As far as Sly's concerned, the dogs are part of the group's happiness, so he lets a lot of himself be dominated by the animals. In the dressing room at ABC, the only reading matter around is The Treasury of Dogs.
Over and over again, Sly runs the group through a track, the backing track they'll use the next day on Music Scene. On breaks, the Family Stone jumps into conversations about either cars or dogs. Tonight, it's dogs. At last count, there were about twenty-eight dogs associated with Sly & the Family Stone, Sly accounting for five of them, Freddy and Larry with three each, Jerry, Rose, and Cynthia a pair each, and Greg with one.
The Family: dogs, clothes, cars, and bikes. Sly surrounds himself with life, with the things and the people he loves. Kapralik, his manager and partner in Stone Flower Productions, is one of them.
He looks like a character out of Batman; a bug-eyed gremlin with a track record twelve years long and wide enough to take in Andy Williams, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Peaches & Herb, and Simon & Garfunkel. He was responsible for signing them up for Columbia and Epic Records. Kapralik is also credited with discovering Barbra Streisand as well as Sly Stone.
Kapralik is behind and on top of almost anything that has to do with Sly & the Family Stone. As manager, he is on tour with the group and, more enthusiastic than the most devoted mother or flack, he is constantly, constantly talking about what makes Sly the "superterrific" cat he is.
SLY I S SITTING AT A TABLE in his temporary apartment in Hollywood-he'll soon be settling into a new home in Coldwater Canyon-and it's coming onto 2 A.M., and he finally wants to talk, really talk. He's restless, nodding almost, perfunctorily while Kapralik tells him how earlier that day he'd said no to an appearance on the Playboy After Dark TV show, "for the same reason we'll never do a `Greatest Hits' album," and for the same reason we'll never hear Sly singing for Coca-Cola. And Sly puts out a typical Sly statement, a kind of philosophy that reveals better than almost anything else what Sly is all about.
"We just want to do the right things. Not for money.. .if it's the money that will satisfy you more than not doing something you don't want to do, then do it. But we will never sell out. For any reason. To death. Anything like that. Anything like that, man.
'Anything like that."
Sly can look animalistic sometimes. When he put out his first LP, he looked no farther-out than, say, Arthur Lee. Pretty flashy, but not uncommonly so. Rather Northern Californian, if you'd known he was from Vallejo. Hair still close to the roots. Since his hits, and concerts and TV shows, he's looked by turn ferocious, babyish, pompous, joyous. Sometimes handsome, devilishly; onstage on the rampage, he can look moonfaced-crinkly eyes, outsized shades, muttonchops, nose and mouth all blended into a voodoo mask topped with overflowing hair, attacking you, with song, through white walls of teeth.
This morning he's just mellow, mellowed by the work on the TV show that ended just an hour and a half before; mellowed by a stop at his office for a celebratory peace pipe; mellowed by his manager, his Jewish, showbiz veteran counterpart; by his beautiful woman Debbie. Kapralik is his mirror, working like a magic prism to bring out all sides of Sly's reflections. Debbie rounds out, punctuates, his points. Sly is sometimes so simple, so absolutely crystal-clear, so final, that Debbie is needed to smooth out the abruptness.
See, all Sly wants, all that makes him happy, is what's right. He cannot define what's right. He's said it through songs: Dancing is right. Togetherness is right. Getting higher is right. Family is right. Music is right.
Now he's telling you school is wrong, or at least it was wrong for him. "Black" or "soul" or "R&B" radio is wrong. But it's all very personal, and definitions can only come out of anecdotes and recollections.
"Like, high school was terrible. It was boring for me 'cause either I was too smart, or too dumb to realize what I could learn. I was in race riots when I was in high school in Vallejo, five hundred people in the student body carrying on, and that was more exciting than anything else.
"There wasn't enough challenge. In English 1A, it was such a drag that by the end of the semester I forgot what I learned."
But the one high point about his schooling remains a high point in his life. This happened at Solano College, a junior college in his hometown.
