I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [48]
The visiting Miles Davis left a cruder but laughable impression on Ria. "Miles was a real crazy asshole, if you ask me," she opines. "Extremely talented, but with a very bad personality. He'd be up to his elbows and eyebrows in cocaine, and sit by himself in the dark in one of the rooms most of the time." Sly's reigning bassist, Rustee Allen, served as an additional witness to the jazz giant's shenanigans. Rustee recalled to Joel Selvin when Miles "got on Sly's organ, and started to voice these nine-note, ethereal crazy chords. Sly was way back in the bedroom and he came out yelling, `Who in the fuck is doing that on my organ?' He came in and saw. `Miles, get your mother-fucking ass out,' he said. `Don't ever play that voodoo shit here ...: Miles left, and I said, `Sly, that was Miles Davis you were talking to. "I don't give a fuck,' he said."
Actor, director, and sometime musician Melvin Van Peebles drew a more favorable report from Ria, as a guest with good influence: "He was normal and happy and creative." Sly himself seemed happy in the studio that Columbia had set up in his flat. "It wasn't like the old days [in California], when I could just sit down on the piano bench and listen to him create for hours," Ria sighs. But, "You should have heard the stuff he recorded" at Central Park West. "It's never been released. Hours and hours of beauty. It was funky, good backbeat, it got down. It wasn't mostly fast, hot dance music. It was calmer than that-very intricate and beautiful," perhaps closer to some of his post-Small Talk tracks for Epic. Ria, meanwhile, "took over being the Mother Love kind of person around the house," cooking up creamed corn from scratch, as Sly's mother had taught her to do.
There wasn't much evidence of communication with the rest of the Family Stone, though there were long-distance entreaties from Cynthia, fielded by Ria. "She was just begging to be paid. `Please, please talk to him.' `I did, Cynthia, I did, yesterday.' Sly didn't have an `attitude' toward anyone; he was only focused on creating his music." Ria recalls only one instance when Sly's cocaine addiction may have indirectly resulted in some friction between her and him. "I said, `Who the hell do you think you are, Jesus Christ?' Because he was already having that kind of delusion." After a tense pause, "He looked at me and couldn't stop laughing. And Bubba kind of looked over his shoulder at me and gave me a sign like, he really does think he's Jesus Christ, so let's not say that anymore."
You Don't Have
to Come Down
1972-1974
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
-HENRY DAVID THOREAU
I was really tired of R & B sounding the same. I think Sly taught me that. I think that it's important for Black music to always, always grow.
-RICK JAMES
HE LONG WAIT FOR RIOT helped it debut at the top of Billboard's pop charts in 1971, and three of its tracks also charted as singles. The follow-up album, Fresh, is seen in retrospect as Sly's last dealings with anything like a major hit. Work on Fresh, in 1972 and '73, brought him back to the Bay Area and to his long-ago employer Tom Donahue. Among the other engineers credited on the album are Bob Gratts, Mike Fusaro, James Green, Family standby Don Puluse, and Tom Flye. The latter had gone west, from New York City to Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, to launch the Record Plant recording studios there. At the point they hooked up, "Sly had recorded [most of] Fresh, but he wasn't happy with it, so Donahue said, `You ought to go to the Plant and see Flye,"' explains Tom, who still lives within a short drive from the Plant. Before his move, he'd briefly worked with Sly in New York. "I mixed his