I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone
Page 13
Ever Catch
a Falling Star?
1974-2001
I've just got to get out. Maybe to Venus or somewhere. Someplace you won't be able to find me.
-JIMI HENDRIX
Funk is to do the best you can and then leave it alone. You can truly say, "Funk it!" 'cause you did the best you can. You don't have to be guilty.
-GEORGE CLINTON 1994 interview with Jeff Kaliss
OWEVER MUCH HIS PERsonal life and his performing and recording prospects would later dim, Sly looked pretty good under TV lights. Appearing on The Mike Douglas Show a month prior to the Madison Square Garden spectacle, he offered up a solo piano rendition of "If You Want Me to Stay," which exquisitely showed off the harmonic structure of the song, as well as its creator's accomplished keyboard technique. A month after the wedding, Sly returned as Mike's co-host. The microphone seemed to like Sly's radio-trained, hip baritone voice, the camera liked his large smile and fantastic wardrobe, and Sly seemed comfortable seated beside Mike, a change from the hot seat he'd shared with TV host Dick Cavett three and four years earlier. Douglas and Stone were an act that could appeal even to daytime suburban housewives. Among the show's guests, Sly played particularly well off Muhammad Ali and the Smothers brothers, who were comfortable in themselves and felt no need to compete for attention.
But off-camera, Sly became further distanced from what remained of his original bandmates. The Family Stone was booked, alongside Kool & the Gang, for the better part of a week in January 1975 at Radio City Music Hall in New York, but the booking drew fractional audiences to the 6000-seat venue. There was much grumbling among band members about inadequate transportation, accommodation, and other matters, and mumblings throughout the audience that Robert "Kool" Bell and his Jersey City-based up-and-comers had blown the West Coast hippies off the stage. In short, it was a bumpy lowering of the lifestyle and adulation to which Sly and his band had become accustomed at the beginning of the decade. John Rockwell of the New York Times pronounced the concert as "totally out of touch with recession realities," and then elaborated: "Worst of all was the quality of Sly's music. In the not-too-distant past, Sly was one of the most exciting and significant forces in American pop music. But now he has taken to the stalest of rehashes of his greatest hits, ignoring his most recent work, submerging the communal energies of his band under a silly ego trip and rushing perfunctorily through the music he does play. It would be easy to dismiss Sly out of hand. Except that the memories of what he used to be make one more sad than angry."
Cynthia lamented to Joel Selvin about this period: "Not having rehearsals began to take a toll on my playing." Soon after, she said, "I just stopped getting calls for gigs" from Sly. Bubba Banks, still married to Rose, noted to Joel that his wife and other members of the band had "come from three or four thousand [dollars] " for their former shows "to two hundred and fifty" at Radio City. "And I say, `Rose won't be getting that-we outta here. I took Rose." Jerry recalls that Ken Roberts had told him, "I really like you, Jerry, but I don't think Sly really needs you. I think he can just hire a band." Sly's brother, Freddie, reportedly took his frustration about Radio City out on Ken, physically. It was Ken, though, who put up the money for Jerry to get home to California after the show. Sly had left them all in the lurch.
Later in 1975, Sly made an appearance on TV during the American Music Awards, but little else was seen of him. In November, he released his first post-Family Epic album, High on You. Joel recounts how Sly, while recording the album with a "square john" CBS engineer named Roy Segal in San Francisco, had "set up a tent in the studio. So, when he needs to be `inspired' he goes into the tent," as if to say, "'I'm not gonna do blow around this cracker.' " Sly's widest exposure that year may have been in a Playboy feature, which predictably celebrated the waning artist's still-luxurious and licentious existence. In the Summer of 1976, Sly flew to the Sunshine Festival in Hawaii, and he appeared on two TV specials in the latter part of the year. In December, he released Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back on the Epic label, but it failed to get Sly back on the charts. His Back on the Right Track, for Warner Bros. in 1979, managed to chart, but no higher than number 152. During the Warner period, there had been one TV appearance, on The Midnight Special, and a San Francisco news spot, both in 1977. Reflecting a few years later, Sly said to journalist Michael Goldberg, "If you think about it, what could I do after `[I Want to Take You] Higher' or `If You Want Me to Stay'? I wanted to go fishing, man. Or drive my own car. For a long time, I didn't understand anywhere but hotel rooms, the inside of airplanes, and trying to figure out a way that I didn't come off wrong to human beings."