"My theory instructor-I'd learn more from him than from listening to anybody. David Froelich was his name. I don't know a whole lot about him, but know he's right.... He was the kind of person who never washed his hair, but it was always clean. White and beautiful and long and healthy. He was cool. He had a crazy walk. Now that I look back, he was-whew! I gotta find him and pull some more of that out of him."
Froelich would like to see Sly, too. The professor, a jazz pianist who pulled pop, jazz, and classical music together for his lectures, is now head of the music department at Solano and it's been oh, four years since Sylvester Stewart sat in his 1A & 1B classes, learning notes, how to build chords, for music.
"He couldn't understand how school could be relevant," he remembered. "But he had a good attitude on life. He never thought he wouldn't make it."
Sly was at Solano (then called Vallejo Junior College) for three semesters, on and off. While there, he sang in the college choir; away from school, he'd spent three months at the Chris Borden School of Modern Broadcasting in downtown San Francisco. He got a job at KSOL ("Super Soul," with an echo, of course), and on weekends he was getting his Family together.
With his royalties from Autumn Records, he'd purchased a house in Daly City for his parents. His father, who now serves as road manager for the Family Stone, would go to Sly's school to attend any musical program Sly was on.
"There are two aspects to Sly that you have to consider," says Donahue, one of the true sages of the San Francisco scene. "First there's that tight relationship with the Family. And second-well, there are a lot of musicians who are dummies. But Slyhe's got it all covered. About the only self-destructive thing about him that I could recall was a Don Quixote thing-you know, he was riding off in all directions."
Turn on the car radio, and you hear the big voice: "Hi; Sly." And the little voice: "Hi-i, Sly...I wanna dedicate to my sister Velma, to all the queens of soul in room oneoh-four, and to you and yours." 'All right, sister," punch, "Hi-i, Sly.... 'And all the time there's a tape loop, boop-boop, Aretha chugging "Chain of Fools," and Sly does three solid minutes of dedications, as musical, as tight, as produced as anything he'd air.
In his first radio job, at KSOL, he brought in a piano and sang "Happy Birthday" to listeners. "Just radio," he'd say. "I played Dylan, Lord Buckley, the Beatles. Every night I tried something else. I really didn't know what was going on. Everything was just on instinct. You know, if there was an Ex-Lax commercial, I'd play the sound of a toilet flushing. It would've been boring otherwise."
People used to dig listening to Sly from 6 to 9 P.M. on KDIA, then switch to KYA for Tommy Saunders, then being called "the Terry Southern of radio" by Ralph J. Gleason in the Chronicle. Then they'd hang on for Russ "The Moose" Syracuse and his all-night flight. AM radio never sounded better.
"But Sly was always itching to move," said Bill Doubleday, KDIA general manager and program director in Sly's days there. "He didn't want a full-time job; he wanted time for his band. Finally, around Christmas of '67 he went to Las Vegas, and that did it."
Sly was itchy-but not because of hyperactivity with his band.
"In radio," he says, "I found out about a lot of things I don't like. Like, I think there shouldn't be 'black radio.' Just radio. Everybody be a part of everything. I didn't look at my job in terms of black."
Still, Sly was getting such high ratings that station managers simply couldn't hassle him about the revolutionary things he was doing. He started at KSOL, then took off to tour with Sly & the Family Stone. Then a return to radio, to the bigger black station, KDIA in Oakland, when the band didn't jell immediately. It was rough. Sly writes about it, relives it, on his first album. There was no positiveness, no affirmation then. Even with the Epic Re
cords contract, and with star-maker David Kapralik by his side, Sly was unsure.
When Sly is asked to pinpoint a watershed in his life, for a particular time when his creative forces felt free enough to really be unleashed, he says: "When I started to become successful."
"Dance to the Music," the title song from his second album, earned Sly Stone a platform. His third album was Life. Now he was experimenting, talking. "You Don't Have to Die Before You Live." A little Sly humor with "Jane Is a Groupee." A vision of the future, in "Love City." Songs like "Fun" and "Into My Own Thing."
