by Jeff Kaliss
Evocative of the congregational celebrations in which the Stewart children had performed on childhood Sundays, "Dance to the Music" inspired the primal directive of the tune's title, but also showcased the newly visible act in a manner unusual in rock and most other genres of pop music. Within the standard three-minute format of a radio single, individual instruments were introduced, a quote from Wilson Pickett's "Mustang Sally" was inserted in homage, and a couple of individual players (Cynthia and Jerry) were actually named in the lyric. Individualized voices were heard: Cynthia's raucous, spoken imperatives ("Dance to the music!" and "All the squares, go home!"), Larry's display of his matching bass vocals, and Sly's impresario tenor. The highlighting of each voice and instrument was almost pedagogical, like a rock band equiva lent to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.
Just as at the Cathedral, this was a band to be listened to as much as danced to. The album's extended twelve-minute "Dance to the Medley" spawned not hits but catchy breaks, later to be highlights of live shows, not only for Sly & the Family Stone but much later for the group's twenty-first century spin-off bands. The three-part "Medley" encompassed stereo-spanning free-form interludes evocative of what was being evolved as mind-bending acid rock by groups like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Doors.
"It touched people more than I ever thought it would," says Greg about the Dance to the Music album. "It was a process of the whole group. And we were able to do it in a way that you got respect from your peers, other musicians, and you could talk to the average cat on the street. Everybody dug it-black, white.... Even to us, it was like, if you just be honest, and give it all you have to give, it will pay off." The band's manifest belief in racial harmony and sexual equality, more explicit in later lyrics, was touched on in a couple of tracks, "Color Me True" and "Don't Burn Baby."
The payoff for both the honesty and the talent became abundant as the Family played shows on both coasts over the course of 1968. "The biggest thrill was, the first time you heard that record on the radio, it felt so good," says Greg. "You go to a city, you get in the rental car, you turn the radio on, the song comes on. That felt better than knowing you were selling a lot of albums." Freddie, testifying from his current perspective of a sober man of the cloth in The Skin I'm In, was tempted into an awkward smile. "We felt like we'd gone on some kind of... I don't even want to say the word, but we were lit up," he confessed.
For those who witnessed the early concerts or bought the Dance to the Music album (and not just the single) when it was released later in 1968, the Family Stone was something to see as well as hear. In the album's cover and publicity photos and onstage, and in its TV appearances that year, the biracial makeup of the outrageously outfitted group was as impressive as was its mix of genders. To his credit, Sly never proffered Rose or Cynthia, both very attractive women, as background eye candy, as Ray Charles had with his Raelettes, but as integral members of the act.
"At a time of great social unrest in this country, this man came forth with an integrated band, the members of which got on famously, as brothers and sisters, and never had a problem anywhere they went," notes Epic's Al DeMarino. This feature broadened the band's appeal across racial lines in audiences and among older liberal-minded fans of Al and David Kapralik's generation.
David explains his personal perspective on race and American culture. As children in Plainfield, New Jersey, in the 1930s, he and his siblings had been "among the only Jews in our elementary school, and we were subjected to a lot of prejudice, and it was hurtful.... I didn't play with the other Caucasian kids, but during the lunch hour the Negroes, as they were called back then, took me in, and we related." As an aspiring Broadway actor in the next decade, David and black actress Jane White founded Torchlight Productions "to integrate Negroes into theater, movies, and the media." Switching to a day job at Columbia Records, David bonded with legendary producer John Hammond in bolstering the label's commitment to rhythm and blues, resurrected the Okeh label as a showcase for black music, and had, with Jerry Brandt, brought several swinging black acts to Columbia from Harlem churches. With this history of dedication, David was perhaps bound to hitch his star to what he thought he saw in the Family Stone and heard in the music created by its black leader. "I saw Sylvester as a vehicle for expressing, lyrically and socio-dynamically, his bringing the races together at this juncture in history," declares David. Sly's own high hopes were not quite so altruistic.
Everybody:
Stand!
1968-1970
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, it is the wine of a new procreation, and I am Bacchus, who presses out this glorious wine for men and makes them drunk with the spirit.
-LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
-ALLAN BLOOM, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER
HE SEEDS OF FAME FOR SLY & the Family Stone had been planted, but it took a while for the band to reach extravagant blossom. A third Epic album, Life, was recorded in May 1968, while the band was still sampling its Dance-driven success. A new kind of confidence was perceptible in the LP's opening track, "Dynamite!," which engineer Don Puluse says was tangible in the studio. Confidence notwithstanding, nothing on Life ever shared its predecessor's success, although in retrospect it's hard to hear why not. Several of the album's cuts, particularly "Fun," "Love City," "M'Lady," and the title piece, bear much of the trademark energy and listener-friendly impulsion of the group's earlier and later hits. The title cut opened with Sly imitating the sound of Laffing Sal, a mechanical clown from Playland at the Beach, San Francisco's erstwhile amusement park. This helped set the tone of the track's (and the album's) life-is-a-circus sentiments, reflective of the good vibes the band was still enjoying. When I party, I party hearty, the band declared in "Fun," and blasts of horns from Jerry Martini and Cynthia Robinson helped celebrate the sentiment, which took in family members-brother, sister, daddy, and momma-and a trademark canny commandment to the congregation of fans: "Socketh unto others / As you would have them socketh to you."
Larry Graham led the exuberant "M'Lady" with some of the bassist's fattest, fuzziest runs heard to date, augmented by Freddie's fast, chunky funk chording and Jerry's giddy clarinet. The bassist's thump-'n'-pluck style had grown more fluid, and his lines on various of these tracks, notably "Dynamite!," would be adapted into innumerable disco bottoms boogieing over dance floors in the '70s. Record sales indicated that the public was not yet buying into all this artistry and delight, but they would with Stand!, the fourth album, whose several singles began bombarding the hit parade the following year.
Over the relatively brief period of gestation of its first three albums and of the public's reaction to them, Sly & the Family Stone were transformed from best-kept secret to an inflating commercial success. Along the way, on the road between coasts, the band was less recognized and more challenged. "I remember that Sly and I drove the equipment truck," says Jerry, "and Daddy [Sly's father K. C. Stewart] followed behind us in a huge station wagon. Drivers changed every hundred miles or so. Sly and I changed when we felt like it, [but] I usually drove and Sly wrote [music]. We talked lots, which kept us awake. These were great times, when there was not very much hard drugs. We enjoyed wine, a few drinks, and some weed, but not too much, as it makes you too tired to drive.
"There were no roadies at first, the band was the roadies," Jerry continues. "Daddy was the road manager. We learned the hard way how to read maps correctly. The straight line is not the fastest when it comes to highway travel. We learned it was so much faster to take the Ohio Turnpike and major highways, as opposed to driving through some scary backwoods towns."
The larger community of Detroit, where racial tension had erupted in 1967, provided its own drama. "There were riots going on, there was a curfew, it was three in the morning, and we got lost in the back streets somewhere," Greg remembers. "And all of a sudden the National Guard p
ulls us over. And here they look in the van, and it's black and white hippies, and that's challenging. But when they pull us out and line us up, Sly starts mouthing off, not accepting certain things. We didn't have any weapons, [but] we're up against the wall, they have machine guns, there's a race riot going on, and this is a very tense situation. And [Sly is] treating it like it's Sunday afternoon: `Don't say anything, 'cause you're gonna hear it back from me.' That was challenging to the point of dangerous, and we're literally yelling at him to back off." In Greg's opinion, this incident (and others like it) was less a reaction of the authorities to the band's racial makeup than to its leader's personality, "'cause he had a very sharp and defined attitude about what he represented and what he was saying. I think that challenged more people than just the fact that he was black."
Back in New York, the group relished the satisfaction of being presented by Bill Graham, who a year earlier had refused to book them at his influential Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. In March 1968, the West Coast impresario had opened the Fillmore East in New York's East Village, and a few months later, he received a call from Epic's Al DeMarino. "Rumor was afloat that Jimi Hendrix was coming in," Al recalls. "Now, Bill Graham, at Fillmore East and West, had a three-act format: opening act, supporting act, headliner, and would very seldom think of deviating from that. So I called Bill ... and I said, `Look, why don't we try this: why don't we have a hundred-percent-equal star billing. Below Jimi, special guest star: Sly & the Family Stone: He said, `Let's go with it!"'
