I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [55]
Alec Palao, not a fan of Sly's recorded output during this period, hazards a guess at what Sly and his studio supporters wanted to do in the Pit. "Probably, for every month he was there, three weeks would be drug taking and partying, and there might be one week of attempts at recording music," opines Alec.
Tom can't recall nefarious business in the Pit, but he also doesn't know if Sly ever recorded anything there that made it onto a record. Sly's unusual studio configuration was maintained at the Record Plant long after he had returned to recording in his own abode and elsewhere. The Pit was rented out to other artists, including Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman. Despite the money invested in Sly, and the time and effort he was investing in studios commercial and personal, his own shelf life seemed to be coming into question.
COLUMBIA/CBS HAD BEEN ANTEING up over a half-million dollars in advance for each of Sly's last few successful recording projects, but the company offered something less for Small Talk, because its predecessor, Fresh, had sold less than previous Sly & the Family Stone albums had. With his career in apparent need of bolstering, Sly decided, in dialogue with his long-term trusted friend CBS's Steve Paley, to make a media event out of his marriage to girlfriend and co-parent Kathy Silva. The public ceremony would bestow familial legitimacy on Sly Jr., already known to fans from the Small Talk cover.
Steve Paley recalls that Irwin Siegelstein, who'd replaced Clive Davis at CBS, allotted some $25,000 for Sly's wedding party, scheduled for June 5, 1974, at Madison Square Garden, the scene of some of the Family Stone's best-remembered performances in New York City. There would also be a wedding reception at the Starlight Room of the Waldorf-Astoria. Steve engaged celebrated fashion designer Halston (with Sly reportedly paying the bill) to clothe Sly and Kathy, their mothers, all Sly's siblings, the other members of the Family Stone and Little Sister groups, Bubba Banks, an additional personal assistant nicknamed Buddha, and a dozen black models, serving as a sort of collective flower girl but bearing gilded palms instead of blossoms. To Freddie Stone's disappointment, Steve was designated best man.
The wedding gig produced the expected and much-needed media attention for Sly, but not necessarily in the tone that Steve would have preferred. Maureen Orth, in Newsweek, characterized Sly as "one of the shrewdest and highest-paid talents in the pop world," and declared that he'd "always been the badass of the rock world." She described the wedding scene as a performance before "23,000 screaming freaks." Steve later confided to Joel Selvin that Sly had attempted to seduce Maureen on the evening of the event. George W. S. Trow, a writer friend of Steve's, provided a more sympathetic and detailed-though sardonic-account for the New Yorker magazine. He portrayed Sly as "a lean, graceful man with a large smile" and went on to state, "He is in control of his leanness and his grace. He is in control of his large smile. He is in control of many of the people around him, and, sporadically, he is in control of his considerable talent." Accompanying Steve on a premarital visit to Sly's Central Park West flat and waiting to take the star to a fitting at Halston's, George was inspired to comment, "Sly uses small, benign delays in the way that a lion uses small, undeadly nips to indicate affection while calling attention to his teeth." One virtue of Sly's particular talent, the writer observed, is: "A singer who appeals to hip blacks and hip whites at the same time makes a lot of money." But about the purported evolution of the ideals of the '60s into the harsher realities of the '70s, George felt that "the waited-for convergence of white and black experience on the countercultural