I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (4 page)

It could be supposed that potential musical influences, as with
other opportunities, were more varied and eclectic for the Stewart
children in the Bay Area than if they'd been raised in Texas. Young
Sylvester might have developed as more of a bluesman and less as
a forward-thinking re-imaginer of rock, though he did end up
bringing to the mix some of the elements of blues and gospel that
he shared with less influential Texans like Bobby"Blue" Bland and
Junior Walker.

Across the city of Vallejo, the heritage of racism stayed in place,
as it did in much of postwar America, but the lines were not as
broadly drawn as in Texas. Each of the low-income neighborhoods
in the Terrace section of the city, collections of plywood structures
erected during World War II on the north side of Vallejo, favored
a particular racial grouping, but the groups all lived in close proximity to each other. The Stewarts occupied a more prominent
home on Denio Street on the western side, near the cemetery and
the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, which had been a major source of
income for blacks and others who flocked to the West Coast from
elsewhere. Though there was some persistent de facto segregation
among elementary schools in the '50s, it started to fade throughout the public school system. In junior high schools and in the
three-year Vallejo High, and over Bay Area radio stations and television, young people of all colors experienced the irresistible evolution of rhythm and blues into rock 'n' roll.

Rock was a revolution that shook up stereotypes. White
teenagers everywhere heard and watched white rock idol Elvis
Presley crooning and shaking his hips in imitation of what he and
his peers, including Jerry Lee Lewis and Conway Twitty, had
observed, sometimes covertly, at Southern black churches and
dance halls. Black teens, meanwhile, found their race represented
alongside whites in the pantheon of early rock by such perform ers as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and any number of black doowop groups. Rock may not yet have sought the sophistication of
jazz (where black and white musicians were already relatively well
integrated), but it had gotten beyond the narrow and restricted
status of "race" music. Anyone could play rock 'n' roll, and everyone could listen to it.

Frank Arellano, the musically inclined son of a Filipino father
(a welder at Mare Island) and a white mother, had upgraded from
the Terraces to a middle-class east side neighborhood. He remembers meeting one of his future singing partners, Sylvester Stewart,
newly nicknamed "Sly," when Sly came to play guitar behind a
doo-wop vocal group at a dance. Both Frank and Sly were still in
junior high. "Everybody in the singing group was waiting for him
to get there," laughs Frank. "Does that sound familiar?" (Delays
have indeed dogged Sly Stone performances, right up to his latest
ones.) After Sly's arrival, Frank noted that the guitar was almost as
big as its player, who was several years younger than most of the
other members of the group.

Just before their first year of high school, Frank encountered
Sly again during a summer league game of basketball. "It was an
elbow here, an elbow there, and `I'm gonna get you after the game.'
So, after the game, everybody was outside and lining up.... Their
team was all black, ours was mostly white.... I saw this skinny little guy, and I went, `I'm gonna get across from him, 'cause he
couldn't hurt me: And that was Sly. We kind of squared off, a few
things were said, and then everybody said, `This isn't cool,' so
nothing ever happened. Little did I know how fast he could be, so
it was probably a good thing we didn't have that fight." At Vallejo
High, though they were at the same grade level, Frank didn't share
many courses with Sly. "Maybe he was smarter than me," Frank
allows, "but I had a bunch of easy courses. I caught my high school counselor groping one of the young lady aides when I went in his
office one time, and after that I got all the easy courses I could get,
any time I wanted." It was Frank's musical inclination that brought
him back in contact with Sly.

In junior high, with an all-Filipino group, Frank had sung
doo-wop, a term coined in the '50s for the smooth, listenerfriendly mode of vocalizing rhythm and blues, or R & B (itself
named earlier in the decade by Atlantic Records producer Jerry
Wexler). Frank had encountered another precocious doo-wopper,
blonde Charlene Imhoff, at musical events and at baseball games,
where she served as what he called an "athletic supporter," a suggestive way of tagging a loyal fan.

