I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (20 page)

Over time, benefited by the recent re-releases in CD format, the
albums Sly recorded after the breakup of the Family Stone have
been more clearly valued. High on You, ascribed to Sly Stone and
not to any backing band, has been praised as a prime chunk of mid'70s funk, whose title track made it to number 3 on the R & B
charts. Heard Ya Missed Me, supported by a "new" Family that
included Cynthia and Vet Stewart, and featuring ascending blond
guitar angel Peter Frampton on the "Let's Be Together" track, maintained a perhaps deceptive upbeat mood. Back on the Right Track
packed a funky punch with the hard-hitting "Who's to Say" and
"Remember Who You Are," the latter jointly credited to Sly
and Bubba Banks. In 1982, Sly created Ain't But the One Way, also
for Warner, with lyrics engagingly reflective of his wit and of the
sort of insightful wisdom he should better have applied to himself.
Even his cover (rare for him) of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me,"
and "Ha Ha, Hee Hee," his bandmate Pat Rizzo's songwriting contribution (another rarity), are distinct and imaginative. Back on the
Right Track had garnered a number 31 spot on the R & B charts in
1979, and its "Remember Who You Are" rated number 38 among
R & B singles. But Ain't But the One Way didn't hit, and there was
no successful follow-up in the '80s. Sly continued to flicker in the
public eye in two different lights: as the source of occasional news
flashes about his misdeeds, and as the inspiration, with his nowextinct Family Stone, for a thriving crop of music makers.

Earth, Wind & Fire, Maurice White's audacious and artful
blend of mysticism and soul, had already mounted mammoth
stage shows and hits like "Shining Star" and "Serpentine Fire." The
Commodores, boasting the superb pop sensibility of vocalist and
songwriter Lionel Richie, were evolving from the dance boogie of
"Slippery When Wet" and "I Feel Sanctified" to slower love songs
like "Three Times a Lady" and "Sail On." Kool & the Gang suggested the influence of the band they'd once bested at Radio City,
with the infectious funk singles "Celebration" and "Get Down on
It." All these acts confirmed the viability of Sly and his band's formula of concocting pop from soul and R & B ingredients, and of
manifesting (as long as possible) a fixed group identity. It was a
vital change from the older Motown or Stax-Volt studio concoctions, with their contracted, offstage songwriters.

GEORGE CLINTON HELPED TO KEEP Sly both stoned and
musically active during some parts of the'80s. George was founder
and mastermind of Parliament-Funkadelic, a loose but productive
project operating under George's highly-in all senses of the
word-conceptual direction. P-Funk had served up a righteous
mix of psychedelia and R & B, not unlike some of what was served
up by the Family Stone. By the mid-'70s, they'd taken theatrical
costumed rock well beyond the Family, in live appearances that
were more spectacles than concerts and on hardcore funk albums
like Maggot Brain and Mothership Connection. Guitarist Eddie
Hazell sounded like an even more acidified Jimi Hendrix, and rubbery bassist Bootsy Collins seemed heir apparent to Larry Graham. "He's my idol, forget all that `peer' stuff," George testified to
the Washington Post in 2006 about Sly. "I heard Stand! and it was like: man, forget it! That band was perfect. And Sly was like all the
Beatles and all of Motown in one."

While soliciting his idol's presence on his new disc The Electric Spanking of War Babies in August 1981, George was arrested
with Sly in Los Angeles, for freebasing cocaine in a car. It was neither Sly's first nor last brush with the law. He'd been arrested and
placed on probation for coke possession in 1973, and in 1979 had
been sued by the IRS for nonpayment of back taxes and put in
rehab in lieu of criminal charges after another coke arrest.

In February 1982, Ken Roberts resigned as Sly's manager.
Throughout the coming months, Sly tried showcasing his greatest
hits with a newly assembled, Georgia-based incarnation of the
Family Stone, but his efforts were drawing increasingly jaundiced
scrutiny. In San Francisco, there were reports of his forgetting
lyrics and switching abruptly from song to song, confusing the
band. In Toronto, after taking a fifteen-minute break, Sly returned
to the stage to perform "I Want to Take You Higher" without realizing that the other players had already left the stage. The reviewer
for the Toronto Globe and Mail summed up the audience reaction:
"Some of the people leaving the bar following Sly Stone's abortive
concert at the Nickelodeon last night (his second this week) were
calling the show a rip-off. It wasn't that so much as it was embarrassing and sad." In July 1982, after being busted for cocaine at the
Westwood Plaza Hotel in L.A., Sly identified himself as his brother,
Freddie.

