I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [1]
David told me I would see for myself that night-he was taking me with him to see Sly.
The show was going to be at the Electric Circus, a small club in the East Village in New York. As showtime approached, I realized David had his hands full dealing with tickets, backstage passes, people, so I told him I would be okay, I would just get a seat.
I walked down to the West Side to a store called Paul Sergeant and got me some funky haberdashery for the night. I knew I had to represent. So many people had compared us.
I showed up at the Electric Circus by myself. I got some acid and I was so high, everything was beautiful, which was not unusual for the East Village on a tab of sunshine. When I arrived at the front door, they saw the look on my face and let me right in. This was a special night. It seems like everyone was high and happy.
It was a psychedelic club, with black lights, posters, side rooms with couches and dens. Everyone was sitting down, relaxing. All of a sudden there was a big commotion. People had been waiting for a good while, and all of a sudden all hell broke loose-I had never heard bass like this before, and one of our bass players, Billy Bass Nelson, would have eight cabinets, so I knew what bass sounded like! Larry Graham was loud as hell! They had the clarity of Motown but the volume of Jimi Hendrix or the Who. They literally turned this motherfucker out. That would be the impression that Sly left on me for the rest of my life.
"Jane Is a Groupee," "Plastic Jim," "Underdog," "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey"-whether political, social, or party songs, you always thought they were speaking directly to you personally. Not unlike Bob Dylan or Smokey Robinson.
David introduced me to Sly and told me that Sly had a new record label called Stone Flower, and would we like to be the first group on the label? Sly gave me a look, the one that I would recognize in time to mean he knew something was cool.
We signed with Stone Flower Records. The label folded after they put out just one record, by Sly's sister, but we stayed in touch. It would be years before I would see him again.
He came and spent a year with me on my farm, and we had a great time, writing songs and everything else. I inducted him into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. I only saw him for a few minutes then, and then it would be years and years before I saw him again, to team up with him on my album George Clinton and Some Gang sters of Love. I don't know what it is about our chemistry, but we are always cool with each other. At the very beginning of the Mothership tours, he played four shows with us. Other than myself, he was the only person ever to come out of that spaceship!
-GEORGE CLINTON
Introduction
OODSTOCK AND THE music that led him there four decades ago are still alive for Sly Stone. "There could be a Woodstock on this very hill, out there," he suggests, gesturing toward the sun-kissed acres of his rented property in Napa County, up the road a piece from his childhood home in Vallejo, California. "That's what I'm working up to now, again, something like that," Sly continues, in reference to his perennial late-night sessions in his private studio, eking out new tunes and lyrics for a public still caught up in the hits from long ago. Of course, it will never be "like that" again, and it doesn't need to be. Too much has changed for Sly, for the Family Stone band in which he played at Woodstock, and for the fans they shared that world with.
The spirit that had floated over the half million hippies sprawled across Max Yasgur's pastureland in the wee hours of August 17, 1969, was made from those times, redolent with marijuana, psychedelics, youthful hormones, and an adrenaline