by Jeff Kaliss
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!"'
Through all this, Sly began to count on Ria as a good friend in frisky female form. She'd follow him downtown on Saturdays, where daddy K. C. Stewart worked in the Higgins Building, and the friends would ride the elevator, one of the few then in town, for hours. It was during the formation of the future Viscaynes that Ria was shanghaied by Frank and Sly, who'd separately become aware of her musical training and ability. "I was walking across the campus one lunch hour," she says, "and they grabbed my arms on either side and said, `You're coming with us.' And they took me over to Sly's mother's house. It was a nice home on a kind of hill, it wasn't in an extremely dangerous or bad part of town, and they had me sing for'em. And Mama cooked us lunch, and that's when I became a member [of the budding group]."
After about a year, the friendly simmer between Ria and Sly heated up to a romance. "I wouldn't call it `dating,' because that wasn't allowed [between blacks and whites]. I would call it"-she hesitates-"what would you say? I hate to use the word `sneaking,' 'cause that's such a terrible word. But I don't know how many people knew. We tried to keep it under cover, because my father told Sly that he would kill him if he found out we were seeing each other. My mother is a very devout Catholic woman, and she only wanted my safety and [Sly's] safety, especially from my father or anyone else who would cause us problems because of it." In a few years, Sly would be ready and eager to hang out with white women in the open, though society wouldn't be ready to condone such relationships for a while longer.
Sly and Ria's romance built on their friendship. "We could tell each other secrets, you know, kid secrets," she says. "Talk about our dreams, spend hours on the phone together. Get away together whenever we could." In the meantime, they openly dated others with whom they wouldn't be violating any unwritten code. "I was dating the football captain," says Ria, "and [Sly] was dating a darling, tiny little black girl. I don't know how he felt about me going out with other people, 'cause I didn't `share myself' with other boys. And I don't know whether he did, with this girl or any of the other girls I heard he'd seen." She did find out, by asking, that he'd bought his girlfriend a bedroom heater for Christmas, and she pronounced this act "kind."
On the Dick Stewart-inspired junket to Los Angeles, Ria found a legitimate reason to hang on openly and tightly to Sly: it was his first plane trip, and he was scared. She didn't know it at the time, but the hotel on Hollywood Boulevard that put the Viscaynes up was one of the few in the area to accept racially mixed groups at that time. After a late night of relatively tame teen fun, "I was the only one that would venture to wake Sly up," Ria points out. "No one else would dare,'cause he would wake up swinging. I don't know what that was all about. But I would go into his room and just sit on the edge of his bed and sing to him. He'd go, `I'm asleep!' and I'd go, `No, no, it's time!' And he'd just get up, sweet as pie."
The bond between Ria and Sly held after his graduation, and hers two years later. The Viscaynes, though, didn't continue long enough to follow up after hitting the KYA charts in the fall of'61. Frank threatened to leave the group after the L.A. experience had revealed that he was in effect working for nothing, for shady management. The management then threatened to sue his parents for breach of contract, and Frank joined the Air Force, where he expected to escape persecution. Charlie went off to a university, while his younger brother, Vern, and Vern's classmate Ria, finished high school. Charlene got a job and got married. Sly, though, had already sensed that his fate lay in music, and he was determined to stay on course.
You Have You
to Complete
1961-1966
Do you know what the secret of success is? Be yourself and have some fun.
-TITO PUENTE
LY STAYED AROUND VALLEJO and expanded his interests and skills with a variety of keyboard and stringed instruments, and harmonica, working them in a number of R & B bands. Shortly after graduating from Vallejo High in 1961, he also decided to focus on continuing his academic education, studying music theory with David Froehlich at Vallejo Junior College. David and Sly developed the sort of studentmentor relationship on which so much great achievement has been built, throughout the histories of both Western and Indian classical music, folk traditions, and more recently in jazz and pop. With uncharacteristic magnanimity, Sly has credited David for this again and again, on the liner notes to his albums, in his rare print interviews, and in TV appearances. And although they've spent practically no time together since those college days in Vallejo, the affection seems certifiably mutual, still treasured by David in his Vallejo home, where he now stays up to speed on jazz piano and ready for the occasional gig, long past his retirement from the educational system.
