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Larry Graham led the exuberant "M'Lady" with some of the bassist's fattest, fuzziest runs heard to date, augmented by Freddie's fast, chunky funk chording and Jerry's giddy clarinet. The bassist's thump-'n'-pluck style had grown more fluid, and his lines on various of these tracks, notably "Dynamite!," would be adapted into innumerable disco bottoms boogieing over dance floors in the '70s. Record sales indicated that the public was not yet buying into all this artistry and delight, but they would with Stand!, the fourth album, whose several singles began bombarding the hit parade the following year.

Over the relatively brief period of gestation of its first three albums and of the public's reaction to them, Sly & the Family Stone were transformed from best-kept secret to an inflating commercial success. Along the way, on the road between coasts, the band was less recognized and more challenged. "I remember that Sly and I drove the equipment truck," says Jerry, "and Daddy [Sly's father K. C. Stewart] followed behind us in a huge station wagon. Drivers changed every hundred miles or so. Sly and I changed when we felt like it, [but] I usually drove and Sly wrote [music]. We talked lots, which kept us awake. These were great times, when there was not very much hard drugs. We enjoyed wine, a few drinks, and some weed, but not too much, as it makes you too tired to drive.

"There were no roadies at first, the band was the roadies," Jerry continues. "Daddy was the road manager. We learned the hard way how to read maps correctly. The straight line is not the fastest when it comes to highway travel. We learned it was so much faster to take the Ohio Turnpike and major highways, as opposed to driving through some scary backwoods towns."

The larger community of Detroit, where racial tension had erupted in 1967, provided its own drama. "There were riots going on, there was a curfew, it was three in the morning, and we got lost in the back streets somewhere," Greg remembers. "And all of a sudden the National Guard pulls us over. And here they look in the van, and it's black and white hippies, and that's challenging. But when they pull us out and line us up, Sly starts mouthing off, not accepting certain things. We didn't have any weapons, [but] we're up against the wall, they have machine guns, there's a race riot going on, and this is a very tense situation. And [Sly is] treating it like it's Sunday afternoon: `Don't say anything, 'cause you're gonna hear it back from me.' That was challenging to the point of dangerous, and we're literally yelling at him to back off." In Greg's opinion, this incident (and others like it) was less a reaction of the authorities to the band's racial makeup than to its leader's personality, "'cause he had a very sharp and defined attitude about what he represented and what he was saying. I think that challenged more people than just the fact that he was black."

Back in New York, the group relished the satisfaction of being presented by Bill Graham, who a year earlier had refused to book them at his influential Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. In March 1968, the West Coast impresario had opened the Fillmore East in New York's East Village, and a few months later, he received a call from Epic's Al DeMarino. "Rumor was afloat that Jimi Hendrix was coming in," Al recalls. "Now, Bill Graham, at Fillmore East and West, had a three-act format: opening act, supporting act, headliner, and would very seldom think of deviating from that. So I called Bill ... and I said, `Look, why don't we try this: why don't we have a hundred-percent-equal star billing. Below Jimi, special guest star: Sly & the Family Stone: He said, `Let's go with it!"'

What they'd created was a night to remember in rock history, with classic comparisons and contrasts. Both Sly's Family and Jimi's Experience were multiracial bands led by charismatic black men, but Jimi's music at this point was much more blues-based, though he'd soon find that approach restrictive. Jimi was having to contend with