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

and had, with Jerry Brandt, brought several swinging black acts to Columbia from Harlem churches. With
this history of dedication, David was perhaps bound to hitch his
star to what he thought he saw in the Family Stone and heard in the music created by its black leader. "I saw Sylvester as a vehicle
for expressing, lyrically and socio-dynamically, his bringing the
races together at this juncture in history," declares David. Sly's own
high hopes were not quite so altruistic.

     

Everybody:
Stand!

1968-1970
    Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and
philosophy, it is the wine of a new procreation,
and I am Bacchus, who presses out this
glorious wine for men and makes them drunk
with the spirit.
    -LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
    Nothing is more singular about this generation
than its addiction to music.
    -ALLAN BLOOM, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER
    HE SEEDS OF FAME FOR SLY &
the Family Stone had been planted,
but it took a while for the band to
reach extravagant blossom. A third Epic album, Life, was recorded
in May 1968, while the band was still sampling its Dance-driven
success. A new kind of confidence was perceptible in the LP's
opening track, "Dynamite!," which engineer Don Puluse says was
tangible in the studio. Confidence notwithstanding, nothing on Life ever shared its predecessor's success, although in retrospect it's
hard to hear why not. Several of the album's cuts, particularly
"Fun," "Love City," "M'Lady," and the title piece, bear much of the
trademark energy and listener-friendly impulsion of the group's
earlier and later hits. The title cut opened with Sly imitating the
sound of Laffing Sal, a mechanical clown from Playland at the
Beach, San Francisco's erstwhile amusement park. This helped set
the tone of the track's (and the album's) life-is-a-circus sentiments, reflective of the good vibes the band was still enjoying.
When I party, I party hearty, the band declared in "Fun," and blasts
of horns from Jerry Martini and Cynthia Robinson helped celebrate the sentiment, which took in family members-brother, sister, daddy, and momma-and a trademark canny commandment
to the congregation of fans: "Socketh unto others / As you would
have them socketh to you."

    Larry Graham led the exuberant "M'Lady" with some of the
bassist's fattest, fuzziest runs heard to date, augmented by Freddie's fast, chunky funk chording and Jerry's giddy clarinet. The
bassist's thump-'n'-pluck style had grown more fluid, and his lines
on various of these tracks, notably "Dynamite!," would be adapted
into innumerable disco bottoms boogieing over dance floors in the
'70s. Record sales indicated that the public was not yet buying into
all this artistry and delight, but they would with Stand!, the fourth
album, whose several singles began bombarding the hit parade the
following year.
    Over the relatively brief period of gestation of its first three
albums and of the public's reaction to them, Sly & the Family
Stone were transformed from best-kept secret to an inflating commercial success. Along the way, on the road between coasts, the
band was less recognized and more challenged. "I remember that
Sly and I drove the equipment truck," says Jerry, "and Daddy [Sly's father K. C. Stewart] followed behind us in a huge station wagon.
Drivers changed every hundred miles or so. Sly and I changed
when we felt like it, [but] I usually drove and Sly wrote [music].
We talked lots, which kept us awake. These were great times, when
there was not very much hard drugs. We enjoyed wine, a few
drinks, and some weed, but not too much, as it makes you too tired
to drive.

    "There were no roadies at first, the band was the roadies," Jerry
continues. "Daddy was the road manager. We learned the hard way
how to read maps correctly. The straight line is not the fastest
when it comes to highway travel. We learned it was so much faster
to take the Ohio Turnpike and major highways, as opposed to driving through some scary backwoods