Over time, benefited by the recent re-releases in CD format, the albums Sly recorded after the breakup of the Family Stone have been more clearly valued. High on You, ascribed to Sly Stone and not to any backing band, has been praised as a prime chunk of mid'70s funk, whose title track made it to number 3 on the R & B charts. Heard Ya Missed Me, supported by a "new" Family that included Cynthia and Vet Stewart, and featuring ascending blond guitar angel Peter Frampton on the "Let's Be Together" track, maintained a perhaps deceptive upbeat mood. Back on the Right Track packed a funky punch with the hard-hitting "Who's to Say" and "Remember Who You Are," the latter jointly credited to Sly and Bubba Banks. In 1982, Sly created Ain't But the One Way, also for Warner, with lyrics engagingly reflective of his wit and of the sort of insightful wisdom he should better have applied to himself. Even his cover (rare for him) of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me," and "Ha Ha, Hee Hee," his bandmate Pat Rizzo's songwriting contribution (another rarity), are distinct and imaginative. Back on the Right Track had garnered a number 31 spot on the R & B charts in 1979, and its "Remember Who You Are" rated number 38 among R & B singles. But Ain't But the One Way didn't hit, and there was no successful follow-up in the '80s. Sly continued to flicker in the public eye in two different lights: as the source of occasional news flashes about his misdeeds, and as the inspiration, with his nowextinct Family Stone, for a thriving crop of music makers.
Earth, Wind & Fire, Maurice White's audacious and artful blend of mysticism and soul, had already mounted mammoth stage shows and hits like "Shining Star" and "Serpentine Fire." The Commodores, boasting the superb pop sensibility of vocalist and songwriter Lionel Richie, were evolving from the dance boogie of "Slippery When Wet" and "I Feel Sanctified" to slower love songs like "Three Times a Lady" and "Sail On." Kool & the Gang suggested the influence of the band they'd once bested at Radio City, with the infectious funk singles "Celebration" and "Get Down on It." All these acts confirmed the viability of Sly and his band's formula of concocting pop from soul and R & B ingredients, and of manifesting (as long as possible) a fixed group identity. It was a vital change from the older Motown or Stax-Volt studio concoctions, with their contracted, offstage songwriters.
GEORGE CLINTON HELPED TO KEEP Sly both stoned and musically active during some parts of the'80s. George was founder and mastermind of Parliament-Funkadelic, a loose but productive project operating under George's highly-in all senses of the word-conceptual direction. P-Funk had served up a righteous mix of psychedelia and R & B, not unlike some of what was served up by the Family Stone. By the mid-'70s, they'd taken theatrical costumed rock well beyond the Family, in live appearances that were more spectacles than concerts and on hardcore funk albums like Maggot Brain and Mothership Connection. Guitarist Eddie Hazell sounded like an even more acidified Jimi Hendrix, and rubbery bassist Bootsy Collins seemed heir apparent to Larry Graham. "He's my idol, forget all that `peer' stuff," George testified to the Washington Post in 2006 about Sly. "I heard Stand! and it was like: man, forget it! That band was perfect. And Sly was like all the Beatles and all of Motown in one."
While soliciting his idol's presence on his new disc The Electric Spanking of War Babies in August 1981, George was arrested with Sly in Los Angeles, for freebasing cocaine in a car. It was neither Sly's first nor last brush with the law. He'd been arrested and placed on probation for coke pos
session in 1973, and in 1979 had been sued by the IRS for nonpayment of back taxes and put in rehab in lieu of criminal charges after another coke arrest.
In February 1982, Ken Roberts resigned as Sly's manager. Throughout the coming months, Sly tried showcasing his greatest hits with a newly assembled, Georgia-based incarnation of the Family Stone, but his efforts were drawing increasingly jaundiced scrutiny. In San Francisco, there were reports of his forgetting lyrics and switching abruptly from song to song, confusing the band. In Toronto, after taking a fifteen-minute break, Sly returned to the stage to perform "I Want to Take You Higher" without realizing that the other players had already left the stage. The reviewer for the Toronto Globe and Mail summed up the audience reaction: "Some of the people leaving the bar following Sly Stone's abortive concert at the Nickelodeon last night (his second this week) were calling the show a rip-off. It wasn't that so much as it was embarrassing and sad." In July 1982, after being busted for cocaine at the Westwood Plaza Hotel in L.A., Sly identified himself as his brother, Freddie.
