by Jeff Kaliss
With time to gather only a few of her things, Ria flew with Sly back to New York, no doubt recalling their first plane trip together a dozen years earlier. After landing, "We stayed by ourselves for a couple of days, and it was absolutely wonderful," sighs Ria. "Then I stayed there for three months. But he was so heavily into his downward spiral then that there was just no hope." It was a period of high living, in more than one sense. "Very posh, little things everywhere, bodyguards everywhere." Since she'd come across the country with little luggage, and she and Sly were about the same, trim size, Ria took to wearing some of "his gorgeous leather clothes." Sly then financed her shopping trips to the ritzy pharmacy on the building's first floor, for cosmetics, and to Greenwich Village, for clothing. He topped off his gifts with a floor-length mink coat. "I used to go walking in Central Park," Ria says, "with a bodyguard and a mink coat. Can you believe it?"
Bubba Banks, still Sly's right-hand man, acted as guide for her shopping trips and as much more than just a bodyguard to Sly, says Ria. "Bubba was more like a valet ... or, he could have been a very dear friend tending to a very sick buddy.... He would take [Sly] in and out of the bathtub, when he couldn't do it himself, and try to get him ready and on his feet for meetings at Columbia, and interviews." The "sickness," of course, was self-induced, and this time, unlike in Paris, Ria was aware of Sly's habits. "He did so many drugs [including PCP] that I thought, a few times, he would die. And Bubba had to take care of him. Many times." Bubba himself "may have tippled," Ria supposes, "but nobody used like Sly, poor baby." Whatever Bubba's reputation among others of Sly's associates, Ria "didn't ever see him implement anything bad.... He never said anything untoward, he never cursed, the `f' word was never spoken."
The visiting Miles Davis left a cruder but laughable impression on Ria. "Miles was a real crazy asshole, if you ask me," she opines. "Extremely talented, but with a very bad personality. He'd be up to his elbows and eyebrows in cocaine, and sit by himself in the dark in one of the rooms most of the time." Sly's reigning bassist, Rustee Allen, served as an additional witness to the jazz giant's shenanigans. Rustee recalled to Joel Selvin when Miles "got on Sly's organ, and started to voice these nine-note, ethereal crazy chords. Sly was way back in the bedroom and he came out yelling, `Who in the fuck is doing that on my organ?' He came in and saw. `Miles, get your mother-fucking ass out,' he said. `Don't ever play that voodoo shit here ...: Miles left, and I said, `Sly, that was Miles Davis you were talking to. "I don't give a fuck,' he said."
Actor, director, and sometime musician Melvin Van Peebles drew a more favorable report from Ria, as a guest with good influence: "He was normal and happy and creative." Sly himself seemed happy in the studio that Columbia had set up in his flat. "It wasn't like the old days [in California], when I could just sit down on the piano bench and listen to him create for hours," Ria sighs. But, "You should have heard the stuff he recorded" at Central Park West. "It's never been released. Hours and hours of beauty. It was funky, good backbeat, it got down. It wasn't mostly fast, hot dance music. It was calmer than that-very intricate and beautiful," perhaps closer to some of his post-Small Talk tracks for Epic. Ria, meanwhile, "took over being the Mother Love kind of person around the house," cooking up creamed corn from scratch, as Sly's mother had taught her to do.
There wasn't much evidence of communication with the rest of the Family Stone, though there were long-distance entreaties from Cynthia, fielded by Ria. "She was just begging to be paid. `Please, please talk to him.' `I did, Cynthia, I did, yesterday.' Sly didn't have an `attitude' toward anyone; he was only focused on creating his music." Ria recalls only one instance when Sly's cocaine addiction may have indirectly resulted in some friction between her and him. "I said, `Who the hell do you think you are, Jesus Christ?' Because he was already having that kind of delusion." After a tense pause, "He looked at me and couldn't stop laughing. And Bubba kind of looked over his shoulder at me and gave me a sign like, he really does think he's Jesus Christ, so let's not say that anymore."
