I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone
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Debbie's account provides a rare look at a period of Sly's personal life by an intimate insider. There are images of the Urbano Drive homestead, with Debbie petting one of Sly's earlier pet dogs, the Great Dane called Stoner, "while Sly played the piano, writing lyrics on yellow tablets and setting notes and chords onto staff paper." Debbie goes on to write, "Mama [Alpha Stewart] made the [rehearsing Family Stone] play softly because of the neighbors. Mama was usually in the kitchen cooking, or sitting at the table in the window, reading her Bible. She was sweet, with a twinkle in her eyes. Her heavy body moved slowly, and Sly danced around her, running back downstairs [to the basement], where she never went. I would sit with her and answer questions about my family and church."
Space Between the Stars goes on to describe Debbie's escape to New York with Sly, where they shared a courtly romance enhanced by marijuana and LSD. Debbie didn't follow the band to Woodstock, but saw Sly often, after she'd enrolled at California State College in Dominguez Hills and he'd relocated to a mansion in Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles, not far away. She refers to Sly's sharing cocaine with her, to help her maintain her academic schedule. She also reports that by 1971, she'd dropped out of college, and that Sly's cocaine use drove him into occasional medical emergencies. Within a year, she writes, Sly had subjected her to a couple of episodes of physical abuse, and she'd left L.A. and their relationship, soon to start the study of yoga and a new romance with her future husband and rock-legend-in-the-making Carlos Santana.
A separate reflection of the benign glow in which Sly and Debbie had begun their affair is heard on Ben Fong-Torres's recording of an interview he conducted with Sly in Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 for the then-new Rolling Stone magazine. "Debbie's smart," Sly told the young reporter, "the brightest girl that has ever been associated with me in any way like this. She lived right around the corner from me and I didn't even know it.... I went to England and all over the place, all I had to do was go up the street and it would have been cool." The young lady in question was heard to reciprocate his esteem. "What Sly has in his head, he knows is right," she advised Ben, "so it doesn't excite him to read somebody who agrees with him."
A few months earlier, in July 1969, impresario George Wein expanded the lineup at his Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island by booking rock and blues acts along with expected jazz greats such as Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Among the youth-oriented bookings were Jeff Beck, Blood, Sweat & Tears, James Brown, B. B. King, John Mayall, Frank Zappa, and Sly & the Family Stone. The rock roster inevitably attracted a different, difficult demographic. On two successive nights, crowds breached the fences during the rock portion of the program, which on the second night featured Sly and company. George was billed for overtime law enforcement and replacement of the fence and was ordered not to book any more rock acts.
A month later, Sly & the Family Stone were among the cultural heroes invited to entertain a half million paying and (mostly) nonpaying throngs of youth swarming over a bucolic farmstead in upstate New York.
THE WOODSTOCK MUSIC AND ARTS Fair was a point of mass affirmation for a generation heady with rebellion, experimentation, hedonism, and the occasional breaching of fences. In retrospect, it stands out as a showcase for a very healthy period in the development of American popular music. More than three decades later, youthful energy sparkled in the eyes of the nowmiddle-aged members of the Family Stone as they invoked the experience in the documentary The Skin I'm In. Greg recalled reveling with Janis Joplin at a nearby Holiday Inn, before his band's scheduled appearance on the early morning of August 17. Freddie reported that in the wee hours of their performance that Sunday, "It was dark when we went on, you could see nothing but candles. And, man, when the sun came up! We began to see how many people there were."
"When we got there, at three o'clock in the morning, we were tired, we were grouchy, we were all full of mud," added Jerry. "We got out there and looked at the audience, who were all in their sleeping bags, and when we started playing, they all jumped out of their sleeping bags. We felt the vibe between the audience and the band, and honest to God, all the hair on my arms stood straight up." Was this evidence of a reprise and validation of Rich Romanello's prophetic reaction to the band at its birth three years earlier?
