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By Root 293 0

Sly's residences, while Sly, as "the controller," determined who got how much of which drugs when. "Nobody had their own blow, he was the man, and that is where he gets his audience." The audience at times included band members, numbed into a very different relationship with the band's leader. They included brother Freddie, who managed to make occasional trips to his own home in the Oakland Hills to dry out.

Jerry marks the move to Los Angeles as the inception of the troubles. Sly amassed a collection of vicious dogs, intimidating most visitors and temporary residents. Frank Arellano, working to establish himself as a musician in L.A. and living a safer life, was invited to Bel Air several times on the strength of his credentials as a singer with Sly in the Viscaynes. He found that his former schoolmate and singing partner "wasn't the same guy. He wasn't as relaxed and loose, he was more rigid and seemed serious." While Sly's father was still functioning as the band's road manager, K. C. Stewart had seemed to turn a blind eye to his son's use of drugs, and after he'd retired from those duties and returned to San Francisco, the onetime warm and regular contact between Sly and his parents became undependable.

"I think cocaine is one of the largest industry-dismantling vehicles," says Jerry. "The downfall of the most famous bands was largely due to the affiliates, the hangers-on, the dealers, the doctors.... [With] everybody we were on tour with, it happened to most of the other bands back then. I don't want to talk about other bands and stuff that I saw, though.... It's kind of a scary thing, and it leaves me open to a lot of criticism." During the late '60s and throughout the '70s, the world of rock was indeed populated by many with addictions of various durations to various drugs. The usual suspects included Elton John, Eric Clapton, Marvin Gaye, Billy Preston, James Taylor, James Brown, David Bowie, and some within the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, the Temptations, the Allman Brothers, and Aerosmith.

Following Sly to his den on the West Coast, manager David Kapralik was among those lining up for white lines. But the drug couldn't fill in the widening cracks in David's idealized picture of Sly as a paradigm of progressive social consciousness and in his view of himself as an able, anointed caretaker. Kitsaun King, the older sister of Sly's former girlfriend Debbie King and herself a one-time employee of Stone Flower Productions, commented to Joel on the saddening role David played out at Sly's L.A. homesteads in the early 1970s. "You expected people like the David Kapraliks, the people who were adults, who had been in the music business, and who, in theory, had some knowledge, to be telling Sly the truth. But they weren't telling the truth. They were just going along with Sly's program. And Sly's program was totally substandard, because he was high all the time."

David recalls, "this whole mise-en-scene in this dank, dank house in Bel Air. Various characters were walking around with guns. And there was Gunn the dog, the terrifier. It was heavy. Let's just leave it at that. And I didn't want to live anymore." The formerly confident and buoyant David felt profoundly shaken by what he perceived as the dissolution of his relationship with Sly, who had been under pressure from his older sister Loretta Stewart and from the Black Panthers to "get rid of whitey." Ultimately, after the release of Riot, David "went on my knees before [Sly] to let me bring in Ken Roberts to manage him, so that I could go on and live." David was well aware of Ken's reputation, still in place today, for cool-headed, bottom-line management of talent and other enterprises.

Having done his best to attend to Sly's future, David decided to shorten his own. He describes the scenario. "One day, I forget what I was on, I was on the whole alphabet at the time, I called a taxicab to take me to the Beverly Hills Hotel. I took two bags, so I could check in. Threw clothes into them.... I'd been going to the Beverly Hills