I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [35]
THE BIG MONEY SLY MADE after Stand! and its follow-ups helped him establish luxurious and well-protected bicoastal command points between 1969 and 1971, including an enviable suite on New York City's prestigious Central Park West. (As for the city of his early success, Sly was witnessed delivering a diatribe from the stage to a Bay Area audience in late '69. "You're over," he told the stunned crowd. "You thought you were cool, but your arrogance was your undoing, and San Francisco is now over, officially." "He didn't explain it," noted spectator Joel Selvin. "He was just pissed off.")
Down in Los Angeles, Stevie Swanigan was assigned responsibility of locating domiciles after Sly and David Kapralik had established an office for their new Stone Flower Productions in Hollywood. From an apartment in the Griffith Park area behind Hollywood, Sly moved to a larger, more removed rented property on Coldwater Canyon. Along with Topanga Canyon, Beverly Hills, and Bel Air, this was one of several select areas favored by L.A.'s rich and famous because they offered verdant hillsides, relative isolation, and spacious structures on large lots. Debbie King lived at the Coldwater Canyon property during that period of her connection with Sly, and Stevie and some of Sly's bandmates and acquaintances used it as a crash pad and base of operations, with a caretaker named Louis abiding on a more permanent basis. Joel Selvin, who made a visit to the property on behalf of his college paper, notes that "K. C. and Alpha [Stewart] were down at Coldwater Canyon a lot. They were somewhere between figurehead parents and kitchen staff." An expanding collection of dogs added to the visual and olfactory signs of life.
Hamp "Bubba" Banks, who'd provided Sly with rowdy company and something of a template of toughness on the streets of San Francisco, reconnected with Sly after spending some time in prison. He found his friend mutated by fame and fortune, and more desirous of services Bubba and some of his streetwise colleagues were quite ready to provide, including facilitating and protecting Sly's indulgences. "When I got to Los Angeles, he was the cocaine king," Bubba recalled. "Now he could really do what he wanted.... If I was in the house, he could do what he wanted." Joel reveals that Bubba was disappointed with K. C. 's relationship to Sly during this period, because "his son was irresponsible, disrespectful, a piece of shit, and K. C. let him be that way ... 'cause the guy was cleaning toilets until his son had a hit record, and when they bought that place on Urbano Drive, Daddy didn't have to clean toilets no more.... So he'd put up with anything."
Bubba himself deserves some thanks, or blame, for letting Sly be himself, or what he'd become, a dynamo of both creativity for occasional public consumption and of extravagant private indulgence. The latter, of course, came to compromise the former. "He didn't have to ask for it, he didn't have to buy," Stephani Owens told Joel about the easy availability of substances for those with the right amount of cash and/or the right connections. "There were some drugs around that were bought, but not as much as were given to him.... Life was drugs, and it was music." While recording at the Record Plant, near San Francisco, "They would spend so many hours, thirty-six to forty-eight hours in a stretch, wearing out the engineers. But they were doing drugs too."
Freddie told Joel that PCP, aka angel dust, was introduced into the array of stimulants at his brother's L.A. digs as early as New Year's Eve 1969. PCP (phencyclidine hydrochloride) had been labeled a "dissociative anesthetic" and removed from its