I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone

by Jeff Kaliss

  Like Sly, Larry was originally from Texas but had relocated as a toddler to Oakland, California, with his family. He'd drummed in his school band and had begun his musical career per se playing guitar, inspired by bluesmen like Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, and had even sat in with a visiting Ike and Tina Turner. When Sly first heard him, Larry was gigging with his mother, Dell, a singer and pianist. That act had shrunk from a trio to a duo, requiring Larry to man both the organ and the guitar. When the organ broke down and the act still needed low registers, the resourceful Larry rented a St. George electric bass guitar to fill in. "I wasn't interested in learning the so-called correct overhand style of playing bass, because in my head I was going back to guitar, anyway," Larry later told Bass Player magazine.

  The necessity of properly accompanying his mother inspired Larry's reputed invention of what has been variously called the slap-pop or thump `n' pluck technique, later immensely influential on rock, funk, and jazz bassists. Most electric bassists up to that time had preferred the softer, rounder tones of conventional finger-style and picking methods. But Larry, as he described it to Bass Player, "would thump the strings with my thumb to make up for the bass drum, and pluck the strings with my fingers to make up for the backbeat snare drum," thus replacing two missing drums with one stringed instrument.

  Sly and Freddie also assessed the talent manifest at each other's shows, and they frequented the Condor, where Sly's pal Jerry Martini was still blowing sax behind George & Teddy. Jerry incorporated the influences of soulful jazz giants Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt. But he now says, "One of the reasons that attracted Sly to my playing was that I emulated [R & B innovator] Junior Walker more than any other white boy in town. Because [the others] were all trying to sound like Art Pepper." In effect, Sly needed a representative of the funky sass of Walker more than the post-bop jazz artistry of Pepper.

  Greg Errico came to Urbano Drive in December 1966 for what he thought was another Stone Souls rehearsal. He describes the sequence of his knocking, Sly's mom, Alpha, opening the door, and the subsequent interchanges: "'Where's Freddie?"Well, he's in the kitchen with Sly, eating chicken.' I went to the kitchen and looked around. `Where's everybody, are we rehearsing tonight?' I said hi to Sly, he was the radio DJ. `We're starting a new group tonight. You wanna do it?"Well, I'm here.' I was just joking around. I was looking for the rest of the Stone Souls. But Sly was already looking out for one more attempt at what he had in mind." Greg later learned that he had actually been the second choice for drummer, after a failed attempt to recruit Bartholomew "Frosty" SmithFrost, accompanist to Lee Michaels, a Hammond organ master popular around the Bay Area and later signed to A&M.

  The group that assembled on that fateful afternoon on Urbano Drive to realize what Sly had in mind included brother Freddie, Greg Errico, Larry Graham, and Cynthia Robinson. There's no known recording of what went down in that basement, but it can be inferred, from what the players looked and sounded like on record and in live performance not all that much later, that it must have been thrilling and unprecedented in pop music.

  Recalling the day for Joel Selvin, Cynthia noted that the musicians found Sly ready with "punching funky" arrangements of Top 40 songs, which he expected to later intersperse with his own original compositions in live sets. Larry, she says, raised a question about group leadership, which Sly met with an affirmation of his sole right to lead. (The potential for a standoff between these two persisted for years.) The group's name was a catchy mutation, with druggy undertones, of the pseudo-surnames both Stewarts had started performing under, as well as a statement of what would be the group's ethos, with Sly as unquestioned head of a tight-knit "Family."

  The brand-new Family Stone's quest for a gig took them beyond the city limits and into the sights of the enterprising Rich Romanello, a couple of dozen miles down the San Francisco Peninsula. A few years Sly's senior, Rich had grown up among fellow Italian Americans in San Francisco's North Beach and Marina neighborhoods, and then stepped up to his father's bar business. Music was vital to Rich's club vision. For the jukebox at his dad's Morocco Room in San Mateo, south of the San Francisco airport, the younger Romanello insisted on selecting the discs himself. "The jukebox company would not buy a record until it was a hit," he points out, "but I'd put in songs that I thought would become hits, so I had the hottest jukebox in the area." Long before "Runaround Sue" scored for Italian American rocker Dion DiMucci in 1961, "The only place you could hear it was at the Morocco Room, or you'd have to wait for it to play on the radio."

