I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone by Jeff Kaliss Read Free Book Online

African American community, right? If you were older generation,
you looked for a public persona that was presentable, decorous.
There's some thinking that, because blacks were accorded secondclass citizenship, in order to have a public face you had to be more
white than white people." This impression was probably particularly strong in the Bay Area among those who, like the older Stewarts, had relocated from regions of entrenched racism. But
Sly, Joel believes, would have been well aware that "the oldfashioned thinking was going away with the young blacks, who
were growing up at that time, and were assuming more independent postures." Sly's on-air independence was manifest more as
cheeky subversion than as militancy or political diatribe.

    Jerry Martini, whose sax services had helped put him close to
Sly, used to listen on his car radio to Sly while on his way to a gig
at the airport Hilton. When he had the chance, he'd visit his friend
at the radio studio, where a small, unused piano sat against a wall.
"So I suggested [to Sly], `Why don't you just sing your whole
show?' And it was a good suggestion," remembers Jerry. "He sang
the news, he sang the weather." Sly would also mock the monotony of Bay Area weather by always announcing the temperature as
"fifty-nine degrees," regardless of any actual deviation from that
dreary norm.
    The appeal and credibility of Sly's on-air sessions were further
enhanced by occasional visits from his new friend Hamp "Bubba"
Banks. They had become acquainted when the coif-conscious Sly
became a patron at Bubba's Fillmore district hair salon, where the
emerging radio personality perhaps came closer to acquiring
"street cred" than at any other point before or after his celebrity.
The neighborhood shop was favored by pimps, prostitutes, and
young African Americans, and its proprietor was eager to promote
himself over the airwaves. Bubba recalled for Joel Selvin that "I'd
come on [the radio] and say, `Sly, you come on and rap, I gotta go
check my trap. Just all this street slang." Banks, an ex-marine and
sometime pimp himself, also shared the nocturnal bustle of North
Beach with Sly and served as something of a hip mentor. "We
became truly inseparable," Bubba recounted. "I would go to the
[Urbano] house after we did our thing, and lay on the floor. Sly would smoke a little weed. But that was the extent of it." Bubba
regretted having later exposed his younger friend to cocaine, but
neither man seemed to have been making debilitating or addictive
use of the drug during this earliest stage of their relationship. The
constructive part of the alliance extended to Bubba's opening a
club, Little Bo Peep's, where Sly acted as emcee and Rose, Sly's sister and later Bubba's wife, sold tickets.

    Sly sought out yet more opportunities to do his own thing on
the air. He found a copy of Ray Charles's great "Let's Go Get
Stoned" in a garbage can, tossed there because of the seemingly
illicit imperative in the lyric (which was actually to drink, not to
drug), and started playing it, helping score yet another national hit
for the man who'd helped inject soul into rock. Sly also deviated
from the implicit color line of his stations' playlists. "They rarely
played a white artist," notes Ben Fong-Torres about the Bay Area's
black-identified stations. "Only the Righteous Brothers and certain sounds could make it on, blue-eyed soul with popularity. Sly
was a bit broader than that; whatever he liked he'd put on." In
among the Motown and Stax-Volt artists of the day, such as Otis
Redding, Wilson Pickett, Smokey Robinson, Mary Wells, Marvin
Gaye, the Supremes, Little Stevie Wonder, and the Temptations,
he'd play the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and white
raconteur Lord Buckley, from whose pseudo-hip delivery Sly freely
borrowed.
    Sly's ascending career as a performing musician wasn't supplanted by his short career as a broadcaster; he kept gigging at a
variety of