I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (19 page)

Steve Paley recalls that Irwin Siegelstein, who'd replaced Clive
Davis at CBS, allotted some $25,000 for Sly's wedding party, scheduled for June 5, 1974, at Madison Square Garden, the scene of
some of the Family Stone's best-remembered performances in
New York City. There would also be a wedding reception at the
Starlight Room of the Waldorf-Astoria. Steve engaged celebrated
fashion designer Halston (with Sly reportedly paying the bill) to
clothe Sly and Kathy, their mothers, all Sly's siblings, the other
members of the Family Stone and Little Sister groups, Bubba
Banks, an additional personal assistant nicknamed Buddha, and a
dozen black models, serving as a sort of collective flower girl but
bearing gilded palms instead of blossoms. To Freddie Stone's disappointment, Steve was designated best man.

The wedding gig produced the expected and much-needed
media attention for Sly, but not necessarily in the tone that Steve
would have preferred. Maureen Orth, in Newsweek, characterized
Sly as "one of the shrewdest and highest-paid talents in the pop
world," and declared that he'd "always been the badass of the rock
world." She described the wedding scene as a performance before
"23,000 screaming freaks." Steve later confided to Joel Selvin that
Sly had attempted to seduce Maureen on the evening of the event.
George W. S. Trow, a writer friend of Steve's, provided a more sympathetic and detailed-though sardonic-account for the New
Yorker magazine. He portrayed Sly as "a lean, graceful man with a
large smile" and went on to state, "He is in control of his leanness
and his grace. He is in control of his large smile. He is in control of many of the people around him, and, sporadically, he is in control of his considerable talent." Accompanying Steve on a premarital visit to Sly's Central Park West flat and waiting to take the star
to a fitting at Halston's, George was inspired to comment, "Sly uses
small, benign delays in the way that a lion uses small, undeadly
nips to indicate affection while calling attention to his teeth." One
virtue of Sly's particular talent, the writer observed, is: "A singer
who appeals to hip blacks and hip whites at the same time makes
a lot of money." But about the purported evolution of the ideals
of the '60s into the harsher realities of the '70s, George felt that
"the waited-for convergence of white and black experience on the
countercultural grid failed to take place." Of Ken Roberts, who
attended and helped plan the wedding, George wrote, "He became
Sly's manager in 1972, at a time when Sly was very badly behaved,
when, Roberts says, no one else wanted the job. He books Sly's
concerts and exercises some tactical control, but he seems to have
few long-term ambitions for Sly. While Paley (who is almost Sly's
age) and others at Epic Records seem eager to make a new career
for Sly, Roberts seems willing to ride the old one out."

The Madison Square Garden wedding, then, was conceived as
an entertaining and hopefully regenerative part of Steve's script,
not Ken's. Playing the role of master of ceremonies was Don Cornelius, immaculate host of TV's syndicated music program Soul
Train. Geraldo Rivera was billed as both celebrity reporter and
"eyewitness usher." By Maureen Orth's reckoning, though, the
"Family Affair for 23,000" never lived up to the planning and
expectations. "Security guards," she noted, "wouldn't let Sly and
his bride march down the aisle. The Humane Society called and
said they'd arrest [set designer and de facto wedding director Joe]
Fula if he released 500 white doves in the Garden.... And Tom
Donahue, the 400-pound disc jockeywho was originally supposed to perform the ceremony, had to bow out because he wasn't
ordained in New York State," although mail-order ordinations
were readily available. The Garden service was in fact performed
by B. R. Stewart, ordained as a Bay Area-based bishop in the
Church of God in Christ, the sect in which Sly's mother, Alpha,
had been raised in Denton, Texas. After listening to a timely musical rendition of "Family Affair," the audience became energized,
and mama Alpha took the mike to remind them that her son's
nuptials were "a sacred ceremony." The service was followed by a
secular Family Stone concert, which for Maureen, at least, "showed
Sly's lack of preparation with his band." Then came the reception,
to which Sly was conveyed in "his brand-new $38,000 brown Mercedes limo, one of a dozen cars he owns." Select guests at the reception included New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard
Bernstein's daughter Jamie, Judy Garland's daughter Lorna Luft,
and pop artist Andy Warhol.

Looking back on all the hoopla, Steve now admits that "it
didn't do anything for record sales." George, in the New Yorker,
drolly closed his piece by noting, "Sly's new album, Small Talk, has
picked up some momentum on the charts. Currently, it is thirtynine on Billboard's list, up from forty-nine." But Steve insists that
the wedding did in fact "establish Sly as a mainstream artist again.
He was asked to host the Mike Douglas Show for a week, and he
could have done soundtracks, had he a manager that had any kind
of foresight.... If he'd had [record mogul] David Geffen or someone like that, or even David Kapralik, he would have known how
to take advantage of the spotlight that was back on him."