Through the rest of the decade, Sly accumulated a rap sheet that spanned the continent and a variety of charges. He was arrested in 1983 for possession of a sawed-off shotgun in Illinois. In Florida, he was variously charged with grand theft, welching on a hotel bill, and drug possession. In California, in 1986, he was apprehended for nonpayment of child support (to Kathy) and for possession of coke. In the press, Sly was gaining a different kind of celebrity, as a scoff-law. He was photographed asleep at a court hearing ("Are we keeping you awake?" the judge asked sardonically), he skipped bail after his L.A. coke arrest, and he in general managed to remain elusive, so that certain of his indiscretions took years to catch up with him.
In the time-honored tradition of celebrities, Sly passed in and out of rehabilitation centers. "We didn't accept `Sly' in our therapy sessions," Dr. Richard Sapp reported to Spin magazine about the singer's stay in the Lee Mental Health Clinic in Ft. Myers, Florida. "Sylvester can control Sly.... Once he realized that we were serious, he became Sylvester. As long as he continues to do that, he shouldn't be having problems with drugs." Sly wasn't quite ready to control himself, though, and Serena-Marie Sanfilipo, a woman he'd met by chance in Florida, stepped in to help. She claims to have served as his court-assigned drug therapist, but her service seems to have been at times both intimate and unusual. "After I saw that people just kept giving him crack, I just locked him up in my house," she recounts in an interview. "I had to be with him for all the tours, and all the rehabs.... He kept having to go back into rehab."
Despite the drugs and the consequences, Sly made himself available to occasional musical collaborators during the '80s. They included George Clinton, Bobby Womack, and Jesse Johnson, the last a talented representative of the next generation of funk and a sometime colleague of emerging funk royalty Prince. Bobby took Sly under his wing during a spell in rehab in 1984. "We used to be as tight as bark on a tree," Bobby later lamented to the Washington Post. "As the drugs set in, the warm, creative side went away. And then it got worse and worse." Sly also worked on occasional tracks and demos, in the preceding and following decades, with REO Speedwagon, Elvin Bishop, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Temptations, Bonnie Pointer, Gene Page, the Brothers Johnson, Maceo Parker, and Earth, Wind & Fire.
In November 1987, Sly was scheduled for two nights at the Las Palmas Theatre in L.A., where a Los Angeles Times reviewer found the sound system inadequate and Sly's voice "thin and strained when he tries to sing high melodies," perhaps a side effect of coke or uppers. Returning to the venue on the following night, Sly was arrested for allegedly owing $2,500 in back child support. The previous night's performance would count at his last real gig for almost twenty years.
Sly paid off his child-support debt the following month, but at some point prior to his scheduled preliminary hearing on drug charges in February 1988, he seems to have gone missing. It wasn't until November 14, 1989, that the watchful staff of the Los Angeles Times was able to report that Sly was being "held without bond in Connecticut pending extradition to California, where he is wanted on a 1987 drug-possession charge." The FBI informed the paper that "Stone has been living in Connecticut and New Jersey and has used the alias Sylvester Allen." Sly was returned to his home state and ordered to spend nine to fourteen months in a drug rehab center. Serena-Marie Sanfilipo, who'd tried to intervene in Florida years earlier, relocated to California to tend to Sly again. She took to parking outside his designated treatment center, to keep an eye on her charge. "He would mop the floor if someone else wouldn't mop it, so that people would like him," observes Serena. "He was an absolute perfect person in rehab. He did everything to make people happy [and] make people laugh. He played his keyboard. He was very joyful for other people, but he was just very lonely and sad.... He said, `As much as I hate being here, it's better than being in jail."' When she managed to get inside the center, "I would light a candle for him and we'd say a couple prayers and sing a couple songs, and he'd write music." After being discharged, "He was like a fawn," she remembers, "very fragile, having a tough time, but very happy." She says Sly then "cut ties with a lot of people that were negative," and that he invited her to move in with him. But she was put off by the threat of the return of bad habits. If Sly were ever turn over a new leaf, he would be the only one who could make himself stay away from the blow.
