I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (14 page)

On ABC-TV's The Dick Cavett Show in July 1970, though, the
band presented a different image to its fans, less the Summer of Love fantasy of the past than the tough streetwise attitude that
would become associated with their next album, There's a Riot
Goin' On. Sly and Cynthia had expanded their hairstyles to sizeable Afros, Jerry and Greg's hair had lengthened, Rose was tough
and beautiful, and Freddie was topped by a swami's turban. After
a tight performance of their new single, "Thank You (Falettinme
Be Mice Elf Agin)," Sly ambled over to the guest area for a loose
quasi-conversation with the host. Sly made for a curious visual and
aural contrast with Dick and his other guest, the chipper )50s star
Debbie Reynolds.

"Could I dress like this and play in your group?" the buttoneddown Cavett needled Sly. "Wouldn't it look funny?"

"With people that were judging the way you were dressing," Sly
responded dully in a low-register mumble.

"There'd probably be a certain pressure on me ..." speculated
Cavett.

"There's a pressure on all of us," said Sly truthfully. How much
of Sly's demeanor in a number of TV appearances was due to preshow drugging (to which there were witnesses) and how much to
his lifelong fondness for shuck and jive is speculative, as is his
impact on TV viewers, who themselves varied in age and hipness
and reaction to the image of a charismatic and seemingly uncontrollable black man.

"Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" had been released
as a single in December 1969 and became one of the biggest hits
of 1970, scoring a number 1 spot on both the pop and R & B lists.
Riding on a seismic, octave-jumping bass line from Larry and
punctuated with Freddie's choked treble chords, the music dug an
irresistible groove, matched by the lyric's clever name-checks of
some of the band's previous tunes: "Dance to the Music," "Sing a
Simple Song," "You Can Make It If You Try," and "Everyday Peo ple." Just as the groove was a sign of the funk to come, the quirky
parenthetical title anticipated Prince, who would make phonetic
spelling one of his signature riffs, as would hip-hop stars of later
decades. "Thank You" was a double-A release, with the radiant and
very different "Everybody Is a Star"-on which all the Family
vocalists, Sly, Larry, Cynthia, Freddie, and Rose-individually
shared one of Sly's most positive lyrics and the band's most loving
arrangements, evoking the good vibes that were in practice starting to slip away from their lives and music. (These two songs,
along with "Hot Fun in the Summertime," were the only nonalbum tracks on Greatest Hits.)

You can hear in "Thank You" and "Everybody Is a Star" the
sound that would influence a number of brassy rock ensembles
throughout the'70s and later. There would be currents of the Family's spiritualized, horn-honking soul and funk in bands like
Blood, Sweat & Tears; Chicago; in spurts in the Rolling Stones; and
more distantly in Santana and Steely Dan.

The popular judgment on Riot is that it's evidence of Sly's fall
from a state of sunlit grace into a miasma of dark introspection,
fueled by chemical self-indulgence. In the wider cultural context,
the album is pictured as an accompaniment to the Baby Boomers'
disillusioned rejection of idealism, based on the preceding
years' scourge of assassinations, war, political intrigue, and bad
drugs.

Riot does in fact sound different from much of what preceded
it, and in looking more closely at Sly's personal circumstances
during the production of the album, likely influences on its sound
can be discovered. Making too tight a tie between that sound and
social and historical circumstances is tempting but fallacious,
since much of what was happening to the world in 1971, as well
as some of what was happening in Sly's life, had in fact already been happening in the years when Sly and the band were putting
out rather different kinds of albums, and would continue for
some while after. But 1971, the year of Riot, is a good point from
which to take a look at the times, however little Sly himself may
have been prone to such reflection.

