I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (30 page)

The staff of the Art, Music, and Recreation Center of the San
Francisco Public Library helped keep me informed, and Susan and
the wizards at Castro Computer Services kept my cybermill turning. My collection of Sly & the Family Stone sides was bolstered by
Streetlight Records, Amazon, John Hagelston of Rhino, and Tom
Cording of Sony/Legacy. Invaluable detail and opinions about
music, and the Family Stone in particular, came from rock and
funk scholars Ben Fong-Torres, Alec Palao, and Rickey Vincent, as
well as developmental editor George Case, and more informally
from Bay Area music veteran Anthony Reginato of Mission Market. The book has been illuminated by multiple suppliers of photographs, both professional and amateur, among them the artful
Jim Marshall and Steve Paley. Seth Affoumado and Beverly Tharp
took useful portraits of the author. Alongside Neal Austinson, continued contact with Sly was facilitated by his other devoted helpmates, Charles Richardson and Rikki Gordon.

On the opposite coast, at mission control, aka Hal Leonard/
Backbeat Books, acquiring editor John Cerullo somehow managed
to keep me in orbit, with reassuring words in my telephone earpiece and my e-mail inbox, and manuscript editor Mike Edison guided me in making my own written words look like a rock
book, ready to be polished by copy editor Godwin Chu. Production editor Bernadette Malavarca completed the assembly, and
Diane Levinson and Aaron Lefkove helped position the result in
the public eye.

I bear a long and deep personal debt to my hometown and college papers, the Bar Harbor Times and the Boston University News,
for first turning me on to journalism, and to the Noe Valley Voice
for much later sparking a flashback that turned into a career, faithfully supported in more than one sense by my wife and conscience,
Louise Whitlock. Our dancing and singing children, Natalie and
Nicholas Kaliss, and our cat, Tula, have made the Kaliss Family
Affair into a wonderful way to work hard while staying in touch
with the other duties and delights of the world.