I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (5 page)

Through all this, Sly began to count on Ria as a good friend in
frisky female form. She'd follow him downtown on Saturdays,
where daddy K. C. Stewart worked in the Higgins Building, and
the friends would ride the elevator, one of the few then in town,
for hours. It was during the formation of the future Viscaynes that
Ria was shanghaied by Frank and Sly, who'd separately become
aware of her musical training and ability. "I was walking across the
campus one lunch hour," she says, "and they grabbed my arms on
either side and said, `You're coming with us.' And they took me
over to Sly's mother's house. It was a nice home on a kind of hill,
it wasn't in an extremely dangerous or bad part of town, and they
had me sing for'em. And Mama cooked us lunch, and that's when
I became a member [of the budding group]."

After about a year, the friendly simmer between Ria and Sly
heated up to a romance. "I wouldn't call it `dating,' because that
wasn't allowed [between blacks and whites]. I would call it"-she
hesitates-"what would you say? I hate to use the word `sneaking,' 'cause that's such a terrible word. But I don't know how many people knew. We tried to keep it under cover, because my father told
Sly that he would kill him if he found out we were seeing each
other. My mother is a very devout Catholic woman, and she only
wanted my safety and [Sly's] safety, especially from my father or
anyone else who would cause us problems because of it." In a few
years, Sly would be ready and eager to hang out with white women
in the open, though society wouldn't be ready to condone such
relationships for a while longer.

Sly and Ria's romance built on their friendship. "We could tell
each other secrets, you know, kid secrets," she says. "Talk about our
dreams, spend hours on the phone together. Get away together
whenever we could." In the meantime, they openly dated others
with whom they wouldn't be violating any unwritten code. "I was
dating the football captain," says Ria, "and [Sly] was dating a darling, tiny little black girl. I don't know how he felt about me going
out with other people, 'cause I didn't `share myself' with other
boys. And I don't know whether he did, with this girl or any of the
other girls I heard he'd seen." She did find out, by asking, that he'd
bought his girlfriend a bedroom heater for Christmas, and she
pronounced this act "kind."

On the Dick Stewart-inspired junket to Los Angeles, Ria
found a legitimate reason to hang on openly and tightly to Sly: it
was his first plane trip, and he was scared. She didn't know it at
the time, but the hotel on Hollywood Boulevard that put the Viscaynes up was one of the few in the area to accept racially mixed
groups at that time. After a late night of relatively tame teen fun,
"I was the only one that would venture to wake Sly up," Ria points
out. "No one else would dare,'cause he would wake up swinging.
I don't know what that was all about. But I would go into his
room and just sit on the edge of his bed and sing to him. He'd go, `I'm asleep!' and I'd go, `No, no, it's time!' And he'd just get
up, sweet as pie."

The bond between Ria and Sly held after his graduation, and
hers two years later. The Viscaynes, though, didn't continue long
enough to follow up after hitting the KYA charts in the fall of'61.
Frank threatened to leave the group after the L.A. experience had
revealed that he was in effect working for nothing, for shady
management. The management then threatened to sue his parents
for breach of contract, and Frank joined the Air Force, where he
expected to escape persecution. Charlie went off to a university,
while his younger brother, Vern, and Vern's classmate Ria, finished
high school. Charlene got a job and got married. Sly, though, had
already sensed that his fate lay in music, and he was determined to
stay on course.

Do you know what the secret of success is?
Be yourself and have some fun.

-TITO PUENTE

LY STAYED AROUND VALLEJO
and expanded his interests and
skills with a variety of keyboard
and stringed instruments, and harmonica, working them in a
number of R & B bands. Shortly after graduating from Vallejo
High in 1961, he also decided to focus on continuing his academic
education, studying music theory with David Froehlich at Vallejo
Junior College. David and Sly developed the sort of studentmentor relationship on which so much great achievement has
been built, throughout the histories of both Western and Indian
classical music, folk traditions, and more recently in jazz and pop.
With uncharacteristic magnanimity, Sly has credited David for this
again and again, on the liner notes to his albums, in his rare print
interviews, and in TV appearances. And although they've spent
practically no time together since those college days in Vallejo, the
affection seems certifiably mutual, still treasured by David in his Vallejo home, where he now stays up to speed on jazz piano and
ready for the occasional gig, long past his retirement from the educational system.

David grew up south of Vallejo, in Oakland, in the 1930s and
'40s, when he'd pay thirty-five cents to see and hear and maybe
later chat with Count Basic, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford,
Fats Waller, and other black jazz greats visiting Oakland's Sweet's
Ballroom. After becoming a skilled pianist and being discharged
from service in World War II, David entered a junior college in San
Bernadino on the G.I. Bill and met his own mentor, a theory
teacher named Russell Baldwin. "He was so deeply sincere about
the value of music," David remembers about Baldwin, "and about
how fortunate we were to be into such a field, which I've always
believed since." Baldwin inspired his student to proceed to graduate study at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York,
from which David returned to the Bay Area, which in the '50s,
looked and sounded quite hospitable to both jazz players and fans.
Clubs abounded in San Francisco's North Beach, Fillmore, and
Tenderloin districts. To help pay for his pleasures, David found stable daytime employment teaching music theory and English to a
multiracial mix of high school graduates in Vallejo and leading
their college dance band. "They were beaten, some could hardly
read," he reflects, "but we had fain together."