Sly grew ever more inaccessible to his biological family, including parents, siblings, and his three children. (Another daughter, Novena, had been born in the late '70s to Olenka Wallach of Sausalito, California.) "My brother's angry," Freddie told Spin in 1985, after withdrawing from his own cocaine habit. "He's been conned so many times, he's become a real con man himself." "I've cried into my pillow so many nights," added their mother, Alpha Stewart, "but I pray there's a God who can save Sly." Sly, in the same article, was dismissive of his connection with his own three offspring. "They do what they want," he stated. "I see them in and out."
Child-support bills, legal costs, and an estimated $3.4 million in back taxes, along with the disappearance of opportunities to record and perform, forced Sly to look for money. In September 1984, he sold his publishing interests to Mijac Music, owned by Michael Jackson, who was then on top of the music world (and a Sly admirer). Sly did manage to record several demos in the latter part of the '80s, some with fellow felon Billy Preston, but they weren't developed into moneymakers. For the 1987 movie Soul Man, Sly sang "Eek-A-Bo-Static" and a duet with Martha Davis of the Motels, "Love and Affection"; but neither charted.
Nostalgia-bound fans of the sounds of the Family Stone in the '60s and '70s might be tempted to assume that Sly's music would have faded in the '80s, even if its maker hadn't, due to changes in taste. Although the under-appreciation accorded Sly's post-bandbreakup recordings of the '70s may have been due in part their being out of step with the dominant disco sound, it's likely that Sly, who was always ahead of his time, could have stayed on the charts if his mental and financial resources hadn't been detoured by drugs. One of his chief disciples, Prince, in fact did very well in the '80s. Like Sly, Prince was a black multi-instrumentalist, producer, songwriter, and arranger who had taken full control of his artistic output. Again like Sly, he attracted a significant white audience to his work, incorporating strains of hard rock and dance pop into his very personal brand of contemporary R & B. Both Prince and Sly had transcended the commercial and stylistic constraints of race, but the groundbreaking Sly had ended up struggling to hold on from day to day.
Early in the 1990s, Sly remained a shadow, even to his parents. His communication with them was spotty, but his mother, Alpha, insisted to Mojo, "I know he's a good man, God watches over him." "You can usually tell what he's been doing from the way he is on the phone," added papa K. C. "Mama knows the moment he says `Hello' if she's talking to Sly or Sylvester. If he tries to tell a tenminute story in ten seconds, then it's been a Sly Stone kinda day."
Jerry Goldstein took over management of Sly Stone in
the early '90s. In a manner evocative of psychologist Eugene Landy's tough appropriation of care of the Beach Boys' fragile Brian Wilson in the 1970s and '80s, Jerry became Sly's guardian and personal supervisor, keeping inquisitive promoters, reporters, biographers, and ex-Family Stone members at bay. Jerry was a music veteran himself, having co-written the 1963 smash "My Boyfriend's Back" for the Angels, and later forming and performing in the Strangeloves, who recorded the first of many versions of the bubblegum standard "I Want Candy." Later he slipped behind the scenes to become a producer, and also served as manager for the great interracial funk act War. For better (Sly seemed to free himself from drugs for a while) or worse (Sly had no authority over his own catalog of compositions), Sly put his career, such as it was, in Jerry's charge.
GEORGE C L I N TO N INDUCTED SLY & the Family Stone into the Rock 'n' roll Hall of Fame in January 1993. Other legends ushered in that year included Sly contemporaries the Doors, Cream, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. While the original Family received their accolades, a quiet and withdrawn Sly, dressed as if he'd been taking fashion tips from Prince, came to the podium and made a very short thank-you speech, closing with, "See you soon." The players from his old band had not expected to see him there, and reaped little from his appearance. "When we were starting out," Jerry reminded People magazine, "Sly Stone had the power to control 80,000 people with his eyes. But in'93, he couldn't even look at me."
In 1995, Sly was back in rehab, spending forty-five days in the Brotman Medical Center in L.A. "He went in by choice, to concentrate on getting healthier," his son Sly Jr., then training to be a sound engineer, explained to People. "He's had problems because he hasn't been able to grow up. He's meant no harm to anyone." Sly remained rooted to the L.A. area through the '90s, though he was often in hot water with landlords and hotel managers. "In a sense, my father has wasted a lot of years," allowed Sly Jr. "But he's purposely stayed away from the spotlight and the pressure. He hasn't wanted attention."