I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [24]
The Family Stone needed a showcase away from San Francisco. With help from a Bay Area mover and shaker with gaming connections, they got an extended booking in July 1967 at a Las Vegas strip club called the Pussycat a Go-Go, which provided live entertainment (and only a bit of gaming) into the wee hours. By this point, the Family Stone, with David's consent, was playing original material alongside its innovative covers. Commuting between Vegas and Columbia's studio in Los Angeles on days off from the Pussycat, the band recorded some of the material for what would become A Whole New Thing. Sly's youngest sister, Vaetta (nicknamed "Vet"), provided background vocals, as she would for future albums, alongside Elva "Tiny" Mouton and Mary McCreary, two women with whom Vet had been performing and recording gospel as the Heavenly Tones.
The members of the Family Stone began to sparkle on and off the stage during their weeks in Vegas. Sly, Freddie, and Larry cruised the Strip in garishly colored Thunderbirds. Band members sometimes wore wigs for their Pussycat shows, and energized the audience by stepping down among them from the stage. Celebrity fans curious to witness the new music after their own gigs in the casinos included Bobby Darin and the Fifth Dimension. Ultimately Sly attracted a different kind of attention by taking up with the club owner's white girlfriend, Anita, provoking not only the expected sexual jealousy but a barrage of threats and racial epithets. Jerry related Sly's reaction: " [He] got up onstage and put his hands up and told the story to the people, and blew the club owner's mind. He said, `We are gonna pack up and leave, because I can't have my woman here, and we are being racially persecuted' ... Everybody that was at that club stood up and gave us a standing ovation." Jerry then had to hurriedly gather his then-wife and kids and join a police-escorted caravan headed out of town.
In the meantime, the tracks the band had laid down in L.A. for Columbia weren't leading to the rapid recognition they'd hoped for. A Whole New Thing "was a musicians' album," reflects Jerry. "So it never really made it big anywhere except Las Vegas, where we played. We didn't have a hit single, we had more of a cult following."
"The first album was just a labor of love, it was us," adds Greg. "We thought we were the greatest thing since spaghetti, but the only people who had [the album] were musicians. You'd go across the country and every musician had it under his arm, but nobody else knew about it."
Among his CBS colleagues and clients in New York, David was delighted to find A Whole New Thing making an impression on notable ears. "Its marketability I wasn't sure of," he admits. "But guys like Mose Allison and Jon Hendricks [were] talking about Sly. I heard this through Teo Macero, who produced them. `He's a musicians' musician' was the word around CBS." David encouraged the band members to spend some time making a name for themselves in New York City, and they were up to the challenge.
"New York either loves you or they hate you, and we were a success there," Jerry reports. He remembers, during an early New York engagement, "having to take the subway from 136 West 55th Street, the Gorham Hotel, all the way down into the Village, wearing my weird clothes. People leave you alone, if you're weird in New York, they don't bother you."
In August '67, the act was booked at the Electric Circus, a venue operated by former talent agent Jerry Brandt, and among the invited guests was Al DeMarino, an up-and-comer at the William Morris Agency, where Brandt had been his boss. "Jerry called me up and said, `I have this great band coming in, and I'm trying to do a favor for a friend, try to get down here and see them,"' Al remembers. "It was at the time when psychedelia had really started to come forth, and [the Circus]