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of focus on ... North Beach and that whole topless thing, which was a very newsworthy thing at the time." The band for "Swim" was basically Joe Piazza and the Continentals, with whom Sly had played bass in North Beach venues and who'd earlier backed the Viscaynes. The group, including future Family Stone saxophonist Jerry Martini, mutated into the Condors, backing popular featured act George & Teddy at North Beach's Condor Club, where Sly himself also appeared with a group called the Mojo Men.

The Condor began attracting lurid national attention when cocktail waitress Carol Doda initiated the practice of mounting the piano, removing her top, and dancing during band breaks. Doda later took over ownership of the Condor, and the former music hall was refitted as a flagship of North Beach's tourist-tempting strip club scene. This reputed revival of San Francisco's Barbary Coast reputation helped the Swim move onto dance floors everywhere, alongside the tamer Twist and Mashed Potato, and arguably helped establish alluring go-go dancers, topless or not, as a fixture at many major clubs. The fad flourished in San Francisco until then-mayor Dianne Feinstein prompted raids and bans in the 1980s. Today the Condor, tamer but still in operation, boasts state landmark status.

With some of the first big money that "C'mon and Swim" brought him, Sly helped his father move the Stewart family from their modest location on the outskirts of the Bay Area to a home in San Francisco's Ingleside district. Earlier in the century, the Ingleside, several miles southwest of North Beach and the downtown, was one of several areas where developers had established written and unwritten "covenants," in effect bylaws enforcing the image of a genteel white middle-class lifestyle that would exclude nonwhite residents. As recently as 1958, a cross had been burned on the front lawn of black judge Cecil Poole's house, who'd managed to buy a home in the Ingleside directly from its previous owner, rather than through realtors, who wouldn't have helped him. Poole accounted for the charred cross to his daughter Patti with the comment, "Some Christian has lost his way." The Pooles stayed put, and over the next decade, the Ingleside became a neighborhood of choice for middle-class black professionals.

The Stewarts' spacious homestead was located a few blocks south of the Pooles', on the ovular Urbano Drive, which had been a popular racetrack before the great earthquake of 1906. Sly moved along his own multiple career tracks in high spirits, sometimes speeding between appointments in a Jaguar XKE custom-painted purple, a reward from Tom Donahue. He appropriated the basement of his parents' house into a base of operations. He continued to perform, as did brother Freddie, in several bands, and to produce singles for Autumn, as well as waxing several of his own. Some of this material has been compiled by Alec Palao for Ace Records (based in his native England) as Precious Stone: In the Studio with Sly Stone 1963-1965, released in 1994. The disc is the best showcase yet, outside of the Family Stone, of Sly's skill as a producer and of his understanding and application in songwriting of '60s R & B. Included are early rock collaborations with siblings Freddie and Rose, and with his then-new friend and keyboard mentor Billy Preston.

It was rare in the early'60s, and evidence of the greater opportunities available in the Bay Area, that a young black man was given access not only to professional studios (San Francisco's Coast and Golden Gate studios) but also to working with different kinds of artists. Sly was assigned several white rock groups, early representatives of what would come later to be embraced by the hippies as the "San Francisco Sound." The city's music scene was evolving, alongside the evolution of its counterculture, from Jack Kerouac and the Beats in the '50s to the starry-eyed flower children of the next decade. The new generation seemed to want to experiment beyond the influence of the Beatles-led "British Invasion." But most musicians weren't as experienced