You Don't Have
to Come Down
1972-1974
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
-HENRY DAVID THOREAU
I was really tired of R & B sounding the same. I think Sly taught me that. I think that it's important for Black music to always, always grow.
-RICK JAMES
HE LONG WAIT FOR RIOT helped it debut at the top of Billboard's pop charts in 1971, and three of its tracks also charted as singles. The follow-up album, Fresh, is seen in retrospect as Sly's last dealings with anything like a major hit. Work on Fresh, in 1972 and '73, brought him back to the Bay Area and to his long-ago employer Tom Donahue. Among the other engineers credited on the album are Bob Gratts, Mike Fusaro, James Green, Family standby Don Puluse, and Tom Flye. The latter had gone west, from New York City to Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, to launch the Record Plant recording studios there. At the point they hooked up, "Sly had recorded [most of] Fresh, but he wasn't happy with it, so Donahue said, `You ought to go to the Plant and see Flye,"' explains Tom, who still lives within a short drive from the Plant. Before his move, he'd briefly worked with Sly in New York. "I mixed his part of the Woodstock album, [on which Sly and the group] played very well. And not everybody did."
For Fresh, "We rerecorded everything in place on the tape, and we just dubbed over whatever was there. And the way he kept it together, since it was piecemeal-one instrument at a time-was that he had a Rhythm King drum machine. He called it the Funk Box, because there were rhythms that had a groove to them. It was like a glorified click track [the term for a sort of analog electronic metronome]. You could adjust the tempo, and ... you could preset different beats and change them a little bit." An advancement over the preexisting Rhythm Ace, the Maestro Rhythm King generated a sterile, "dry" tone lacking the acoustic properties of a real drum kit but making for its own kind of supple groove.
"[Sly] was so innovative in the process of recording," Tom continues. "He was the first guy to record piecemeal, one track at a time, using this click track. 'Cause quite often, he'd play all the parts," and would need the coordinating guidance of the clicks. "If someone could play it better, fine. But usually he played it better than anybody-everybody except for his brother Freddie." Tom had determined early in his long career to accommodate the recording process as much as possible to his clients' needs. He'd been a professional drummer in the '60s for Don McLean (on the anthemic "American Pie") and for a moderately successful group called Lothar and the Hand People. He'd experienced what it was like to be disrespected by a recording studio (Capitol) and had vowed, "I never want to treat an artist that way."
Adjusting to Sly involved some challenging and fascinating improvisations. Breaking with studio tradition, Sly preferred playing instruments in the control room, usually reserved for engineers and producers, rather than in the studio area proper. "And he liked to sing in the control room, which was kind of a pain in the butt," says Tom. "You get the `bleed' from the speakers." Sly's earlier recording with the Family Stone had stayed closer to the standard format, "where everybody pretty much played all at the same time, or you'd have the rhythm section and the vocalist and then you'd add the strings or the horns." But once Sly started flying solo, he "did it track-by track, he pulled this together in his head, and it was amazing. He's hearing in his imagination the ultimate product, so he can understand what each individual thing is."
Ken Roberts, replacing the troubled David Kapralik as the band's manager in financially shaky times, had reportedly recommended that the leader divest himself of his players as an unnecessary expense. Although Sly still seems resentful about that suggestion, Tom finds other evidence that the separation from the band bore hidden virtues. Sly, he believes, "could play all the parts better" than any pick-up musician, "and he knew what he wanted, so he didn't have to try to expla
in it to anyone." Supplying most of the ingredients himself, and replacing a human drummer with a machine, were in Tom's opinion "just a different art form."
Says Tom about the recording of "Babies Makin' Babies," a seeming warning about unwanted pregnancies: "We were working ... and every time we'd get to this one section of the song, he'd say, `This is really funky! Those four bars are really funky!' And they were. So he says, `I sure wish I could have the whole track like those four bars: He'd done a rough vocal, a 'guide'vocal [a dummy track, to be erased later, from which to reference other takes]. So he says, `Is there any way we could make it all like that?' I said, `I don't know, but I can try.' We were working on two-inch tape, so I stayed `after school' that night and made a couple hundred copies of those four bars.... And then I took a razor blade and cut them all together. He came in the next day, and really loved it.
