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

by Jeff Kaliss

  But toward the end of the decade, there were healthy signs that Sly, or maybe Sylvester, was preparing himself properly for the new millennium. In 1997, he extended a rare summons to a young MIT graduate student named Jon Dakss, who'd established the slyfam- stone.com Web site. Jon went to Los Angeles in April of that year to help Sly learn how to make use of his computer and the Web: "Though he assured me it was nothing personal," Jon related on his Web site, Sly"insisted on observing all that I did with his computer, and asked that I explain whatever I was going to do before I did it." Jon pronounced Sly to be in good spirits and in good health, living with a pair of sisters as aides. "They set up his equipment and perform on his songs. If Sly has lyrics, they write them down." For his trouble and devotion, Jon was given a spontaneous display by Sly on keyboards, to which he reacted, "I think he hasn't made a comeback because he doesn't want to. He could take the world by storm right now if he wanted to."

  In 1998, Joel Selvin released Sly & the Family Stone: An Oral History. It presented a collection of interviews with Family Stone veterans, Stewart family members, and business and personal acquaintances of Sly, though the man himself did not share any thoughts with Joel. "Most of the people interviewed for this book have never spoken about their experiences before and many of the others have never publicly discussed some of these matters," ran Joel's introduction. "It's easy to understand their reluctance."

  Alas, some of them became more reluctant after the publication of Joel's book. Jerry counted himself among the several people less than pleased with how they'd figured in Joel's handling of the story. Jerry stated to this author, in 2006, "I am not going to have any kind of negative comments to make about Sly & the Family Stone, because I've already been misquoted so much.... Everybody's been bit so much. So you are coming along at a time when I have scars on my heart." "That's the dirty laundry, the trash," said Greg about Joel's book. "And that's not what [the group] was about, really."

  In 1999, documentarians Nina Rosenblum and Dennis Watlington were engaged by New York Times Television to create a film about the careers of Sly and Jimi Hendrix, which took its title, The Skin I'm In, from one of Fresh's lesser known but more soulful tracks. Reflecting on the project, director Nina allows that the view through her lens was rosier than that through Joel's glasses. "We really think that Sly Stone was a complete unadulterated genius ... the likes of Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Mozart," she avows. As for Sly's diversion from artistic purpose, "He was like a reed, so in touch, as great artists are, with the times he lived in," says the filmmaker. "When things get repressive, [artists] really suffer, and I think he really suffered. The times went one way, and he went a different way.... Now, everything that that generation won is with us, in terms of civil rights and women's rights and understanding-the world will never be the same. But I think Sly paid for it.... He was taken away from us."

  Among its many high points, the film, now available in the form of a director's rough cut, included footage shot at brother Freddie's Evangelist Temple Fellowship Center in his hometown of Vallejo, affiliated with the Church of God in Christ. His mother, Alpha, who had carried her family's connection to that denomination from her native Texas, spoke to the filmmakers from one of the temple's pews, bedecked in her Sunday finery, just a few years' before her and her husband K. C. 's passing. "Freddie came home [to Vallejo], and I was so glad," she testified. "I thought he might draw Sly. And maybe someday he will." She remembered that Sly, her older son, "just really was good in church ... people would be hollering." Flashing forward, she commented, "I don't know what happened to him. It has to be the drugs." The Skin I'm In also featured input from music teacher David Froehlich, ex-manager David Kapralik, Bobby "The Swim" Freeman, and Billy Preston, as well as every member of the Family Stone except its leader. "The production company tried every which way [to reach Sly], but it wasn't to be," admits Nina. "We went to Beverly Hills, we tried to stake it out, we went to his front gate, we rang the bellnothing. His family tried on our behalf, but it was difficult for them, too."

