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By Root 353 0

blew me away," remembers David. "And after the gig, probably about four in the morning, Sly and I went to a nearby International House of Pancakes, and we sat there looking at each other." From his current refuge on Maui, he can't recapture verbatim what transpired, but the grandiloquent David prefers to cast it in a "mythopoetic" format, inspired by his Jewish upbringing. "I just know that we made a connection in the magic mirror," he says, and he elaborates on the quality of this new relationship: "The nearer, the dearer, the clearer you see, Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad." Taken from Deuteronomy, this incantation means, "Here, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One."

Aside from the insights into oneness inspired by Sly at the IHOP, David let the ambitious young artist know that he was intent on signing the band to Epic. The pair spent more time together over the next several days and nights, cruising around the Bay Area in Sly's ride. "He had to get to know me," David explains. "He was a street-wise kid. I'm not a street-wise kid. For better or worse I come from Plainfield, New Jersey, a middle-class situation."

Whatever Sly may have shared with David apparently didn't include any information about the prior management arrangement with Rich Romanello, who remembers Sly confronting him during this period. "He came back and said, `I spent a lot of time with David, and I think I'm gonna do a deal,"' recounts Rich, who was made to feel "like someone had cut off my arm." Rich was offered a percentage of Sly & the Family Stone's future earnings, and was thus persuaded to release his client from his management contract. A new contract was promptly consummated by David in the basement of the Stewart home on Urbano Drive. "I said, `Sly, I know I can help you fulfill all your dreams as an artist,"' remembers David. "Somehow or other I knew the power of my enthusiasm. I had total confidence." This prompted his return to the Epic offices in New York, where "I had that buzz happening. And when I have a buzz, I infuse that buzz in other people." It had worked in promoting the young Barbra Streisand early in the '60s. "I was a madman! I'd jump on desks, I would go in the middle of meetings, I would go into an office and climb on my boss's desk and have a demo in my hand and put it on the turntable. And that's also how I got attention for Sly in the beginning."

Back on the San Francisco Peninsula, the Family Stone completed its booking at the Cathedral in June '67, on the eve of the Summer of Love. Rich, despite what he'd been promised, saw no more money from the band. A couple of months later, the Cathedral was shut down by a fire, and its proprietor began contemplating a more dependable and rewarding occupation. His former star opening act had started looking east.

SLY & THE FAMILY STONE had a sense early on that they wouldn't be comfortable in anyone's pigeonhole. They were impressed by new manager David Kapralik's industry credentials and track record, but skeptical about following in the footsteps of his latest successful clients, Peaches & Herb, a successful lounge act with a few hits. "That's what [David] wanted us to be," notes Jerry Martini. "But Sly didn't wanna do lounge. He wanted to do concerts. So it was harder to break us."

Likewise, the Family Stone didn't hear itself as necessarily concordant with the hippie lifestyle and the so-called San Francisco Sound that accompanied it. "Being in San Francisco in 1967, it wasn't about rock 'n' roll, it was about psychedelics," says Greg Errico. "It was Quicksilver [Messenger Service], the Grateful Dead, Blue Cheer. And it had nothing to do with what we were doing, and we had nothing to do with that ... I had no interest in going with a psychedelic group. What I found myself in the middle of, I couldn't have dreamed it any better. I felt very comfortable, very natural." What separated the Family Stone from many of the groups associated with psychedelia was its tightly plotted balance of voices and instruments, memorable on later hits. Many of the players involved