• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

For Fresh, "We rerecorded everything in place on the tape, and we just dubbed over whatever was there. And the way he kept it together, since it was piecemeal-one instrument at a time-was that he had a Rhythm King drum machine. He called it the Funk Box, because there were rhythms that had a groove to them. It was like a glorified click track [the term for a sort of analog electronic metronome]. You could adjust the tempo, and ... you could preset different beats and change them a little bit." An advancement over the preexisting Rhythm Ace, the Maestro Rhythm King generated a sterile, "dry" tone lacking the acoustic properties of a real drum kit but making for its own kind of supple groove.

"[Sly] was so innovative in the process of recording," Tom continues. "He was the first guy to record piecemeal, one track at a time, using this click track. 'Cause quite often, he'd play all the parts," and would need the coordinating guidance of the clicks. "If someone could play it better, fine. But usually he played it better than anybody-everybody except for his brother Freddie." Tom had determined early in his long career to accommodate the recording process as much as possible to his clients' needs. He'd been a professional drummer in the '60s for Don McLean (on the anthemic "American Pie") and for a moderately successful group called Lothar and the Hand People. He'd experienced what it was like to be disrespected by a recording studio (Capitol) and had vowed, "I never want to treat an artist that way."

Adjusting to Sly involved some challenging and fascinating improvisations. Breaking with studio tradition, Sly preferred playing instruments in the control room, usually reserved for engineers and producers, rather than in the studio area proper. "And he liked to sing in the control room, which was kind of a pain in the butt," says Tom. "You get the `bleed' from the speakers." Sly's earlier recording with the Family Stone had stayed closer to the standard format, "where everybody pretty much played all at the same time, or you'd have the rhythm section and the vocalist and then you'd add the strings or the horns." But once Sly started flying solo, he "did it track-by track, he pulled this together in his head, and it was amazing. He's hearing in his imagination the ultimate product, so he can understand what each individual thing is."

Ken Roberts, replacing the troubled David Kapralik as the band's manager in financially shaky times, had reportedly recommended that the leader divest himself of his players as an unnecessary expense. Although Sly still seems resentful about that suggestion, Tom finds other evidence that the separation from the band bore hidden virtues. Sly, he believes, "could play all the parts better" than any pick-up musician, "and he knew what he wanted, so he didn't have to try to explain it to anyone." Supplying most of the ingredients himself, and replacing a human drummer with a machine, were in Tom's opinion "just a different art form."

Says Tom about the recording of "Babies Makin' Babies," a seeming warning about unwanted pregnancies: "We were working ... and every time we'd get to this one section of the song, he'd say, `This is really funky! Those four bars are really funky!' And they were. So he says, `I sure wish I could have the whole track like those four bars: He'd done a rough vocal, a 'guide'vocal [a dummy track, to be erased later, from which to reference other takes]. So he says, `Is there any way we could make it all like that?' I said, `I don't know, but I can try.' We were working on two-inch tape, so I stayed `after school' that night and made a couple hundred copies of those four bars.... And then I took a razor blade and cut them all together. He came in the next day, and really loved it.

"As far as I know, that was one of the first times anybody had made what in reality was a multitrack loop, which nowadays is the basis of how many people make a record.... But in the digital domain,