  Visits to Tom Donahue and Bob Mitchell's shows at the Cow Palace convinced Rich of the commercial power of live rock. On a mission to convert the Morocco Room "from a neighborhood cocktail lounge into a young hot spot," he began to feature live entertainment, leaning toward the R & B end of the rock spectrum. Emile O'Connor (called "Little E") and Wally Cox, two of his featured performers, talked Rich into managing them. "It was black entertainment, and a white Peninsula crowd," he says. "But if there were any blacks that came in, they were welcomed. We weren't segregated." Later, Rich was advised to audition a white act from San Francisco, the Beau Brummels. He remembers their tryout at the Morocco Room in 1964. "There were maybe four people in the place, and they set up and started playing, and that old hair on my arm goes up. And when the hair on your arm goes up, you got something. It was a big change, to go from saxophones and black singers to a white guitar sound. But I hired 'em."

  Soon enough, "They said, `Be our Brian Epstein,' and that got my attention, because [Beatles manager] Brian Epstein was my hero." Rich's second management venture prompted a visit to the Morocco Room by Tom Donahue and Sly Stone, who had already worked with the Brummels at Autumn Records. Rich subsequently got to observe Sly in action at the Cow Palace and in the studio. "He was a very cool, low-key individual," Rich remembers about Sly. He supposes that "maybe at that time, because of his growing, there might have been a little bit of insecurity," which maintained Sly's low-key presence. This belied the young producer's manifest talent: "He'd get up and play in the studio, and I knew he could play just about any instrument. You knew he knew what he was doing."

  Parallel club-owning and management functions continued for Rich, as did the connection with Autumn Records. He booked the Warlocks, later to morph into the Grateful Dead, and the Tikis, later more famous (albeit briefly) as Harpers Bizarre. On a single Labor Day weekend in 1966, Rich's earnings for booking the Jefferson Airplane in resorts north of San Francisco exceeded his take on the Brummels' two hit records. He decided to invest that money in converting another club on the Peninsula, in Redwood City, formerly a venue for big-band acts such as Stan Kenton and Count Basie. "When I walked into the place, for some reason they were just playing `Winchester Cathedral' [a quirky retro hit by the New Vaudeville Band]," Rich recalls. "And I said, `This place has the feeling of a church. I'm gonna call it Winchester Cathedral: "

  Rich needed an energizing act to christen the Cathedral. Walking down Broadway, the neon-lit strip in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, he encountered Jerry Martini, who had accompanied George & Teddy on a Morocco Room booking. "I've opened a new club in Redwood City," Rich told Jerry.

  "Well, I'm with Sly," said the saxophonist, who was still psyched from the recent Urbano Drive conclave. "Sly put a new band together."

  "You're kidding!"

  "No, you've gotta hear us."

  Rich was summoned to the Stewart family basement for the next rehearsal of the Family Stone. "I'm walking down the stairs, and I hear it," he recounts. "And that hair goes right up on my arm. I go, `Oh shit, does this sound good!' And I go and sit down. They're just starting, but they're good. They were doing everybody else's music, they hadn't gone out on their own yet, but what they were covering was better than the originals, no doubt about it. Freddie singing `Try a Little Tenderness'? Whew! They could play! So I hired 'em that night."

  The Cathedral and its opening act, Sly & the Family Stone, were aggressively promoted by Rich through
newspaper and radio advertising. He assumed there might not be widespread familiarity with radio jock Sly as a musician. On opening night-December 16, 1966-there was a long line to get into the new club. And there was plenty for the patrons of the early show, many of them teens, to smile about as they looked around after entering. "The whole place was red-flocked wallpaper, crystal chandeliers, and it had a real elegance about it," says Rich, about the design elements he'd retained from the previous owners. He'd added a stained-glass display inside a planter box, spelling out L-O-V-E. "We were capturing a little of the Haight-Ashbury, but this was not a hippie place. And if you look at [later] photographs of the Cathedral, kids dancing, you can see how appropriately dressed they are, for the time."