At Vallejo High, Frank and Charlene assembled several versions of a group they named for her junior high ensemble, the Viscounts. Sly at this time was singing and playing guitar with a black
group, the Webs, who the Viscounts encountered at interscholastic talent shows. Frank told Charlene, "Our harmonies suck, and
I'm gonna ask this guy I know if he'll come help us put some harmony together." That's how Sylvester Stewart came, somewhat
reluctantly, to be recruited into the Viscounts, who happened,
without deliberate intent, to be multiracial.

Aside from Charlene, Frank, and Sly, the Viscounts ultimately
included brothers Charles and Vern Gebhardt, who lived a couple
of doors down from Charlene, and Maria Boldway, a classically
trained soprano and an alluring, raven-haired ethnic mix of Spanish, Mexican, French, and Native American. For performances, the
girls lined up in flared dresses and high heels, the boys in blazers,
slacks, and dress shirts, cinched by narrow ties. Their hair was as
trim and maintained as their outfits.

After the group had begun to show professional promise, they
were advised to change their name. There already was a group called the Viscounts, which had made a successful cover of the
moody "Harlem Nocturne" in 1959, the year the Vallejo Viscounts'
formed. The teens considered being called the Biscaynes, after a
popular full-size Chevy model introduced in 1958, but ended up
as the Viscaynes by substituting a V for the B to signal their hometown and to avoid confusion.

Despite the pressures of school and of most of the guys' athletic involvement (Sly avoided organized sports), the Viscaynes
accelerated practice sessions to five evenings a week in the Geb-
hardts' rec room. They all had fine and flexible voices, with Sly able
to sing high or low across a two-and-a-half-octave range, and
Frank ascending in a heady falsetto. By 1961, when most of the
group was in the last year of high school (Vern and Maria were two
years younger), they felt ready to sing in a contest promoted by the
Dick Stewart Dance Party television show, a San Franciscan echo
of Dick Clark's nationally broadcast American Bandstand. They
beat out the competition, appeared on local TV, and were placed
under management by associates of the television host. As graduation approached, they were encouraged to record several 45-rpm
singles, with dubbed accompaniment by Joe Piazza and the Continentals (including future Family Stone member Jerry Martini),
at San Francisco's Geary Theatre. Less than satisfied with this
effort, their new management flew them down to Los Angeles for
another recording session (using songs written by husband-andwife team George Motola and Ricky Page) and an appearance at a
dance party event at Pacific Oceanside Park, alongside a young Lou
Rawls.

Boarding at a hotel and recording and performing in Tinsel
Town amounted to quite an adventure for the Vallejo adolescents.
"We swam, we were treated like royalty," recalls Maria, commonly
called "Ria" by her friends. "The boys ran around doing crazy stuff, dumping ice water on us when we'd be sleeping by the pool."
Treatment by their handlers turned out to be chillier. In a move
sadly common on the lower rungs of the music business, the
Viscaynes were told to sign their checks for performing over to
management, and they never got to bank any of the proceeds
themselves. The Viscaynes' "Yellow Moon" placed at number 16
on KYA radio's Top 60 chart in the week of November 13, 1961,
and stayed aloft for a few weeks, but the group had long since
dispersed.

Inside and outside the Viscaynes, Frank Arellano had gotten
closer to Sly than most of his schoolmates. "We were everyday
friends," says Frank, now retired with his own teenage son in Palm
Springs, California. "We would drink, do crazy things. We were
always on the edge of the law, but never getting caught, never anything we could go to jail for." This reputation would have helped
justify the morphing of "Sylvester Stewart" into "Sly." "And we
were out trying to get girls," Frank continues. "We cruised downtown, mostly in Sly's car. He had a '56 Ford Victoria." When they
had enough pocket money, the pair would extend their cruising
west, across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, where they could get
girls to join them on the Ferris wheel at the Playland at the Beach
amusement park. For this and other purposes, the underage party
animals had to figure out how to find booze. Sly had copped an
identification card from someone of legal age and had talked
Frank into making use of it at a Vallejo convenience store, even
though the cardholder's "race" was designated "colored." When
Frank somehow succeeded in scoring a large green bottle of
Rainier Ale, the friends shared a good laugh along with the intoxicant. Sly seemed to regard most racial issues lightly. Charlene
recalls a Viscaynes gathering in the living room of the Stewart
household and Sly entering the room from mama Alpha's kitchen. "Now I know," he declared to his fellow Viscaynes sardonically,
"how funny I must look in your house."

