I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [47]
Betty Davis recalls having met Sly in the Bay Area before she'd met Miles and before she went on, after their marriage, to record three legendary albums of funk herself, the first produced by Greg Errico, who, along with Larry Graham, was also featured in her band. "I was at the Record Plant [in Sausalito] and they were having a party there, and [Sly] was at the party," says Betty. She "thought he was really great," musically, but found him, as many did, "a bit aloof" in person. Not so aloof, though, that he didn't try to hustle the long-limbed Betty, perhaps providing inspiration for the most popular track off her Errico-produced album, "If I'm in Luck I Might Get Picked Up." Later, "I turned Miles on to [Sly]," Betty verifies, "because I used to play him in the house all the time. `Dance to the Music,"Family Affair' . . . [Miles] liked it, or else he would have told me to turn it off." Betty sings an admiring shoutout to Sly in the lyrics of "F.U.N.K." on her fabulous Nasty Gal album (1975).
Miles had been one of several regular celebrity visitors to Sly's Central Park West digs in New York City for several years by the time Ria Boldway made another loving appearance, in 1973. She'd just returned to California from Paris and had ended up consulting a psychiatrist about what she thought was culture shock. "He said, `It sounds to me like you need to leave your husband,"' she laughs. "And I did. I had been planning to. And that's when I got back in touch with Sly. I guess I called his mother's house and left my phone number. I said, `If he ever needs me, if there's ever trouble or anything, let him call me."' Sly himself soon called her, "And he said, `I need you to come to New York with me."' Having hopped a plane to San Francisco, Sly drove over to Ria's and took her to his parents' house. Taking Ria aside, "They begged me to help him," she says. "They didn't out and out say what the problems were, they just said, `He's having a lot of problems and we're worried about his health, and maybe he'll listen to you."'
With time to gather only a few of her things, Ria flew with Sly back to New York, no doubt recalling their first plane trip together a dozen years earlier. After landing, "We stayed by ourselves for a couple of days, and it was absolutely wonderful," sighs Ria. "Then I stayed there for three months. But he was so heavily into his downward spiral then that there was just no hope." It was a period of high living, in more than one sense. "Very posh, little things everywhere, bodyguards everywhere." Since she'd come across the country with little luggage, and she and Sly were about the same, trim size, Ria took to wearing some of "his gorgeous leather clothes." Sly then financed her shopping trips to the ritzy pharmacy on the building's first floor, for cosmetics, and to Greenwich Village, for clothing. He topped off his gifts with a floor-length mink coat. "I used to go walking in Central Park," Ria says, "with a bodyguard and a mink coat. Can you believe it?"
Bubba Banks, still Sly's right-hand man, acted as guide for her shopping trips and as much more than just a bodyguard to Sly, says Ria. "Bubba was more like a valet ... or, he could have been a very dear friend tending to a very sick buddy.... He would take [Sly] in and out of the bathtub, when he couldn't do it himself, and try to get him ready and on his feet for meetings at Columbia, and interviews." The "sickness," of course, was self-induced, and this time, unlike in Paris, Ria was aware of Sly's habits. "He did so many drugs [including PCP] that I thought, a few times, he would die. And Bubba had to take care of him. Many times." Bubba himself "may have tippled,"