Cynthia described the scene for People magazine: "It was pouring rain. Freddie got shocked. The equipment was crackling. But Sly was like a preacher. He had half a million people in the palm of his hand." Larry told Vanity Fair, "It's like when an athlete like Michael Jordan realizes the extent of his gifts and goes, `Oh, I can do that.'"
Michael Wadleigh's Oscar-winning documentary film about Woodstock (edited by a pre-Mean Streets Martin Scorsese) and the associated three-LP soundtrack served both as souvenirs of the generation's peak experience and as an extension of Woodstock's legend to those who couldn't, or wouldn't, be there. Sly & the Family Stone played one of the festival's best sets, including "M'Lady," "Sing a Simple Song," "You Can Make It If You Try," "Stand!," "Love City," "Dance to the Music," "Music Lover," and "I Want to Take You Higher," but only the last three made it onto the film and record. It's not the band's best performance, but it is one of their most celebrated, and the powerful current between stage and captive audience is tangible.
David Kapralik, though still managing the group, didn't witness the Woodstock gig until he saw the documentary. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, he views the indelible image of Sly, his arms raised in salute to the throng, with long white fringes trailing off the jacket, as a harbinger of hard times. "I knew that this was Icarus, his wings made of wax, and [the spotlight] was the sun he flew too close to," David opines. His characteristically visionary metaphor is drawn from Greek mythology, but he refers to a reallife meltdown that would increasingly weaken his bond with Sly, Sly's bond with the band, and David's hold on his own well-being.
On the surface, it looked like Sly & the Family Stone's career was in full flight, with the Woodstock film and recording helping to uplift and sustain the band's popularity. Without a new album in the works, though, Columbia decided to launch a couple of singles. The laid-back and jazzy "Hot Fun in the Summertime," released in August '69, rose to the number-2 spot on the charts in the fall of that year; early in 1970, "I Want to Take You Higher" was released as the A-side of a single ("Stand!" was on the flip), and its success this time around was supercharged by the song's strong placement in the Woodstock set. It sounded a rousing call for various means of enhanced experience. The Woodstock media quickly elevated the festival and several of its star acts, including Sly & the Family Stone, from the status of peak but flawed experiences to the status of myth. And the public is always hungry for myth, even when it obscures any clear-eyed view of what's really going down.
THE BIG MONEY SLY MADE after Stand! and its follow-ups helped him establish luxurious and well-protected bicoastal command points between 1969 and 1971, including an enviable suite on New York City's prestigious Central Park West. (As for the city of his early success, Sly was witnessed delivering a diatribe from the stage to a Bay Area audience in late '69. "You're over," he told the stunned crowd. "You thought you were cool, but your arrogance was your undoing, and San Francisco is now over, officially." "He didn't explain it," noted spectator Joel Selvin. "He was just pissed off.")
Down in Los Angeles, Stevie Swanigan was assigned responsibility of locating domiciles after Sly and David Kapralik had established an office for their new Stone Flower Productions in Hollywood. From an apartment in the Griffith Park area behind Hollywood, Sly moved to a larger, more removed rented property on Coldwater Canyon. Along with Topanga Canyon, Beverly Hills, and Bel Air, this was one of several select areas favored by L.A.'s rich and famous because they offered verdant hillsides, relative isolation, and spacious structures on large lots. Debbie King lived at the Coldwater Canyon property during that period of her connection with Sly, and Stevie and some of Sly's bandmates and acquaintances used it as a crash pad and base of operations,
with a caretaker named Louis abiding on a more permanent basis. Joel Selvin, who made a visit to the property on behalf of his college paper, notes that "K. C. and Alpha [Stewart] were down at Coldwater Canyon a lot. They were somewhere between figurehead parents and kitchen staff." An expanding collection of dogs added to the visual and olfactory signs of life.
