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later return to producing others. For the time being, though, Sly wanted to follow Tom and Bob's footsteps in another direction, spinning discs rather than making them. He wasn't the only would-be celebrity to have applied a musician's skills to radio. Waylon Jennings, on KLLL in Lubbock, Texas, and B. B. King, on WDIA in Memphis, had also proven that they had the ears to detect potential hits, recognize catchy hooks, and understand what makes a pop song work. All three of these musicians were also able to apply their on-air experience to making their own listenerfriendly music.

After training at the Chris Borden School of Broadcasting and graduating in 1964, Sly filled a slot on AM radio station KSOL, whose call letters announced its focus on soul and R & B, with some crossover to pop, aimed at a primarily black demographic.

Sly's speaking voice, like his singing, was strong and sensual, dipping, like Tom Donahue's, into a baronial lower register. His manner was hip and masterful, with many moments of humor and improvisation. Consider this broadcast bit of Sly's wily wisdom, copping from Shakespeare: "The whole world is a stage, and you only have a part to play, and if you don't play it right, you get kicked out of the party." And a warning, now easily assessed as prescient: "The Soul Brothers remind you to be cool," Sly intoned between hits. "Keep the poison out of the kids' reach. And keep it out of any fool's reach that might try to use it, you know what I mean? Keep it out of your woman's reach!"

"I love every one of them," he testified over the fade-out of the Supremes' rather inane soundtrack single "The Happening." "Especially Diana [Ross]. And she loves me! That's a gas," he opined, and after a signifying pause, he continued, "The movie, not the record." Any self-respecting Supremes fan would have seconded this assessment.

Radio execs and wiser listeners couldn't help but have realized that Sly knew his music very well. While KSOL hadn't KYA's national significance as a "break" station, Sly's broadcast presence there (he had the 7:00 p.m. to midnight slot), and later on the similarly formatted KDIA, bolstered his importance to the Bay Area entertainment scene, reaching beyond his black target audience to youth of other ethnicities. "Sly had a specific energy, he was clearly some kind of star," remembers Ben Fong-Torres, former Rolling Stone editor, ongoing rock historian, and current KFRC-FM "Classic Hits" radio personality. To the then-teenaged Ben, attending school and helping out in his parents' Chinese eatery in Hayward, Sly sounded "confident, but not smug ... in kind of an `older brother' sound, friendly, not coming on to anybody, not `I am the disc jockey, so I am the king."' The radio DJ's largesse was manifest in "the way he demanded requests and dedications and the way he talked to kids on the phone," making those conversations audible on-air.

"You would hear him bring in his instruments to the radio station and do his own station IDs," says Ben, about how creatively Sly carried out the obligatory identifications of his stations' call letters. "He would sing his commercials, he was so inventive, or he'd bring in his musician friends and do a little jam session. Back then, even though it was formatted, DJs could do things that were unique, more than what they can do today, which is nothing."

Pop writer Joel Selvin was a teenager back then, a white boy living in the Oakland ghetto with a job as a copy boy at the San Francisco Chronicle. Young Joel avoided KFRC, "where they played Herman's Hermits," in favor of KDIA, where Sly "was fast-talking, he was jivey, and he knew who the Beatles and Lord Buckley were, and so did C" Joel today recalls that "the other [KDIA] guys were like this old-fashioned black thing, being very carefully spoken and articulate, not necessarily sounding white but not sounding black. And Sly was laughing and squeaking and rhyming, it was an exciting thing.... And everybody remembers the dedications."

Joel observes that "this was a transitional period in the whole African American