  Dennis Watlington, the African American author and filmmaker who conducted most of the documentary's interviews, secured the Stewart family's input. "He came from the church, so when he showed up, they knew he was one of them, from them, by them, so we had much more access than we would ever have had," Nina points out. On camera, Jerry and Greg made reference to the deleterious effects of drugs, and record exec Steve Paley pointed out that Sly "loves being the Howard Hughes of his generation, he loves being inaccessible, he loves the idea that nobody knows who he is, where he is, or what he's doing and what his music is like. He loves being a legend." From a slightly different but equally amiable angle, George Clinton referred to his fellow performer and substance abuser as a "funny, witty, crazy, clever, halfass would-be pimp," and noted that "he had to be what he was: father, preacher, he had the best of all the things they needed to do what they did." Billy Preston, interviewed in his kitchen, revealed, "It's always a dream, to get this long keyboard that we both play. If you ever see Sly," he told the filmmakers, pounding his chest and smiling, "tell him that I love him from the heart!" Billy passed away in 2006.

  As aired on the Showtime cable television network, The Skin I'm In appeared in a version significantly edited by network func tionaries, and was closer to the "sorry crawl" associated by Nina with Joel's oral history than to the sprightly, respectful time trot intended by her and Dennis. "When we gave it to Showtime, what we thought was one of the best things we had ever done got cut up into something else altogether, like a rag story from a tabloid," she laments. "It was really a cheapening of Sly: Sly the bad boy, Sly the drug addict, without really any human or social dimension. We were very, very, very shocked." So, yet again, were some of the interviewees. The filmmakers were put in the position of having to disseminate apologies and explanations, which were generally accepted, though the experience may have revived suspicions about interviews and media exposure. Sly himself has not registered any opinion about the Showtime documentary. About Joel's book and the print media in general, he proclaims, "I don't read all of that. I don't even know about Joel Selvin."

  Keeping to his private music making, and far away from the public in an L.A. hillside home during the later '90s, Sly came to depend upon Mario Errico, the older brother of his former drummer Greg, as factotum and confidante. Mario, six years Greg's elder, got to know Sly while roaming San Francisco's North Beach nightlife in the mid-'60s. By the time the Family Stone, including Greg, had launched their performing career at Winchester Cathedral down the Peninsula, Mario was married and a father and thereby somewhat constrained in his night moves. Through several marriages, Mario held a variety of day jobs, while keeping contact with his brother and with Sly, and responding to occasional calls for help from the latter, until he became something of a livein helpmate in L.A. "There's lots of times I inspire him to do certain things, and it works," says Mario, "'cause he loves a lot of the things I love," including "music, motorcycles, and cars." The elder Errico was one of Sly's few acquaintances invited to extended stays in his abodes. Like many men in middle age, both Sly and Mario ultimately became restless to head down new roads in search of some of what had excited them long ago on the old ones.

  As nostalgic pop music, by the turn of the twenty-first century, Sly & the Family Stone's oeuvre received ever-wider (and newly lucrative) exposure in TV shows, ads, and dozens of films. Crossover to the youngest generations was powered by the presence of the Family Stone on soundtracks of the popular Shrek movies, A Knight's Tale, and more recently the retro comedy SemiPro. Jerry reports that he and other band members have reaped particularly bountiful benefits from commercial mechanical royalties for repeated usage of their songs for selling Toyotas ("Everyday People") and Carnival Cruises ("Hot Fun in the Summertime"). With attribution but not compensation, pithy messages and catch phrases embedded within Sly's lyrics show up daily in media worldwide, even when the stories have nothing to do with music. Commenting on the problems
and potential of humanity, Sly seems to have created his own gospel.

  The band's irresistible integration of kaleidoscopic soul and get-down funk forged templates for pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop. Those in their creative debt, acknowledged or not, include the Beastie Boys, Living Color, Lenny Kravitz, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose extravagantly thump in'-and-pluckin' bassist Flea has borrowed Larry's bass brilliance. The Chili Peppers ably covered Fresh's seductive "If You Want Me to Stay" in 1985, as did four-string luminary Victor Wooten on a live medley with "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" in 2001. Hip-hoppers Arrested Development fashioned "People Everyday" as a sharp rewrite of "Everyday People," doubling the take with a bonus "Metamorphosis Mix" on their 1992 album. With the advent of digital, snippets of Sly & the Family Stone's songs seemed to emerge everywhere as backbeats, riffs, and fanfares on the tracks of Everlast, Too Short, De La Soul, Fatboy Slim, Janet Jackson, the Beastie Boys, Kid Rock, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and others. The enduring influence of Sly extended even further. In the sophisticated and demanding arena of jazz, from which he'd long ago attracted the innovative Miles Davis, Sly became the co-subject of a seminar conducted at New York's Symphony Space in 2000 by irrepressible jazz clarinetist Don Byron, titled Contrasting Brilliance: The Music of Henry Mancini and Sly Stone. Several years later, "Stand" (with plenty of punch but no exclamation point) was extended to become the longest track, at eleven minutes, on trumpeter Wallace Roney's simply-titled album Jazz. And Jamie Davis sang a suave "If You Want Me to Stay" on his 2008 big-band album Vibe Over Perfection, produced and with drumming by Greg Errico.

