I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (10 page)

But the uniqueness of the Family Stone, however much it may
have been appreciated in 1967 by members of the band and other
musicians, didn't immediately result in strong records sales and a
wide fan base. Clive Davis, then president of Columbia Records,
which owned Epic, recalled for Vanity Fair magazine an early lunch
with Sly. "I told him, `I'm concerned that the serious radio stations
that might be willing to play you'-by which I meant the underground FM radio stations-'will be put off by the costuming, the
hairstyles:... Sly said, `Look, that's part of what I'm doing. I know people could take it the wrong way, but that's who I am: And he
was right. I learned an important lesson from him: when you're
dealing with a pathfinder, you allow that genius to unfold."

Jerry Martini was summoned with Sly to meet with other
Columbia execs and A & R (artists and repertoire) personnel
responsible for artist development. "They played us other things,
like [sweet soul successes] the Fifth Dimension, and they said, `We
want you to do this,"" Jerry recalls. "Sly walked out of there very
disturbed and upset, because [of the lack of recognition of] his
innovative ideas and drumbeats."

Greg remembers that, after the disappointment of A Whole
New Thing, "Sly was very conscious that we had to simplify the
music, that we had to find a subject that could talk to the audience. It was kind of like the Pied Piper ... something that he had
to touch upon, and live with himself, because he was going to have
to be doing `it' every night. We were all gonna have to do `it' every
night."

David Kapralik recalls Sly "coming into my office and saying,
`I'm going back to San Francisco. And I'm gonna stay there. And
if anything ever happens with [the debut] album, let me know
about it. And I say to him, `Sly, you gotta make a hit single. And
you have to have a dum-dum-repeat lyric. And in between all
those dum-dum-repeats, you put all your schticklach.' That was my
first and only A & R suggestion to him in all the years that we were
together. Because I'm not qualified, I'm not a musician. That was
just something I knew from being a promotions man all those
years.

Sly reportedly sought a transfer to Atlantic Records, the legendary R & B, soul, and jazz label whose roster included Ray
Charles and the Coasters, but he demurred when Atlantic asked
him to forsake his band for their hand-picked musicians. (It wouldn't be the only time that a label tried to break up the band;
it would happen again around the recording of Riot.) Sly was not
only insistent on maintaining the Family Stone, but on enhancing
it with his middle sister, Rose, whom he approached on his return
to San Francisco. "I didn't want to just be a slave to the keyboard,"
Rose admitted later in The Skin I'm In. "And [Sly] said, `No, you
can just sing.' I said, `Okay, then.' So I quit my job [at a San Francisco music store] and the next thing he said was, `Okay, we got
you on keyboards.' I was so mad!" Fortunately for the band and
fans alike, Rose also got to display her clarion soprano as the
group's lead female vocalist. Her sound partnered gorgeously, and
uniquely, with Sly's funky midrange and Larry's soul-stirring bassbaritone vocals

These days, without having scored a blockbuster at the start,
an act like the Family Stone might well be dropped from any major
label. In the late '60s, new acts were still being given a chance to
develop their style and realize their artistic and commercial potentials. By the fall of '67, Al DeMarino was touting Sly & the Family
Stone "within the agency at every opportunity, even at TV meetings and film meetings," and finding what bookings he could for
them. "What I felt I needed to do in that initial year was select sizeable, worthwhile engagements," he says. But that "was easier said
than done, because with any new act you're up against people who
don't want to pay you what you're worth. So you bang the drums."

Propelled by Al's and David's metaphorical drumming and
Greg's literal efforts, a much more accessible sophomore album,
Dance to the Music, was assembled in New York's CBS recording
studios. Don Puluse, an engineer young in years but musically well
trained (at Eastman and the Manhattan School) and adept at
deploying the then-new eight-track technology, was assigned to
record the bulk of the album in September 1967. (A couple of tracks had been recorded in California earlier by Bryan Ross-
Myring.) But aside from electronics, Don first needed to recharge
his young clients' energy for the project.

