I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [28]
It took the newly invigorated band a few months to get heard beyond 52nd Street. But when the second album's title tune was released as a single in the dawn of the new year, 1968, it took hold of the hearts, minds, and wallets of the general public on both coasts, in between, and around the globe. It climbed to number 8 on the Billboard pop chart and to number 7 in the United Kingdom. Out on the West Coast, "Dance to the Music" caught up with young would-be rock authority Joel Selvin on a blissful Saturday morning, while he was driving down the Eastshore Freeway near Berkeley with the radio on. "And it's Sly, sitting in on KDIA again," Joel remembers. "He hasn't been on in maybe a year. Wow, Sly! And he's all pumped up, as usual, and he's got his record, and he puts it on.... It was if something had come from outer space! It was so far beyond anything we had heard on the radio up to that point: the breakdown of the a cappella voices, the way the vocals were voiced, Larry Graham's boom-boom-boom, the way it was all pieced together. It was just literally the way I said in my book: There was black music before Sly Stone, and black music after Sly Stone. A watershed event, and that was the record."
Evocative of the congregational celebrations in which the Stewart children had performed on childhood Sundays, "Dance to the Music" inspired the primal directive of the tune's title, but also showcased the newly visible act in a manner unusual in rock and most other genres of pop music. Within the standard three-minute format of a radio single, individual instruments were introduced, a quote from Wilson Pickett's "Mustang Sally" was inserted in homage, and a couple of individual players (Cynthia and Jerry) were actually named in the lyric. Individualized voices were heard: Cynthia's raucous, spoken imperatives ("Dance to the music!" and "All the squares, go home!"), Larry's display of his matching bass vocals, and Sly's impresario tenor. The highlighting of each voice and instrument was almost pedagogical, like a rock band equiva lent to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.
Just as at the Cathedral, this was a band to be listened to as much as danced to. The album's extended twelve-minute "Dance to the Medley" spawned not hits but catchy breaks, later to be highlights of live shows, not only for Sly & the Family Stone but much later for the group's twenty-first century spin-off bands. The three-part "Medley" encompassed stereo-spanning free-form interludes evocative of what was being evolved as mind-bending acid rock by groups like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Doors.
"It touched people more than I ever thought it would," says Greg about the Dance to the Music album. "It was a process of the whole group. And we were able to do it in a way that you got respect from your peers, other musicians, and you could talk to the average cat on the street. Everybody dug it-black, white.... Even to us, it was like, if you just be honest, and give it all you have to give, it will pay off." The band's manifest belief in racial harmony and sexual equality, more explicit in later lyrics, was touched on in a couple of tracks, "Color Me True" and "Don't Burn Baby."
The payoff for both the honesty and the talent became abundant as the Family played shows on both coasts over the course of 1968. "The biggest thrill was, the first time you heard that record on the radio, it felt so good," says Greg. "You go to a city, you get in the rental car, you turn the radio on, the song comes on. That felt better than knowing you were selling a lot of albums." Freddie, testifying from his current perspective of