• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 359 0

"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