  Both the dancing teens and the older sit-down crowd who took their place for the after-hours session, starting at about 2:00 a.m., seemed delighted with the brand-new Family Stone band, and the feeling seemed mutual. In subsequent bookings, on regular Friday and Saturday nights during the first half of 1967, the band took to opening its shows with the Spencer Davis Group's recent hit, "Gimme Some Lovin'," repeating the appreciative mes sage, "So glad you made it!" "If you talk to the kids," says Rich, referring to the Family Stone as if they still were the youngsters he shepherded, "they might tell you it was the best place they ever played, for their own entertainment and satisfaction.... And that was probably some of the best they ever sounded."

  Sly had taken notice of what Rich had done as manager of the Beau Brummels, and he approached the club owner about assuming that function for the Family Stone. Rich recalled his Brummels experience in a less positive light, but ultimately gave in to Sly's request. Word got around that bookings at the Cathedral alongside the Family Stone could help launch other new acts, including the young Santana Blues Band from San Francisco's Mission district. "I gave Carlos seventy-five dollars a night, and I gave Sly a hundred, 'cause I was the manager and had to get my commission." Rich remembers. The audience paid about two dollars a head to see this pre-legend double bill.

  In the early months at the Cathedral, repeat customers were delighted with the Family Stone's creative covers of material from the soul and R & B side of the rock spectrum. "We did things like `Shotgun' and `Try a Little Tenderness,"' says Jerry Martini, "because we'd worked out a show thing where we'd walk around the room, dancing and playing tambourines." Larry's baritone voice effectively channeled Lou Rawls's on the soulful "Tobacco Road" and "The Shadow of Your Smile." "But we started immediately adding original songs, one by one," Jerry continues. "We even practiced dialogue, a little acting. I remember Freddie and Larry on a [Sly-penned] song that Larry sang, called `Let Me Hear It from You.' They would talk to each other and say, `I heard my girlfriend's gonna break up with me, but I wanna hear it from you.' It went over really well, personal life things." (The song was later included on the band's debut album, A Whole New Thing, but without the dramatic spoken intro.) Jerry's commitment to the new group involved major changes in his own personal life, including forsaking a lucrative engagement with another band and moving in with his wife's family to minimize costs.

  The Family Stone's extended engagements in Redwood City ultimately benefited both club and band, until the latter began to outgrow the former. In his management function, Rich booked the band into other clubs around the Bay and sought out larger showcases. He put out an invitation to Bill Graham, now on his way to rock regency as owner and operator of San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, one of a handful of concert halls attractive to the burgeoning crop of flower children who had cash to spend on tickets. Witnessing the band in action, Bill expressed little interest in its dance-inducing appeal, despite his previous year's booking of Freddie's band. Rich reacted with resentment. "I said, `Bill, you probably have one of the best dance floors in all of Northern California. But you've got all the hippies in their Indian squats, sitting on that floor like a bunch of vegetables. Do you think you ever want to get these people up and dancing?' Nope. Not ready. So we parted company. And after the session was over, Sly came up and said, `Why not?' And I told him the story. He said, 'I'll change the music!' I said, `Don't!' We stuck to our guns and said, `Fuck Graham and his psychedelic heads, we're on this path and we're staying on this path."

  Rich turned to a list of contacts he'd maintained while working with Autumn Records, and picked out Chuck Gregory, the local promotion manager for Columbia Records. Chuck had secured Columbia's first rock act (Moby Grape), as well as a recording of Carol Doda and her backing band at the Condor. For Aretha Franklin, performing at a private party downstairs from the club, Chuck had recruited Sly and some other Condor familiars as backing musicians. Chuck then called Columbia's New York office, at Aretha's request, to propose recording the rising soul diva with Sly and the others. This promising project, conjoining two future superstars, never came to be: Columbia, ready to divest themselves of Aretha, gave it the thumbs-down.

  On the night Chuck came to the Cathedral to assess the Family Stone, at Rich's invitation, in March 1967, "Everything that could go wrong went wrong," says the club owner. "Microphones went out, amplifiers went out, strings broke on guitars, it was just a fucking mess." Chuck's reaction came as a relief: "I think we got something." Inspired by this interest, Rich set about cleaning up his star act. "Sly had been in trouble with the IRS and the Musicians' Union," he says, "so we got his back dues straightened out and brought in Sid Frank, my dad's accountant." The band was sent to Don Wehr's Music City in San Francisco to equip itself with proper instruments and amplifiers, and then was sent across town to the trendy Town Squire for outfits. "They came out looking like fucking clowns," laughs Rich. "Jerry with his polka-dot shirt and Sly with his knickers. I said, `What the fuck is going on?' But Sly was right, I was wrong. They were gonna be new, they were gonna be unique, their music was different, they were on their way."