David grew up south of Vallejo, in Oakland, in the 1930s and '40s, when he'd pay thirty-five cents to see and hear and maybe later chat with Count Basic, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford, Fats Waller, and other black jazz greats visiting Oakland's Sweet's Ballroom. After becoming a skilled pianist and being discharged from service in World War II, David entered a junior college in San Bernadino on the G.I. Bill and met his own mentor, a theory teacher named Russell Baldwin. "He was so deeply sincere about the value of music," David remembers about Baldwin, "and about how fortunate we were to be into such a field, which I've always believed since." Baldwin inspired his student to proceed to graduate study at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, from which David returned to the Bay Area, which in the '50s, looked and sounded quite hospitable to both jazz players and fans. Clubs abounded in San Francisco's North Beach, Fillmore, and Tenderloin districts. To help pay for his pleasures, David found stable daytime employment teaching music theory and English to a multiracial mix of high school graduates in Vallejo and leading their college dance band. "They were beaten, some could hardly read," he reflects, "but we had fain together."
In the early 1960s, David was approached by an intense young man he'd seen around campus, playing guitar at student assemblies. Sly Stewart told the teacher that he "wanted to do more, to become a professional. And he was in the position I was in when I started school in San Bernadino, never having heard the nine symphonies of Beethoven." For David, the classics of the Western canon were treasures he was eager to share, because "the longer we live, the more we realize their greatness, their truth, their majesty." The teacher made the old masters work for his pupils. "A big part of our program was ear training, based on the Bach root movement," says David. "The theory part was [from composer and academic] Walter Piston, but ear training was something different." David disseminated miniature classical scores so that students could see the structure of what they were listening to and noted that "Sly wasn't used to seeing such a thing." Years later, former Epic Records exec Steve Paley reports that Sly could be seen strolling through a studio with one or another of the Walter Piston theory tomes under his arm, a tangible influence on his distinct and sophisticated approach to popular music. For Sly, more so than for most rockers, informed sophistication mattered as much as unschooled instinct.
While he was still one among a roomful of music students, Sly's teacher noted that his star pupil "stood out, of course, as being intelligent and personable but with a complete anxiety to learn. He was not acquainted, had not had a chance, with the physics of music, acoustics, the overtone series, which the chord progressions of Bach are based on. All of this was new to this gentleman, and it fascinated him. When it came to such things as style and form and history, it's what he wanted to know."
As a role model for David and Sly, "Bach was an excellent ear man," the teacher points out. The eighteenth-century composer "could walk into a cat
hedral and say, `The sound will come over that beam and across the ceiling, and be heard over there.' That was all new to Sly." However, Sly would display similar perception and attention to detail in his later work, orchestrating, arranging, and recording in the studio.
Sly's love of learning had him raising his hand repeatedly in class and remaining with more questions after other students had been dismissed. He shuffled attentively through not only Western classics but also his teacher's strongest suit, jazz. "We laughed about the song [famed jazz bassist] Ray Brown wrote, `The Gravy Waltz,"' David recalls merrily. "When we got to the bridge, neither he nor I could remember it. He came back in the next day or two and said, `I got the bridge!' and he hummed it out. That was something he did for me. When I think back, he wasn't listening as much as he was rehearsing, playing, and writing [in his mind's ear]."
Both David and Sly probably would have been very happy to prolong their mutual learning experience. But the day came when Sly had to leave academia for other adventures. "I didn't want to say much, I was listening," recalls the teacher about Sly's actual day of departure. "And he said, `Don't worry, I'll be back to see you, in a limousine full of girls: And [several years later], he was!"