What they'd created was a night to remember in rock history, with classic comparisons and contrasts. Both Sly's Family and Jimi's Experience were multiracial bands led by charismatic black men, but Jimi's music at this point was much more blues-based, though he'd soon find that approach restrictive. Jimi was having to contend with the reputation he'd created as "The Wild Man of Pop," prompting audience expectations of his guitar acrobatics, inverting the instrument, licking the strings lasciviously, and maybe destroying the guitar onstage, all the while coaxing hallucinogenic wails of feedback from stacks of amplifiers. It may have challenged Jimi that Sly and his up-and-coming act were being perceived more as entertainers and musicians than as a psychedelic freak show. This contrast may have helped influence Jimi, in his last years, to turn away from the pure guitar theatrics that helped launch his career and move toward the more soulful palette displayed on Electric Ladyland and Band of Gypsys.
"And what Sly did, the first show on that Saturday night," Al reminisces about the Fillmore face-off, "he literally marched the band off the stage [while doing the hambone], through the aisles, and marched the entire audience out onto Second Avenue before the second show was about to begin.... Traffic had to be halted for about an hour." In addition, Jimi had to allow for a forty-fiveminute interlude instead of the usual twenty-minute break before he took the stage, to give the crowd enough time to cool down.
During a period where he and Jimi were dating the same woman, Al had a chance to assess the guitar legend's personal take on Sly. "I think there was some competitive spirit within," says Al, "but I know there was great respect....I know that [Jimi] admired Sly's music and wanted to go beyond the power trio [the configuration of his Experience act."
The Family Stone's reputation for eye-and-ear-filling entertainment justified a booking in London in September 1968. But hints of troubles to come ended up dooming the mini-tour. Sly refused to begin one show when he was offered what he considered an inadequate substitute for his own keyboard, delayed in transit. Then Larry Graham got busted for possession of a joint, which he'd taken from Jerry, despite Jerry's warning to dispose of it before passing through customs. The flustered group returned to the States and to the recording of the optimistic "You Can Make It If You Try," the earliest track of what would become the fourth album, Stand! Production of the record continued on into the first part of 1969, with the band shuttling between New York and San Francisco, partly to work at the latter's Pacific High Recording Studios and partly for the Stewart siblings to keep in touch with their genetic family and its local church.
The first hit off the new album, released in April '69, was "Everyday People," an anthem in which Sly clearly stated that My own beliefs are in my song, seemingly inspired by the ethos of '60s San Francisco. Referencing awareness of the era's variety of race, class, and lifestyles-different strokes for different folks-the song maintained that I am no better, and neither are you / We are the same whatever we do. Larry sustained a one-note pulse under the message, later telling Guitar World, "I'd never done that before.... That's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." The song's sentiments matched the hopes of the generation they were aimed at, to expand and maintain egalitarian ideals and tolerance. And with this song, the band, which seemed to be not only singing about these hopes but actually living them, was rewarded with its first-ever place at the top of the pop hit singles chart, for a month.
The title track, "Stand!," was the next to land on the charts, though not as high. It opened with a dramatic roll from Greg Errico and featured yet another of Larry's powerfully percussive bass figures. In a rare move, the coda for this song was recorded separately by Sly with studio musicians after he decided it needed more brassy drama, befitting its lyrical declarations: You've been sitting much too long / There's a permanent crease in your right and wrong and There's a midget standing tall /And a giant beside him about to fall. Sly was beginning to distinguish himself among pop songsmiths for the subtlety, imagination, and sometime humor of his music writing as much as for his musical virtuosity. "You could hear the songs getting stronger, the melodies getting stronger," Larry told Guitar World. " We were becoming a better band, better musicians, and [Sly] was becoming a better writer."
