I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (9 page)

Rich turned to a list of contacts he'd maintained while working with Autumn Records, and picked out Chuck Gregory, the
local promotion manager for Columbia Records. Chuck had
secured Columbia's first rock act (Moby Grape), as well as a
recording of Carol Doda and her backing band at the Condor. For
Aretha Franklin, performing at a private party downstairs from the club, Chuck had recruited Sly and some other Condor familiars as
backing musicians. Chuck then called Columbia's New York office,
at Aretha's request, to propose recording the rising soul diva with
Sly and the others. This promising project, conjoining two future
superstars, never came to be: Columbia, ready to divest themselves
of Aretha, gave it the thumbs-down.

On the night Chuck came to the Cathedral to assess the Family Stone, at Rich's invitation, in March 1967, "Everything that
could go wrong went wrong," says the club owner. "Microphones
went out, amplifiers went out, strings broke on guitars, it was just
a fucking mess." Chuck's reaction came as a relief: "I think we got
something." Inspired by this interest, Rich set about cleaning up
his star act. "Sly had been in trouble with the IRS and the Musicians' Union," he says, "so we got his back dues straightened out
and brought in Sid Frank, my dad's accountant." The band was
sent to Don Wehr's Music City in San Francisco to equip itself with
proper instruments and amplifiers, and then was sent across town
to the trendy Town Squire for outfits. "They came out looking like
fucking clowns," laughs Rich. "Jerry with his polka-dot shirt and
Sly with his knickers. I said, `What the fuck is going on?' But Sly
was right, I was wrong. They were gonna be new, they were gonna
be unique, their music was different, they were on their way."

Eye-catching fashion and coiffure remained hallmarks
throughout the band's existence and into Sly's career beyond. The
bandleader would go so far as to create outfits instantly with a rug
and a knife. Though Hendrix's Experience had their towering
Afros, Jim Morrison his tight leather pants, and Janis Joplin her
hippy bell-bottoms, the Family Stone's group image of garish costuming almost seemed to prefigure the '70s-there were highheeled boots, tight slacks or dresses, luminescent puffy shirts evocative of some gilded age, oversize hats atop oversize dos, and
ornate jewelry. In publicity shots, on record covers, and in live performance, the band manifested a new standard of rock royalty.

Back in New York, Chuck Gregory's superiors at Columbia
Records were still bedecked in three-piece suits and ties, smoking
tobacco copiously while attempting to stay ahead of rapidly changing trends in music. An enthusiastic phoned dispatch from Chuck
reached the ears of David Kapralik, who'd lateraled from his position in national promotions for Columbia (succeeding the notorious rock hater Mitch Miller) to managing A & R (artists and
repertoire) for Columbia's rock-centered Epic Records. "Now that
you're there [at Epic]," Chuck urged David, "come on out and I'll
sign a hell of a band for ya." While still at Columbia, David had
resurrected the legendary Okeh label and engaged performer and
producer Curtis Mayfield and others to broaden the label's R & B
catalog. He'd also coined the term "pop gospel" and had signed
Peaches & Herb to Epic. Chuck's report about a black DJ with a
racially integrated ensemble intrigued David, then in his early forties, and he flew out to San Francisco and slept off some of his jet
lag at Chuck's home in Marin County, across the Golden Gate
Bridge. "Then we woke up at 12:30 [a.m.] and took a cup of coffee," says Chuck. "My wife drove us down [to Winchester Cathedral] and Sly went on at two o'clock."

"I heard this sound that totally blew me away," remembers
David. "And after the gig, probably about four in the morning, Sly
and I went to a nearby International House of Pancakes, and we
sat there looking at each other." From his current refuge on Maui,
he can't recapture verbatim what transpired, but the grandiloquent David prefers to cast it in a "mythopoetic" format, inspired
by his Jewish upbringing. "I just know that we made a connection in the magic mirror," he says, and he elaborates on the quality of
this new relationship: "The nearer, the dearer, the clearer you see,
Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad." Taken from
Deuteronomy, this incantation means, "Here, Israel, the Lord our
God, the Lord is One."

Aside from the insights into oneness inspired by Sly at the
IHOP, David let the ambitious young artist know that he was
intent on signing the band to Epic. The pair spent more time
together over the next several days and nights, cruising around the
Bay Area in Sly's ride. "He had to get to know me," David explains.
"He was a street-wise kid. I'm not a street-wise kid. For better or
worse I come from Plainfield, New Jersey, a middle-class
situation."

