I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [29]
For those who witnessed the early concerts or bought the Dance to the Music album (and not just the single) when it was released later in 1968, the Family Stone was something to see as well as hear. In the album's cover and publicity photos and onstage, and in its TV appearances that year, the biracial makeup of the outrageously outfitted group was as impressive as was its mix of genders. To his credit, Sly never proffered Rose or Cynthia, both very attractive women, as background eye candy, as Ray Charles had with his Raelettes, but as integral members of the act.
"At a time of great social unrest in this country, this man came forth with an integrated band, the members of which got on famously, as brothers and sisters, and never had a problem anywhere they went," notes Epic's Al DeMarino. This feature broadened the band's appeal across racial lines in audiences and among older liberal-minded fans of Al and David Kapralik's generation.
David explains his personal perspective on race and American culture. As children in Plainfield, New Jersey, in the 1930s, he and his siblings had been "among the only Jews in our elementary school, and we were subjected to a lot of prejudice, and it was hurtful.... I didn't play with the other Caucasian kids, but during the lunch hour the Negroes, as they were called back then, took me in, and we related." As an aspiring Broadway actor in the next decade, David and black actress Jane White founded Torchlight Productions "to integrate Negroes into theater, movies, and the media." Switching to a day job at Columbia Records, David bonded with legendary producer John Hammond in bolstering the label's commitment to rhythm and blues, resurrected the Okeh label as a showcase for black music, and had, with Jerry Brandt, brought several swinging black acts to Columbia from Harlem churches. With this history of dedication, David was perhaps bound to hitch his star to what he thought he saw in the Family Stone and heard in the music created by its black leader. "I saw Sylvester as a vehicle for expressing, lyrically and socio-dynamically, his bringing the races together at this juncture in history," declares David. Sly's own high hopes were not quite so altruistic.
Everybody:
Stand!
1968-1970
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, it is the wine of a new procreation, and I am Bacchus, who presses out this glorious wine for men and makes them drunk with the spirit.
-LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
-ALLAN BLOOM, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER
HE SEEDS OF FAME FOR SLY & the Family Stone had been planted, but it took a while for the band to reach extravagant blossom. A third Epic album, Life, was recorded in May 1968, while the band was still sampling its Dance-driven success. A new kind of confidence was perceptible in the LP's opening track, "Dynamite!," which engineer Don Puluse says was tangible in the studio. Confidence notwithstanding, nothing on Life ever shared its predecessor's success, although in retrospect it's hard to hear why not. Several of the album's cuts, particularly "Fun," "Love City," "M'Lady," and the title piece, bear much of the trademark energy and listener-friendly impulsion of the group's earlier and later hits. The title cut opened with Sly imitating the sound of Laffing Sal, a mechanical clown from Playland at the Beach, San Francisco's erstwhile amusement park. This helped set the tone of the track's (and the album's) life-is-a-circus sentiments, reflective of the good vibes the band was still enjoying. When I party, I party hearty, the band declared in "Fun," and blasts of horns from Jerry Martini and Cynthia Robinson helped celebrate the sentiment, which took in family members-brother, sister, daddy, and momma-and a trademark canny commandment to the congregation of fans: "Socketh unto others