I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (8 page)

Back in April of '66, Freddie's group had earned a booking by
former San Francisco Mime Troupe manager Bill Graham (the
soon-to-be heavy-hitting rock impresario and godfather of the
San Francisco sound) at a hall he'd been using, the Fillmore Auditorium, just west of San Francisco's Civic Center.

Meanwhile, Sly, after working with groups like the Continentals and the Mojo Men, formed the Stoners. (By this time, he'd
adopted the surname "Stone" on-air). This group included Cynthia Robinson, a high-powered female trumpeter with a spunky
stage presence, whom Sly had encountered on visits to Sacramento. Years later, Sly credited Jerry Martini with inspiring his formation of the Family Stone, an attribution which Jerry still
cherishes. What's clear is that Jerry, on those visits to KSOL, began
urging his musical friend to get off the air and on to a career with
a new band. Sly was reportedly less than satisfied with his old
group and wanted to form a new ensemble, while bandmate Cynthia just quit the Stoners in frustration. Looking ahead together,
Sly and Cynthia checked out Larry Graham, a keyboardist and guitarist who had taken up the bass.

Like Sly, Larry was originally from Texas but had relocated as
a toddler to Oakland, California, with his family. He'd drummed
in his school band and had begun his musical career per se playing guitar, inspired by bluesmen like Clarence "Gatemouth"
Brown, and had even sat in with a visiting Ike and Tina Turner.
When Sly first heard him, Larry was gigging with his mother, Dell,
a singer and pianist. That act had shrunk from a trio to a duo,
requiring Larry to man both the organ and the guitar. When the
organ broke down and the act still needed low registers, the resourceful Larry rented a St. George electric bass guitar to fill in.
"I wasn't interested in learning the so-called correct overhand style
of playing bass, because in my head I was going back to guitar, anyway," Larry later told Bass Player magazine.

The necessity of properly accompanying his mother inspired
Larry's reputed invention of what has been variously called the
slap-pop or thump `n' pluck technique, later immensely influential on rock, funk, and jazz bassists. Most electric bassists up to that
time had preferred the softer, rounder tones of conventional finger-style and picking methods. But Larry, as he described it to Bass
Player, "would thump the strings with my thumb to make up for
the bass drum, and pluck the strings with my fingers to make up
for the backbeat snare drum," thus replacing two missing drums
with one stringed instrument.

Sly and Freddie also assessed the talent manifest at each other's
shows, and they frequented the Condor, where Sly's pal Jerry Martini was still blowing sax behind George & Teddy. Jerry incorporated the influences of soulful jazz giants Gene Ammons and
Sonny Stitt. But he now says, "One of the reasons that attracted Sly
to my playing was that I emulated [R & B innovator] Junior Walker
more than any other white boy in town. Because [the others] were
all trying to sound like Art Pepper." In effect, Sly needed a representative of the funky sass of Walker more than the post-bop jazz
artistry of Pepper.

Greg Errico came to Urbano Drive in December 1966 for what
he thought was another Stone Souls rehearsal. He describes the
sequence of his knocking, Sly's mom, Alpha, opening the door, and
the subsequent interchanges: "'Where's Freddie?"Well, he's in the
kitchen with Sly, eating chicken.' I went to the kitchen and looked
around. `Where's everybody, are we rehearsing tonight?' I said hi
to Sly, he was the radio DJ. `We're starting a new group tonight. You wanna do it?"Well, I'm here.' I was just joking around. I was
looking for the rest of the Stone Souls. But Sly was already looking out for one more attempt at what he had in mind." Greg later
learned that he had actually been the second choice for drummer,
after a failed attempt to recruit Bartholomew "Frosty" SmithFrost, accompanist to Lee Michaels, a Hammond organ master
popular around the Bay Area and later signed to A&M.

The group that assembled on that fateful afternoon on Urbano
Drive to realize what Sly had in mind included brother Freddie,
Greg Errico, Larry Graham, and Cynthia Robinson. There's no
known recording of what went down in that basement, but it can
be inferred, from what the players looked and sounded like on
record and in live performance not all that much later, that it must
have been thrilling and unprecedented in pop music.