"As far as I know, that was one of the first times anybody had made what in reality was a multitrack loop, which nowadays is the basis of how many people make a record.... But in the digital domain, you can go in and move 'em around, do whatever you want. With a razor blade, it's a little harder. So it's another thing that [Sly] kind of started.... He had a sense of, `Let's go for it, let's try it.' Engineers are always trying to keep things technically together, so they're often on the careful side. But you also have to let creativity breathe. I'm after the emotional content when I'm recording or mixing ... and to have someone come in who exuded emotional content-," Tom chuckles, "it was great."
Gazing back more than three decades, it's tough for Tom to identify particular tracks on which he was influential, the more so because there was no sure way of keeping track of them. "Sly had gotten ripped off a number of times in his life, and he would not leave the tapes at the studio. He had like a Toyota station wagon, which one of his bodyguards drove, and every night the thing would pull up [to the Record Plant] and they would unload all the tapes. At the end of the [late-night] session, the next day or whatever, they'd pack it back up and take off. Sometimes the paperwork would get lost with the reels of tape, you wouldn't know where the songs were, and sometimes you'd have tracks which were started but didn't have a name for them yet."
Fresh continued to move the sound of Sly's music away from that of a live band and toward what might be dubbed a prototechno mode. The drum machines, multiple overdubs, and tape loops deployed by Tom were all early, makeshift versions of studio tools that would become ubiquitous in later decades, along with increasing computer sophistication. Still new in 1973, this approach put a hypnotic electronic gloss on Fresh, testifying yet again to Sly's innovative pioneering genius. Today, when anyone with a computer and a digital recorder can burn their own music disc, technology has become overextended, to the detriment of pop music generally.
Sly's diminished but ongoing recording and performing activity still needed flesh-and-blood players to go along with the machines. When Jerry Martini began demanding what he saw as fair compensation for past and present services, Sly hired saxophonist Pat Rizzo. Was that the coercion it appeared to be? "I guess you could call it that," Jerry responds. "But I [ended up getting] my money." Actually, Jerry and Pat served Sly together for a while (both men were credited on the sleeve of Fresh). They became friends, and they were both present for the return of Sly to the Apollo in Harlem, in March 1972. Brother Freddie was present in body too, but not in spirit. "Freddie passed out at the Apollo," Bubba Banks reported to Joel Selvin. "I think the thing was, who could get the highest and be the most out of it. Freddie was always trying to get Sly's attention. Everybody was trying to out-high each other."
Another sort of competition had Larry Graham attempting to out-macho Sly. Larry's questioning of Sly's authority had surfaced during the first few hours of the band's existence, and it's arguable that his handsome, cocky stage presence, resonant vocals, and peerless bass technique later drew some of the spotlight away from Sly. Behind the scenes, there were reports of affairs with Rose and with Freddie's wife, Sharon. Ultimately, Larry assembled his own posse of brutal, badass hangers-on. By the time of the making of Riot, Larry's bass parts were among the countless overdubs requested and sometimes discarded by Sly, who played the instrument himself on "You Caught Me Smilin'. "I didn't play anything with the rest of the band," Larry griped to Mojo, and his thump `n' pluck style is certainly less noticeable on Riot.
Late in 1972, Sly and Larry's two sets of "bodyguards" confronted each other at L.A.'s Cavalier Hotel. Bubba Banks and his pal Larry Chin, high on PCP and inspired by a recent screening of Stanley Kubrick's dystopian film A Clockwork Orange, assaulted Larry's henchmen Vernon "Moose" Constan and Robert Joyce with fists, feet, and walking sticks. Sly's men had also been assigned to apprehend Larry Graham, over what Sly perceived as the bassist's insubordination and alleged designs on Sly's life. Alerted to the threat, Pat Rizzo sought out Larry and his girlfriend, Patryce, in their hotel room at the Cavalier and escorted them safely away from the mayhem. Later in San Francisco, Ken Roberts could not persuade a shaken Larry, who continued to fear for his life, to rejoin the group.