Attention among Americans in the '70s was shifted toward
more militant manifestations of black pride. The civil rights movement, focused on righting wrongs perpetrated by whites on blacks,
had resulted in the federally enforced Civil Rights Act of 1964, with
marches and protests before and after. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968, was a shock to all Americans, but it
didn't do away with peaceful protest. The most visible of the militant groups, the Black Panther Party, had been founded back in
1966 in Oakland, while Sly was still gigging in North Beach on the
other side of the San Francisco Bay. By the time of Riot, the Black
Panthers' power and presence in the press had grown alongside
Sly's, and it was no surprise that party members started making
overtures to Sly, Jimi Hendrix, and other reigning black rockers.
But Sly clearly wasn't interested. His action in assembling a racially
and gender-integrated unit spoke louder than any of his rare public declarations on racism, and the Family Stone, unlike some rock
and folk acts, never manifested itself as part of civil rights demonstrations or the movement overall. Instead, the band expressed its
collective consciousness on the subject in musical form, most
famously in "Everyday People," "Underdog," and most explicitly
"Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey."

Critic Greil Marcus, in his 1974 book Mystery Train, noted,
"With this album [Riot], Sly is giving his audience-particularly
his white audience-precisely what they don't want. What they
want from Sly is an upper, not a portrait of what lies behind his
big freaky black superstar grin. One gets the feeling, listening to this album, that Sly's disastrous concerts of the past year have not
been so much a matter of insulting his audience as attacking it,
with real bitterness and hate, because of what its demands on him
have forced him to produce. It is an attack on himself as well, for
having gone along with those demands."

The shooting of students at Kent State in 1970 shocked but
failed to stop those who'd been protesting the Vietnam War on
U.S. college campuses since the early'60s. By 1969, wider protests
were moving tens of thousands of people of all ages along the
streets of San Francisco and other cities. Among the growing number of bands collectively referred to as being part of the San Francisco sound were several with antiwar messages in their lyrics,
most notably Country Joe and the Fish and the Jefferson Airplane.
These and other acts, along with folk performers like Bob Dylan,
Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger, provided inspiration at larger gatherings for peace. Creedence Clearwater Revival (which started in El
Cerrito, a few minutes south of Vallejo) got their wailing rocker of
a protest song, "Fortunate Son," onto the charts in the autumn of
1969. Other successful antiwar tunes included John Lennon's
"Give Peace a Chance," in'69, Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun," and
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's "Ohio," both in '70. From the sector of soul and R & B, there were Edwin Starr's "War" and the
Temptations' "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is
Today)," also in '70, and Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" the
next year. Sly & the Family Stone sang even less about war than
they did about racism, though their apparent promotion of life
and self-realization allowed them to keep company with artists
making clearer statements of resistance.

Allusions to drugs, marijuana in particular, can be discovered
in the lyrics of some of the songs on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde,
Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced, and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Drugs aren't specifically referenced in
any of Sly & the Family Stone's lyrics, although they certainly figured in the band's creative process long before the making of Riot,
and over-indulgence in harder drugs affected the production of
that and later albums.

"We were a pot-smoking, wine-drinking band until cocaine
was introduced," Jerry Martini pointed out to Joel Selvin. This
change of habits was not to be taken lightly. Marijuana, relatively
inexpensive and available, might be said to have furthered some of
the ideals promoted in Sly's earlier lyrics, including the relaxation
of differences, the pursuit of happiness, and the enjoyment of
social and personal love. For Sly's and the Baby Boomers generation, powders and pills generally came along later and at a greater
cost, literally and figuratively.

Cocaine and amphetamines could also function as a means
toward the end of sustaining high energy and production. None
of this, of course, could guarantee a great musical experience. The
celebrity and money, which peaked for the Family Stone after
Woodstock, meant that the band members could attract sources
of cocaine and afford to maintain serial highs, as well as to obtain
prescription drugs. Jerry told Joel that the band at one point had
in tow a physician who "was really impressed with the music business [and] felt that Sly needed ... psychosedatives.... You wake
up, take Placidyl, which [Sly] got from his doctor. Then, you snort
enough cocaine until you can talk straight. It was like this up-anddown roller coaster." There were reports that at some point, Sly
may have had cocaine prescribed for relief from an ulcer. Stephani
Owens told Joel Selvin how, during her early days of service as a
personal assistant to Sly, he'd shared some pharmaceutical cocaine
with her. "As it turns out, he was getting his drugs from the dentist," she said. "Then I found out there was a doctor in New York that would give him and anybody in the group prescription drugs,
yellow jackets [downers], etcetera."