But in one rare instance, Sly shared with Frank a deeper reflection on being a young black man in the '60s, closer to what he'd
express lyrically later in "Underdog," on the first Family Stone
album. "He felt," says Frank, "that he was on a ladder, and that he
was trying to climb up the ladder. And there were people above,
pushing him down, and there were people below him, grabbing
his legs and pulling him down. And that was his struggle, more or
less. It is tough being black, I guess. But I'm glad he realized there
were people of his own race trying to pull him down, and people
of other races pushing him down. I never had that much of a
problem."

There were problems, Frank also remembers, with interracial
dating, even though Sly's natural-born attractiveness transcended
any color barrier. Frank compares the young Sly with their black
piano-and-trumpet-playing schoolmate John Turk, who'd known
Sly since childhood and would continue their musical relationship
into the 1970s. "The difference was, John Turk was kind of like a
lounge lizard, everybody knew what he was there for, and John
Turk was there just to go get some white women. Sly, on the other
hand, was there and had white women go for him.... They
bugged him, they'd call him, and I was there for some of those
calls, the finest girls. He'd make a date with 'em, and then he
couldn't go pick 'em up. So guess who did? Yours truly!"

Thus Frank found himself yet again pressed, or persuaded,
into service for his buddy. "I'd say, `How the hell do you think
they're gonna like a Filipino pickin"em up any more than a black
guy?' He goes, `But, man, you're not a nigger: It worked. We never
had any problem. I got a few weird looks, but nobody told the girls,
`You can't go out with him: Then the parents would say, `But you guys be home by twelve."' Frank would take the date to a prearranged meeting point, deliver her to Sly, and then connect with
one of his own. "I'd say, `Okay, be back here by 11:30 and I'll take
her home.' But I'd have to wait till 1:30 or 2:00, and then take 'em
home! Thanks a lot, Sly."

Frank thought that Sly shared everything with him, but he
didn't realize how well his friend was living up to his new nickname. During the L.A. stay, for example, Sly had been taking side
trips with songwriters Motola and Page to record solo projects
without the knowledge of his fellow travelers. Back in Vallejo, Sly
had started making recordings with his younger brother, Freddie,
and others, and on some weekends sustaining his instrumental
chops with club bands in the black part of the Terraces, also without telling the other Viscaynes that he might have competing gigs.

On a double date shortly before spring graduation in '61 (Sly
had to wait and make up a unit in summer school before getting
his diploma), Frank came to the realization that his best friend had
been secretly carrying on a relationship with a sister Viscayne, Ria
Boldway. More than any other member of the group, Ria seems to
have been sensitive to racial issues in their community. She and Sly
and John Turk all joined a group called the Youth Problems Committee, specifically to address these matters. Ria was also more
interested than most of her white girlfriends, even as a preteen, in
the rhythm and blues being beamed toward the Bay Area black
demographic over KDIA radio. Ria now recalls how she'd been
inspired by "Ray Charles and [jazz vocalist] Betty Carter performing together. And it's so funny, because even Sammy Davis was too
square for me by the time I was sixteen. He wasn't funky enough
for me."

Although she was two grades behind Sly, Ria shared choir
practice with him, and apparently a certain amount of classroom mischief. Despite their superior voices, they both ended up flunking one semester of choir, having amused themselves by baiting a
substitute teacher. As far as Ria knew, Sly got "great grades" otherwise, and was generally a standout among the student body. "He
was a star before he ever became a star," she says. "He just glittered
when he walked, like Richard Cory," in the poem by Edward
Arlington Robinson, which was also a popular folk song.

Ria points to other juvenile harbingers of later Sly Stone
behavior, including "his smile, and his ability to put everybody on.
And I understood what he was doing, and most people didn't. He
always told me I was probably the lamest person he ever knew, but,
man, when people would talk to him or ask him things, he'd go off
and say the craziest stuff, and I knew he'd be putting them on. And
they'd just say, `Oh, thank you, Sylvester!"'