  In 2001, over the waves in Holland, a pair of thirty-something Dutch twins, Arno and Edwin Konings, embarked on a massive long-term project (still in process) to annotate every detail of every year of Sly's life and every track he'd ever recorded. Their research made them aware of the primarily sensationalist approach of most journalists and other writers to the subject of Sly, "especially how he wasted his life," says Edwin. "I was stunned," he continues. "Here was one of the greatest groups ever, in our opinion, and everything that people talk about is the not showing up, the drugs, and they don't talk about the greatness of the music."

  The Rhythm and Blues Foundation presented Sly & the Family Stone with its Pioneer Award in 2001, for "lifelong contributions [which] have been instrumental in the development of rhythm and blues music." Sly didn't join his bandmates at the ceremony in Philadelphia.

  Love You for

  Who You Are

  2002-

  There should be someplace that we sit down and say, "Hey, let's work it out, let's get on the good foot together. Let's let bygones be bygones."

  -JAMES BROWN 1993 interview with Jeff Kaliss

  I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

  -BONNIE RAITT

  OST OF THE ORIGINAL MEMbers of the Family Stone convened in the back of a music store in Vallejo, California, in 2002, with the intention of recording again under the Family Stone name. Larry, who, with Greg, had been declared, in June of that year, one of the "25 Greatest Rhythm Sections of All Time" in Drumming magazine, expressed interest in a band reunion during the Rhythm and Blues Pioneer Award induction, but neither he nor Sly showed up in Vallejo, and Rustee Allen took over the bass duties. Activity extended into 2003 and to a studio in L.A., but Freddie declined to join a follow-up tour and funding dried up. The project was dropped, but not before the participants made a spirited appearance on funk scholar Rickey Vincent's annual Sly birthday radio show on KPFA-FM in Berkeley.

  Eager to maintain momentum, Greg accepted an invitation from a couple of local promoters to assemble a band for the San Francisco Funk Festival in 2004. "We did it as the San Francisco Funk All-Stars," he says. "I called Vet [Stewart] and Tiny [Mouton, both from Little Sister], and I got Jerry and Cynthia, Fred Wesley on trombone.... My intentions were just to bring the music, the integrity and the spirit of it, on the stage. I wasn't trying to recreate a Sly, that was the last thing I wanted to do." He hoped, though, that the enterprise might, somehow, some time, tempt Sly to join in. After the gig, at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, Greg summoned Jerry, Cynthia, Vet, and Tiny to team up with bassist Bobby Vega and guitarist Gail Muldrow (both of whom had played on High on You) and vocalists Skyler Jett and Fred Ross, in a group called the Funk Family Affair. "I was getting offers, and I saw it very clear in my mind what to do," says Greg. "But I found myself wrestling with the understanding of what it was, what it could be, and just trying to get it done."

  The new group was booked for "Quiet Storm" radio station KBLX's Stone Soul Picnic, on Memorial Day 2004 on the Cal State, Hayward campus. For Greg, it was "a musical letdown.... We went onstage and it just fell apart." Greg determined to form yet another band, the Family Stone Experience, with singer Ian Neville, son of the Neville Brothers' Aaron, from New Orleans, and without Vet. Greg arranged for this band to showcase for booking agents in Las Vegas, but soon began experiencing dissent among the players. "Some of the individuals in the band thought they should be making a fortune 'cause this was `the Family Stone,"' Greg attests. "There was a lot of misconception of perspective of reality." Jerry, says Greg, specifically challenged him about leadership of the group. Ultimately, Greg "stepped out of the way. I went, if I'm gonna do this anymore, I'm gonna do it with the Man [i.e., Sly] himself ... because you don't know how many times, over the last thirty years, people have come up to me and said, `Well, c'mon, we'll kidnap Sly and bring him up to the country and put him in a studio and he'll want to do it.' I've heard every kind of story you could imagine, knowing none of them could ever work. And everybody's tried everything, from Clive Davis to Jerry Goldstein to who knows what."

