I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [59]
While soliciting his idol's presence on his new disc The Electric Spanking of War Babies in August 1981, George was arrested with Sly in Los Angeles, for freebasing cocaine in a car. It was neither Sly's first nor last brush with the law. He'd been arrested and placed on probation for coke possession in 1973, and in 1979 had been sued by the IRS for nonpayment of back taxes and put in rehab in lieu of criminal charges after another coke arrest.
In February 1982, Ken Roberts resigned as Sly's manager. Throughout the coming months, Sly tried showcasing his greatest hits with a newly assembled, Georgia-based incarnation of the Family Stone, but his efforts were drawing increasingly jaundiced scrutiny. In San Francisco, there were reports of his forgetting lyrics and switching abruptly from song to song, confusing the band. In Toronto, after taking a fifteen-minute break, Sly returned to the stage to perform "I Want to Take You Higher" without realizing that the other players had already left the stage. The reviewer for the Toronto Globe and Mail summed up the audience reaction: "Some of the people leaving the bar following Sly Stone's abortive concert at the Nickelodeon last night (his second this week) were calling the show a rip-off. It wasn't that so much as it was embarrassing and sad." In July 1982, after being busted for cocaine at the Westwood Plaza Hotel in L.A., Sly identified himself as his brother, Freddie.
Through the rest of the decade, Sly accumulated a rap sheet that spanned the continent and a variety of charges. He was arrested in 1983 for possession of a sawed-off shotgun in Illinois. In Florida, he was variously charged with grand theft, welching on a hotel bill, and drug possession. In California, in 1986, he was apprehended for nonpayment of child support (to Kathy) and for possession of coke. In the press, Sly was gaining a different kind of celebrity, as a scoff-law. He was photographed asleep at a court hearing ("Are we keeping you awake?" the judge asked sardonically), he skipped bail after his L.A. coke arrest, and he in general managed to remain elusive, so that certain of his indiscretions took years to catch up with him.
In the time-honored tradition of celebrities, Sly passed in and out of rehabilitation centers. "We didn't accept `Sly' in our therapy sessions," Dr. Richard Sapp reported to Spin magazine about the singer's stay in the Lee Mental Health Clinic in Ft. Myers, Florida. "Sylvester can control Sly.... Once he realized that we were serious, he became Sylvester. As long as he continues to do that, he shouldn't be having problems with drugs." Sly wasn't quite ready to control himself, though, and Serena-Marie Sanfilipo, a woman he'd met by chance in Florida, stepped in to help. She claims to have served as his court-assigned drug therapist, but her service seems to have been at times both intimate and unusual. "After I saw that people just kept giving him crack, I just locked him up in my house," she recounts in an interview. "I had to be with him for all the tours, and all the rehabs.... He kept having to go back into rehab."
Despite the drugs and the consequences, Sly made himself available to occasional musical collaborators during the '80s. They included George Clinton, Bobby Womack, and Jesse Johnson, the last a talented representative of the next generation of funk and a sometime colleague of emerging funk royalty Prince. Bobby took Sly under his wing during a spell in rehab in 1984. "We used to be as tight as bark on a tree," Bobby later lamented to the Washington Post. "As the drugs set in, the warm, creative side went away. And then it got worse and worse." Sly also worked on occasional tracks and demos, in the preceding and following decades, with REO Speedwagon, Elvin Bishop, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Temptations, Bonnie Pointer, Gene Page, the Brothers Johnson, Maceo Parker, and Earth, Wind &