by Jeff Kaliss
I WANT
TO TAKE YOU
HIGHER
WANT
TO TAKE YOU
HIGHER
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
SLY & THE FAMILY STONE
JEFF KALISS
Contents
Foreword vii
Preface ix
Introduction xiii
Note on Style xix
Get Your Livin' Down (1943-1961) 1
You Have You to Complete (1961-1966) 17
Dance to the Music (1966-1968) 35
Everybody: Stand! (1968-1970) 63
Riot (1970-1972) 83
You Don't Have to Come Down (1972-1974) 107
Ever Catch a Falling Star? (1974-2001) 127
I Love You for Who You Are (2002-) 145
Afterword 775
Selected Discography 783
Sources 795
Acknowledgments 207
Index 205
Foreword
OY, THE YEARS GO BY FAST now. I've been looking at it like, between this Friday and the next Friday, it seems like it's getting shorter and shorter. I'm using my time right, but it's always that pursuit of happiness. There's more happiness, but the one you're looking for, I think, stays the same distance away.
This world is different, but it's the same difference with another name. If I didn't play music from now on, I wouldn't be a musician-and I'm gonna hang in there whatever happens. I'm still doing music, and still representative of the truth. I like playing with everybody, but I can only harmonize with a few. If everybody from the old band could afford to get together and stay together for about a month and then go to play gigs, that would be cool. We do love to play with each other.
I don't read much of what anybody writes about me, but I know that it's mostly secondhand stuff that looks like it's supposed to be firsthand. I don't know nobody, and nobody knows me, and they don't know what they're talking about. But I see why they say some things that they consider negative, especially when it has to do with what will sell their damned things.
I like the way Jeff tells my story. It seems level, and it seems on the level. He keeps how I look at things separate from anybody else's looking at things. I'm only craving fewer pieces of paper, fewer words in my letters and fewer letters in my words, in order to say what I gotta say. The rest of it, like this book, happens natural, and everything's good after that. My opinion about things is still the same, and I'm pretty aggressive about making sure people hear it. They accept it easy, or they gotta accept it hard.
Thank you, Jeff.
-SYLVESTER STEWART/SLY STONE From inside his '58 Packard Napa County, California February 2008
Preface
AVID KAPRALIK CAME TO SEE my group at the Sugar Shack in Boston and he was blown away. He was ready to sign us as soon as possible.
I was overwhelmed. This was the dude-at the time he was a well-known Columbia Records executive.
Three weeks later, I walked into his office in New York and he was frantically rushing around. He laid some pictures out on the floor, on the table, all over the place, while giving me advice on our show-he talked about me being the center of attention, about being brighter and wearing brighter clothing, etc. He was comparing me to the guy in the pictures.
I had heard this comparison before-it was Sly and the Family Stone.
He said, "I better be right, because I am betting my life on this. I am my leaving my job here at Epic to manage him." At the same time, he was pulling out records and putting them on the turntable for me to hear, and he said, "Remember, it's different."
I said, "You're damn right it's different!" They were a mixed, beautiful group. Black, white, and big Afros. They looked like Funkadelic on Motown! We were very similar, but dark. They looked like a polished version of us.
When the first record played, I didn't know what to think. Were they a white group? They had a strange pop sound. Their pop songs, like "Stand" and "Everyday People," were as pop as you could possibly get, but the black songs was as black and funky as Ray Charles and James Brown. They had the biggest Afros in the world. I thought it was a Bay Area thing, like Huey Newton.
"Sing a Simple Motherfucking Song" was the bomb! This was it. This song hit me just like "What'd I Say" by Ray Charles. It was the funkiest thing I had ever heard in my life, from Motown to James Brown to the Beatles. I knew then David knew what the fuck he was talking about. They were the complete package: they could play, sing, write, and produce, and all superior to anybody I'd ever seen or heard before. David had to pull me away-I was so into Sly's records that I forgot I had gone up there to sign a deal for myself.
David told me I would see for myself that night-he was taking me with him to see Sly.
The show was going to be at the Electric Circus, a small club in the East Village in New York. As showtime approached, I realized David had his hands full dealing with tickets, backstage passes, people, so I told him I would be okay, I would just get a seat.
I walked down to the West Side to a store called Paul Sergeant and got me some funky haberdashery for the night. I knew I had to represent. So many people had compared us.
I showed up at the Electric Circus by myself. I got some acid and I was so high, everything was beautiful, which was not unusual for the East Village on a tab of sunshine. When I arrived at the front door, they saw the look on my face and let me right in. This was a special night. It seems like everyone was high and happy.
It was a psychedelic club, with black lights, posters, side rooms with couches and dens. Everyone was sitting down, relaxing. All of a sudden there was a big commotion. People had been waiting for a good while, and all of a sudden all hell broke loose-I had never heard bass like this before, and one of our bass players, Billy Bass Nelson, would have eight cabinets, so I knew what bass sounded like! Larry Graham was loud as hell! They had the clarity of Motown but the volume of Jimi Hendrix or the Who. They literally turned this motherfucker out. That would be the impression that Sly left on me for the rest of my life.