"Sometimes in a family, it comes time to go," a discreet and reformed Larry told Bass Player years later. He went on to form Graham Central Station, and by the time of that group's biggest hit, One in a Million You (1980), Larry was better known as a singer than as a bassist. Larry then dissolved his band, but was always sought as an accompanist, and he found gigs with Carlos Santana, Chaka Khan, Aretha Franklin, and Stanley Jordan. He also made a popular instructional video for aspiring bass players, with his oldest and greatest rhythmic teammate Greg Errico serving as drummer.
Sly handpicked a replacement bassist, Rustee Allen, who'd been pointed out by Larry himself. The young Louisiana native, now a resident of Oakland, had experience playing with blues guitarist Johnny Talbot, the Edward Hawkins singers, and Vet Stone's Little Sister group. Rustee fit in quickly on Fresh, most memorably pouring out the haunting bass line on "If You Want Me to Stay." "Rather than being controlling, [Sly] encouraged the tune's spirit and vibe," Rustee told Bass Player. "He wanted me to be myself and put my nuances in the part." Influenced more by Motown stalwart James Jamerson's melodic technique than by Larry's percussive snap, the new recruit managed to blend the two. "Although I've always been primarily a finger-style player, I was able to adapt," he pointed out. "It's sort of a light slap in which you hold your thumb perpendicular to the strings and, using just the side of your thumb, you strike the string, sometimes using a little bit of your nail. You control the notes' duration with your left hand." The effect helped morph Sly's sound from psychedelic funk toward studio-rigged soul.
Seeking another real live drummer, Sly went with Pat Rizzo's recommendation of Andy Newmark, a solid pro with extensive credentials in a variety of acts. The Drumming World Web site has described how Andy was introduced to the leader of the Family Stone while Sly was prone and zoned-out in bed. "Are you funky?" Sly managed to ask. Andy replied in the affirmative, and sat down at a nearby kit to play for less than a minute. It was all Sly needed to command Freddie to replace Greg's temporary replacement, Jerry Gibson. Widely considered one of the Family Stone's most valuable additions, Andy later went on to play with David Bowie, George Benson, Luther Vandross, and with John Lennon on his final album, Double Fantasy.
Riot's one big hit had been "Family Affair." For Fresh, released in 1973, it was "If You Want Me to Stay" (revived thirty-four years later as a highlight of Sly's comeback performances). It's a slinky mid-tempo soul statement, based on the same Phrygian mode of chord changes as Bobby Hebb's 1966 hit "Sunny." Rustee recalled for Bass Player Sly's reaction to his freestyling fretwork on his Fender Jazz bass: "He just turned his back to me and grooved with my interpretation, giving a shout when he really liked what he heard," which involved nailing down the rhythm while pumping out flourishes of eighth- and sixteenth-note fills, effectively functioning as the track's lead instrument. Andy Newmark's drums propelled the song unobtrusively. "I didn't zero in on any part of his
kit per se," Rustee explained. "I just focused on the overall groove.
Among the most distinctive of the tracks was the disc's opener, "In Time," spiraling out in a treacherous time signature that oneupped "Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." Miles Davis was reportedly so struck by this piece that he made his band listen to it repeatedly, to absorb its snakelike syncopation. The remaining songs were arguably somewhat brighter and more artful than Riot's, with something of the sensuality of Al Green or Marvin Gaye and an obvious influence on the later output of Stevie Wonder. Equally upbeat was the cover art, featuring images by fine art/fashionista photographer Richard Avedon of a grinning Sly (again without ensemble), high-kicking in a tight leather outfit, bare-chested, and sporting a lush Afro. Compared to Riot, the album was also embedded with more "message" material. "Let Me Have It All" carried an almost gospel hopefulness, supported by wah-wah guitar, bubbly bass, and female chorus. "Thankful N' Thoughtful" showcased Cynthia's tight trumpeting in a similarly bright vein. Here was evidence that, musically at least, Sly was not on the steady road to hell to which many seemed ready to consign him.