Recalling the day for Joel Selvin, Cynthia noted that the musicians found Sly ready with "punching funky" arrangements of Top
40 songs, which he expected to later intersperse with his own original compositions in live sets. Larry, she says, raised a question
about group leadership, which Sly met with an affirmation of his
sole right to lead. (The potential for a standoff between these two
persisted for years.) The group's name was a catchy mutation, with
druggy undertones, of the pseudo-surnames both Stewarts had
started performing under, as well as a statement of what would be
the group's ethos, with Sly as unquestioned head of a tight-knit
"Family."

The brand-new Family Stone's quest for a gig took them
beyond the city limits and into the sights of the enterprising Rich
Romanello, a couple of dozen miles down the San Francisco
Peninsula. A few years Sly's senior, Rich had grown up among fellow Italian Americans in San Francisco's North Beach and Marina
neighborhoods, and then stepped up to his father's bar business. Music was vital to Rich's club vision. For the jukebox at his dad's
Morocco Room in San Mateo, south of the San Francisco airport,
the younger Romanello insisted on selecting the discs himself. "The jukebox company would not buy a record until it was
a hit," he points out, "but I'd put in songs that I thought would
become hits, so I had the hottest jukebox in the area." Long
before "Runaround Sue" scored for Italian American rocker
Dion DiMucci in 1961, "The only place you could hear it was at
the Morocco Room, or you'd have to wait for it to play on the
radio."

Visits to Tom Donahue and Bob Mitchell's shows at the Cow
Palace convinced Rich of the commercial power of live rock. On a
mission to convert the Morocco Room "from a neighborhood
cocktail lounge into a young hot spot," he began to feature live
entertainment, leaning toward the R & B end of the rock spectrum. Emile O'Connor (called "Little E") and Wally Cox, two of
his featured performers, talked Rich into managing them. "It was
black entertainment, and a white Peninsula crowd," he says. "But
if there were any blacks that came in, they were welcomed. We
weren't segregated." Later, Rich was advised to audition a white act
from San Francisco, the Beau Brummels. He remembers their tryout at the Morocco Room in 1964. "There were maybe four people in the place, and they set up and started playing, and that old
hair on my arm goes up. And when the hair on your arm goes up,
you got something. It was a big change, to go from saxophones and
black singers to a white guitar sound. But I hired 'em."

Soon enough, "They said, `Be our Brian Epstein,' and that got
my attention, because [Beatles manager] Brian Epstein was my
hero." Rich's second management venture prompted a visit to the
Morocco Room by Tom Donahue and Sly Stone, who had already
worked with the Brummels at Autumn Records. Rich subsequently got to observe Sly in action at the Cow Palace and in the studio.
"He was a very cool, low-key individual," Rich remembers about
Sly. He supposes that "maybe at that time, because of his growing,
there might have been a little bit of insecurity," which maintained
Sly's low-key presence. This belied the young producer's manifest
talent: "He'd get up and play in the studio, and I knew he could
play just about any instrument. You knew he knew what he was
doing."

Parallel club-owning and management functions continued
for Rich, as did the connection with Autumn Records. He booked
the Warlocks, later to morph into the Grateful Dead, and the Tikis,
later more famous (albeit briefly) as Harpers Bizarre. On a single
Labor Day weekend in 1966, Rich's earnings for booking the Jefferson Airplane in resorts north of San Francisco exceeded his take
on the Brummels' two hit records. He decided to invest that money
in converting another club on the Peninsula, in Redwood City, formerly a venue for big-band acts such as Stan Kenton and Count
Basie. "When I walked into the place, for some reason they were
just playing `Winchester Cathedral' [a quirky retro hit by the New
Vaudeville Band]," Rich recalls. "And I said, `This place has the feeling of a church. I'm gonna call it Winchester Cathedral: "

Rich needed an energizing act to christen the Cathedral. Walking down Broadway, the neon-lit strip in San Francisco's North
Beach neighborhood, he encountered Jerry Martini, who had
accompanied George & Teddy on a Morocco Room booking. "I've
opened a new club in Redwood City," Rich told Jerry.

"Well, I'm with Sly," said the saxophonist, who was still psyched from the recent Urbano Drive conclave. "Sly put a new band
together."

"You're kidding!"

"No, you've gotta hear us."

Rich was summoned to the Stewart family basement for the
next rehearsal of the Family Stone. "I'm walking down the stairs,
and I hear it," he recounts. "And that hair goes right up on my arm.
I go, `Oh shit, does this sound good!' And I go and sit down.
They're just starting, but they're good. They were doing everybody
else's music, they hadn't gone out on their own yet, but what they
were covering was better than the originals, no doubt about it.
Freddie singing `Try a Little Tenderness'? Whew! They could play!
So I hired 'em that night."