Hamp "Bubba" Banks, who'd provided Sly with rowdy company and something of a template of toughness on the streets of San Francisco, reconnected with Sly after spending some time in prison. He found his friend mutated by fame and fortune, and more desirous of services Bubba and some of his streetwise colleagues were quite ready to provide, including facilitating and protecting Sly's indulgences. "When I got to Los Angeles, he was the cocaine king," Bubba recalled. "Now he could really do what he wanted.... If I was in the house, he could do what he wanted." Joel reveals that Bubba was disappointed with K. C. 's relationship to Sly during this period, because "his son was irresponsible, disrespectful, a piece of shit, and K. C. let him be that way ... 'cause the guy was cleaning toilets until his son had a hit record, and when they bought that place on Urbano Drive, Daddy didn't have to clean toilets no more.... So he'd put up with anything."
Bubba himself deserves some thanks, or blame, for letting Sly be himself, or what he'd become, a dynamo of both creativity for occasional public consumption and of extravagant private indulgence. The latter, of course, came to compromise the former. "He didn't have to ask for it, he didn't have to buy," Stephani Owens told Joel about the easy availability of substances for those with the right amount of cash and/or the right connections. "There were some drugs around that were bought, but not as much as were given to him.... Life was drugs, and it was music." While recording at the Record Plant, near San Francisco, "They would spend so many hours, thirty-six to forty-eight hours in a stretch, wearing out the engineers. But they were doing drugs too."
Freddie told Joel that PCP, aka angel dust, was introduced into the array of stimulants at his brother's L.A. digs as early as New Year's Eve 1969. PCP (phencyclidine hydrochloride) had been labeled a "dissociative anesthetic" and removed from its original use in human and veterinary medicine because of its threatening and unpredictable side effects, including psychotic reactions and a speculative link to permanent brain damage. But some of its effects, including a removal from bodily and environmental reality and a desensitizing of reactions to pain, had brought the drug back into recreational use.
Freddie recalled that on that drugged New Year's Eve, two PCP users had to be rushed to the hospital. Over the next year, Hamp "Bubba" Banks observed the effects of PCP on both of the Stewart/Stone brothers: " [Sly] and Freddie walked around the house all day, like zombies," he told Joel. "That is where it all fell apart."
Drug use and self-indulgent behavior were becoming common among successful musicians. Their lifestyles were substantially financed by advances paid to them against their future earnings, and recording companies were only too ready to provide the cash and to tolerate indications of excess. "The more popular you get," Sly pointed out to Spin magazine in 1985, "the more people there are around you who say they will make everything work. So more people make money off your hide, like from traveling arrangements.... When you're much younger and on top, they tell you, `Don't worry `bout nothin'. Hey, you're an artist, just worry about your music.' . . . I'd get a lot of contracts crammed in my face. I'd be getting into a Learjet, on my way somewhere, and they'd say, `Before you get to the next place, can we see you, sweetheart? Sign this right quick.'" Along with the cash, it became ever easier for Sly to acquire roadies, personal assistants, and luxury vehicles. Ultimately, of course, it became more difficult for him to fulfill the terms of those contracts and to put aside any part of the money toward his financial future; most of it disappeared in the short run.
With a more hopeful approach to finances, Sly and David Kapralik's Stone Flower Productions was set up in an office opposite the distinctive cylindrical headquarters of Capitol Records in Hollywood. Drawing on the producing skills he'd first honed as a teenager at Autumn Records, Sly helped launch a brief but successful career (on Atlantic Records) for Little Sister, the group named for his youngest musical sibling, Vet. She was joined by two other vocalists, Mary McCreary and Elva "Tiny" Mouton, with whom she'd attended high school, performed gospel music (as the Heavenly Tones), and later provided backup on her older brother's albums. In 1970, Little Sister placed on the pop and R & B charts with two of Sly's compositions, "Somebody's Watching You" (a cover from the Family Stone's Stand! album) and "You're the One." Stone Flower also produced less successful recordings by R & B artist Joe Hicks and the proto-funk group 6iX. Notable in these productions was Sly's novel use of a prototype drum machine, a harbinger of developments in Sly's own later recordings and in popular music in general.