Whatever Sly may have shared with David apparently didn't
include any information about the prior management arrangement with Rich Romanello, who remembers Sly confronting him
during this period. "He came back and said, `I spent a lot of time
with David, and I think I'm gonna do a deal,"' recounts Rich, who
was made to feel "like someone had cut off my arm." Rich was
offered a percentage of Sly & the Family Stone's future earnings,
and was thus persuaded to release his client from his management
contract. A new contract was promptly consummated by David in
the basement of the Stewart home on Urbano Drive. "I said, `Sly,
I know I can help you fulfill all your dreams as an artist,"' remembers David. "Somehow or other I knew the power of my enthusiasm. I had total confidence." This prompted his return to the Epic
offices in New York, where "I had that buzz happening. And when
I have a buzz, I infuse that buzz in other people." It had worked in
promoting the young Barbra Streisand early in the '60s. "I was
a madman! I'd jump on desks, I would go in the middle of meetings, I would go into an office and climb on my boss's desk
and have a demo in my hand and put it on the turntable. And
that's also how I got attention for Sly in the beginning."

Back on the San Francisco Peninsula, the Family Stone completed its booking at the Cathedral in June '67, on the eve of the
Summer of Love. Rich, despite what he'd been promised, saw no
more money from the band. A couple of months later, the Cathedral was shut down by a fire, and its proprietor began contemplating a more dependable and rewarding occupation. His former star
opening act had started looking east.

SLY & THE FAMILY STONE had a sense early on that they
wouldn't be comfortable in anyone's pigeonhole. They were
impressed by new manager David Kapralik's industry credentials
and track record, but skeptical about following in the footsteps of
his latest successful clients, Peaches & Herb, a successful lounge act
with a few hits. "That's what [David] wanted us to be," notes Jerry
Martini. "But Sly didn't wanna do lounge. He wanted to do concerts. So it was harder to break us."

Likewise, the Family Stone didn't hear itself as necessarily concordant with the hippie lifestyle and the so-called San Francisco
Sound that accompanied it. "Being in San Francisco in 1967, it
wasn't about rock 'n' roll, it was about psychedelics," says Greg
Errico. "It was Quicksilver [Messenger Service], the Grateful Dead,
Blue Cheer. And it had nothing to do with what we were doing,
and we had nothing to do with that ... I had no interest in going
with a psychedelic group. What I found myself in the middle of, I
couldn't have dreamed it any better. I felt very comfortable, very
natural." What separated the Family Stone from many of the
groups associated with psychedelia was its tightly plotted balance of voices and instruments, memorable on later hits. Many of the
players involved in the San Francisco sound, by contrast, were guitar-based, with a more relaxed approach to songwriting and
arranging that allowed for some amount of extended improvisation. These were the antecedents of today's jam bands.

The Family Stone needed a showcase away from San Francisco.
With help from a Bay Area mover and shaker with gaming connections, they got an extended booking in July 1967 at a Las Vegas
strip club called the Pussycat a Go-Go, which provided live entertainment (and only a bit of gaming) into the wee hours. By this
point, the Family Stone, with David's consent, was playing original material alongside its innovative covers. Commuting between
Vegas and Columbia's studio in Los Angeles on days off from the
Pussycat, the band recorded some of the material for what would
become A Whole New Thing. Sly's youngest sister, Vaetta (nicknamed "Vet"), provided background vocals, as she would for
future albums, alongside Elva "Tiny" Mouton and Mary McCreary,
two women with whom Vet had been performing and recording
gospel as the Heavenly Tones.

The members of the Family Stone began to sparkle on and off
the stage during their weeks in Vegas. Sly, Freddie, and Larry
cruised the Strip in garishly colored Thunderbirds. Band members
sometimes wore wigs for their Pussycat shows, and energized the
audience by stepping down among them from the stage. Celebrity
fans curious to witness the new music after their own gigs in the
casinos included Bobby Darin and the Fifth Dimension. Ultimately Sly attracted a different kind of attention by taking up with
the club owner's white girlfriend, Anita, provoking not only the
expected sexual jealousy but a barrage of threats and racial epithets. Jerry related Sly's reaction: " [He] got up onstage and put his
hands up and told the story to the people, and blew the club owner's mind. He said, `We are gonna pack up and leave, because
I can't have my woman here, and we are being racially persecuted'
... Everybody that was at that club stood up and gave us a standing ovation." Jerry then had to hurriedly gather his then-wife and
kids and join a police-escorted caravan headed out of town.

