by Jeff Kaliss
Some white rockers, most famously the Beau Brummels, were in tune with their young black producer. The Precious Stone liner notes by Alec quote a couple of women who'd sung for Sly at the Coast studios, back when they were teens in Catholic school. "Here was this very flashy black man, dressed in Beatle suits and this weird pompadour," said Catherine Kerr. "He was strange! But he was always very sweet to us, always very protective. You know, `Make sure you call your mom!"' Her schoolmate Melinda Balaam added, "Sly was always smiling. I've never been around someone who was so `up' all the time." In those times, it still would have been a pretty natural high.
With other rock acts, like the Great Society and the Warlocks (antecedents of the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, respectively) and the Charlatans, there was friction and sometimes open hostility. "They had their own ideas, but they didn't have the chops to back them up," says Alec about such groups. "As far as [Sly] was concerned, they were amateurs, and as far as they were concerned, he was Mr. Plastic-Hey-Baby-Soul. But at the same time, a lot of rock groups benefited from Sly being in the booth, because of his enthusiasm," not to mention the erudition the producer had absorbed from his teacher David Froelich. "That's why, when you listen to some of the Beau Brummels' session tapes [rough cuts], and you hear [Sly], you know he's focusing on getting them to sing right, have a great performance," Alec points out, "even though the group already had the goods and a style."
In the case of the Great Society, Sly reportedly put the group and its lead singer, Grace Slick, through two hundred takes of "Somebody to Love" and attempted to position himself on lead guitar. Grace ended up taking the song on to another group-the Jefferson Airplane-and to legendary rock status a few years later. The Beau Brummels, though, stayed with Autumn and scored the label's next (and last) national big hits, "Just a Little" and "Laugh, Laugh," both produced by Sly, with a deceptive sound evocative of the Beatles even though the Brummels were strictly Bay Area.
Sly's Autumn output was, in Alec's opinion, "more vanilla than you'd expect." It's revealing to listen to the Brummels' delivery of Sly's "Underdog" from their debut disc. It's reminiscent of the Rolling Stones' "Get Off of My Cloud" and far more upbeat than the Family Stone's version of the tune several years later. Like the racial makeup of the stellar band he'd later form, Sly created music in different colors, favoring elements from the white side of rock when it pleased him (and clients like the Brummels), but equally ready to deploy R & B (as he did on the Family's "Underdog"), and to meld the two influences with jaunty syncopation, at odds with standard R & B rhythmic patterns. Sly's youthful and multifaceted talent is also in evidence on his own recorded performances for Autumn. His "Scat Swim," one of several follow-ups to Bobby Freeman's big hit, didn't go very far, but it revealed a jazzy, scatting style of the vocalist perhaps unfamiliar to later fans and probably encouraged by David Froelich. Within the tracks of Alec's Autumn compilation, you can sense Sly seasoning his chops for what would be the Family Stone, and in the process helping prepare a couple of the future band members (his brother and sister) and an important collaborator (Billy Preston) for their work on major labels.
Some of Sly's early efforts show he was listening closely to, and borrowing some from, established rockers. His Autumn single "Buttermilk," says Alec, "was just a rip-off of the Stones' `2120 South Michigan Avenue' . . . and he'd quote `Satisfaction' in other songs." His gifts as songwriter and arranger and as a tasteful blender of influences would blossom with the Family Stone, and he'd later return to producing others. For the time being, though, Sly wanted to follow Tom and Bob's footsteps in another direction, spinning discs rather than making them. He wasn't the only would-be celebrity to have applied a musician's skills to radio. Waylon Jennings, on KLLL in Lubbock, Texas, and B. B. King, on WDIA in Memphis, had also proven that they had the ears to detect potential hits, recognize catchy hooks, and understand what makes a pop song work. All three of these musicians were also able to apply their on-air experience to making their own listenerfriendly music.
After training at the Chris Borden School of Broadcasting and graduating in 1964, Sly filled a slot on AM radio station KSOL, whose call letters announced its focus on soul and R & B, with some crossover to pop, aimed at a primarily black demographic.
Sly's speaking voice, like his singing, was strong and sensual, dipping, like Tom Donahue's, into a baronial lower register. His manner was hip and masterful, with many moments of humor and improvisation. Consider this broadcast bit of Sly's wily wisdom, copping from Shakespeare: "The whole world is a stage, and you only have a part to play, and if you don't play it right, you get kicked out of the party." And a warning, now easily assessed as prescient: "The Soul Brothers remind you to be cool," Sly intoned between hits. "Keep the poison out of the kids' reach. And keep it out of any fool's reach that might try to use it, you know what I mean? Keep it out of your woman's reach!"
"I love every one of them," he testified over the fade-out of the Supremes' rather inane soundtrack single "The Happening." "Especially Diana [Ross]. And she loves me! That's a gas," he opined, and after a signifying pause, he continued, "The movie, not the record." Any self-respecting Supremes fan would have seconded this assessment.
Radio execs and wiser listeners couldn't help but have realized that Sly knew his music very well. While KSOL hadn't KYA's national significance as a "break" station, Sly's broadcast presence there (he had the 7:00 p.m. to midnight slot), and later on the similarly formatted KDIA, bolstered his importance to the Bay Area entertainment scene, reaching beyond his black target audience to youth of other ethnicities. "Sly had a specific energy, he was clearly some kind of star," remembers Ben Fong-Torres, former Rolling Stone editor, ongoing rock historian, and current KFRC-FM "Classic Hits" radio personality. To the then-teenaged Ben, attending school and helping out in his parents' Chinese eatery in Hayward, Sly sounded "confident, but not smug ... in kind of an `older brother' sound, friendly, not coming on to anybody, not `I am the disc jockey, so I am the king."' The radio DJ's largesse was manifest in "the way he demanded requests and dedications and the way he talked to kids on the phone," making those conversations audible on-air.
"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 list
en 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.
Dance to
the Music
1966-1968
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 Fr
eddie 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.
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.
