Sly & The Family Stone

The book is coming along. It isn't what I thought it would be when I started. I'll have more to say on this when it's done, which, hopefully will be in the next two or three days.

What follows is the first draft of my Sly & The Family Stone profile. It's the first thing I've written for the book in weeks that I'm kind of proud of. It's 1,200 words and it needs to be chopped to 500, so I don't know at this point what it's going to look like after I've done so.

Tony hasn't edited it yet, so there's probably lots of dropped words, bad grammar and generally bad habits that he's been trying to break me of.

But I want to post this to have some kind of record of it. Some of you rock crit types will recognize shades of Greil Marcus' definitive piece on Sly from his book Mystery Train. It was hard to avoid, since the book inspires me so much. But hopefully 95-99 percent of it is mine.

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Sly & The Family Stone emerged from the San Francisco scene in 1967 playing a hybrid of James Brown and psychedelic rock. It was more rock and roll than the R&B emanating from Memphis and Detroit. It also reflected much of the idealism of the San Francisco scene with hippie rallying cries like “You can make it you try” or “You don’t have to die before you live.” Only in Sly’s context, it was more than sloganeering. Along with Booker T & The MGs and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Sly & The Family Stone was one of the best and most important interracial bands in pop music. So when they sang, “We got to live together,” in the charttopping “Everyday People,” it resonated with more intensity than most of the hippie blather coming out of San Francisco, because they were putting it into practice, not just racially but from a gender perspective.

In the Family Stone, the women weren’t back-up singers. Cynthia Robinson played the trumpet and Rosie Stone played the piano. The rhythm section was integrated with a Greg Errico, a white musician, playing drums and Larry Graham, a black musician, establishing himself as one of the most innovative bass players in rock. Every one sang and harmonized (except Cynthia who, well, vocalized). And driving it all was Sly Stone’s soulful wail and creative arrangements.

You could see it unfold before you in their five-minute-or-so excerpt in the Woodstock film taken from the legendary festival in 1969. In what is possibly the most powerful scene in the film, Stone holds the crowd of 400,000 in his hands. “I Want To Take You Higher” resembles a combination of a church revival meeting and a political rally. And that wasn’t even the band’s peak. That would come in early 1970 with the single “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin.”

The intro starts with a Graham’s propulsive bass locking perfectly with Fred Stewart’s chicken scratch guitar and Errico’s high-hat. Then Jerry Martini’s sax and Robinson’s trumpet and Errico’s full drum kit launches into the song that initially sounds like cop of James Brown’s “Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose,” but it has more melody, more density and even more creative horn lines. The lyrics are straight out of the bible. In Genesis 32::22-32, Jacob proves his worthiness by wrestling with God in the form of an angel. Sly, with harrowing foreshadowing, wrestles with the devil and triumphs. The song would mark the turning point in his career, for Sly would wrestle with more than a few demons over the next year before returning to the public eye.

“The Incredible and Unpredictible Sly Stone” was how Columbia Records described the star. But the description was getting too close to comfort for most people concerned with his career. For one, there were the death threats from the Black Panthers, who were displeased that he wasn’t addressing their political agenda in his lyrics and objected to his white Jewish manager. He began to show up late for gigs, if he didn’t miss them completely. There were financial problems leading Greg Errico to quit. There was Sly’s obsessive nature in the studio, which held up their next album for two years and led the label to stop royalty payments until the album was completed. And there was cocaine - mountains of it.

“What can you put on vinyl or acetate or plastic? Not just something like a funny shaped LP cover. Gotta be something it says or does. Maybe melt the LP and turn it into something…” Sly Stone said in an interview with Ben Fong-Torres in Rolling Stone in 1970. Sly & The Family Stone’s next album did just that: It was too smoldering to touch. And when it melted, it changed the language of pop music for the rest of the decade.

When There’s a riot goin’ on finally came out in 1971, Sly & The Family Stone had undergone a complete transformation. Rather than the optimistic, idealistic aura of their first four albums, this album was like staring down the barrel of a gun. The music was shrouded in a veil of fog. The grooves were deeper, more rhythmic almost liquid sounding, but this music didn’t invite the audience in. Sly sounded stoned or worse throughout. The words were filled with dread and defeat. Sly would languish over every syllable as if the he were uncertain he would make it to the end of the song. The lyrics festered with images of a barren wasteland. The album would yield a Top Ten single, “A Family Affair,” but even this song was misleading, for the song was not about the unity and community created by a family but rather how families rip themselves apart. To put a fine point on it, he closed the album with a remake of “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin,” only he titled this version “Thank You For Talkin’ To Me, Africa” and it was a photo negative version of the earlier hit. In 1970, the song was perky and triumphant. In the 1971 version, Sly and the devil are one and no one wins. The song moves like a heroin trip. The song effectively drove a knife through the heart of Woodstock Nation.

Between the band’s new sound and Sly’s unreliable performance record (including some that resulted in riots at some venues), both fans and band members, most notably, Larry Graham, got off the bus. He would regain some goodwill with 1973’s Fresh, which received good reviews and a #12 single with “If You Want Me To Stay.” But Sly would never really return. After Fresh, most of his albums disappeared without a trace. He faces a $3.4 million tax lien. Between 1973 and 1989, there was a litany of drug and gun charges. He was in and out of rehab. He poked his head up once in a while like on Funkadelic’s The Electric Spanking Of War Babies in 1981, but then he would disappear again.

He made his first public appearance in nearly 20 years on the Grammy Awards telecast in 2006. The even was a tribute to Sly & The Family Stone that included, incongruously, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, American Idol contestant Fantasia and soul revivalist phenom Joss Stone. In the middle of the tribute, members of the original Family Stone came on stage started playing “I Want To Take You Higher.” At Tyler’s beckoning, Stone strutted on stage with a 12-inch high mohawk hairstyle. He took his place behind a keyboard at center stage, sang for about 90 seconds waved and disappeared. He has also shown up in the audience at gigs performed by his younger sister Vet. There is always chatter of a comeback.

But with There’s a riot goin’ on, Sly Stone created a new vocabulary. The Temptations, in particular, would take up this sound and create several hits with it, including “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” and “Cloud Nine,” albeit in sanitized versions. The sound would resurface in the O’Jays’ “For The Love Of Money” and “Backstabbers.” And Curtis Mayfield would adopt his version of it in “Freddie’s Dead” and “Superfly.” But none would ever catch up with Sly. And no one has yet.