by Jeff Kaliss
Looking back on the after-show activities at Sly's hotel, Ria realizes how naive she was then about the chemical influences on his behavior. "Sly said, `Hey, Ria, can you get me some coke?' And I said, `Man, it's kind of late, but I'll try.' I called up the frigging concierge and was trying for about an hour to order Coca-Cola at around two in the morning.... He'd always told me I was lame, and I guess he was right." During that week, Ria noticed that Sly "would spend so much time in the bathroom with different people. Not girls, guys. They'd go in there, and I had no idea what it was about."
There was a parting of the ways when Sly moved on to tour dates in Holland. He returned to the States, to deal with the volatile mix of celebrity and infamy that he and the press had been stirring up. Ria herself crossed back over the Atlantic two years later, with a husband (who wanted her to give up show biz) and their two children. Another reunion with Sly awaited, further down his hard road.
Riot
1970-1972
No one understands another's grief, no one understands another's joy.... My music is the product of my talent and my misery. And that which I have written in my greatest distress is what the world seems to like the best.
-FRANZ SCHUBERT
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself.
-JEAN COCTEAU
HILE WAITING OUT THE two years for a new album after Stand!, Columbia gave fans a recap of what they'd already learned to love about Sly & the Family Stone. Greatest Hits, the band's first compilation, was released in 1970, and its tracks were almost consistently positive and uplifting.
On ABC-TV's The Dick Cavett Show in July 1970, though, the band presented a different image to its fans, less the Summer of Love fantasy of the past than the tough streetwise attitude that would become associated with their next album, There's a Riot Goin' On. Sly and Cynthia had expanded their hairstyles to sizeable Afros, Jerry and Greg's hair had lengthened, Rose was tough and beautiful, and Freddie was topped by a swami's turban. After a tight performance of their new single, "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," Sly ambled over to the guest area for a loose quasi-conversation with the host. Sly made for a curious visual and aural contrast with Dick and his other guest, the chipper )50s star Debbie Reynolds.
"Could I dress like this and play in your group?" the buttoneddown Cavett needled Sly. "Wouldn't it look funny?"
"With people that were judging the way you were dressing," Sly responded dully in a low-register mumble.
"There'd probably be a certain pressure on me ..." speculated Cavett.
"There's a pressure on all of us," said Sly truthfully. How much of Sly's demeanor in a number of TV appearances was due to preshow drugging (to which there were witnesses) and how much to his lifelong fondness for shuck and jive is speculative, as is his impact on TV viewers, who themselves varied in age and hipness and reaction to the image of a charismatic and seemingly uncontrollable black man.
"Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" had been released as a single in December 1969 and became one of the biggest hits of 1970, scoring a number 1 spot on both the pop and R & B lists. Riding on a seismic, octave-jumping bass line from Larry and punctuated with Freddie's choked treble chords, the music dug an irresistible groove, matched by the lyric's clever name-checks of some of the band's previous tunes: "Dance to the Music," "Sing a Simple Song," "You Can Make It If You Try," and "Everyday Peo ple." Just as the groove was a sign of the funk to come, the quirky parenthetical title anticipated Prince, who would make phonetic spelling one of his signature riffs, as would hip-hop stars of later decades. "Thank You" was a double-A release, with the radiant and very different "Everybody Is a Star"-on which all the Family vocalists, Sly, Larry, Cynthia, Freddie, and Rose-individually shared one of Sly's most positive lyrics and the band's most loving arrangements, evoking the good vibes that were in practice starting to slip away from their lives and music. (These two songs, along with "Hot Fun in the Summertime," were the only nonalbum tracks on Greatest Hits.)
You can hear in "Thank You" and "Everybody Is a Star" the sound that would influence a number of brassy rock ensembles throughout the'70s and later. There would be currents of the Family's spiritualized, horn-honking soul and funk in bands like Blood, Sweat & Tears; Chicago; in spurts in the Rolling Stones; and more distantly in Santana and Steely Dan.
