by Jeff Kaliss
In the meantime, blacks returned to being dependent on white services downtown. "We knew where we were supposed to go and we went where we were supposed to go, and we didn't go where we weren't supposed to go," recalls Betty Kimble of her life as a black teenager attending school with Sly's older cousins (including future college halfback and pro football Hall of Famer Abner Haynes) in 1940s Denton. "We'd sit in the back of buses, and go to colored water fountains, and at the restaurants we went through the back door."
As southeast Denton laid in retail outlets and services along Prairie Street, one of its two blacktop thoroughfares, the churches did their best to sustain hope and community spirit. The newcomer St. Andrew Church of God in Christ and its pastor, F. L. Haynes, must have seemed like novelties alongside the established Methodist and Baptist sects, which dated back to Quakertown. Haynes's congregation was "more free with their rejoicing and all," says Ruby Cole, who went to church and school with several of the pastor's offspring, Sly's cousins. Others remember that before St. Andrew was constructed, worship occurred outdoors under a tent, and intimidated passersby would throw things at the "hollering" parishioners. Eventually St. Andrew earned more respect for its music. The pastor's younger sisters, Alpha (Sly's mother) and Omega, led hymns with pretty, powerful voices. Alpha's husband, K. C. Stewart, who'd relocated to Denton from Fort Worth, fashioned a percussion instrument from a washboard, tin cans, and baking pans. This unique form of accompaniment joined in with the church's piano and numerous tambourines.
Into this joyful noise were born K. C. and Alpha's daughter Loretta in 1934, and son Sylvester on March 15, 1943, the first two of five children, all of whom would be raised in music. (Freddie Stewart would also inherit from his uncle F. L. Haynes a pastoral calling within the Church of God in Christ.) The growing Stewart family occupied a large white house on bustling Prairie Street. K. C. reportedly frequented the cotton and tomato fields, turning his percussion array to the purpose of entertaining and soliciting donations from the field workers. His wife, Alpha, worked as a maid in white neighborhoods, at least up until the birth of Loretta.
Not long after Sylvester's arrival, the family followed the path of several of Alpha's relatives out west to the San Francisco Bay Area, to seek a better life in an economy that had been stimulated by wartime industry.
Well-liked and dependable, K. C. Stewart found a home in Vallejo, a smaller city on the northeast outskirts of the Bay. The size of the black population in Vallejo increased dramatically during the '40s, jumping from 438 in 1940 to 1,513 in 1950, an increase of 345 percent. With modest income from maintenance work for a local department store and from other jobs, K. C. was able, with Alpha, to expand their family to Rose (1945), Frederick (1947), and Vaetta (1950). In the San Francisco Bay Area, the children were able to envision possibilities far beyond those their parents had been limited to in Texas. Black Stars magazine, in 1972, relayed an anecdote from Alpha, in which her sons had been asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. "Freddie said he wanted to be a lawyer," she remembered. "Sylvester said he wanted to be a bishop." (To this day, Sly has plenty to do with lawyers, but it was his younger brother who himself became an ordained church official.) Back in the '40s and '50s, each of the Stewart kids in turn, and ultimately in ensemble, came to share their parents' celebration of music and of the church.
There was a strong musical presence in the local black churches, as there had been back in Texas, and Vallejo spawned at least one successful recording gospel group, the Spartonaires. As in Denton, there was musical migration between sects, and the Stewart kids sang all over the Bay Area. In Mojo magazine, mama Alpha later singled out young Sylvester, then nicknamed "Syl," as the star of these devotional routines. "They'd stand this bitty fiveyear-old on a table and he'd sing `You Got to Move," she related. "People were hollering and wanting to touch him. You had to hold them back sometimes." For Syl's part, he was already sensitive to audience reaction, as recounted by his sister Rose in the 2000 Showtime documentary The Skin I'm In. "When we were little kids," she said, "if people didn't stand and applaud and really feel the spirit of what he was singing, he'd cry afterwards. It affected him that bad." A local church official urged the Stewart Family Four, formed from the eldest of the children, to further spread their appealing juvenile spirit in a 45-rpm gospel single. Syl, nine at the time of the recording, had picked up on his older sister Loretta's familiarity with piano. Mama Alpha, who played guitar in church, also introduced Syl to her instrument.
