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The necessity of properly accompanying his mother inspired Larry's reputed invention of what has been variously called the slap-pop or thump `n' pluck technique, later immensely influential on rock, funk, and jazz bassists. Most electric bassists up to that time had preferred the softer, rounder tones of conventional finger-style and picking methods. But Larry, as he described it to Bass Player, "would thump the strings with my thumb to make up for the bass drum, and pluck the strings with my fingers to make up for the backbeat snare drum," thus replacing two missing drums with one stringed instrument.

Sly and Freddie also assessed the talent manifest at each other's shows, and they frequented the Condor, where Sly's pal Jerry Martini was still blowing sax behind George & Teddy. Jerry incorporated the influences of soulful jazz giants Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt. But he now says, "One of the reasons that attracted Sly to my playing was that I emulated [R & B innovator] Junior Walker more than any other white boy in town. Because [the others] were all trying to sound like Art Pepper." In effect, Sly needed a representative of the funky sass of Walker more than the post-bop jazz artistry of Pepper.

Greg Errico came to Urbano Drive in December 1966 for what he thought was another Stone Souls rehearsal. He describes the sequence of his knocking, Sly's mom, Alpha, opening the door, and the subsequent interchanges: "'Where's Freddie?"Well, he's in the kitchen with Sly, eating chicken.' I went to the kitchen and looked around. `Where's everybody, are we rehearsing tonight?' I said hi to Sly, he was the radio DJ. `We're starting a new group tonight. You wanna do it?"Well, I'm here.' I was just joking around. I was looking for the rest of the Stone Souls. But Sly was already looking out for one more attempt at what he had in mind." Greg later learned that he had actually been the second choice for drummer, after a failed attempt to recruit Bartholomew "Frosty" SmithFrost, accompanist to Lee Michaels, a Hammond organ master popular around the Bay Area and later signed to A&M.

The group that assembled on that fateful afternoon on Urbano Drive to realize what Sly had in mind included brother Freddie, Greg Errico, Larry Graham, and Cynthia Robinson. There's no known recording of what went down in that basement, but it can be inferred, from what the players looked and sounded like on record and in live performance not all that much later, that it must have been thrilling and unprecedented in pop music.

Recalling the day for Joel Selvin, Cynthia noted that the musicians found Sly ready with "punching funky" arrangements of Top 40 songs, which he expected to later intersperse with his own original compositions in live sets. Larry, she says, raised a question about group leadership, which Sly met with an affirmation of his sole right to lead. (The potential for a standoff between these two persisted for years.) The group's name was a catchy mutation, with druggy undertones, of the pseudo-surnames both Stewarts had started performing under, as well as a statement of what would be the group's ethos, with Sly as unquestioned head of a tight-knit "Family."

The brand-new Family Stone's quest for a gig took them beyond the city limits and into the sights of the enterprising Rich Romanello, a couple of dozen miles down the San Francisco Peninsula. A few years Sly's senior, Rich had grown up among fellow Italian Americans in San Francisco's North Beach and Marina neighborhoods, and then stepped up to his father's bar business. Music was vital to Rich's club vision. For the jukebox at his dad's Morocco Room in San Mateo, south of the San Francisco airport, the younger Romanello insisted on selecting the discs himself. "The jukebox company would not buy a record until it was a hit," he points out, "but I'd put in songs that I thought would become hits, so I had the hottest jukebox in the area." Long before "Runaround Sue" scored for Italian American rocker Dion DiMucci in 1961, "The only