The popular judgment on Riot is that it's evidence of Sly's fall from a state of sunlit grace into a miasma of dark introspection, fueled by chemical self-indulgence. In the wider cultural context, the album is pictured as an accompaniment to the Baby Boomers' disillusioned rejection of idealism, based on the preceding years' scourge of assassinations, war, political intrigue, and bad drugs.
Riot does in fact sound different from much of what preceded it, and in looking more closely at Sly's personal circumstances during the production of the album, likely influences on its sound can be discovered. Making too tight a tie between that sound and social and historical circumstances is tempting but fallacious, since much of what was happening to the world in 1971, as well as some of what was happening in Sly's life, had in fact already been happening in the years when Sly and the band were putting out rather different kinds of albums, and would continue for some while after. But 1971, the year of Riot, is a good point from which to take a look at the times, however little Sly himself may have been prone to such reflection.
Attention among Americans in the '70s was shifted toward more militant manifestations of black pride. The civil rights movement, focused on righting wrongs perpetrated by whites on blacks, had resulted in the federally enforced Civil Rights Act of 1964, with marches and protests before and after. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968, was a shock to all Americans, but it didn't do away with peaceful protest. The most visible of the militant groups, the Black Panther Party, had been founded back in 1966 in Oakland, while Sly was still gigging in North Beach on the other side of the San Francisco Bay. By the time of Riot, the Black Panthers' power and presence in the press had grown alongside Sly's, and it was no surprise that party members started making overtures to Sly, Jimi Hendrix, and other reigning black rockers. But Sly clearly wasn't interested. His action in assembling a racially and gender-integrated unit spoke louder than any of his rare public declarations on racism, and the Family Stone, unlike some rock and folk acts, never manifested itself as part of civil rights demonstrations or the movement overall. Instead, the band expressed its collective consciousness on the subject in musical form, most famously in "Everyday People," "Underdog," and most explicitly "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey."
Critic Greil Marcus, in his 1974 book Mystery Train, noted, "With this album [Riot], Sly is giving his audience-particularly his white audience-precisely what they don't want. What they want from Sly is an upper, not a portrait of what lies behind his big freaky black superstar grin. One gets the feeling, listening to this album, that Sly's disastrous concerts of the past year have not been so much a matter of insulting his audience as attacking it, with real bitterness and hate, because of what its demands on him have forced him to produce. It is an attack on himself as well, for having gone along with those demands."
The shooting of students at Kent State in 1970 shocked but failed to stop those who'd been protesting the Vietnam War on U.S. college campuses since the early'60s. By 1969, wider protests were moving tens of thousands of people of all ages along the streets of San Francisco and other cities. Among the growing number of bands collectively referred to as being part of the San Francisco sound were several with antiwar messages in their lyrics, most notably Country Joe and the Fish and the Jefferson Airplane. These and other acts, along with folk performers like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger, provided inspiration at larger gatherings for peace. Creedence Clearwater Revival (which started in El Cerrito, a few minutes south of Vallejo) got their wailing rocker of a protest song, "Fortunate Son," onto the charts in t
he autumn of 1969. Other successful antiwar tunes included John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance," in'69, Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun," and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's "Ohio," both in '70. From the sector of soul and R & B, there were Edwin Starr's "War" and the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today)," also in '70, and Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" the next year. Sly & the Family Stone sang even less about war than they did about racism, though their apparent promotion of life and self-realization allowed them to keep company with artists making clearer statements of resistance.
Allusions to drugs, marijuana in particular, can be discovered in the lyrics of some of the songs on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced, and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Drugs aren't specifically referenced in any of Sly & the Family Stone's lyrics, although they certainly figured in the band's creative process long before the making of Riot, and over-indulgence in harder drugs affected the production of that and later albums.