It could be supposed that potential musical influences, as with other opportunities, were more varied and eclectic for the Stewart children in the Bay Area than if they'd been raised in Texas. Young Sylvester might have developed as more of a bluesman and less as a forward-thinking re-imaginer of rock, though he did end up bringing to the mix some of the elements of blues and gospel that he shared with less influential Texans like Bobby"Blue" Bland and Junior Walker.
Across the city of Vallejo, the heritage of racism stayed in place, as it did in much of postwar America, but the lines were not as broadly drawn as in Texas. Each of the low-income neighborhoods in the Terrace section of the city, collections of plywood structures erected during World War II on the north side of Vallejo, favored a particular racial grouping, but the groups all lived in close proximity to each other. The Stewarts occupied a more prominent home on Denio Street on the western side, near the cemetery and the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, which had been a major source of income for blacks and others who flocked to the West Coast from elsewhere. Though there was some persistent de facto segregation among elementary schools in the '50s, it started to fade throughout the public school system. In junior high schools and in the three-year Vallejo High, and over Bay Area radio stations and television, young people of all colors experienced the irresistible evolution of rhythm and blues into rock 'n' roll.
Rock was a revolution that shook up stereotypes. White teenagers everywhere heard and watched white rock idol Elvis Presley crooning and shaking his hips in imitation of what he and his peers, including Jerry Lee Lewis and Conway Twitty, had observed, sometimes covertly, at Southern black churches and dance halls. Black teens, meanwhile, found their race represented alongside whites in the pantheon of early rock by such perform ers as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and any number of black doowop groups. Rock may not yet have sought the sophistication of jazz (where black and white musicians were already relatively well integrated), but it had gotten beyond the narrow and restricted status of "race" music. Anyone could play rock 'n' roll, and everyone could listen to it.
Frank Arellano, the musically inclined son of a Filipino father (a welder at Mare Island) and a white mother, had upgraded from the Terraces to a middle-class east side neighborhood. He remembers meeting one of his future singing partners, Sylvester Stewart, newly nicknamed "Sly," when Sly came to play guitar behind a doo-wop vocal group at a dance. Both Frank and Sly were still in junior high. "Everybody in the singing group was waiting for him to get there," laughs Frank. "Does that sound familiar?" (Delays have indeed dogged Sly Stone performances, right up to his latest ones.) After Sly's arrival, Frank noted that the guitar was almost as big as its player, who was several years younger than most of the other members of the group.
Just before their first year of high school, Frank encountered Sly again during a summer league game of basketball. "It was an elbow here, an elbow there, and `I'm gonna get you after the game.' So, after the game, everybody was outside and lining up.... Their team was all black, ours was mostly white.... I saw this skinny little guy, and I went, `I'm gonna get across from him, 'cause he couldn't hurt me: And that was Sly. We kind of squared off, a few things were said, and then everybody said, `This isn't cool,' so nothing ever happened. Little did I know how fast he could be, so it was probably a good thing we didn't have that fight." At Vallejo High, though they were at the same grade level, Frank didn't share many courses with Sly. "Maybe he was smarter than me," Frank allows, "but I had a bunch of easy courses.
I caught my high school counselor groping one of the young lady aides when I went in his office one time, and after that I got all the easy courses I could get, any time I wanted." It was Frank's musical inclination that brought him back in contact with Sly.
In junior high, with an all-Filipino group, Frank had sung doo-wop, a term coined in the '50s for the smooth, listenerfriendly mode of vocalizing rhythm and blues, or R & B (itself named earlier in the decade by Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler). Frank had encountered another precocious doo-wopper, blonde Charlene Imhoff, at musical events and at baseball games, where she served as what he called an "athletic supporter," a suggestive way of tagging a loyal fan.