"There was more affirmation," Kapralik says, "a growing consolidation of his image as a winner."
And, finally, Stand, and "Hot Fun in the Summertime," an instant number-one single, and, currently, the four-minute "Thank You." The official title, in Stone/ghetto vernacular, is "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." Saying thanks for letting him be creatively free, for accepting him on his own terms.
Now he's finishing up an album, the most optimistic of all, with Sly Stone having gauged his power around the country. He'll call it The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly & the Family Stone. It's a line out of one of Epic's publicity releases last year.
You must remember that Sly Stone, writing songs about blacks and whites, isn't just using rhetoric he learned in the schools. The only thing he learned in school-outside of music theory from David Froelich-was that you learn your stuff in the streets. Sly and his family went to church together, sang in the choir together, lived in Vallejo, which Sly calls "like a Watts, only with more whites," for twenty years together. But Sly was also a street cat, a fighting man wrestling his way through his teens.
"There are a lot of black people who understand reality," he says, "but the ones who do all the talking are usually the people like Leslie Uggams, who seems like kind of a white/black person-or H. Rap Brown, a black/black person-and all the people between-you never hear about them. I don't know what to call them. Either everything's fair or nothing's fair.... You can't scream that because you are a color, you are anything. You are black-you are black, that's all. You are among people who've been mistreated a lot. But it doesn't necessarily mean a white person next door is responsible. His grandfather may have killed yours, but he himself may love you. It's simple. The majority-maybe they're not advertising themselves; maybe they're not saying anything interesting."
Sly & the Family Stone are what the press insist on calling "an interracial band." The idea that Jerry Martini and cousin Greg Errico are white somehow delights them.
"Jerry's white because he's not any other color; Larry's black because he's not white. You know what I mean?"
He'd known Martini since high school days, and Jerry, who plays accordion, piano, and clarinet in addition to the saxophone, was having about as much luck with Bay Area bands as Sly when he dropped by KDIA to visit. He hooked up with the Family Stone soon after. Errico had picked up a job with a band called the VIPs in 1966 when the VIP drummer was sick. Freddy Stone had just joined that band, and six months later, when Freddy got the call from brother Sly, Errico simply fit in.
Sly discovered Larry, who sings bass as well as he plays it, in a club. Graham had his own family scene going. He played organ and bass with his mother, a pianist whose band played jazz and standards in clubs around the Bay Area.
Cynthia Robinson, the stylish horn player, also knew Sly from high school days. "I was in an inspirational all-faith church choir in Sacramento," said Cynthia, who played brass instruments in the school marching band. "We just ran into each other again when I came to Oakland and he was a DJ."
So Sly's Family Stone is firmly rooted in California, in the church, and in church music.
"See," Sly is saying, "the concept was to be able to conceive all kinds of music. Whatever was contemporary, and not necessarily in terms of being commercialwhatever meant whatever now. Like today, things like censorship, and the black people/white people thing. That's on my mind. So we just like to perform the things that are on our mind."
SLY I S I N HIS DRESSING ROOM at ABC-TV, carefully adjusting an ornate silver bracelet on his wrist, checking, hitching up, checking his velvet pants, his vest, his boots, his makeup. His talk is abrupt, almost half-hearted, and he squeezes his answer into succinct bites.
"I started playing music, instruments, when I was very young. Everybody else had swimming pools; we had drumsticks."
"I learned a little in a lot of places."
After the TV session, as the clock winds its way past 3 o'clock, beyond conscious consideration, Sly loosens up. And it is, he will say around 5, the first time he's really talked.
Sly Stone, for one thing, is worried about what comes next. "I mean, what can we do-what that wouldn't hurt Stone Flower?" he asks, his mouth open, asking for an answer. "The record company wants another LP by February. Well, we could do some good songs, but that would be just another LP. Now you expect a group to come out with another LP and another." [Sly's head moves in a rhythmic repetitive circular motion] "There's got to be more to it. But what else can you do? The only thing that sounds interesting is something that ties in with a play that finishes what an LP starts to say, and the LP will be important on account of the play.
