I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [26]
David Kapralik recalls Sly "coming into my office and saying, `I'm going back to San Francisco. And I'm gonna stay there. And if anything ever happens with [the debut] album, let me know about it. And I say to him, `Sly, you gotta make a hit single. And you have to have a dum-dum-repeat lyric. And in between all those dum-dum-repeats, you put all your schticklach.' That was my first and only A & R suggestion to him in all the years that we were together. Because I'm not qualified, I'm not a musician. That was just something I knew from being a promotions man all those years.
Sly reportedly sought a transfer to Atlantic Records, the legendary R & B, soul, and jazz label whose roster included Ray Charles and the Coasters, but he demurred when Atlantic asked him to forsake his band for their hand-picked musicians. (It wouldn't be the only time that a label tried to break up the band; it would happen again around the recording of Riot.) Sly was not only insistent on maintaining the Family Stone, but on enhancing it with his middle sister, Rose, whom he approached on his return to San Francisco. "I didn't want to just be a slave to the keyboard," Rose admitted later in The Skin I'm In. "And [Sly] said, `No, you can just sing.' I said, `Okay, then.' So I quit my job [at a San Francisco music store] and the next thing he said was, `Okay, we got you on keyboards.' I was so mad!" Fortunately for the band and fans alike, Rose also got to display her clarion soprano as the group's lead female vocalist. Her sound partnered gorgeously, and uniquely, with Sly's funky midrange and Larry's soul-stirring bassbaritone vocals
These days, without having scored a blockbuster at the start, an act like the Family Stone might well be dropped from any major label. In the late '60s, new acts were still being given a chance to develop their style and realize their artistic and commercial potentials. By the fall of '67, Al DeMarino was touting Sly & the Family Stone "within the agency at every opportunity, even at TV meetings and film meetings," and finding what bookings he could for them. "What I felt I needed to do in that initial year was select sizeable, worthwhile engagements," he says. But that "was easier said than done, because with any new act you're up against people who don't want to pay you what you're worth. So you bang the drums."
Propelled by Al's and David's metaphorical drumming and Greg's literal efforts, a much more accessible sophomore album, Dance to the Music, was assembled in New York's CBS recording studios. Don Puluse, an engineer young in years but musically well trained (at Eastman and the Manhattan School) and adept at deploying the then-new eight-track technology, was assigned to record the bulk of the album in September 1967. (A couple of tracks had been recorded in California earlier by Bryan Ross- Myring.) But aside from electronics, Don first needed to recharge his young clients' energy for the project.
"I had to give them a bit of a pep talk, because of the downers of Atlantic Records and CBS, where you had people already knocking them before they had even laid down anything," Don recalls. "I had to say, `Hey, guys, you put all that aside. You're in the studio now, now is the time to make a record. We can't worry about what the suits in the other building are worrying about: And Sly said, `Yeah, sounds right, man, let's go!' And they went in there, and the thing which really stood out was the energy, which was outrageous. They would do very few takes, and to listen back they would come into the control room and dance."
The group's rightful reveling in their own music didn't interfere with the task at hand. "Sly would bark out orders: `Jerry, do this! Cynthia, do that! Freddie, play it this way!' He would just, in about thirty seconds, summarize what he expected, and they'd be