At Vallejo High, Frank and Charlene assembled several versions of a group they named for her junior high ensemble, the Viscounts. Sly at this time was singing and playing guitar with a black group, the Webs, who the Viscounts encountered at interscholastic talent shows. Frank told Charlene, "Our harmonies suck, and I'm gonna ask this guy I know if he'll come help us put some harmony together." That's how Sylvester Stewart came, somewhat reluctantly, to be recruited into the Viscounts, who happened, without deliberate intent, to be multiracial.
Aside from Charlene, Frank, and Sly, the Viscounts ultimately included brothers Charles and Vern Gebhardt, who lived a couple of doors down from Charlene, and Maria Boldway, a classically trained soprano and an alluring, raven-haired ethnic mix of Spanish, Mexican, French, and Native American. For performances, the girls lined up in flared dresses and high heels, the boys in blazers, slacks, and dress shirts, cinched by narrow ties. Their hair was as trim and maintained as their outfits.
After the group had begun to show professional promise, they were advised to change their name. There already was a group called the Viscounts, which had made a successful cover of the moody "Harlem Nocturne" in 1959, the year the Vallejo Viscounts' formed. The teens considered being called the Biscaynes, after a popular full-size Chevy model introduced in 1958, but ended up as the Viscaynes by substituting a V for the B to signal their hometown and to avoid confusion.
Despite the pressures of school and of most of the guys' athletic involvement (Sly avoided organized sports), the Viscaynes accelerated practice sessions to five evenings a week in the Geb- hardts' rec room. They all had fine and flexible voices, with Sly able to sing high or low across a two-and-a-half-octave range, and Frank ascending in a heady falsetto. By 1961, when most of the group was in the last year of high school (Vern and Maria were two years younger), they felt ready to sing in a contest promoted by the Dick Stewart Dance Party television show, a San Franciscan echo of Dick Clark's nationally broadcast American Bandstand. They beat out the competition, appeared on local TV, and were placed under management by associates of the television host. As graduation approached, they were encouraged to record several 45-rpm singles, with dubbed accompaniment by Joe Piazza and the Continentals (including future Family Stone member Jerry Martini), at San Francisco's Geary Theatre. Less than satisfied with this effort, their new management flew them down to Los Angeles for another recording session (using songs written by husband-andwife team George Motola and Ricky Page) and an appearance at a dance party event at Pacific Oceanside Park, alongside a young Lou Rawls.
Boarding at a hotel and recording and performing in Tinsel Town amounted to quite an adventure for the Vallejo adolescents. "We swam, we were treated like royalty," recalls Maria, commonly called "Ria" by her friends. "The boys ran around doing crazy stuff, dumping ice water on us when we'd be sleeping by the pool." Treatment by their handlers turned out to be chillier. In a move sadly common on the lower rungs of the music business, the Viscaynes were told to sign their checks for performing over to management, and they never got to bank any of the proceeds themselves. The Viscaynes' "Yellow Moon" placed at number 16 on KYA radio's Top 60 chart in the week of November 13, 1961, and stayed aloft for a few weeks, but the group had long since dispersed.
Inside and outside the Viscaynes, Frank Arellano had gotten closer to Sly than most of his schoolmates. "We were everyday friends," says Frank, now retired with his own teenage son in Palm Springs, California. "We would drink, do crazy things. We were always on the edge of the law, but never getting caught, never anything we could go to jail for." This reputation would have helped justify the morphing of "Sylvester Stewart" into "Sly." "And we were out trying to get girls," Frank continues. "We cruised downtown, mostly in Sly's car. He had a '56 Ford Victoria." When they had enough pocket money, the pair would extend their cruising west, across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, where they could get girls to join them on the Ferris wheel at the Playland at the Beach amusement park. For this and other purposes, the underage party animals had to figure out how to find booze. Sly had copped an identification card from someone of legal age and had talked Frank into making use of it at a Vallejo convenience store, even though the cardholder's "race" was designated "colored." When Frank somehow succeeded in scoring a large green bottle of Rainier Ale, the friends shared a good laugh along with the intoxicant. Sly seemed to regard most racial issues lightly. Charlene recalls a Viscaynes gathering in the living room of the Stewart household and Sly entering the room from mama Alpha's kitchen. "Now I know," he declared to his fellow Viscaynes sardonically, "how funny I must look in your house."