Through the rest of the decade, Sly accumulated a rap sheet
that spanned the continent and a variety of charges. He was
arrested in 1983 for possession of a sawed-off shotgun in Illinois.
In Florida, he was variously charged with grand theft, welching on
a hotel bill, and drug possession. In California, in 1986, he was
apprehended for nonpayment of child support (to Kathy) and for possession of coke. In the press, Sly was gaining a different kind of
celebrity, as a scoff-law. He was photographed asleep at a court
hearing ("Are we keeping you awake?" the judge asked sardonically), he skipped bail after his L.A. coke arrest, and he in general
managed to remain elusive, so that certain of his indiscretions
took years to catch up with him.

In the time-honored tradition of celebrities, Sly passed in and
out of rehabilitation centers. "We didn't accept `Sly' in our therapy
sessions," Dr. Richard Sapp reported to Spin magazine about the
singer's stay in the Lee Mental Health Clinic in Ft. Myers, Florida.
"Sylvester can control Sly.... Once he realized that we were serious, he became Sylvester. As long as he continues to do that, he
shouldn't be having problems with drugs." Sly wasn't quite ready
to control himself, though, and Serena-Marie Sanfilipo, a woman
he'd met by chance in Florida, stepped in to help. She claims to
have served as his court-assigned drug therapist, but her service
seems to have been at times both intimate and unusual. "After I
saw that people just kept giving him crack, I just locked him up in
my house," she recounts in an interview. "I had to be with him for
all the tours, and all the rehabs.... He kept having to go back into
rehab."

Despite the drugs and the consequences, Sly made himself
available to occasional musical collaborators during the '80s. They
included George Clinton, Bobby Womack, and Jesse Johnson, the
last a talented representative of the next generation of funk and a
sometime colleague of emerging funk royalty Prince. Bobby took
Sly under his wing during a spell in rehab in 1984. "We used to be
as tight as bark on a tree," Bobby later lamented to the Washington
Post. "As the drugs set in, the warm, creative side went away. And
then it got worse and worse." Sly also worked on occasional tracks
and demos, in the preceding and following decades, with REO Speedwagon, Elvin Bishop, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, the
Temptations, Bonnie Pointer, Gene Page, the Brothers Johnson,
Maceo Parker, and Earth, Wind & Fire.

In November 1987, Sly was scheduled for two nights at the Las
Palmas Theatre in L.A., where a Los Angeles Times reviewer found
the sound system inadequate and Sly's voice "thin and strained
when he tries to sing high melodies," perhaps a side effect of coke
or uppers. Returning to the venue on the following night, Sly was
arrested for allegedly owing $2,500 in back child support. The previous night's performance would count at his last real gig for
almost twenty years.

Sly paid off his child-support debt the following month, but
at some point prior to his scheduled preliminary hearing on drug
charges in February 1988, he seems to have gone missing. It
wasn't until November 14, 1989, that the watchful staff of the Los
Angeles Times was able to report that Sly was being "held without
bond in Connecticut pending extradition to California, where he
is wanted on a 1987 drug-possession charge." The FBI informed
the paper that "Stone has been living in Connecticut and New Jersey and has used the alias Sylvester Allen." Sly was returned to his
home state and ordered to spend nine to fourteen months in a
drug rehab center. Serena-Marie Sanfilipo, who'd tried to intervene in Florida years earlier, relocated to California to tend to Sly
again. She took to parking outside his designated treatment center, to keep an eye on her charge. "He would mop the floor if someone else wouldn't mop it, so that people would like him," observes
Serena. "He was an absolute perfect person in rehab. He did everything to make people happy [and] make people laugh. He played
his keyboard. He was very joyful for other people, but he was just
very lonely and sad.... He said, `As much as I hate being here, it's
better than being in jail."' When she managed to get inside the center, "I would light a candle for him and we'd say a couple
prayers and sing a couple songs, and he'd write music." After being
discharged, "He was like a fawn," she remembers, "very fragile,
having a tough time, but very happy." She says Sly then "cut ties
with a lot of people that were negative," and that he invited her to
move in with him. But she was put off by the threat of the return
of bad habits. If Sly were ever turn over a new leaf, he would be
the only one who could make himself stay away from the blow.

