I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [36]
Freddie recalled that on that drugged New Year's Eve, two PCP users had to be rushed to the hospital. Over the next year, Hamp "Bubba" Banks observed the effects of PCP on both of the Stewart/Stone brothers: " [Sly] and Freddie walked around the house all day, like zombies," he told Joel. "That is where it all fell apart."
Drug use and self-indulgent behavior were becoming common among successful musicians. Their lifestyles were substantially financed by advances paid to them against their future earnings, and recording companies were only too ready to provide the cash and to tolerate indications of excess. "The more popular you get," Sly pointed out to Spin magazine in 1985, "the more people there are around you who say they will make everything work. So more people make money off your hide, like from traveling arrangements.... When you're much younger and on top, they tell you, `Don't worry `bout nothin'. Hey, you're an artist, just worry about your music.' . . . I'd get a lot of contracts crammed in my face. I'd be getting into a Learjet, on my way somewhere, and they'd say, `Before you get to the next place, can we see you, sweetheart? Sign this right quick.'" Along with the cash, it became ever easier for Sly to acquire roadies, personal assistants, and luxury vehicles. Ultimately, of course, it became more difficult for him to fulfill the terms of those contracts and to put aside any part of the money toward his financial future; most of it disappeared in the short run.
With a more hopeful approach to finances, Sly and David Kapralik's Stone Flower Productions was set up in an office opposite the distinctive cylindrical headquarters of Capitol Records in Hollywood. Drawing on the producing skills he'd first honed as a teenager at Autumn Records, Sly helped launch a brief but successful career (on Atlantic Records) for Little Sister, the group named for his youngest musical sibling, Vet. She was joined by two other vocalists, Mary McCreary and Elva "Tiny" Mouton, with whom she'd attended high school, performed gospel music (as the Heavenly Tones), and later provided backup on her older brother's albums. In 1970, Little Sister placed on the pop and R & B charts with two of Sly's compositions, "Somebody's Watching You" (a cover from the Family Stone's Stand! album) and "You're the One." Stone Flower also produced less successful recordings by R & B artist Joe Hicks and the proto-funk group 6iX. Notable in these productions was Sly's novel use of a prototype drum machine, a harbinger of developments in Sly's own later recordings and in popular music in general.
Sly made several carefully selected concert appearances across the country in 1970. One of those stops, for a free concert in Chicago's Grant Park on July 27, resulted in what was described in subsequent national reports and in legend for decades to come as "a riot."
As reported in the New York Times, "several thousand youths" battled police and vandalized the city's Loop district after the Family Stone refused to perform at the concert. Presented by the city as "a way to bridge the generation gap," the concert featured Sly as a form of apology to fans who'd been disappointed when he'd welched on dates earlier in the summer. The band, however, refused to begin playing for the free concert until the crowd quieted itself, which it didn't. The Times piece didn't lay blame on Sly for the Chicago riot, but other parts of the press and the rumor among the public nationwide did. It didn't help that Sly & the Family Stone were accumulating blame for showing up late for gigs or missing them altogether, trying the patience of young audiences. Besides, the health of rock concerts in general had become suspect, after