• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Another perspective on Sly's love life appears in the pages of an autobiography by Deborah Santana, Space Between the Stars. Debbie, long married to (and more recently divorced from) guitar legend Carlos Santana, devotes a half dozen chapters to her early relationship with Sly. It had begun on the San Francisco street where Deborah, then known as Debbie King, lived, in the summer of 1969, with her parents, black jazz guitarist and band leader Saunders King and his Irish American wife, Jo Frances. Sly, who'd been staying in his parents' Urbano Drive house nearby, stopped his vehicle in the middle of the street to make conversation with the attractive eighteen-year-old, eight years his junior, who had just a few weeks earlier viewed his televised appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. By the time Sly and the band flew east in preparation for the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair a few weeks later, the teenager had begun an intense, long-term liaison with the rising rock luminary, and it lasted through the spring of 1972. (Stevie Swanigan's professional services to Sly began slightly sooner, but were more or less contemporaneous.)

Debbie's account provides a rare look at a period of Sly's personal life by an intimate insider. There are images of the Urbano Drive homestead, with Debbie petting one of Sly's earlier pet dogs, the Great Dane called Stoner, "while Sly played the piano, writing lyrics on yellow tablets and setting notes and chords onto staff paper." Debbie goes on to write, "Mama [Alpha Stewart] made the [rehearsing Family Stone] play softly because of the neighbors. Mama was usually in the kitchen cooking, or sitting at the table in the window, reading her Bible. She was sweet, with a twinkle in her eyes. Her heavy body moved slowly, and Sly danced around her, running back downstairs [to the basement], where she never went. I would sit with her and answer questions about my family and church."

Space Between the Stars goes on to describe Debbie's escape to New York with Sly, where they shared a courtly romance enhanced by marijuana and LSD. Debbie didn't follow the band to Woodstock, but saw Sly often, after she'd enrolled at California State College in Dominguez Hills and he'd relocated to a mansion in Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles, not far away. She refers to Sly's sharing cocaine with her, to help her maintain her academic schedule. She also reports that by 1971, she'd dropped out of college, and that Sly's cocaine use drove him into occasional medical emergencies. Within a year, she writes, Sly had subjected her to a couple of episodes of physical abuse, and she'd left L.A. and their relationship, soon to start the study of yoga and a new romance with her future husband and rock-legend-in-the-making Carlos Santana.

A separate reflection of the benign glow in which Sly and Debbie had begun their affair is heard on Ben Fong-Torres's recording of an interview he conducted with Sly in Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 for the then-new Rolling Stone magazine. "Debbie's smart," Sly told the young reporter, "the brightest girl that has ever been associated with me in any way like this. She lived right around the corner from me and I didn't even know it.... I went to England and all over the place, all I had to do was go up the street and it would have been cool." The young lady in question was heard to reciprocate his esteem. "What Sly has in his head, he knows is right," she advised Ben, "so it doesn't excite him to read somebody who agrees with him."

A few months earlier, in July 1969, impresario George Wein expanded the lineup at his Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island by booking rock and blues acts along with expected jazz greats such as Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Among the youth-oriented bookings were Jeff Beck, Blood, Sweat & Tears, James Brown, B. B. King, John Mayall, Frank Zappa, and Sly & the Family Stone. The rock roster inevitably attracted a different, difficult demographic. On two successive nights, crowds breached