The Cathedral and its opening act, Sly & the Family Stone,
were aggressively promoted by Rich through newspaper and radio
advertising. He assumed there might not be widespread familiarity with radio jock Sly as a musician. On opening night-December 16, 1966-there was a long line to get into the new club. And
there was plenty for the patrons of the early show, many of them
teens, to smile about as they looked around after entering. "The
whole place was red-flocked wallpaper, crystal chandeliers, and it
had a real elegance about it," says Rich, about the design elements
he'd retained from the previous owners. He'd added a stained-glass
display inside a planter box, spelling out L-O-V-E. "We were capturing a little of the Haight-Ashbury, but this was not a hippie
place. And if you look at [later] photographs of the Cathedral, kids
dancing, you can see how appropriately dressed they are, for the
time."

Both the dancing teens and the older sit-down crowd who
took their place for the after-hours session, starting at about 2:00
a.m., seemed delighted with the brand-new Family Stone band,
and the feeling seemed mutual. In subsequent bookings, on regular Friday and Saturday nights during the first half of 1967, the
band took to opening its shows with the Spencer Davis Group's
recent hit, "Gimme Some Lovin'," repeating the appreciative mes sage, "So glad you made it!" "If you talk to the kids," says Rich,
referring to the Family Stone as if they still were the youngsters he
shepherded, "they might tell you it was the best place they ever
played, for their own entertainment and satisfaction.... And that
was probably some of the best they ever sounded."

Sly had taken notice of what Rich had done as manager of the
Beau Brummels, and he approached the club owner about assuming that function for the Family Stone. Rich recalled his Brummels
experience in a less positive light, but ultimately gave in to Sly's
request. Word got around that bookings at the Cathedral alongside the Family Stone could help launch other new acts, including
the young Santana Blues Band from San Francisco's Mission district. "I gave Carlos seventy-five dollars a night, and I gave Sly a
hundred, 'cause I was the manager and had to get my commission." Rich remembers. The audience paid about two dollars a
head to see this pre-legend double bill.

In the early months at the Cathedral, repeat customers were
delighted with the Family Stone's creative covers of material from
the soul and R & B side of the rock spectrum. "We did things like
`Shotgun' and `Try a Little Tenderness,"' says Jerry Martini,
"because we'd worked out a show thing where we'd walk around
the room, dancing and playing tambourines." Larry's baritone
voice effectively channeled Lou Rawls's on the soulful "Tobacco
Road" and "The Shadow of Your Smile." "But we started immediately adding original songs, one by one," Jerry continues. "We even
practiced dialogue, a little acting. I remember Freddie and Larry
on a [Sly-penned] song that Larry sang, called `Let Me Hear It
from You.' They would talk to each other and say, `I heard my girlfriend's gonna break up with me, but I wanna hear it from you.' It
went over really well, personal life things." (The song was later
included on the band's debut album, A Whole New Thing, but without the dramatic spoken intro.) Jerry's commitment to the
new group involved major changes in his own personal life,
including forsaking a lucrative engagement with another band and
moving in with his wife's family to minimize costs.

The Family Stone's extended engagements in Redwood City
ultimately benefited both club and band, until the latter began to
outgrow the former. In his management function, Rich booked the
band into other clubs around the Bay and sought out larger showcases. He put out an invitation to Bill Graham, now on his way to
rock regency as owner and operator of San Francisco's Fillmore
Auditorium, one of a handful of concert halls attractive to the burgeoning crop of flower children who had cash to spend on tickets.
Witnessing the band in action, Bill expressed little interest in its
dance-inducing appeal, despite his previous year's booking of
Freddie's band. Rich reacted with resentment. "I said, `Bill, you
probably have one of the best dance floors in all of Northern California. But you've got all the hippies in their Indian squats, sitting
on that floor like a bunch of vegetables. Do you think you ever
want to get these people up and dancing?' Nope. Not ready. So we
parted company. And after the session was over, Sly came up and
said, `Why not?' And I told him the story. He said, 'I'll change the
music!' I said, `Don't!' We stuck to our guns and said, `Fuck Graham and his psychedelic heads, we're on this path and we're staying on this path."