"Dance tracks are just nice, cool but nothing. Something should be done."
The soliloquy continues:
"Maybe it's impossible. What can you put on vinyl or acetate or plastic. Not just something like a funny-shaped LP cover. Gotta be something it says or does. Maybe melt the LP and turn it into something. Like hash you can smoke."
A scientist reaching for a new formula. And very frustrated, in a way, because he's not sure he's got all the ingredients.
"I worry about my not reading. About whether I'm valid."
Sly doesn't trust the press; he doesn't seek publicity of any sort. But if he's going to write plays and go far beyond music, he's got to absorb some of the concepts, the history of theater. So he's forcing himself through this book, The Art of Writing. But man, he doesn't know...
Sly is still at his table, and now it's 5 o'clock in the morning. Surrounded by coffee cups and a healthy amount of unmentionables, he has worked out a little platform for himself this morning. The voice is still booming-"I will be a part of it, in the near future, something in the written media that will have contact with people. But before that, I've got to appreciate the potency of the written media."
At this point, it's music, exclusively.
"In music, there's notes-a C chord makes you go `ahh'...a minor chord makes you sad. A C-major implies happiness. Something changes every minute.
"I mean, I've never heard of anybody getting their minds blown by written media. You don't really know where the idea comes from.
"But music, I can pinpoint it, who did it. Right or wrong. But in literature, unless I know the person, you read it once or twice and that's it. But you can listen to an album over and over until it wears out. It really seems like music and that's it."
Kapralik fairly propels himself out of his sofa with a scream, tearing Sly's logic apart, quoting poets, philosophers, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Socrates, Plato. And Sly answers:
"I read dog books, a book on Africa. I've tried to read but the only thing I want to read is on stuff I care about.. .like writing plays. I don't care about Rimbaud.
"I used to be ashamed to mention that I didn't read anything. In school I didn't read. I really don't understand what's in a book."
But what about the impact of the written word? The effect of a statement, say, about Sly himself, calling him an Uncle Tom or a black fascist?
"But it's so easy to say those words. I don't care. If anybody's hip at all, they know all you need is a flash to say those things. And so far in my life, anybody that's together hasn't said that about me.
"I believe a lot of people are misled by books. People I respect always say, `Some asshole said this or that. That cat doesn't know what he's writing about.' The press is: If you're nice to them, they're nice to you...it's s
tupid."
Kapralik leans forward and, as always, wraps it up.
"I don't think Sly Stone has ever or will ever live anything vicariously," he says. "He is a prime force, a prime mover himself and will never sit back reflectively and experience through print, theater, or anything else. He is a penultimate pragmatist. He lives by his sheer own personal experience."
Debbie punctuates it: "You're a street person," winking at Sly. He is nodding, happy again.
-March 19, 1970
Rolling Stone
Trying to keep up-and stay up-with Sly Stone was exhausting, and I had no problem with handing the baton to other writers as Stone's star continued to rise-and then began its fall. In fact, much of Rolling Stone's subsequent coverage of this gifted musician had to do with his erratic behavior; his inability to show up for concerts on time ...or at all. Within a few years, his antics, including a lavish wedding at Madison Square Garden made him something of an industry joke-especially when the marriage ended after only a few months. Soon enough, the Family Stone broke up, his record label dropped him, he got new deals, then frittered them away. One of his problems was drugs, and one year in the mid-eighties, when Sly Stone had pretty much dropped off the rock radar screen, I heard about him again. Because of yet another drug bust, he was placed under the "courtesy supervision" of the Adult Probation Department in San Francisco. His probation officer? My wife, Dianne. However, she told me in an exclusive interview, she never met him. He spent most of his time in Los Angeles, trying to get a recording and himself together. Yet for all that he had done in and for popular music, Sly & the Family Stone were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. For the induction ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, Sly showed up.
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 4