For a while, Sly's career seemed more solid than his marriage.
Kathy sued Sly for divorce in November 1974, less than six months
after the wedding, complaining he had abducted Sly Jr., among
other misdeeds. "He beat me, held me captive, and wanted me to be in a menage a trois," Kathy confessed to People magazine in
1996. "I didn't want that world of drugs and weirdness." But their
relationship continued on for several years. "He'd write me a song
or promise to change, and I'd try again. We were always fighting,
then getting back together." One painful source of conflict was
Kathy's discovery that Sly had fathered a daughter, Sylvette
Phunne, with his bandmate Cynthia, in 1976. Later that year, Sly's
favored fighting dog, Gunn, lacerated Sly Jr. 's scalp at the couple's
rented mansion in Novato, in Northern California. Their divorce
was finalized after a long estrangement, and Sly was commanded
to provide child support, for which noncompliance put him in
legal trouble several times. "Sly never grew out of drugs," said
Kathy. "He lost his backbone and destroyed his future."

I've just got to get out. Maybe to Venus or
somewhere. Someplace you won't be able to
find me.

-JIMI HENDRIX

Funk is to do the best you can and then leave it
alone. You can truly say, "Funk it!" 'cause you
did the best you can. You don't have to be
guilty.

-GEORGE CLINTON
1994 interview with Jeff Kaliss

OWEVER MUCH HIS PERsonal life and his performing and
recording prospects would later
dim, Sly looked pretty good under TV lights. Appearing on The
Mike Douglas Show a month prior to the Madison Square Garden
spectacle, he offered up a solo piano rendition of "If You Want Me
to Stay," which exquisitely showed off the harmonic structure of
the song, as well as its creator's accomplished keyboard technique. A month after the wedding, Sly returned as Mike's co-host. The
microphone seemed to like Sly's radio-trained, hip baritone voice,
the camera liked his large smile and fantastic wardrobe, and Sly
seemed comfortable seated beside Mike, a change from the hot
seat he'd shared with TV host Dick Cavett three and four years earlier. Douglas and Stone were an act that could appeal even to daytime suburban housewives. Among the show's guests, Sly played
particularly well off Muhammad Ali and the Smothers brothers,
who were comfortable in themselves and felt no need to compete
for attention.

But off-camera, Sly became further distanced from what
remained of his original bandmates. The Family Stone was booked,
alongside Kool & the Gang, for the better part of a week in January 1975 at Radio City Music Hall in New York, but the booking
drew fractional audiences to the 6000-seat venue. There was much
grumbling among band members about inadequate transportation, accommodation, and other matters, and mumblings throughout the audience that Robert "Kool" Bell and his Jersey City-based
up-and-comers had blown the West Coast hippies off the stage. In
short, it was a bumpy lowering of the lifestyle and adulation to
which Sly and his band had become accustomed at the beginning
of the decade. John Rockwell of the New York Times pronounced
the concert as "totally out of touch with recession realities," and
then elaborated: "Worst of all was the quality of Sly's music. In the
not-too-distant past, Sly was one of the most exciting and significant forces in American pop music. But now he has taken to the
stalest of rehashes of his greatest hits, ignoring his most recent
work, submerging the communal energies of his band under a silly
ego trip and rushing perfunctorily through the music he does play.
It would be easy to dismiss Sly out of hand. Except that the memories of what he used to be make one more sad than angry."

Cynthia lamented to Joel Selvin about this period: "Not having rehearsals began to take a toll on my playing." Soon after, she
said, "I just stopped getting calls for gigs" from Sly. Bubba Banks,
still married to Rose, noted to Joel that his wife and other members of the band had "come from three or four thousand [dollars] "
for their former shows "to two hundred and fifty" at Radio City.
"And I say, `Rose won't be getting that-we outta here. I took
Rose." Jerry recalls that Ken Roberts had told him, "I really like
you, Jerry, but I don't think Sly really needs you. I think he can just
hire a band." Sly's brother, Freddie, reportedly took his frustration
about Radio City out on Ken, physically. It was Ken, though, who
put up the money for Jerry to get home to California after the
show. Sly had left them all in the lurch.

Later in 1975, Sly made an appearance on TV during the
American Music Awards, but little else was seen of him. In November, he released his first post-Family Epic album, High on You. Joel
recounts how Sly, while recording the album with a "square john"
CBS engineer named Roy Segal in San Francisco, had "set up a tent
in the studio. So, when he needs to be `inspired' he goes into the
tent," as if to say, "'I'm not gonna do blow around this cracker.' "
Sly's widest exposure that year may have been in a Playboy feature,
which predictably celebrated the waning artist's still-luxurious and
licentious existence. In the Summer of 1976, Sly flew to the Sunshine Festival in Hawaii, and he appeared on two TV specials in
the latter part of the year. In December, he released Heard Ya
Missed Me, Well I'm Back on the Epic label, but it failed to get
Sly back on the charts. His Back on the Right Track, for Warner
Bros. in 1979, managed to chart, but no higher than number 152.
During the Warner period, there had been one TV appearance,
on The Midnight Special, and a San Francisco news spot, both in
1977. Reflecting a few years later, Sly said to journalist Michael Goldberg, "If you think about it, what could I do after `[I Want to
Take You] Higher' or `If You Want Me to Stay'? I wanted to go fishing, man. Or drive my own car. For a long time, I didn't understand anywhere but hotel rooms, the inside of airplanes, and
trying to figure out a way that I didn't come off wrong to human
beings."