But in one rare instance, Sly shared with Frank a deeper reflection on being a young black man in the '60s, closer to what he'd express lyrically later in "Underdog," on the first Family Stone album. "He felt," says Frank, "that he was on a ladder, and that he was trying to climb up the ladder. And there were people above, pushing him down, and there were people below him, grabbing his legs and pulling him down. And that was his struggle, more or less. It is tough being black, I guess. But I'm glad he realized there were people of his own race trying to pull him down, and people of other races pushing him down. I never had that much of a problem."
There were problems, Frank also remembers, with interracial dating, even though Sly's natural-born attractiveness transcended any color barrier. Frank compares the young Sly with their black piano-and-trumpet-playing schoolmate John Turk, who'd known Sly since childhood and would continue their musical relationship into the 1970s. "The difference was, John Turk was kind of like a lounge lizard, everybody knew what he was there for, and John Turk was there just to go get some white women. Sly, on the other hand, was there and had white women go for him.... They bugged him, they'd call him, and I was there for some of those calls, the finest girls. He'd make a date with 'em, and then he couldn't go pick 'em up. So guess who did? Yours truly!"
Thus Frank found himself yet again pressed, or persuaded, into service for his buddy. "I'd say, `How the hell do you think they're gonna like a Filipino pickin"em up any more than a black guy?' He goes, `But, man, you're not a nigger: It worked. We never had any problem. I got a few weird looks, but nobody told the girls, `You can't go out with him: Then the parents would say, `But you guys be home by twelve."' Frank would take the date to a prearranged meeting point, deliver her to Sly, and then connect with one of his own. "I'd say, `Okay, be back here by 11:30 and I'll take her home.' But I'd have to wait till 1:30 or 2:00, and then take 'em home! Thanks a lot, Sly."
Frank thought that Sly shared everything with him, but he didn't realize how well his friend was living up to his new nickname. During the L.A. stay, for example, Sly had been taking side trips with songwriters Motola and Page to record solo projects without the knowledge of his fellow travelers. Back in Vallejo, Sly had started making recordings with his younger brother, Freddie, and others, and on some weekends sustaining his instrumental chops with club bands in the black part of the Terraces, also without telling the other Viscaynes that he might have competing gigs.
On a double date shortly before spring graduation in '61 (Sly had to wait and make up a unit in summer school before getting his diploma), Frank came to the realization that his best friend had been secretly carrying on a relationship with a sister Viscayne, Ria Boldway. More than any other member o
f the group, Ria seems to have been sensitive to racial issues in their community. She and Sly and John Turk all joined a group called the Youth Problems Committee, specifically to address these matters. Ria was also more interested than most of her white girlfriends, even as a preteen, in the rhythm and blues being beamed toward the Bay Area black demographic over KDIA radio. Ria now recalls how she'd been inspired by "Ray Charles and [jazz vocalist] Betty Carter performing together. And it's so funny, because even Sammy Davis was too square for me by the time I was sixteen. He wasn't funky enough for me."
Although she was two grades behind Sly, Ria shared choir practice with him, and apparently a certain amount of classroom mischief. Despite their superior voices, they both ended up flunking one semester of choir, having amused themselves by baiting a substitute teacher. As far as Ria knew, Sly got "great grades" otherwise, and was generally a standout among the student body. "He was a star before he ever became a star," she says. "He just glittered when he walked, like Richard Cory," in the poem by Edward Arlington Robinson, which was also a popular folk song.