
what they did." Billy Preston, interviewed in his kitchen, revealed,
"It's always a dream, to get this long keyboard that we both play.
If you ever see Sly," he told the filmmakers, pounding his chest and
smiling, "tell him that I love him from the heart!" Billy passed away
in 2006.

As aired on the Showtime cable television network, The Skin
I'm In appeared in a version significantly edited by network func tionaries, and was closer to the "sorry crawl" associated by Nina
with Joel's oral history than to the sprightly, respectful time trot
intended by her and Dennis. "When we gave it to Showtime, what
we thought was one of the best things we had ever done got cut up
into something else altogether, like a rag story from a tabloid," she
laments. "It was really a cheapening of Sly: Sly the bad boy, Sly the
drug addict, without really any human or social dimension. We
were very, very, very shocked." So, yet again, were some of the
interviewees. The filmmakers were put in the position of having
to disseminate apologies and explanations, which were generally
accepted, though the experience may have revived suspicions
about interviews and media exposure. Sly himself has not registered any opinion about the Showtime documentary. About Joel's
book and the print media in general, he proclaims, "I don't read
all of that. I don't even know about Joel Selvin."

Keeping to his private music making, and far away from the
public in an L.A. hillside home during the later '90s, Sly came to
depend upon Mario Errico, the older brother of his former drummer Greg, as factotum and confidante. Mario, six years Greg's
elder, got to know Sly while roaming San Francisco's North Beach
nightlife in the mid-'60s. By the time the Family Stone, including
Greg, had launched their performing career at Winchester Cathedral down the Peninsula, Mario was married and a father and
thereby somewhat constrained in his night moves. Through several marriages, Mario held a variety of day jobs, while keeping contact with his brother and with Sly, and responding to occasional
calls for help from the latter, until he became something of a livein helpmate in L.A. "There's lots of times I inspire him to do certain things, and it works," says Mario, "'cause he loves a lot of the
things I love," including "music, motorcycles, and cars." The elder
Errico was one of Sly's few acquaintances invited to extended stays in his abodes. Like many men in middle age, both Sly and Mario
ultimately became restless to head down new roads in search of
some of what had excited them long ago on the old ones.

As nostalgic pop music, by the turn of the twenty-first century, Sly & the Family Stone's oeuvre received ever-wider (and
newly lucrative) exposure in TV shows, ads, and dozens of films.
Crossover to the youngest generations was powered by the presence of the Family Stone on soundtracks of the popular Shrek
movies, A Knight's Tale, and more recently the retro comedy SemiPro. Jerry reports that he and other band members have reaped
particularly bountiful benefits from commercial mechanical
royalties for repeated usage of their songs for selling Toyotas
("Everyday People") and Carnival Cruises ("Hot Fun in the Summertime"). With attribution but not compensation, pithy messages and catch phrases embedded within Sly's lyrics show up
daily in media worldwide, even when the stories have nothing to
do with music. Commenting on the problems and potential of
humanity, Sly seems to have created his own gospel.

The band's irresistible integration of kaleidoscopic soul and
get-down funk forged templates for pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop.
Those in their creative debt, acknowledged or not, include the
Beastie Boys, Living Color, Lenny Kravitz, and the Red Hot Chili
Peppers, whose extravagantly thump in'-and-pluckin' bassist Flea
has borrowed Larry's bass brilliance. The Chili Peppers ably covered Fresh's seductive "If You Want Me to Stay" in 1985, as did
four-string luminary Victor Wooten on a live medley with "Thank
You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" in 2001. Hip-hoppers Arrested
Development fashioned "People Everyday" as a sharp rewrite of
"Everyday People," doubling the take with a bonus "Metamorphosis Mix" on their 1992 album. With the advent of digital, snippets
of Sly & the Family Stone's songs seemed to emerge everywhere as backbeats, riffs, and fanfares on the tracks of Everlast, Too Short,
De La Soul, Fatboy Slim, Janet Jackson, the Beastie Boys, Kid Rock,
Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and others. The enduring influence of Sly
extended even further. In the sophisticated and demanding arena
of jazz, from which he'd long ago attracted the innovative Miles
Davis, Sly became the co-subject of a seminar conducted at New
York's Symphony Space in 2000 by irrepressible jazz clarinetist
Don Byron, titled Contrasting Brilliance: The Music of Henry
Mancini and Sly Stone. Several years later, "Stand" (with plenty of
punch but no exclamation point) was extended to become the
longest track, at eleven minutes, on trumpeter Wallace Roney's
simply-titled album Jazz. And Jamie Davis sang a suave "If You
Want Me to Stay" on his 2008 big-band album Vibe Over Perfection, produced and with drumming by Greg Errico.

In 2001, over the waves in Holland, a pair of thirty-something
Dutch twins, Arno and Edwin Konings, embarked on a massive
long-term project (still in process) to annotate every detail of every
year of Sly's life and every track he'd ever recorded. Their research
made them aware of the primarily sensationalist approach of most
journalists and other writers to the subject of Sly, "especially how
he wasted his life," says Edwin. "I was stunned," he continues. "Here
was one of the greatest groups ever, in our opinion, and everything
that people talk about is the not showing up, the drugs, and they
don't talk about the greatness of the music."

The Rhythm and Blues Foundation presented Sly & the Family Stone with its Pioneer Award in 2001, for "lifelong contributions [which] have been instrumental in the development of
rhythm and blues music." Sly didn't join his bandmates at the ceremony in Philadelphia.

There should be someplace that we sit down
and say, "Hey, let's work it out, let's get on the
good foot together. Let's let bygones be
bygones."

-JAMES BROWN
1993 interview with Jeff Kaliss

I think my fans will follow me into our
combined old age. Real musicians and real fans
stay together for a long, long time.

-BONNIE RAITT

OST OF THE ORIGINAL MEMbers of the Family Stone convened in the back of a music
store in Vallejo, California, in 2002, with the intention of recording again under the Family Stone name. Larry, who, with Greg, had
been declared, in June of that year, one of the "25 Greatest Rhythm
Sections of All Time" in Drumming magazine, expressed interest
in a band reunion during the Rhythm and Blues Pioneer Award induction, but neither he nor Sly showed up in Vallejo, and Rustee Allen took over the bass duties. Activity extended into 2003 and
to a studio in L.A., but Freddie declined to join a follow-up tour
and funding dried up. The project was dropped, but not before the
participants made a spirited appearance on funk scholar Rickey
Vincent's annual Sly birthday radio show on KPFA-FM in
Berkeley.

Eager to maintain momentum, Greg accepted an invitation
from a couple of local promoters to assemble a band for the San
Francisco Funk Festival in 2004. "We did it as the San Francisco
Funk All-Stars," he says. "I called Vet [Stewart] and Tiny [Mouton,
both from Little Sister], and I got Jerry and Cynthia, Fred Wesley
on trombone.... My intentions were just to bring the music, the
integrity and the spirit of it, on the stage. I wasn't trying to recreate a Sly, that was the last thing I wanted to do." He hoped, though,
that the enterprise might, somehow, some time, tempt Sly to join
in. After the gig, at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall,
Greg summoned Jerry, Cynthia, Vet, and Tiny to team up with
bassist Bobby Vega and guitarist Gail Muldrow (both of whom had
played on High on You) and vocalists Skyler Jett and Fred Ross, in
a group called the Funk Family Affair. "I was getting offers, and I
saw it very clear in my mind what to do," says Greg. "But I found
myself wrestling with the understanding of what it was, what it
could be, and just trying to get it done."