Sly grew ever more inaccessible to his biological family, including parents, siblings, and his three children. (Another daughter,
Novena, had been born in the late '70s to Olenka Wallach of
Sausalito, California.) "My brother's angry," Freddie told Spin in
1985, after withdrawing from his own cocaine habit. "He's been
conned so many times, he's become a real con man himself." "I've
cried into my pillow so many nights," added their mother, Alpha
Stewart, "but I pray there's a God who can save Sly." Sly, in the
same article, was dismissive of his connection with his own three
offspring. "They do what they want," he stated. "I see them in and
out."

Child-support bills, legal costs, and an estimated $3.4 million
in back taxes, along with the disappearance of opportunities to
record and perform, forced Sly to look for money. In September
1984, he sold his publishing interests to Mijac Music, owned by
Michael Jackson, who was then on top of the music world (and a
Sly admirer). Sly did manage to record several demos in the latter
part of the '80s, some with fellow felon Billy Preston, but they
weren't developed into moneymakers. For the 1987 movie Soul
Man, Sly sang "Eek-A-Bo-Static" and a duet with Martha Davis of
the Motels, "Love and Affection"; but neither charted.

Nostalgia-bound fans of the sounds of the Family Stone in the
'60s and '70s might be tempted to assume that Sly's music would have faded in the '80s, even if its maker hadn't, due to changes in
taste. Although the under-appreciation accorded Sly's post-bandbreakup recordings of the '70s may have been due in part their
being out of step with the dominant disco sound, it's likely that
Sly, who was always ahead of his time, could have stayed on the
charts if his mental and financial resources hadn't been detoured
by drugs. One of his chief disciples, Prince, in fact did very well in
the '80s. Like Sly, Prince was a black multi-instrumentalist, producer, songwriter, and arranger who had taken full control of his
artistic output. Again like Sly, he attracted a significant white audience to his work, incorporating strains of hard rock and dance pop
into his very personal brand of contemporary R & B. Both Prince
and Sly had transcended the commercial and stylistic constraints
of race, but the groundbreaking Sly had ended up struggling to
hold on from day to day.

Early in the 1990s, Sly remained a shadow, even to his parents.
His communication with them was spotty, but his mother, Alpha,
insisted to Mojo, "I know he's a good man, God watches over him."
"You can usually tell what he's been doing from the way he is on
the phone," added papa K. C. "Mama knows the moment he says
`Hello' if she's talking to Sly or Sylvester. If he tries to tell a tenminute story in ten seconds, then it's been a Sly Stone kinda day."

Jerry Goldstein took over management of Sly Stone in the
early '90s. In a manner evocative of psychologist Eugene Landy's
tough appropriation of care of the Beach Boys' fragile Brian Wilson in the 1970s and '80s, Jerry became Sly's guardian and personal supervisor, keeping inquisitive promoters, reporters,
biographers, and ex-Family Stone members at bay. Jerry was a
music veteran himself, having co-written the 1963 smash "My
Boyfriend's Back" for the Angels, and later forming and performing in the Strangeloves, who recorded the first of many versions of the bubblegum standard "I Want Candy." Later he slipped behind
the scenes to become a producer, and also served as manager for
the great interracial funk act War. For better (Sly seemed to free
himself from drugs for a while) or worse (Sly had no authority
over his own catalog of compositions), Sly put his career, such as
it was, in Jerry's charge.

GEORGE C L I N TO N INDUCTED SLY & the Family Stone into the
Rock 'n' roll Hall of Fame in January 1993. Other legends ushered
in that year included Sly contemporaries the Doors, Cream, and
Creedence Clearwater Revival. While the original Family received
their accolades, a quiet and withdrawn Sly, dressed as if he'd been
taking fashion tips from Prince, came to the podium and made a
very short thank-you speech, closing with, "See you soon." The players from his old band had not expected to see him there, and reaped
little from his appearance. "When we were starting out," Jerry
reminded People magazine, "Sly Stone had the power to control
80,000 people with his eyes. But in'93, he couldn't even look at me."

In 1995, Sly was back in rehab, spending forty-five days in the
Brotman Medical Center in L.A. "He went in by choice, to concentrate on getting healthier," his son Sly Jr., then training to be a
sound engineer, explained to People. "He's had problems because
he hasn't been able to grow up. He's meant no harm to anyone."
Sly remained rooted to the L.A. area through the '90s, though he
was often in hot water with landlords and hotel managers. "In a
sense, my father has wasted a lot of years," allowed Sly Jr. "But he's
purposely stayed away from the spotlight and the pressure. He
hasn't wanted attention."