Sly himself wielded the bass on "You Can Make It If You Try." The propulsive, intoxicating "I Want to Take You Higher" only made it to number 60 on the singles charts (on the flip side of "Stand!"), but it was to return to prominence later, on the strength of its inclusion on the set list at Woodstock.
The Stand! album itself, which reached number 13 on the Billboard pop charts in April '69, held experimentations and revela tions beyond what was manifest in its individual chartable hits. They included Sly's use of the vocoder, an early synthesizer that had the effect of making his a voice sound like an eerie, trippy electronic instrument. The album's second track began with the dual advisory, Don't call me nigger, whitey /Don't call me whitey, nigger. This polemical reference to racism, very rare in Sly's lyrics, effectively blocked airplay, but the song highlighted Rose in a soulful plaint, partnered by Freddie's roiling wah-wah guitar. An atypically dense evocation of Hendrix-like blues rock, it sounded a rightful reaction to recent strife, including the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. a year earlier. "Sing a Simple Song" broadcast a very different, sunnier sentiment in funky syncopation. The psychedelic blues instrumental "Sex Machine," at fourteen minutes, far outlasted most rock album tracks of the time, and prefigured the jam band format of coming years. Freddie reflected later that he'd rehearsed laboriously for this jam, but ended up being allowed to improvise on the spot.
Stand! contained yet more remarkable tracks and held on to the charts for over a hundred weeks. It served to solidify the Family Stone's unique synthesis of vocal-centered R & B with guitarbased rock. "Oh, man, that was the greatest-our greatest album, without a doubt," Freddie later opined to Guitar World. "It's my favorite because we were still fresh and hungry and sharp." If the band had disbanded at this point in time, it would have already scored a secure place in rock history.
Over what fans perceived as a long two years before the advent of another album, the Family Stone watched itself be illuminated and ultimately transfigured by the spotlight of success. Jerry commented on the peaks of this period for The Skin I'm In, saying, "The feeling that we'd gone Big Time made us feel really good. First-class tickets, limousines, instead of Sly and I driving the truck and Big Daddy in back with the va
n." How the band members moved through this phase of their youth was of course affected by their celebrity. Those who were married experienced strains on those bonds, and whether married or single, there were increasing opportunities for carnal indulgence, as referenced in Life's final track, "Jane Is a Groupee": She's got a thing for guys in the band / Every musician's biggest fan ... Claps her hands, without a doubt / Has no idea what the song's about.
There are reports of other females in Sly's life whom he may have considered more significant. The reunions with his first love, Ria Boldway, are accounted for later in this story. It appears that Anita, Sly's fateful companion from the Pussycat in Las Vegas, accompanied him to New York and on some of the group's early road trips. Stevie Swanigan, known as Stephani Owens when she was later interviewed by Joel Selvin, was brought in by David Kapralik in the fall of 1968 to work as secretary and personal assistant to Sly and the band. She revealed to Joel, "We had some intimate times, I will say that, but I was never [Sly's] girlfriend, I was more his conscience. I never took on the attitude of being his woman, because it would have made me less effective in the things I was supposed to do.... I was in and out a lot, because he wanted our relationship to be one where he could control me as another individual, as a woman. [But] I wanted him to respect me for what I could contribute, and for my mind."
Another perspective on Sly's love life appears in the pages of an autobiography by Deborah Santana, Space Between the Stars. Debbie, long married to (and more recently divorced from) guitar legend Carlos Santana, devotes a half dozen chapters to her early relationship with Sly. It had begun on the San Francisco street where Deborah, then known as Debbie King, lived, in the summer of 1969, with her parents, black jazz guitarist and band leader Saunders King and his Irish American wife, Jo Frances. Sly, who'd been staying in his parents' Urbano Drive house nearby, stopped his vehicle in the middle of the street to make conversation with the attractive eighteen-year-old, eight years his junior, who had just a few weeks earlier viewed his televised appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. By the time Sly and the band flew east in preparation for the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair a few weeks later, the teenager had begun an intense, long-term liaison with the rising rock luminary, and it lasted through the spring of 1972. (Stevie Swanigan's professional services to Sly began slightly sooner, but were more or less contemporaneous.)