"We were a pot-smoking, wine-drinking band until cocaine was introduced," Jerry Martini pointed out to Joel Selvin. This change of habits was not to be taken lightly. Marijuana, relatively inexpensive and available, might be said to have furthered some of the ideals promoted in Sly's earlier lyrics, including the relaxation of differences, the pursuit of happiness, and the enjoyment of social and personal love. For Sly's and the Baby Boomers generation, powders and pills generally came along later and at a greater cost, literally and figuratively.
Cocaine and amphetamines could also function as a means toward the end of sustaining high energy and production. None of this, of course, could guarantee a great musical experience. The celebrity and money, which peaked for the Family Stone after Woodstock, meant that the band members could attract sources of cocaine and afford to maintain serial highs, as well as to obtain prescription drugs. Jerry told Joel that the band at one point had in tow a physician who "was really impressed with the music business [and] felt that Sly needed ... psychosedatives.... You wake up, take Placidyl, which [Sly] got from his doctor. Then, you snort enough cocaine until you can talk straight. It was like this up-anddown roller coaster." There were reports that at some point, Sly may have had cocaine prescribed for relief from an ulcer. Stephani Owens told Joel Selvin how, during her early days of service as a personal assistant to Sly, he'd shared some pharmaceutical cocaine with her. "As it turns out, he was getting his drugs from the dentist," she said. "Then I found out there was a doctor in New York that would give him and anybody in the group prescription drugs, yellow jackets [downers], etcetera."
Sly seemed to be finding it difficult to get off the roller coaster in time to make it to his bookings, nearby and on tour. "He used to cancel, which also used to piss me off," Jerry related for Joel. "He would have six months of fantastic bookings, then, at the last minute, he would cancel them. He was incapable of going on the road, as he had for the last twenty years. Incapable of functioning as a traveling musician, doing what he could do so well." "He was never on time," said Stephani in Mojo magazine. "It was always an effort to get the band to the gig and get them onstage on time.... It was mostly Freddie and Sly because even when the rest of the group would catch a commercial flight and do what they were supposed to do, with Freddie and Sly, I would be trying to find a private plane for them to go on." Sly gave his own explanation later to Vanity Fair about his perennial tardiness for gigs, suggesting that promoters and roadies encouraged this behavior so that they could profit from it: "I got tired of going to concerts where I'd have to pay a bond, pay money in case I didn't show up," he admitted. "I later found out that they had a deal going between the promoter and the guy that was taking me to the gig. So I would put up the $25,000 or the $50,000. The guy with me would help me be late, and I didn't realize that was what was going on until later. Then they'd split the money.... I wasn't so focused after a while." Whatever the setup, Sly was five hours late for a show in Washington, D.C., causing a fan melee outside the venue of Constitution Hall in early 1970. He ducked out of five concerts in succession a year later, his excuse, quoted in Rolling Stone, being simply, "Sometimes you don't feel your soul at seven-thirty."
There was a long wait also for Sly and the band's next recorded product, and CBS officials were getting a little nervous. "I'd be fibbing if I said I wasn't somewhat concerned," says Epic's Al DeMarino, "but [Sly's] back catalog was selling constantly, and there was promoter interest and press interest. I had great confidence that he could do it." David Kapralik's confidence was waning. "I had no influence on what Sly was doing," he told Mojo. "I was managing the unmanageable.... His two personas-the shy, innocent poet Sylvester Stewart and the streetwise character he'd invented, Sly Stone-were torn apart. He numbed himself with cocaine." Clive Davis, who headed Epic, was of two minds. "At some point, I started getting concerned about stories I heard about Sly's personal habits," he recalled for Vanity Fair. "But every time I met with him, he was on top of his game. I was somewhat innocent of the lifestyle going on around me, whether it was him or Janis Joplin."