"Jane Is a Groupee," "Plastic Jim," "Underdog," "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey"-whether political, social, or party songs, you always thought they were speaking directly to you personally. Not unlike Bob Dylan or Smokey Robinson.
David introduced me to Sly and told me that Sly had a new record label called Stone Flower, and would we like to be the first group on the label? Sly gave me a look, the one that I would recognize in time to mean he knew something was cool.
We signed with Stone Flower Records. The label folded after they put out just one record, by Sly's sister, but we stayed in touch. It would be years before I would see him again.
He came and spent a year with me on my farm, and we had a great time, writing songs and everything else. I inducted him into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. I only saw him for a few minutes then, and then it would be years and years before I saw him again, to team up with him on my album George Clinton and Some Gang sters of Love. I don't know what it is about our chemistry, but we are always cool with each other. At the very beginning of the Mothership tours, he played four shows with us. Other than myself, he was the only person ever to come out of that spaceship!
-GEORGE CLINTON
Introduction
OODSTOCK AND THE music that led him there four decades ago are still alive for Sly Stone. "There could be a Woodstock on this very hill, out there," he suggests, gesturing toward the sun-kissed acres of his rented property in Napa County, up the road a piece from his childhood home in Vallejo, California. "That's what I'm working up to now, a
gain, something like that," Sly continues, in reference to his perennial late-night sessions in his private studio, eking out new tunes and lyrics for a public still caught up in the hits from long ago. Of course, it will never be "like that" again, and it doesn't need to be. Too much has changed for Sly, for the Family Stone band in which he played at Woodstock, and for the fans they shared that world with.
The spirit that had floated over the half million hippies sprawled across Max Yasgur's pastureland in the wee hours of August 17, 1969, was made from those times, redolent with marijuana, psychedelics, youthful hormones, and an adrenaline pulse of protest against the old, the tired, and the just plain wrong. The groups booked throughout the weekend of the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair had already helped set the accompaniment for the late sixties and the coming early seventies. The motley but consistently exciting and often rebellious acts included Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, and Carlos Santana. But Sly & the Family Stone stood out against the happy haze. They not only played to the times, but they actually looked like the ideals held dear by their fans: black and white, male and female stood side by side on the stage, arrayed in fantastic fashions and hairdos, rallying the crowd to get "higher." All their songs, in fact, were rhythmic and uplifting, bass and drums providing an irresistible foundation for the flights of horns, guitar, and keyboards, and for the catchy vocals of sexy sister Rose and her sibling Sly-part shaman, part preacher, part trickster, part soul brother. His lyrics raised messages that might serve as musical picket signs: up with love, down with racism, turn on, free your mind!
To seek out the story of this man and this band, we need to look beyond the brief, bright glow of Woodstock. We go back to Sly's beginnings, as Sylvester Stewart, in gospel music, and through the Family Stone's start as a rhythm-and-blues cover band in San Francisco. And we continue past Woodstock on to a confusing time with darker messages, influenced by drugs and the other indulgences of celebrity, by the dissolution of the band, and by Sly's subsequent struggle to keep his gifts and his person from being extinguished by his loneliness and bad judgment.
There's much mystery and apparent contradiction in this story, not all of which can be resolved within any literary discourse on it. Sly is a black man, whose scrutiny by and punishment under the law may have been prejudiced by his race. Yet he rarely testified to his ethnicity or to contemporary civil rights struggles. Sly formed one of rock 'n' roll's most vital and visible ensembles, and partnered them in a set of high-energy performances and in hits that continue to live in movie soundtracks and commercials. Yet Sly was party to the premature end of that ensemble, and opted instead for a solitary, synthesized sound and a succession of pickup groups.
And now, after decades in which Sly & the Family Stone's legacy helped fertilize the blossoming of rock, jazz, funk, rhythm and blues, and urban musical styles, the mystery persists. The sexagenarian Sly has outlived some of those rockers who shared and succumbed to the same bad habits, among them Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, as well as those like Marvin Gaye and John Lennon, who were victims of violence. But Sly has been slow to deploy the Family Stone in the sort of successful comeback enjoyed by such other veterans as the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and the Police. Sly's own appearances with several Family Stone spin-offs have usually fallen short of the standard set by the original band. Yet he keeps making music and maintaining, "It'll all come together, and there will be a lot of help."
This suggests the story is still playing out. Old hits and old crimes must be examined for what they suggest about the people directly responsible and about the times in which they occurred. But this book is also about relationships, a sort of extended "Family Affair," and about how the good and bad vibes of some of these relationships continue into the present alongside the music.
My own first contact with Sly & the Family Stone came over the radio during my first months covering topics like civil rights and antiwar protests as a student journalist at San Francisco State, in the year of Woodstock. I loved every one of their new, surprising singles that made it onto the airwaves over the next few years: "Dance to the Music," "Stand!," "Sing a Simple Song," "Everyday People," "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," "Family Affair," "If You Want Me to Stay," and so forth. Soon after the last big hit, like many fans, I lost track of the man and the band. So it was exciting and easy, many years later, to accept the assignment to put the story of Sly & the Family Stone in print.
