I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone by Jeff Kaliss Page A

individual players (Cynthia and Jerry)
were actually named in the lyric. Individualized voices were heard:
Cynthia's raucous, spoken imperatives ("Dance to the music!" and
"All the squares, go home!"), Larry's display of his matching bass
vocals, and Sly's impresario tenor. The highlighting of each voice
and instrument was almost pedagogical, like a rock band equiva lent to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

    Just as at the Cathedral, this was a band to be listened to as
much as danced to. The album's extended twelve-minute "Dance
to the Medley" spawned not hits but catchy breaks, later to be
highlights of live shows, not only for Sly & the Family Stone but
much later for the group's twenty-first century spin-off bands. The
three-part "Medley" encompassed stereo-spanning free-form
interludes evocative of what was being evolved as mind-bending
acid rock by groups like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Doors.
    "It touched people more than I ever thought it would," says
Greg about the Dance to the Music album. "It was a process of the
whole group. And we were able to do it in a way that you got
respect from your peers, other musicians, and you could talk to
the average cat on the street. Everybody dug it-black, white....
Even to us, it was like, if you just be honest, and give it all you have
to give, it will pay off." The band's manifest belief in racial harmony and sexual equality, more explicit in later lyrics, was touched
on in a couple of tracks, "Color Me True" and "Don't Burn Baby."
    The payoff for both the honesty and the talent became abundant as the Family played shows on both coasts over the course of
1968. "The biggest thrill was, the first time you heard that record
on the radio, it felt so good," says Greg. "You go to a city, you get
in the rental car, you turn the radio on, the song comes on. That
felt better than knowing you were selling a lot of albums." Freddie, testifying from his current perspective of a sober man of the
cloth in The Skin I'm In, was tempted into an awkward smile. "We
felt like we'd gone on some kind of... I don't even want to say the
word, but we were lit up," he confessed.

    For those who witnessed the early concerts or bought the
Dance to the Music album (and not just the single) when it was
released later in 1968, the Family Stone was something to see as
well as hear. In the album's cover and publicity photos and
onstage, and in its TV appearances that year, the biracial makeup
of the outrageously outfitted group was as impressive as was its
mix of genders. To his credit, Sly never proffered Rose or Cynthia,
both very attractive women, as background eye candy, as Ray
Charles had with his Raelettes, but as integral members of the act.
    "At a time of great social unrest in this country, this man came
forth with an integrated band, the members of which got on
famously, as brothers and sisters, and never had a problem anywhere they went," notes Epic's Al DeMarino. This feature broadened the band's appeal across racial lines in audiences and among
older liberal-minded fans of Al and David Kapralik's generation.
    David explains his personal perspective on race and American
culture. As children in Plainfield, New Jersey, in the 1930s, he and
his siblings had been "among the only Jews in our elementary
school, and we were subjected to a lot of prejudice, and it was hurtful.... I didn't play with the other Caucasian kids, but during the
lunch hour the Negroes, as they were called back then, took me in,
and we related." As an aspiring Broadway actor in the next decade,
David and black actress Jane White founded Torchlight Productions "to integrate Negroes into theater, movies, and the media."
Switching to a day job at Columbia Records, David bonded with
legendary producer John Hammond in bolstering the label's commitment to rhythm and blues, resurrected the Okeh label as a
showcase for black music,