IT WAS A FORTUITOUS TIME and place for Sly to be launching a career in popular music. He and the baby boomers, just a few years his junior, were listening to the radio, buying what they heard there, and going out to dance to the music, which in 1961 included Ben E. King's wistful "Stand by Me" and "Spanish Harlem," Ray Charles's imperative "Hit the Road Jack," Sam Cooke's smoothly polished "Cupid," and such melodramatic marvels as "Running Scared" by Roy Orbison and "Runaway" by Del Shannon. That was also the year Chubby Checker launched non-contact but sinuous dancing to "The Twist." Meanwhile, Berry Gordy had founded his prolific Motown label, and former Georgia cotton picker and shoe-shine boy James Brown, who'd been gigging and recording since the mid-1950s, began to earn a lucrative reputation as "the hardest working man in show business."
Sly could hardly wait to join this scene where blacks were hardly a minority. KYA-AM was among the most popular San Francisco rock stations in the early '60s. It had also proven a benign refuge for disc jockeys and close friends Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue and Bob Mitchell, who'd reportedly fled west from Pittsburgh's WIBG under threat of federal prosecution for the not uncommon practice of taking payola (basing radio playlists on bribes from record companies). "They had the East Coast radio technique down," comments Alec Palao, a rock archivist who has produced compilations of Sly's pre-Family recordings. "Donahue in particular had an incredible presence on the radio. He had this deep voice and this commanding manner," issuing from a jumbosize body, "and he was talking the argot of the time, he had a lot of phrases. He [and Mitchell] took over KYA, and once they got that going, they really sent the ratings up.... They became very powerful as guys that would spot a hit and play it to death, 'breaking' it. That's how KYA got a reputation as a 'break' station [open to regional surprises and sudden crazes]."
The spontaneous sound of radio in that era, long before corporate depersonalization squelched that sound, was intoxicating to free spirits like Sly. He was thrilled when Tom Donahue and Bob Mitchell heard the potential in the Viscaynes' "Yellow Moon" and afforded the single some time on their drive-time playlists.
TV was also learning how to rock out as Bay Area baby boomers of all races flocked to the tapings of Dick Stewart Dance Party. Prominent in Stewart's early'60s telecasts, alongside future Playboy Playmate (and future Mrs. Dick Stewart) Barbara Burrus, was another hiply attractive and likeable youth with great dance moves, Sylvester Stewart (obviously no relation to the show's host), who also appeared on Dance Party with the Viscaynes. Sly also frequented live rock shows at San Francisco's Cow Palace, hosted by radio jocks Donahue and Mitchell under the aegis of Tempo Productions.
It may have been at one of these shows that Sly made the fateful acquaintance of the jocks/impresarios. In any case, the DJs, following their ambitions beyond arena shows and the airwaves, founded a label, Autumn Records, in 1964, and with remarkable foresight hired the much younger but equally ambitious Sly, who'd already impressed them as the de facto producer for the Viscaynes. In Autumn's studio, notes Alec Palao, "He'd be leading the band on the floor, jumping around, changing the arrangement, directing people. The role of the producer back then wasn't as defined." And Sly knew his way around a variety of instruments and musical styles. The studio served as a hands-on laboratory for the twenty-one-year-old Sly to apply his collegiate training in orchestration, to learn the mechanics of taping, microphone placement, and overdubbing, and to absorb the more subtle craft of songwriting while turning out a marketable product.
Within a year of signing with Autumn, Sly had proved his worth by creating the label's biggest hit record. Bobby Freeman had been one of the first San Francisco rockers (after ballad crooner Johnny Mathis) to place on the charts, with the playful, Latinized "Do You Wanna Dance," in 1958. There were lesser follow-up hits, but his "C'mon and Swim," in 1964, qualified as a dance craze. Bobby has credited Sly as the "composer, producer, and conductor" of the single and associated album. It happened this way: the veteran singer had been signed by Tom Donahue and Bob Mitchell to join in their Cow Palace shows, where Sly was providing production and instrumental duties and eventually leading the house band, in addition to his job in the recording studio. After one show, Sly engaged Bobby about his onstage movements, liken ing them to a swimmer's. Performer and producer then brought their brainstorm back to the studio, forging a gold record that climbed to the number 5 spot on Billboard's pop and R & B charts, revived Bobby Freeman's career, secured Autumn Records' reputation, and started to bolster the name and bank account of the multitalented Sly.
