In this extract from JEFF KALLIS’ new book I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & The Family Stone we look at the 1968-70 period following the releases of Sly & The Family Stone’s
early albums, the relatively ignored A Whole New Thing, their debut hit ‘Dance To The Music’ and the fine follow-up, Life.
The band’s saxophonist JERRY MARTINI and drummer GREG ERRICO speak about the Family’s continuing growth and popularity.
O
VER THE RELATIVELY BRIEF PERIOD OF gestation of its first three albums and of the public’s reaction to them, Sly & The Family Stone were transformed from best-kept
secret to an inflating commercial success. Along the way, on the road between coasts, the band was less recognised and more challenged. “I remember that Sly and I drove the equipment truck,” says Jerry, “and Daddy (Sly’s father KC Stewart) followed behind us in a huge station wagon. Drivers changed every hundred miles or so. Sly and I changed when we felt like it, but I usually drove and Sly wrote. We talked lots, which kept us awake. These were great times, when there were not very much hard drugs. We enjoyed wine, a few drinks, and some weed, but not too much, as it makes you too tired to drive.
“There were no roadies at first, the band was the roadies,” Jerry continues. “Daddy was the road manager. We learned the hard way how to read maps correctly. The straight line is not the fastest when it comes to highway travel. We learned it was so much faster to take the Ohio Turnpike and major highways, as opposed to driving through some scary backwoods towns.”
The larger community of Detroit, where racial tension had erupted in ’67, provided its own drama. “There were riots going on, there was curfew, it was three in the morning, and we got lost in the back streets somewhere,” Greg remembers. “And all of a sudden the National Guard pulls us over. And here they look in the van, and it’s black and white hippies, and that’s challenging. But when they pull us out and line us up, Sly starts mouthing off, not accepting certain things. We didn’t have any weapons, but we’re up against the wall, they have machine guns, there’s a race riot going on, and this is a very tense situation. And Sly is treating it like it’s Sunday afternoon: ‘Don’t say anything, ‘cause you’re gonna hear it back from me.’ That was challenging to the point of dangerous, and we’re literally yelling at him to back off.” In Greg’s opinion this incident, and others like it, was less a reaction of the authorities to the band’s racial makeup than to its leader’s personality, “’cause he had a very sharp and defined attitude about what he represented and what he was saying. I think that challenged more people than just the fact that he was black.”
Back in New York, the group relished the satisfaction of being presented by Bill Graham, who a year earlier had refused to book them at his influential Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. In March of ’68, the West Coast impresario had opened the Fillmore East in New York’s East Village, and a few months later he received a call from Epic’s Al DeMarino. “Rumour was afloat that Jimi Hendrix was coming in,” Al recalls. “Now, Bill Graham, at Fillmore East and West, had a three-act format: opening act, supporting act, headliner, and would very seldom think of deviating from that. So I called Bill and I said, ‘Look, why don’t we try this: why don’t we have a 100% equal star billing. Below Jimi, special guest star: Sly & The Family Stone.’ He said, ‘Let’s go with it!’”
What they’d created was a night to remember in rock history, with classic comparisons and contrasts. Both Sly’s Family and Jimi’s Experience were multi-racial
bands led by charismatic black men, but Jimi’s music at this point was much more blues-based, though he’d soon find that approach restrictive. Jimi was having to contend with the reputation he’d created as “The Wild Man of Pop”, prompting audience expectations of his guitar acrobatics, inverting the instrument, licking the strings lasciviously, and maybe destroying the guitar onstage, all the while coaxing hallucinogenic wails of feedback from stacks of amplifiers. It may have challenged Jimi that Sly and his up-and-coming act were being perceived more as entertainers and musicians than as a psychedelic freak show. This contrast may have helped influence Jimi, in his last years, to turn away from the pure guitar theatrics that helped launch his career, and move towards the more soulful palette displayed on Electric Ladyland and Band of Gypsys.
“And what Sly did, the first show on that Saturday night,” Al recounts about the Fillmore face-off, “he literally marched the band off the stage [while doing the hambone], through the aisles and marched the entire audience out onto Second Avenue before the second show was about to begin… Traffic had to be halted for about an hour.” In addition, Jimi had to allow for a 45- instead of the usual 20-minute break before he took the stage, to give the crowd enough time to cool down.