In the early 1960s, David was approached by an intense young
man he'd seen around campus, playing guitar at student assemblies. Sly Stewart told the teacher that he "wanted to do more, to
become a professional. And he was in the position I was in when
I started school in San Bernadino, never having heard the nine
symphonies of Beethoven." For David, the classics of the Western
canon were treasures he was eager to share, because "the longer
we live, the more we realize their greatness, their truth, their majesty." The teacher made the old masters work for his pupils. "A
big part of our program was ear training, based on the Bach root
movement," says David. "The theory part was [from composer and
academic] Walter Piston, but ear training was something different." David disseminated miniature classical scores so that students could see the structure of what they were listening to and
noted that "Sly wasn't used to seeing such a thing." Years later, former Epic Records exec Steve Paley reports that Sly could be seen
strolling through a studio with one or another of the Walter Piston theory tomes under his arm, a tangible influence on his distinct and sophisticated approach to popular music. For Sly, more
so than for most rockers, informed sophistication mattered as
much as unschooled instinct.

While he was still one among a roomful of music students,
Sly's teacher noted that his star pupil "stood out, of course, as
being intelligent and personable but with a complete anxiety to
learn. He was not acquainted, had not had a chance, with the
physics of music, acoustics, the overtone series, which the chord
progressions of Bach are based on. All of this was new to this gentleman, and it fascinated him. When it came to such things as style
and form and history, it's what he wanted to know."

As a role model for David and Sly, "Bach was an excellent ear
man," the teacher points out. The eighteenth-century composer
"could walk into a cathedral and say, `The sound will come over
that beam and across the ceiling, and be heard over there.' That
was all new to Sly." However, Sly would display similar perception
and attention to detail in his later work, orchestrating, arranging,
and recording in the studio.

Sly's love of learning had him raising his hand repeatedly in
class and remaining with more questions after other students had
been dismissed. He shuffled attentively through not only Western classics but also his teacher's strongest suit, jazz. "We laughed
about the song [famed jazz bassist] Ray Brown wrote, `The Gravy
Waltz,"' David recalls merrily. "When we got to the bridge, neither
he nor I could remember it. He came back in the next day or two
and said, `I got the bridge!' and he hummed it out. That was something he did for me. When I think back, he wasn't listening as
much as he was rehearsing, playing, and writing [in his mind's
ear]."

Both David and Sly probably would have been very happy to
prolong their mutual learning experience. But the day came when
Sly had to leave academia for other adventures. "I didn't want to
say much, I was listening," recalls the teacher about Sly's actual day
of departure. "And he said, `Don't worry, I'll be back to see you, in
a limousine full of girls: And [several years later], he was!"

IT WAS A FORTUITOUS TIME and place for Sly to be launching
a career in popular music. He and the baby boomers, just a few
years his junior, were listening to the radio, buying what they heard
there, and going out to dance to the music, which in 1961 included
Ben E. King's wistful "Stand by Me" and "Spanish Harlem," Ray
Charles's imperative "Hit the Road Jack," Sam Cooke's smoothly
polished "Cupid," and such melodramatic marvels as "Running
Scared" by Roy Orbison and "Runaway" by Del Shannon. That was
also the year Chubby Checker launched non-contact but sinuous
dancing to "The Twist." Meanwhile, Berry Gordy had founded his
prolific Motown label, and former Georgia cotton picker and
shoe-shine boy James Brown, who'd been gigging and recording
since the mid-1950s, began to earn a lucrative reputation as "the
hardest working man in show business."

Sly could hardly wait to join this scene where blacks were
hardly a minority. KYA-AM was among the most popular San
Francisco rock stations in the early '60s. It had also proven a
benign refuge for disc jockeys and close friends Tom "Big Daddy"
Donahue and Bob Mitchell, who'd reportedly fled west from Pittsburgh's WIBG under threat of federal prosecution for the not
uncommon practice of taking payola (basing radio playlists on
bribes from record companies). "They had the East Coast radio
technique down," comments Alec Palao, a rock archivist who has
produced compilations of Sly's pre-Family recordings. "Donahue
in particular had an incredible presence on the radio. He had this
deep voice and this commanding manner," issuing from a jumbosize body, "and he was talking the argot of the time, he had a lot
of phrases. He [and Mitchell] took over KYA, and once they got
that going, they really sent the ratings up.... They became very
powerful as guys that would spot a hit and play it to death, 'breaking' it. That's how KYA got a reputation as a 'break' station [open
to regional surprises and sudden crazes]."