"He arranged `C'mon and Swim' with exciting breakdowns," comments Alec Palao, in reference to the song's periods of danceinducing percussion, a technique later applied pervasively to disco and hip-hop. "Maybe to our ears they sound kind of cliched, but [Sly] turned what could have been a pedestrian record into a very exciting record. He's on top of the groove, and that's a crucial thing in any form of music." Alec also attributes the Swim's success to "a little bit of serendipity: the sudden explosion of focus on ... North Beach and that whole topless thing, which was a very newsworthy thing at the time." The band for "Swim" was basically Joe Piazza and the Continentals, with whom Sly had played bass in North Beach venues and who'd earlier backed the Viscaynes. The group, including future Family Stone saxophonist Jerry Martini, mutated into the Condors, backing popular featured act George & Teddy at North Beach's Condor Club, where Sly himself also appeared with a group called the Mojo Men.
The Condor began attracting lurid national attention when cocktail waitress Carol Doda initiated the practice of mounting the piano, removing her top, and dancing during band breaks. Doda later took over ownership of the Condor, and the former music hall was refitted as a flagship of North Beach's tourist-tempting strip club scene. This reputed revival of San Francisco's Barbary Coast reputation helped the Swim move onto dance floors everywhere, alongside the tamer Twist and Mashed Potato, and arguably helped establish alluring go-go dancers, topless or not, as a fixture at many major clubs. The fad flourished in San Francisco until then-mayor Dianne Feinstein prompted raids and bans in the 1980s. Today the Condor, tamer but still in operation, boasts state landmark status.
With some of the first big money that "C'mon and Swim" brought him, Sly helped his father move the Stewart family from their modest location on the outskirts of the Bay Area to a home in San Francisco's Ingleside district. Earlier in the century, the Ingleside, several miles southwest of North Beach and the downtown, was one of several areas where developers had established written and unwritten "covenants," in effect bylaws enforcing the image of a genteel white middle-class lifestyle that would exclude nonwhite residents. As recently as 1958, a cross had been burned on the front lawn of black judge Cecil Poole's house, who'd managed to buy a home in the Ingleside directly from its previous own
er, rather than through realtors, who wouldn't have helped him. Poole accounted for the charred cross to his daughter Patti with the comment, "Some Christian has lost his way." The Pooles stayed put, and over the next decade, the Ingleside became a neighborhood of choice for middle-class black professionals.
The Stewarts' spacious homestead was located a few blocks south of the Pooles', on the ovular Urbano Drive, which had been a popular racetrack before the great earthquake of 1906. Sly moved along his own multiple career tracks in high spirits, sometimes speeding between appointments in a Jaguar XKE custom-painted purple, a reward from Tom Donahue. He appropriated the basement of his parents' house into a base of operations. He continued to perform, as did brother Freddie, in several bands, and to produce singles for Autumn, as well as waxing several of his own. Some of this material has been compiled by Alec Palao for Ace Records (based in his native England) as Precious Stone: In the Studio with Sly Stone 1963-1965, released in 1994. The disc is the best showcase yet, outside of the Family Stone, of Sly's skill as a producer and of his understanding and application in songwriting of '60s R & B. Included are early rock collaborations with siblings Freddie and Rose, and with his then-new friend and keyboard mentor Billy Preston.
It was rare in the early'60s, and evidence of the greater opportunities available in the Bay Area, that a young black man was given access not only to professional studios (San Francisco's Coast and Golden Gate studios) but also to working with different kinds of artists. Sly was assigned several white rock groups, early representatives of what would come later to be embraced by the hippies as the "San Francisco Sound." The city's music scene was evolving, alongside the evolution of its counterculture, from Jack Kerouac and the Beats in the '50s to the starry-eyed flower children of the next decade. The new generation seemed to want to experiment beyond the influence of the Beatles-led "British Invasion." But most musicians weren't as experienced or as confident as Sly. Charged with devising make-or-break singles with musicians whose technical range might not allow for much formal sophistication, Sly learned to shape their talents into basic but very effective hooks, licks, and choruses.