  Thus began the schism that resulted in the formation of two Family Stone spin-off bands: the Family Stone Experience, under Jerry's leadership, and the Phunk Phamily Affair, under Vet's. Greg went off, in 2005, to form Unity Music with producer Sam Beler and singer Jamie Davis, primarily devoted to showcasing Jamie's impressive, mellow chops in a big-band jazz setting. Meanwhile, the funky canon he'd helped create and had tried to resurrect started appearing on display stands alongside the lattes and Wi-Fi in Starbucks, under the title Higher!, a user-friendly compilation of Sly & the Family Stone hits, within the coffee giant's new Hear Music Opus collection of market-friendly CDs. Starbucks also marketed Different Strokes by Different Folks, a re-imagining of several Family Stone hits by young "urban" performers. These were apparent efforts to appeal both to older Sly fans and to their contemporary offspring. Vet's band got booked for an August 15, 2005, performance at L.A.'s Knitting Factory, a venue for jazz and "new" music, like the older club of the same name in New York. Vet, who now lives in a comfortable house in a newer section of her native Vallejo, had been in touch with her older brother, who, she says, "was kind of moved that I would take this on, after all these years, doing all the old songs, as opposed to something new." She called Sly and asked him to transport her to the Knitting Factory and was surprised when he assented. No one had seen him in public for a long time.

  "I didn't think I was going to hold him to it," she says. "So on the night of the gig, I went to his house [in Beverly Hills], and I said, `The gig's in about an hour.' And he went down and said, `Something's wrong with the bike."' A sometime collector of cars old and new, luxurious and not, Sly had recently begun to accrue motorcycles. "I said, `You just gotta flip that switch,"' Vet continues. "He forgot that he told me how to work the bike. So ... he went upstairs and got dressed, I was dressed up, and he came down and said, `We're gonna stop by Hollywood Boulevard.'

  "So I'm on the back of his bike, and we go down and stop at this store called Zebra. We go into the store and he says, `Dress my baby sister up, she's got a show to do! Dress her up like a biker!' And they did," Vet giggles. "I had on Harley-Davidson boots, the corset thing, the big baggy pants, the whole thing.... So I got back on the bike ... and when we g
ot there, they lifted up the side of the Knitting Factory so that Sly could drive his bike in. But Sly didn't drive right in, he sat outside, and people were just everywhere, and the tears were really flowing from people, because they really thought he'd died. People were just snapping pictures, and he was just as calm and collected as he could be." Sly was taken to a closed-off booth on the Knitting Factory's second level, while his sister joined the Phunk Phamily Affair onstage. "To me, that was one of the best shows we'd ever done," she says. "And when I looked up, where Sly was, I threw him a kiss, and he was dancing away. And I thought to myself, `Dancing to his own music!' And after the show ... he said to me, `You know what, you guys play my music better than I've ever heard anyone play it in my life.' That's when he took a real interest in us."

  And the wider music world seemed to be regenerating interest in Sly, or at least in what they remembered of him. Don Was, successful producer of acts as diverse as Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Paula Abdul, and Waylon Jennings, positioned Sly & the Family Stone among "The Greatest Artists of All Time" in his 2004 article in Rolling Stone. Sly "is a singular folk orchestrator; Duke Ellington is probably the best reference point," Don declared, before choosing another laudatory comparison from the world of art. "As time went on, Sly started using some more dissonant colors; he became like the Cezanne of funk. It's like he took these traditional James Brown groove elements and started putting orange into the picture." Don went on to reflect on the era of his great artist's greatest hits. "The so-called revolution that was coming at the end of the Sixties: We might have lost that one, but Sly won his own personal revolution, musically and in the minds of the audience. I just hope he knows that, and maybe that he's OK with it. I hope he's not sitting around with any kind of remorse. Because by any real criteria that you could measure success, this guy is a titan."