Making it happen was a slower, tougher process. Although there were feature pieces and reviews in periodicals from the band's heyday, there had been little since, and no biography per se aside from Joel Selvin's Oral History, a compendium of quotes published in 1998. I went through this material with a skeptical eye for bias, recognizing that there was little to be found in the way of substantial interviews with Sly himself. I did interview those few persons intimately involved with the story who were still alive and willing to talk about it, and I eventually got to Sly.
What emerged from all this was a portrait of a passionate talent-unpredictable, uncontrollable, and fantastic-which had been based in family, community, and friendship, and then extended into the wider world. The world was entertained, and arguably bettered, by its embrace of Sly & the Family Stone. The portrait also reflected on the peculiar and often perverse interdependence of media and celebrity, and on the pervasive influence that both have on the culture at large, which is all of us. Fame and fortune seemed to ultimately aggravate Sly's compromise of his personal integrity and of the integrity of his group.
I came to realize that the faith of Sly's blood family and friends, and that of his musical Family, had survived the decades of estrangement and resentment. Despite old bummers, these people seemed eager to see themselves now as part of a more positive and forward-looking legacy, more about making memorable music, both then and now. Looking back on Sly's story, however large and distorted the images may have become, we all can find familiar facets of our own humanity, hopes, challenges, mistakes, and achievements. I wish I could, Sly had sung in "If You Want Me to Stay," get the message over to you now. In Sly's many messages, and throughout this book, there are glitters of introspection and wisdom, as well as the makings of a great soundtrack.
-JEFF KALISS
Note on Style
O REFLECT THE FRIENDLY and informal spirit of a family and a band, first names are used throughout the book after the initial use, or re-establishing uses, of each full name. Generally, the present tense is used with quotes from this author's interviews, and the past tense with quotes originating elsewhere, in order to distinguish the sources and to help forestall misunderstandings. The only exceptions to this usage comes in the stand-alone descriptions, in the past tense, of the author's two in-person interviews with Sly, and in the scene of Sly's return performance in 2007, where the author is clearly identified and the present tense would have proven awkward.
I WANT
TO TAKE YOU
HIGHER
Get Your
Livin' Down
1943-1961
You live your life religiously, and you live your life with mankind, trying to make sure that you can deal with this world while you're here.
-JAMES BROWN
1993 interview with Jeff Kaliss
HE STEWART FAMILY OF Vallejo, California, had a reputation for making music, both in their own house and in several houses of the Lord. The earliest recording of Sylvester Stewart, later known as Sly, was a seven-inch 45-rpm disc with "On the Battlefield of the Lord" on one side and "Walking in Jesus' Name" on the other. It was recorded in 1952, on the recommendation of a local church official, when Sylvester was nine. He sang lead vocals alongside brother Freddie and sisters Loretta and Rose, and it was in the family, and their church, that Sylvester found his earliest musical and spiritual inspiration.
The family made occasional road trips to Denton, in northern Texas, to stay with relatives, perform in area churches, and peddle their recordings. Those travels brou
ght the kids' mother, Alpha, back to her own roots as a daughter of the Haynes family, founders of the very musical St. Andrew Church of God in Christ, in Denton. The role of music in the sect, the largest Pentecostal group in America, seems related to what is described in Church of God documents as "supernatural manifestations," having occurred in Christ's time on the day of Pentecost, fifty days after Passover. "The sudden appearance of the Holy Ghost appealed first to the ear," the Church maintains today on its Web site. "The disciples heard a `sound' from heaven which rushed with a mighty force into the house and filled it, even as a storm rushes, but there was no wind." No doubt the mind of young Sylvester and his siblings also received this apocalyptic spirit.
The history of Denton, Texas, Sylvester Stewart's birthplace, encapsulates an important portion of the history of African descendants in the United States, and the influences under which Sly and his family would be raised. Denton County's 1850 census listed five slave owners and ten slaves. These persons likely originated in Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas, and whites and blacks worked the fields side by side to subsist on the clay-based soil of the newly created state of Texas, which joined the Confederacy in 1861, four years after the founding of the city of Denton. Following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, many of the former slaves evolved from servants to tenant farmers, and the development of cotton, wheat, and other cash crops expanded the influx of both races. The Chisholm Trail, regaled in a jaunty cowboy ballad, brought cattle from the South through Denton, and two major rail lines followed suit.
The settlement of Freedmen Town, in the area where Sly would be born seventy years later, was populated in 1875 by twenty-seven black families from Dallas. What would become an even larger and more active black community, Quakertown (possibly named for Quaker abolitionists) took form a few years later, closer to the city center. Outside of farming and service jobs within Quakertown, the North Texas Normal College and the Girls Industrial College both became significant employers of blacks after opening in Denton (to white students only) around the turn of the century. Other Quakertown folk worked as daytime domestic servants of wealthy whites along Oak Street several blocks to the west. Pride of place in a growing Quakertown community ultimately fell victim to resentful white racists, who appropriated the area to establish a downtown park and fairground, forcing the black residents out of the downtown and into an area of failed former pastureland to the southeast. Many blacks opted to leave Texas, but those who remained strived to restore Quakertown's hard-won level of selfsufficiency.