I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (7 page)

"You would hear him bring in his instruments to the radio station and do his own station IDs," says Ben, about how creatively
Sly carried out the obligatory identifications of his stations' call
letters. "He would sing his commercials, he was so inventive, or
he'd bring in his musician friends and do a little jam session. Back
then, even though it was formatted, DJs could do things that were
unique, more than what they can do today, which is nothing."

Pop writer Joel Selvin was a teenager back then, a white boy
living in the Oakland ghetto with a job as a copy boy at the San
Francisco Chronicle. Young Joel avoided KFRC, "where they played
Herman's Hermits," in favor of KDIA, where Sly "was fast-talking,
he was jivey, and he knew who the Beatles and Lord Buckley were,
and so did C" Joel today recalls that "the other [KDIA] guys were
like this old-fashioned black thing, being very carefully spoken and
articulate, not necessarily sounding white but not sounding black.
And Sly was laughing and squeaking and rhyming, it was an exciting thing.... And everybody remembers the dedications."

Joel observes that "this was a transitional period in the whole
African American community, right? If you were older generation,
you looked for a public persona that was presentable, decorous.
There's some thinking that, because blacks were accorded secondclass citizenship, in order to have a public face you had to be more
white than white people." This impression was probably particularly strong in the Bay Area among those who, like the older Stewarts, had relocated from regions of entrenched racism. But
Sly, Joel believes, would have been well aware that "the oldfashioned thinking was going away with the young blacks, who
were growing up at that time, and were assuming more independent postures." Sly's on-air independence was manifest more as
cheeky subversion than as militancy or political diatribe.

Jerry Martini, whose sax services had helped put him close to
Sly, used to listen on his car radio to Sly while on his way to a gig
at the airport Hilton. When he had the chance, he'd visit his friend
at the radio studio, where a small, unused piano sat against a wall.
"So I suggested [to Sly], `Why don't you just sing your whole
show?' And it was a good suggestion," remembers Jerry. "He sang
the news, he sang the weather." Sly would also mock the monotony of Bay Area weather by always announcing the temperature as
"fifty-nine degrees," regardless of any actual deviation from that
dreary norm.

The appeal and credibility of Sly's on-air sessions were further
enhanced by occasional visits from his new friend Hamp "Bubba"
Banks. They had become acquainted when the coif-conscious Sly
became a patron at Bubba's Fillmore district hair salon, where the
emerging radio personality perhaps came closer to acquiring
"street cred" than at any other point before or after his celebrity.
The neighborhood shop was favored by pimps, prostitutes, and
young African Americans, and its proprietor was eager to promote
himself over the airwaves. Bubba recalled for Joel Selvin that "I'd
come on [the radio] and say, `Sly, you come on and rap, I gotta go
check my trap. Just all this street slang." Banks, an ex-marine and
sometime pimp himself, also shared the nocturnal bustle of North
Beach with Sly and served as something of a hip mentor. "We
became truly inseparable," Bubba recounted. "I would go to the
[Urbano] house after we did our thing, and lay on the floor. Sly would smoke a little weed. But that was the extent of it." Bubba
regretted having later exposed his younger friend to cocaine, but
neither man seemed to have been making debilitating or addictive
use of the drug during this earliest stage of their relationship. The
constructive part of the alliance extended to Bubba's opening a
club, Little Bo Peep's, where Sly acted as emcee and Rose, Sly's sister and later Bubba's wife, sold tickets.

Sly sought out yet more opportunities to do his own thing on
the air. He found a copy of Ray Charles's great "Let's Go Get
Stoned" in a garbage can, tossed there because of the seemingly
illicit imperative in the lyric (which was actually to drink, not to
drug), and started playing it, helping score yet another national hit
for the man who'd helped inject soul into rock. Sly also deviated
from the implicit color line of his stations' playlists. "They rarely
played a white artist," notes Ben Fong-Torres about the Bay Area's
black-identified stations. "Only the Righteous Brothers and certain sounds could make it on, blue-eyed soul with popularity. Sly
was a bit broader than that; whatever he liked he'd put on." In
among the Motown and Stax-Volt artists of the day, such as Otis
Redding, Wilson Pickett, Smokey Robinson, Mary Wells, Marvin
Gaye, the Supremes, Little Stevie Wonder, and the Temptations,
he'd play the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and white
raconteur Lord Buckley, from whose pseudo-hip delivery Sly freely
borrowed.

Sly's ascending career as a performing musician wasn't supplanted by his short career as a broadcaster; he kept gigging at a
variety of local clubs. But "it's hard to do a hundred percent both
ways," points out Sly's former KDIA colleague Chuck Scruggs.
"He'd come in late and leave in a hurry ... and I believe he left the
station because he got so busy, he couldn't make his air schedule."
Had Sly stayed in radio, "He probably would have developed his style.... He commanded an audience, because he was a people
person, and he was [from] the community."