"I had to give them a bit of a pep talk, because of the downers
of Atlantic Records and CBS, where you had people already knocking them before they had even laid down anything," Don recalls.
"I had to say, `Hey, guys, you put all that aside. You're in the studio now, now is the time to make a record. We can't worry about
what the suits in the other building are worrying about: And Sly
said, `Yeah, sounds right, man, let's go!' And they went in there, and
the thing which really stood out was the energy, which was outrageous. They would do very few takes, and to listen back they would
come into the control room and dance."

The group's rightful reveling in their own music didn't interfere with the task at hand. "Sly would bark out orders: `Jerry, do
this! Cynthia, do that! Freddie, play it this way!' He would just, in
about thirty seconds, summarize what he expected, and they'd be
playing again. We did some overdubbing, but basically they did the
whole take." Producer Don Was, in Rolling Stone in 2004, pointed
out, "Sly orchestrated those early records in very advanced waysa little guitar thing here that would trigger the next part that would
trigger the next part."

Changes then in progress in the mode of studio recording may
have furthered Sly's own tight control of the process, Don Puluse
figures. "The groups had started coming in ... saying, `Hey, we're
not gonna record with one guy and mix [i.e., process the recorded
tracks] with another guy,"' he explains. "It wasn't like the old
three- or four-track recordings, where they did everything at one
time, did a little overdubbing, and sent it to a mix room." With
more tracks to manage, "This was much more complicated. They
would do overdubbing, over a period of weeks or months. Then, if they'd sent it to a new guy, he'd have to start all over. So I wound
up [assigned to artists] like Sly, and later [the jazz-rock ensemble]
Chicago, people who insisted on doing the mixing right there
where they knew the sound, and with the same engineer." Don had
the good taste to realize, with Sly's band, that "it would be foolish
to try to get ultra-clean sounds, when what was really important
was the music. I had done a lot of recording, but Dance to the
Music had so much funk to it. Whoa! Where the hell did that come
from? It was incredible!"

Funk had just begun to define itself within pop music in the
late '60s, though its roots of course reached much further back.
Funk and soul scholar and writer Rickey Vincent, in his Funk: The
Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One, singles out a definition of the form by Fred Wesley, a trombonist and collaborator
with James Brown, Bootsy Collins, and George Clinton. Says Fred,
"If you have a syncopated bass line, a strong, strong heavy back
beat from the drummer, a counter-line from the guitar or the keyboard, and someone soul-singing on top of that, in a gospel style,
then you have funk." The Family Stone had all of this, as well as an
embarrassment of individual and collective uniqueness and talent.
Jerry claims that Cynthia was "the first female African American
trumpet player in history." While this is unsupportable-Valaida
Snow, for one, launched a successful career on vocals and trumpet
in 1918-it's evident that female instrumentalists, aside from
occasional pianists and guitarists, were rare in rock, and that Cynthia had acquired a strong, spirited, and accurate horn technique
in her hometown of Sacramento. "Cynthia," wrote Sly in Dance to
the Music's original liner notes, "is one of the most talented trumpets alive and that includes guys!" Jerry himself, who'd played
Vegas and overseas venues before anybody else in the Family Stone, was a sophisticated jazz-wise reedman. Together he and
Cynthia often gave the impression of a much larger brass section.

Larry laid down his trademark down-and-dirty thumpin' and
pluckin' bass, connected through new effects units designed for
guitars-fuzz and wah-wah pedals, which altered the instrument's
signal to give it a fat or stinging "underwater" tone. Larry's taut,
snappy slaps of his Fender Jazz and Vox Constellation basses, making use of melody as rhythm, was a stimulating change-up from
the happy bass burble of Paul McCartney or James Jamerson, and
he influenced imitators for decades to come.

Freddie possessed, in the opinion of bandmate Jerry, "just
about the most innovative guitar style of all.... You ask any of the
modern-day rhythm guitarists who they listen to, and Freddie
Stone, or Freddie Stewart, would be at the top of the list. There's
no funkier or better rhythm guitar player."