In the meantime, the tracks the band had laid down in L.A. for
Columbia weren't leading to the rapid recognition they'd hoped
for. A Whole New Thing "was a musicians' album," reflects Jerry.
"So it never really made it big anywhere except Las Vegas, where
we played. We didn't have a hit single, we had more of a cult
following."

"The first album was just a labor of love, it was us," adds Greg.
"We thought we were the greatest thing since spaghetti, but the
only people who had [the album] were musicians. You'd go across
the country and every musician had it under his arm, but nobody
else knew about it."

Among his CBS colleagues and clients in New York, David was
delighted to find A Whole New Thing making an impression on
notable ears. "Its marketability I wasn't sure of," he admits. "But
guys like Mose Allison and Jon Hendricks [were] talking about
Sly. I heard this through Teo Macero, who produced them.
`He's a musicians' musician' was the word around CBS." David
encouraged the band members to spend some time making a
name for themselves in New York City, and they were up to the
challenge.

"New York either loves you or they hate you, and we were a
success there," Jerry reports. He remembers, during an early New
York engagement, "having to take the subway from 136 West 55th
Street, the Gorham Hotel, all the way down into the Village, wearing my weird clothes. People leave you alone, if you're weird in
New York, they don't bother you."

In August '67, the act was booked at the Electric Circus, a
venue operated by former talent agent Jerry Brandt, and among
the invited guests was Al DeMarino, an up-and-comer at the
William Morris Agency, where Brandt had been his boss. "Jerry
called me up and said, `I have this great band coming in, and I'm
trying to do a favor for a friend, try to get down here and see
them,"' Al remembers. "It was at the time when psychedelia had
really started to come forth, and [the Circus] had become a very
hip, `in' place to be, with strobe lights and projections. I got there
the first night. I was knocked out by the show, and immediately
went up to Sly and the band and introduced myself. Jerry arranged
an immediate meeting with David Kapralik ... and I was very
aggressive not only about signing them, but caring about them."
What made Al so eager to secure the relatively unknown act for his
employer, the largest diversified talent agency in the world, was,
"The dynamics of the music, the strength of the music, Sly's leadership qualities onstage, and the chemistry within the band. They
were more than band members, it felt like a family, they cared
about each other."

Al perceived A Whole New Thing as "a smash record," but he
shared David's doubts about its marketability. Whatever its mass
appeal, the album displayed the sophistication of good jazz. Sly's
sophisticated arrangements showcased Larry's articulate bass lines
and the brassy teamed horns of Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini, all especially notable on the opening track, where "Underdog"
quoted "Frere Jacques" in a minor key. Greg's drumming on that
same track seemed to presage the hip-hop of thirty years later. The
swirling segue from "I Cannot Make It" to "Trip to Your Heart"
was pure '67 psychedelia. But this mix of elements rendered it difficult to categorize the album within the accepted format of radio
playlists and record store bins.

Like the Jefferson Airplane with Grace Slick, and Big Brother
with Janis Joplin, the Family Stone suggested a flower-power
female-and-male bouquet from California, but they had a better
handle on time and sounded more like a full-fledged band working and playing in harmony. They laid down pop grooves as
impressive as Motown's, but without the impersonal grooming
and choreography that glossed many of the faceless studio musicians who backed Berry Gordy's Motown vocalists. Onstage Sly
Stone could sing with some of the bluely grit and edge of Otis
Redding and Wilson Pickett, but he also conveyed that endearing
attitude of mischief that had once entranced both Ria Boldway
and his radio audiences.

Sly's group also boasted the squalling brass and syncopated
power of James Brown's, but without Brown's cold control of
meter and melody and his autocratic approach to organization.
The Godfather of Soul had been known to slap fines on band
members who missed beats or hit wrong notes. But Freddie Stone
told Guitar World magazine that in the Family Stone, "No one was
held to any rules. It wasn't necessarily about playing the traditional
guitar part or the traditional bass part or the traditional horn line.
It was about giving the musicians the freedom to create a part that
they thought was appropriate."