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-JIMI HENDRIX

Funk is to do the best you can and then leave it alone. You can truly say, "Funk it!" 'cause you did the best you can. You don't have to be guilty.

-GEORGE CLINTON 1994 interview with Jeff Kaliss

OWEVER MUCH HIS PERsonal life and his performing and recording prospects would later dim, Sly looked pretty good under TV lights. Appearing on The Mike Douglas Show a month prior to the Madison Square Garden spectacle, he offered up a solo piano rendition of "If You Want Me to Stay," which exquisitely showed off the harmonic structure of the song, as well as its creator's accomplished keyboard technique. A month after the wedding, Sly returned as Mike's co-host. The microphone seemed to like Sly's radio-trained, hip baritone voice, the camera liked his large smile and fantastic wardrobe, and Sly seemed comfortable seated beside Mike, a change from the hot seat he'd shared with TV host Dick Cavett three and four years earlier. Douglas and Stone were an act that could appeal even to daytime suburban housewives. Among the show's guests, Sly played particularly well off Muhammad Ali and the Smothers brothers, who were comfortable in themselves and felt no need to compete for attention.

But off-camera, Sly became further distanced from what remained of his original bandmates. The Family Stone was booked, alongside Kool & the Gang, for the better part of a week in January 1975 at Radio City Music Hall in New York, but the booking drew fractional audiences to the 6000-seat venue. There was much grumbling among band members about inadequate transportation, accommodation, and other matters, and mumblings throughout the audience that Robert "Kool" Bell and his Jersey City-based up-and-comers had blown the West Coast hippies off the stage. In short, it was a bumpy lowering of the lifestyle and adulation to which Sly and his band had become accustomed at the beginning of the decade. John Rockwell of the New York Times pronounced the concert as "totally out of touch with recession realities," and then elaborated: "Worst of all was the quality of Sly's music. In the not-too-distant past, Sly was one of the most exciting and significant forces in American pop music. But now he has taken to the stalest of rehashes of his greatest hits, ignoring his most recent work, submerging the communal energies of his band under a silly ego trip and rushing perfunctorily through the music he does play. It would be easy to dismiss Sly out of hand. Except that the memories of what he used to be make one more sad than angry."

Cynthia lamented to Joel Selvin about this period: "Not having rehearsals began to take a toll on my playing." Soon after, she said, "I just stopped getting calls for gigs" from Sly. Bubba Banks, still married to Rose, noted to Joel that his wife and other members of the band had "come from three or four thousand [dollars] " for their former shows "to two hundred and fifty" at Radio City. "And I say, `Rose won't be getting that-we outta here. I took Rose." Jerry recalls that Ken Roberts had told him, "I really like you, Jerry, but I don't think Sly really needs you. I think he can just hire a band." Sly's brother, Freddie, reportedly took his frustration about Radio City out on Ken, physically. It was Ken, though, who put up the money for Jerry to get home to California after the show. Sly had left them all in the lurch.

Later in 1975, Sly made an appearance on TV during the American Music Awards, but little else was seen of him. In November, he released his first post-Family Epic album, High on You. Joel recounts how Sly, while recording the album with a "square john" CBS engineer named Roy Segal in San Francisco, had "set up a tent in the studio. So, when he needs to be `inspired' he goes into the tent," as if to say, "'I'm not gonna do blow around this cracker.' " Sly's widest exposure that year may have been in a Playboy feature, which predictably celebrated the waning artist's still-luxurious and licentious existence. In the Summer of 1976, Sly flew to