Sly seemed to be finding it difficult to get off the roller coaster
in time to make it to his bookings, nearby and on tour. "He used
to cancel, which also used to piss me off," Jerry related for Joel. "He
would have six months of fantastic bookings, then, at the last
minute, he would cancel them. He was incapable of going on the
road, as he had for the last twenty years. Incapable of functioning
as a traveling musician, doing what he could do so well." "He was
never on time," said Stephani in Mojo magazine. "It was always an
effort to get the band to the gig and get them onstage on time....
It was mostly Freddie and Sly because even when the rest of the
group would catch a commercial flight and do what they were supposed to do, with Freddie and Sly, I would be trying to find a private plane for them to go on." Sly gave his own explanation later
to Vanity Fair about his perennial tardiness for gigs, suggesting
that promoters and roadies encouraged this behavior so that they
could profit from it: "I got tired of going to concerts where I'd have
to pay a bond, pay money in case I didn't show up," he admitted.
"I later found out that they had a deal going between the promoter
and the guy that was taking me to the gig. So I would put up the
$25,000 or the $50,000. The guy with me would help me be late,
and I didn't realize that was what was going on until later. Then
they'd split the money.... I wasn't so focused after a while." Whatever the setup, Sly was five hours late for a show in Washington,
D.C., causing a fan melee outside the venue of Constitution Hall
in early 1970. He ducked out of five concerts in succession a year
later, his excuse, quoted in Rolling Stone, being simply, "Sometimes
you don't feel your soul at seven-thirty."

There was a long wait also for Sly and the band's next recorded
product, and CBS officials were getting a little nervous. "I'd be fibbing if I said I wasn't somewhat concerned," says Epic's Al
DeMarino, "but [Sly's] back catalog was selling constantly, and
there was promoter interest and press interest. I had great confidence that he could do it." David Kapralik's confidence was waning. "I had no influence on what Sly was doing," he told Mojo. "I
was managing the unmanageable.... His two personas-the shy,
innocent poet Sylvester Stewart and the streetwise character he'd
invented, Sly Stone-were torn apart. He numbed himself with
cocaine." Clive Davis, who headed Epic, was of two minds. "At
some point, I started getting concerned about stories I heard about
Sly's personal habits," he recalled for Vanity Fair. "But every time
I met with him, he was on top of his game. I was somewhat innocent of the lifestyle going on around me, whether it was him or
Janis Joplin."

For those fans financially able to partake of pills and powders,
harder drugs might provide the illusion of sharing, at least for a
while, the high life of performers. Whatever uppers or downers
may have been shared by the fans at Madison Square Garden in
September 1971, the effect was not lost on Don Heckman, reviewing for The New York Times. "The sheer, exuberant joy that I've
seen flowing out of the audiences at Sly's past concerts seems to
have been replaced by an almost desperate self-conditioning," he
wrote, "a sheer determination that dancing up and down, singing
`higher, higher, higher,' waving, whistling, and shouting will somehow revive the old magic. But it isn't working, because the Family
Stone sounds as though it is just going through the motions....
Could it be that the milk and honey have been flowing too freely
in the gardens of the gods?"

There's a Riot Goin' On took form not in any godly garden, but
in the Record Plant, a new state-of-the-art recording studio in
Northern California, and at what Jerry Martini described as "a stately mansion," at 783 Bel Air Road, near Beverly Hills. Formerly
the home of '30s screen sweetheart Jeannette MacDonald, it bore
evidence of its more recent occupants, John and Michelle Phillips,
of the Mamas and Papas, a'60s folk-rock group. There was a home
recording studio, installed by John Phillips, a small buffet of drugs,
and a general mess. Sly had connected with the property, which he
rented for a reputed $12,000 a month, through Terry Melcher, who
was the son of Doris Day and a well-connected party animal
favored by the young entertainers of the late '60s and early '70s,
among them John and Michelle, the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson,
and actress Candice Bergen. Terry had established success as producer of his mother's television show and of records for Columbia, but he also embodied the spendthrift wealth and casual
debauchery of young Hollywood. Dennis Wilson had introduced
Terry to ex-convict and would-be mass murderer Charles Manson,
in hopes of furthering the latter's songwriting aspirations.