During a period where he and Jimi were dating the same woman, Al had a chance to assess the guitar legend’s personal take on Sly. “I think there was some competitive spirit within,” says Al, “but I know there was great respect… I know that [Jimi] admired Sly’s music and wanted to go beyond the power trio,” the configuration of his Experience act.
The Family Stone’s reputation for eye-and-ear-filling entertainment justified a booking in London in September of ’68. But hints of troubles to come ended up dooming the mini-tour. Sly refused to begin one show when he was offered what he considered an inadequate substitute for his own keyboard, delayed in transit. Then (bassist) Larry Graham got busted for possession of a joint that he’d taken from Jerry, despite Jerry’s warning to dispose of it before passing through customs. The flustered group returned to the States and to the recording of the optimistic ‘You Can Make It If You Try’, the earliest track of what would become the fourth album, Stand! Production of the record continued on into the first part of ’69, with the band shuttling between New York and San Francisco, partly to work at the latter’s Pacific High Recording Studios and partly for the Stewart siblings to keep in touch with their genetic family and its local church.
The first hit off the new album, released in April ’69, was ‘Everyday People’, an anthem in which Sly clearly stated that “My own beliefs are in my song,” seemingly inspired by the ethos of ’60s San Francisco. Referencing awareness of the era’s variety of race, class, and lifestyle – “different strokes for different folks”– the song maintained that, “I am no better, and neither are you / We are the same whatever we do”. Larry sustained a one-note pulse under the message, later telling Guitar World: “I’d never done that before... that’s where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we’d be allowed to do that.” The song’s sentiments matched the hopes of the generation they
were aimed at, to expand and maintain egalitarian ideals and tolerance. And with this song, the band which seemed to be not only singing about these hopes, but actually living them, was rewarded with its first-ever place at the top of the pop hit singles chart, for a month.
The title track, ‘Stand!’, was the next to land on the charts, though not as high. It opened with a dramatic roll from Greg Errico and featured yet another of Larry’s powerfully percussive bass figures. In a rare move, the coda for this song was recorded separately by Sly with studio musicians after he decided it needed more brassy drama, befitting its lyrical declarations: “You’ve been sitting much too long / There’s a permanent crease in your right and wrong” and “There’s a midget standing tall / And a giant beside him about to fall.” The subtlety, imagination, and sometime humour of Sly’s music writing were beginning to distinguish him among pop songsmiths as much as it did his musical virtuosity. “You could hear the songs getting stronger, the melodies getting stronger,” Larry told Guitar World. “We were becoming a better band, better musicians, and [Sly] was becoming a better writer.”
Sly himself wielded the bass on ‘You Can Make It If You Try’. The propulsive, intoxicating ‘I Want To Take You Higher’ only made it to #60 on the singles charts (on the flip side of ‘Stand!’), but was to return to prominence later, on the strength of its inclusion on the set list at Woodstock.
The Stand! album itself, which reached #13 on the Billboard pop charts in April ’69, held experimentations and revelations beyond what was manifest in its individual chartable hits. They included Sly’s use of the vocoder, an early synthesiser which had the effect of making his a voice sound like an eerie, trippy electronic instrument. The album’s second track began with the dual advisory “Don’t call me nigger, whitey / Don’t call me whitey, nigger.” This polemical reference to racism, very rare in Sly’s lyrics, effectively blocked airplay, but the song highlighted Rose in a soulful plaint, partnered by Freddie’s roiling wah-wah guitar. An atypically dense evocation of Hendrix-like blues-rock, it sounded a rightful reaction to recent strife, including the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. a year earlier. ‘Sing a Simple Song’ broadcast a very different, sunnier sentiment in funky syncopation. The psychedelic blues instrumental ‘Sex Machine’, at 14 minutes, far outlasted most rock album tracks of the time, and prefigured the jam band format of coming years. Freddie reflected later that he’d rehearsed laboriously for this jam, but ended up being allowed to improvise on the spot.
Stand! contained yet more remarkable tracks and held onto the charts for over a hundred weeks. It served to solidify the Family Stone’s unique synthesis of vocal- centred R&B with guitar-based rock. “Oh, man, that was the greatest – our greatest album, without a doubt,” Freddie later opined to Guitar World. “It’s my favourite because we were still fresh and hungry and sharp.” If they’d disbanded at this point in time, it would have already scored a secure place in rock history.
I Want To Take You Higher: The Life And Times Of Sly And The Family Stone by Jeff Kaliss is published by Backbeat Books ISBN: 9780879309343
47
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84