For those fans financially able to partake of pills and powders, harder drugs might provide the illusion of sharing, at least for a while, the high life of performers. Whatever uppers or downers may have been shared by the fans at Madison Square Garden in September 1971, the effect was not lost on Don Heckman, reviewing for The New York Times. "The sheer, exuberant joy that I've seen flowing out of the audiences at Sly's past concerts seems to have been replaced by an almost desperate self-conditioning," he wrote, "a sheer determination that dancing up and down, singing `higher, higher, higher,' waving, whistling, and shouting will somehow revive the old magic. But it isn't working, because the Family Stone sounds as though it is just going through the motions.... Could it be that the milk and honey have been flowing too freely in the gardens of the gods?"
There's a Riot Goin' On took form not in any godly garden, but in the Record Plant, a new state-of-the-art recording studio in Northern California, and at what Jerry Martini described as "a stately mansion," at 783 Bel Air Road, near Beverly Hills. Formerly the home of '30s screen sweetheart Jeannette MacDonald, it bore evidence of its more recent occupants, John and Michelle Phillips, of the Mamas and Papas, a'60s folk-rock group. There was a home recording studio, installed by John Phillips, a small buffet of drugs, and a general mess. Sly had connected with the property, which he rented for a reputed $12,000 a month, through Terry Melcher, who was the son of Doris Day and a well-connected party animal favored by the young entertainers of the late '60s and early '70s, among them John and Michelle, the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, and actress Candice Bergen. Terry had established success as producer of his mother's television show and of records for Columbia, but he also embodied the spendthrift wealth and casual debauchery of young Hollywood. Dennis Wilson had introduced Terry to ex-convict and would-be mass murderer Charles Manson, in hopes of furthering the latter's songwriting aspirations.
Recording at 783 Bel Air Road commenced in the autumn of 1970. The resulting music lacked the live, spacious ambience of the whole band playing together in real time, so much a part of the appeal of earlier albums. Instead, the tracks that would be used on Riot favored a compressed, claustrophobic density, in part due to endless overdubs that actually threatened to wear out the magnetic oxide coating on the recording tape. Sly Stone annotator Alec Palao shares a report about this process, which is corroborated in part by Jerry Martini. "Sly would pick these girls up at L.A. clubs and say, `Baby, I want you to sing on my record. They'd be high on cocaine, he'd record them at two in the morning, warbling along, and then the next morning he'd wipe the tape" and dismiss the musical and romantic one-nighter. In any case, the fidelity on the album is unusual and somehow intimate; listen to the breathy wetness and directness of Sly's voice on "Family Affair."
Outside John Phillips' studio, Sly did much taping in a Winnebago camper parked near the mansion and fitted with state-ofthe-art recording gear. The original Family Stone members we
re in and out, logging tracks individually, and holding on to Sly for a variety of reasons, among them the supply of cocaine.
But Larry, Greg, and Freddie started spending more time in Northern California, and Sly was supplying more of his own bass and guitar parts, also supplementing his rhythm needs with a drum machine. Greg credits the album with extending Sly's talent and vision. "He was one of the first to take the drum machine and make it be an instrument," concedes the flesh-and-blood drummer. "The machine, as opposed to what it is now [i.e., high-tech computerized programs], was a lounge instrument that the guy at the bar at the Holiday Inn might have used. Sly took the tickytacky, which started on the `tick,' and he inverted it, turned it inside out, into something the ear wasn't used to. He took the texture and created a rhythm with it that made it very interesting." From the man-versus-machine perspective, "I don't think the trade-off was good," Greg insists, but he points out that Sly had become attracted to synthesized percussion well before its use on Riot.
While the band's bonds of togetherness frayed, Sly kept company with Bubba Banks (who at this point was married to Rose) and James "J. B." Brown (Bubba's buddy, not the Godfather of Soul), and he received visits from musicians Ike Turner, Bobby Womack, jazz legend and enfant terrible Miles Davis, and Sly's old friend Billy Preston, who'd gone on to play with everyone from Ray Charles to the Beatles. It can be assumed that any or all of these visitors shared recorded jams, inspired by snorts of coke. Billy provided the artful keyboards on "Family Affair," and Bobby and Miles maybe somewhere in the mix, but it's likely that nobody had a chance to get very comfortable.