Bob Jones, another KDIA DJ, says that the station, for a while,
held on to hopes that Sly would return to the airwaves someday
after leaving them in 1966. But in any case, Bob is grateful for Sly's
radio legacy. "Sly was absolutely good theater," says Bob. "He
always had an opening and a closing, and the opening was dramatic. He was definitely an influence on me, and I was doing the
same thing later: theater for the mind." Over the next couple of
decades, though, on-air "personalities," black, white, or otherwise,
who spun discs while ad-libbing their way into the ears and hearts
of their listeners would gradually disappear from the dial.

Ria Boldway, finishing up at Vallejo High, stuck by Sly during
those busy years when he was transitioning from school into multiple careers. During her senior year (1962-1963), Ria had started
spending more time at the small place Sly had rented in Vallejo
after moving out of his childhood home on Denio Street. She ultimately moved to San Francisco, accompanying Sly on some of his
gigs with the Mojo Men. Of Sly's radio days, she remembers that
"he was incredibly popular, as he was in high school. He was
always one to show off, be lighthearted, and laugh his head off, and
that's what he did on the radio as well." But Sly was also capable
of being serious in an intimate setting. Ria had brought up marriage, and Sly had talked about having kids. "He said, `Oh, we'll
have the most beautiful little golden babies,"' she recalls. "Now,
I'm a dark human being [of Mediterranean mien]. `He'll never
have golden babies with me,' I thought to myself. But instead of
saying anything to him, I kept it to myself."

In one offhand moment, Sly told Ria, "I'm gonna get a blond
wife and a white car and a white dog." She hadn't worried about
the remark till Sly's attention began drifting away from her. Her regret came to a head one night when Sly bid her good-bye before
taking off for a gig at the Condor. "I think I was still underage and
couldn't go to some clubs yet," Ria says. "He'd gotten dressed and
he got into a white Cadillac convertible with [the blond Condor
waitress-turned-topless-icon] Carol Doda. And he went off. And
I realized a whole lot of things then: that it was just not gonna happen, that we would not get married, as we had spoken of doing.
He had other things on his mind; it was all career."

After that sad realization, "I talked to his mother and his father,
and moped around the house for a while. I realized it was not
gonna go anywhere. His mama didn't want it to anyway,'cause she
was afraid my father would kill him. She loved me and everything,
like one of the little kids she took care of. She said, `Just let him go
and do what he needs to do: And I did." Ria later left the country
and married another man, but cherished her memories of her high
school lover and would try to get close to him a couple of more
times-after he'd launched himself into fame with the Family
Stone.

Black and white, the young rebels are free
people, free in a way that Americans have
never been before in the history of their
country.

-ELDRIDGE CLEAVER
Soul on Ice

HE APPETITE FOR LIVE MUSIC
in San Francisco in the late '60s
supported an effervescent club
scene in the North Beach neighborhood and beyond, where youthful talent could mature. Before deploying his considerable guitar
skills around the city's clubs, Sly's younger brother, Freddie, had
studied music in college for a short while and had been briefly
employed by Billy Preston in Los Angeles. Signing on with future
Santana vocalist Leon Patillo's Sensations, Freddie encountered a
young drummer in the Excelsior district, who was sitting in with
the Sensations during a downtown gig hosted by Sly in his radio
star capacity. Just seventeen, Greg Errico (his Italian family name
is accented on the second syllable) had already been playing beer joints for a couple of years. Freddie decided to include Greg in his
own group, the Stone Souls.

"Freddie loved me," reflects Greg. "He was totally confident, he
didn't look at color, he didn't look at age, none of that." Greg himself is modest about assessing his early worth, other than to say, "I
did have very good ears, and I was musical as a drummer." His
older brother, Mario Errico, who later became one of Sly's trusted
lieutenants, is more forthcoming about what the brothers Stewart
must have liked about Greg: "It was the way he played, for a white
boy. He was funky, and he had this backbeat. They used to call him
`Hands-and-Feet: I was proud as hell that my brother could play."

Greg and Mario's parents, Italian Americans who'd raised their
sons to respect financial security and their imported 78-rpm
recordings of Italian opera and popular music, were skeptical
about their younger son's ambitions. "I said to Greg, `I don't
understand this,"' remembers Jo Errico, now in her mid-eighties.
"And he said, `Mom, you just wait. One day, you're gonna hear
things I've played on, on the radio, and you're gonna maybe see
me on television. And we did! You had to give it to him; he pursued his dream."

Back in '66, the dream meant a booking with Freddie and the
Stone Souls at Little Bo Peep's in the Excelsior, uniformed in
slacks, shirts, and vests, backing such visiting acts as the Coasters
when not performing covers of Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, and
other pop-oriented soul material. Freddie was developing a tight
rhythmic finesse, chopping out a crisp sixteenth-note chord style
in the manner of James Brown band member Jimmy Nolen. Freddie's lead forays, though brief and economical, were executed with
precision and taste on a variety of classy guitars, including the
Fender Jazzmaster, Telecaster, Gibson SG, Gibson Les Paul, andunusual for the time-a semi-acoustic (hollow body) Gibson Byrdland. He'd never attain the status of a Clapton or Hendrix,
but forty years later, Freddie was remembered by fans and rock
writers as one of the Bay Area's influential guitar greats.