I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [17]
Bob Jones, another KDIA DJ, says that the station, for a while, held on to hopes that Sly would return to the airwaves someday after leaving them in 1966. But in any case, Bob is grateful for Sly's radio legacy. "Sly was absolutely good theater," says Bob. "He always had an opening and a closing, and the opening was dramatic. He was definitely an influence on me, and I was doing the same thing later: theater for the mind." Over the next couple of decades, though, on-air "personalities," black, white, or otherwise, who spun discs while ad-libbing their way into the ears and hearts of their listeners would gradually disappear from the dial.
Ria Boldway, finishing up at Vallejo High, stuck by Sly during those busy years when he was transitioning from school into multiple careers. During her senior year (1962-1963), Ria had started spending more time at the small place Sly had rented in Vallejo after moving out of his childhood home on Denio Street. She ultimately moved to San Francisco, accompanying Sly on some of his gigs with the Mojo Men. Of Sly's radio days, she remembers that "he was incredibly popular, as he was in high school. He was always one to show off, be lighthearted, and laugh his head off, and that's what he did on the radio as well." But Sly was also capable of being serious in an intimate setting. Ria had brought up marriage, and Sly had talked about having kids. "He said, `Oh, we'll have the most beautiful little golden babies,"' she recalls. "Now, I'm a dark human being [of Mediterranean mien]. `He'll never have golden babies with me,' I thought to myself. But instead of saying anything to him, I kept it to myself."
In one offhand moment, Sly told Ria, "I'm gonna get a blond wife and a white car and a white dog." She hadn't worried about the remark till Sly's attention began drifting away from her. Her regret came to a head one night when Sly bid her good-bye before taking off for a gig at the Condor. "I think I was still underage and couldn't go to some clubs yet," Ria says. "He'd gotten dressed and he got into a white Cadillac convertible with [the blond Condor waitress-turned-topless-icon] Carol Doda. And he went off. And I realized a whole lot of things then: that it was just not gonna happen, that we would not get married, as we had spoken of doing. He had other things on his mind; it was all career."
After that sad realization, "I talked to his mother and his father, and moped around the house for a while. I realized it was not gonna go anywhere. His mama didn't want it to anyway,'cause she was afraid my father would kill him. She loved me and everything, like one of the little kids she took care of. She said, `Just let him go and do what he needs to do: And I did." Ria later left the country and married another man, but cherished her memories of her high school lover and would try to get close to him a couple of more times-after he'd launched himself into fame with the Family Stone.
Dance to
the Music
1966-1968
Black and white, the young rebels are free people, free in a way that Americans have never been before in the history of their country.
-ELDRIDGE CLEAVER Soul on Ice
HE APPETITE FOR LIVE MUSIC in San Francisco in the late '60s supported an effervescent club scene in the North Beach neighborhood and beyond, where youthful talent could mature. Before deploying his considerable guitar skills around the city's clubs, Sly's younger brother, Freddie, had studied music in college for a short while and had been briefly employed by Billy Preston in Los Angeles. Signing on with future Santana vocalist Leon Patillo's Sensations, Freddie encountered a young drummer in the Excelsior district, who was sitting in with the Sensations during a downtown gig hosted by Sly in his radio star capacity. Just seventeen, Greg Errico (his Italian family