  Eye-catching fashion and coiffure remained hallmarks throughout the band's existence and into Sly's career beyond. The bandleader would go so far as to create outfits instantly with a rug and a knife. Though Hendrix's Experience had their towering Afros, Jim Morrison his tight leather pants, and Janis Joplin her hippy bell-bottoms, the Family Stone's group image of garish costuming almost seemed to prefigure the '70s-there were highheeled boots, tight slacks or dresses, luminescent puffy shirts evocative of some gilded age, oversize hats atop oversize dos, and ornate jewelry. In publicity shots, on record covers, and in live performance, the band manifested a new standard of rock royalty.

  Back in New York, Chuck Gregory's superiors at Columbia Records were still bedecked in three-piece suits and ties, smoking tobacco copiously while attempting to stay ahead of rapidly changing trends in music. An enthusiastic phoned dispatch from Chuck reached the ears of David Kapralik, who'd lateraled from his position in national promotions for Columbia (succeeding the notorious rock hater Mitch Miller) to managing A & R (artists and repertoire) for Columbia's rock-centered Epic Records. "Now that you're there [at Epic]," Chuck urged David, "come on out and I'll sign a hell of a band for ya." While still at Columbia, David had resurrected the legendary Okeh label and engaged performer and producer Curtis Mayfield and others to broaden the label's R & B catalog. He'd also coined the term "pop gospel" and had signed Peaches & Herb to Epic. Chuck's report about a black DJ with a racially integrated ensemble intrigued David, then in his early forties, and he flew out to San Francisco and slept off some of his jet lag at Chuck's home in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge. "Then we woke up at 12:30 [a.m.] and took a cup of coffee," says Chuck. "My wife drove us down [to Winchester Cathedral] and Sly went on at two o'clock."

  "I heard this sound that totally blew me away," remembers David. "And after the gig, probably about four in the morning, Sly and I went to a nearby International House of Pancakes, and we sat there looking at each other." From his current refuge on Maui, he can't recapture verbatim what transpired, but the grandiloquent David prefers to cast it in a "mythopoetic" format, inspired by his Jewish upbringing. "I just
know that we made a connection in the magic mirror," he says, and he elaborates on the quality of this new relationship: "The nearer, the dearer, the clearer you see, Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad." Taken from Deuteronomy, this incantation means, "Here, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One."

  Aside from the insights into oneness inspired by Sly at the IHOP, David let the ambitious young artist know that he was intent on signing the band to Epic. The pair spent more time together over the next several days and nights, cruising around the Bay Area in Sly's ride. "He had to get to know me," David explains. "He was a street-wise kid. I'm not a street-wise kid. For better or worse I come from Plainfield, New Jersey, a middle-class situation."

  Whatever Sly may have shared with David apparently didn't include any information about the prior management arrangement with Rich Romanello, who remembers Sly confronting him during this period. "He came back and said, `I spent a lot of time with David, and I think I'm gonna do a deal,"' recounts Rich, who was made to feel "like someone had cut off my arm." Rich was offered a percentage of Sly & the Family Stone's future earnings, and was thus persuaded to release his client from his management contract. A new contract was promptly consummated by David in the basement of the Stewart home on Urbano Drive. "I said, `Sly, I know I can help you fulfill all your dreams as an artist,"' remembers David. "Somehow or other I knew the power of my enthusiasm. I had total confidence." This prompted his return to the Epic offices in New York, where "I had that buzz happening. And when I have a buzz, I infuse that buzz in other people." It had worked in promoting the young Barbra Streisand early in the '60s. "I was a madman! I'd jump on desks, I would go in the middle of meetings, I would go into an office and climb on my boss's desk and have a demo in my hand and put it on the turntable. And that's also how I got attention for Sly in the beginning."