His brother Sly, having willed the guitar function to Freddie,
had quickly mastered a variety of keyboards, and was heard on
both joyful and soulful organ passages throughout the album, with
sister Rose partnering prettily on keyboards and solo and harmonized vocals. Sly variously made use of a Farfisa Professional,
Yamahas of various years, a Vox Continental, and often a classic
Hammond B-3. Greg powerfully and confidently propelled the
rhythm, without encroaching on Larry's standout rumbles. "Greg
had a drumming style that really complemented what I was
doing," Larry testified to Bass Player. "We never had any collisions.
It wouldn't have worked if he filled up a lot of space, which is what
everybody else was doing at the time.... Greg plays on the money;
he doesn't rush or lag."

It took the newly invigorated band a few months to get heard
beyond 52nd Street. But when the second album's title tune was released as a single in the dawn of the new year, 1968, it took hold
of the hearts, minds, and wallets of the general public on both
coasts, in between, and around the globe. It climbed to number 8
on the Billboard pop chart and to number 7 in the United Kingdom. Out on the West Coast, "Dance to the Music" caught up with
young would-be rock authority Joel Selvin on a blissful Saturday
morning, while he was driving down the Eastshore Freeway near
Berkeley with the radio on. "And it's Sly, sitting in on KDIA again,"
Joel remembers. "He hasn't been on in maybe a year. Wow, Sly!
And he's all pumped up, as usual, and he's got his record, and he
puts it on.... It was if something had come from outer space! It
was so far beyond anything we had heard on the radio up to that
point: the breakdown of the a cappella voices, the way the vocals
were voiced, Larry Graham's boom-boom-boom, the way it was
all pieced together. It was just literally the way I said in my book:
There was black music before Sly Stone, and black music after Sly
Stone. A watershed event, and that was the record."

Evocative of the congregational celebrations in which the
Stewart children had performed on childhood Sundays, "Dance to
the Music" inspired the primal directive of the tune's title, but also
showcased the newly visible act in a manner unusual in rock and
most other genres of pop music. Within the standard three-minute
format of a radio single, individual instruments were introduced,
a quote from Wilson Pickett's "Mustang Sally" was inserted in
homage, and a couple of individual players (Cynthia and Jerry)
were actually named in the lyric. Individualized voices were heard:
Cynthia's raucous, spoken imperatives ("Dance to the music!" and
"All the squares, go home!"), Larry's display of his matching bass
vocals, and Sly's impresario tenor. The highlighting of each voice
and instrument was almost pedagogical, like a rock band equiva lent to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

Just as at the Cathedral, this was a band to be listened to as
much as danced to. The album's extended twelve-minute "Dance
to the Medley" spawned not hits but catchy breaks, later to be
highlights of live shows, not only for Sly & the Family Stone but
much later for the group's twenty-first century spin-off bands. The
three-part "Medley" encompassed stereo-spanning free-form
interludes evocative of what was being evolved as mind-bending
acid rock by groups like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Doors.

"It touched people more than I ever thought it would," says
Greg about the Dance to the Music album. "It was a process of the
whole group. And we were able to do it in a way that you got
respect from your peers, other musicians, and you could talk to
the average cat on the street. Everybody dug it-black, white....
Even to us, it was like, if you just be honest, and give it all you have
to give, it will pay off." The band's manifest belief in racial harmony and sexual equality, more explicit in later lyrics, was touched
on in a couple of tracks, "Color Me True" and "Don't Burn Baby."

The payoff for both the honesty and the talent became abundant as the Family played shows on both coasts over the course of
1968. "The biggest thrill was, the first time you heard that record
on the radio, it felt so good," says Greg. "You go to a city, you get
in the rental car, you turn the radio on, the song comes on. That
felt better than knowing you were selling a lot of albums." Freddie, testifying from his current perspective of a sober man of the
cloth in The Skin I'm In, was tempted into an awkward smile. "We
felt like we'd gone on some kind of... I don't even want to say the
word, but we were lit up," he confessed.

For those who witnessed the early concerts or bought the
Dance to the Music album (and not just the single) when it was
released later in 1968, the Family Stone was something to see as
well as hear. In the album's cover and publicity photos and
onstage, and in its TV appearances that year, the biracial makeup
of the outrageously outfitted group was as impressive as was its
mix of genders. To his credit, Sly never proffered Rose or Cynthia,
both very attractive women, as background eye candy, as Ray
Charles had with his Raelettes, but as integral members of the act.