I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [42]
Outside John Phillips' studio, Sly did much taping in a Winnebago camper parked near the mansion and fitted with state-ofthe-art recording gear. The original Family Stone members were in and out, logging tracks individually, and holding on to Sly for a variety of reasons, among them the supply of cocaine.
But Larry, Greg, and Freddie started spending more time in Northern California, and Sly was supplying more of his own bass and guitar parts, also supplementing his rhythm needs with a drum machine. Greg credits the album with extending Sly's talent and vision. "He was one of the first to take the drum machine and make it be an instrument," concedes the flesh-and-blood drummer. "The machine, as opposed to what it is now [i.e., high-tech computerized programs], was a lounge instrument that the guy at the bar at the Holiday Inn might have used. Sly took the tickytacky, which started on the `tick,' and he inverted it, turned it inside out, into something the ear wasn't used to. He took the texture and created a rhythm with it that made it very interesting." From the man-versus-machine perspective, "I don't think the trade-off was good," Greg insists, but he points out that Sly had become attracted to synthesized percussion well before its use on Riot.
While the band's bonds of togetherness frayed, Sly kept company with Bubba Banks (who at this point was married to Rose) and James "J. B." Brown (Bubba's buddy, not the Godfather of Soul), and he received visits from musicians Ike Turner, Bobby Womack, jazz legend and enfant terrible Miles Davis, and Sly's old friend Billy Preston, who'd gone on to play with everyone from Ray Charles to the Beatles. It can be assumed that any or all of these visitors shared recorded jams, inspired by snorts of coke. Billy provided the artful keyboards on "Family Affair," and Bobby and Miles maybe somewhere in the mix, but it's likely that nobody had a chance to get very comfortable.
"I was always thinking I was gonna get killed and that the feds were gonna bust in on Sly," Bobby told Vanity Fair. "Everybody had pistols ... Sly be talkin' to you, but he ain't there. He'd be lying on the piano whacked out of his brain when it was time to do a vocal, and they'd have to lay the microphone next to his head." For his autobiography, Miles Davis recollected, "I went to a couple [of recording sessions] and there were nothing but girls everywhere and coke, bodyguards with guns, looking all evil. I told him I couldn't do nothing with him-told Columbia I couldn't make him record any quicker. We snorted some coke together and that was it."
Jerry, although he'd return to Sly periodically to help burnish recording projects, described to Joel Selvin how he extricated himself from the drug-driven L.A. residence. "I got in my jeep, put my dog and my wife in, and went back up to my house [in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco]. Left no notice, and didn't talk to [Sly] for a couple of months." Greg was the soonest to escape from an orbit around Sly altogether, returning to his own Marin home. He noted to Joel that, after his departure, "I'd get daily calls from [Sly], from everybody, and I just didn't want no more part of it. It wasn't fun anymore.... The business was handled very poorly... I had seen the situation deteriorate and seen [Sly] not responding to it, refusing to respond to the needs of everybody on all different levels. It got ugly within the group, around the group, the audience, the whole thing.... Then I