Sly made several carefully selected concert appearances across the country in 1970. One of those stops, for a free concert in Chicago's Grant Park on July 27, resulted in what was described in subsequent national reports and in legend for decades to come as "a riot."
As reported in the New York Times, "several thousand youths" battled police and vandalized the city's Loop district after the Family Stone refused to perform at the concert. Presented by the city as "a way to bridge the generation gap," the concert featured Sly as a form of apology to fans who'd been disappointed when he'd welched on dates earlier in the summer. The band, however, refused to begin playing for the free concert until the crowd quieted itself, which it didn't. The Times piece didn't lay blame on Sly for the Chicago riot, but other parts of the press and the rumor among the public nationwide did. It didn't help that Sly & the Family Stone were accumulating blame for showing up late for gigs or missing them altogether, trying the patience of young audiences. Besides, the health of rock concerts in general had become suspect, after the fatality and chaos of the Altamont Free Concert, featuring the Rolling Stones, in December 1969.
Epic's Al DeMarino is still eager to clear the record about the Chicago fiasco. "There was racial tension against the police force well before this day was scheduled," he claims. "In fact, bricks were found, chains were found, bats were found, prior to the band coming out. So they didn't cause it by not performing, it was caused by tension before.... And Irv Kupcinet, a great writer in Chicago [for the Sun-Times], was the only one who came forth days later and said, listen, this has nothing to do with Sly & the Family Stone.... I gave a radio interview to Gene Loving, a major disc jockey ... and explained everything to him, because he cared enough and wanted to know the truth. And I referred to Irv Kupcinet's column."
Later that summer, Sly left the accusations (but not his selfindulgent habits) behind and made an extensive sweep through Western Europe, including a stop at the Olympia, Paris's oldest music hall (where he would stage a comeback, with Vet, thirtyseven summers later). The expatriated Ria Boldway was alerted to Sly's visit and got to experience him in a context very different from the hometown boy she'd hung with; Sly was now an ascending international celebrity.
Ria had moved to Paris in 1968 to study at the American College, learn French, and start a performing career. Attractive, talented, and quickly bilingual, she landed a role in the French-language production of Hair: The Tribal-Rock Love Musical, which had been luring younger audiences to Broadway with its pop-oriented score and episode of onstage nudity. For a long time, Ria kept herself deliberately ignorant of the Family Stone's path to fame and fortune: "I didn't buy any of his stuff." Even now, "I've still never read any books written about him, because I thought it would hurt way too much," she says. But back in Paris, "I remember one day going over to my friend Paul's flat, we were all going to study music for this anthropology course. And Paul said, `I got this new album, let's put it on. And I almost died! It was Dance to the Music.... I thought it was wonderful."
Ria thus came to Sly bearing kudos, but she noted that after she told him about being featured in Hair, there was no complimentary reciprocation. "You know, what really h
urt was he never said he was proud of me for being in the most successful play in Paris, which was comparable to being on the New York stage for three and a half years. He just didn't acknowledge it.... The whole [Family Stone] band was invited to come and see our show, we gave them tickets and treated them like royalty. I was given [a variety of roles] to perform that night, specially for my friends. And he didn't come."
The disappointed Ria had to admit to herself how far Sly had wandered along the metaphorical road she'd seen him moving down four years earlier, in the white convertible with Carol Doda. Still, the old flames spent much time together during Sly's week in the City of Light. "He was fairly unreachable, as far as depth of emotion and real contact went," she reports. "He was that way with everybody.... As far as I could tell, he didn't have private conversations with anybody anymore. He didn't hang out with the group, stayed by himself, pretty much a different person." The rest of the Family Stone, in turn, "was looking down in the mouth, the whole band." Nevertheless, despite a now-familiar hour's delay in starting, Sly and the ensemble were able to mount "a damn good show" at the Olympia, with Ria cheering from the audience. "The staging was beautiful, the costuming was excellent," she says. "Very much the whole Hair thing, the whole hippie movement thing. And the vocals were excellent."