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By Root 336 0

you can go in and move 'em around, do whatever you want. With a razor blade, it's a little harder. So it's another thing that [Sly] kind of started.... He had a sense of, `Let's go for it, let's try it.' Engineers are always trying to keep things technically together, so they're often on the careful side. But you also have to let creativity breathe. I'm after the emotional content when I'm recording or mixing ... and to have someone come in who exuded emotional content-," Tom chuckles, "it was great."

Gazing back more than three decades, it's tough for Tom to identify particular tracks on which he was influential, the more so because there was no sure way of keeping track of them. "Sly had gotten ripped off a number of times in his life, and he would not leave the tapes at the studio. He had like a Toyota station wagon, which one of his bodyguards drove, and every night the thing would pull up [to the Record Plant] and they would unload all the tapes. At the end of the [late-night] session, the next day or whatever, they'd pack it back up and take off. Sometimes the paperwork would get lost with the reels of tape, you wouldn't know where the songs were, and sometimes you'd have tracks which were started but didn't have a name for them yet."

Fresh continued to move the sound of Sly's music away from that of a live band and toward what might be dubbed a prototechno mode. The drum machines, multiple overdubs, and tape loops deployed by Tom were all early, makeshift versions of studio tools that would become ubiquitous in later decades, along with increasing computer sophistication. Still new in 1973, this approach put a hypnotic electronic gloss on Fresh, testifying yet again to Sly's innovative pioneering genius. Today, when anyone with a computer and a digital recorder can burn their own music disc, technology has become overextended, to the detriment of pop music generally.

Sly's diminished but ongoing recording and performing activity still needed flesh-and-blood players to go along with the machines. When Jerry Martini began demanding what he saw as fair compensation for past and present services, Sly hired saxophonist Pat Rizzo. Was that the coercion it appeared to be? "I guess you could call it that," Jerry responds. "But I [ended up getting] my money." Actually, Jerry and Pat served Sly together for a while (both men were credited on the sleeve of Fresh). They became friends, and they were both present for the return of Sly to the Apollo in Harlem, in March 1972. Brother Freddie was present in body too, but not in spirit. "Freddie passed out at the Apollo," Bubba Banks reported to Joel Selvin. "I think the thing was, who could get the highest and be the most out of it. Freddie was always trying to get Sly's attention. Everybody was trying to out-high each other."

Another sort of competition had Larry Graham attempting to out-macho Sly. Larry's questioning of Sly's authority had surfaced during the first few hours of the band's existence, and it's arguable that his handsome, cocky stage presence, resonant vocals, and peerless bass technique later drew some of the spotlight away from Sly. Behind the scenes, there were reports of affairs with Rose and with Freddie's wife, Sharon. Ultimately, Larry assembled his own posse of brutal, badass hangers-on. By the time of the making of Riot, Larry's bass parts were among the countless overdubs requested and sometimes discarded by Sly, who played the instrument himself on "You Caught Me Smilin'. "I didn't play anything with the rest of the band," Larry griped to Mojo, and his thump `n' pluck style is certainly less noticeable on Riot.

Late in 1972, Sly and Larry's two sets of "bodyguards" confronted each other at L.A.'s Cavalier Hotel. Bubba Banks and his pal Larry Chin, high on PCP and inspired by a recent screening of Stanley Kubrick's dystopian film A Clockwork Orange, assaulted Larry's henchmen Vernon "Moose" Constan and Robert Joyce with fists, feet, and walking sticks. Sly's men had also been assigned to apprehend Larry Graham, over what Sly perceived as the bassist's