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By Root 310 0

neighborhoods in the Terrace section of the city, collections of plywood structures erected during World War II on the north side of Vallejo, favored a particular racial grouping, but the groups all lived in close proximity to each other. The Stewarts occupied a more prominent home on Denio Street on the western side, near the cemetery and the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, which had been a major source of income for blacks and others who flocked to the West Coast from elsewhere. Though there was some persistent de facto segregation among elementary schools in the '50s, it started to fade throughout the public school system. In junior high schools and in the three-year Vallejo High, and over Bay Area radio stations and television, young people of all colors experienced the irresistible evolution of rhythm and blues into rock 'n' roll.

Rock was a revolution that shook up stereotypes. White teenagers everywhere heard and watched white rock idol Elvis Presley crooning and shaking his hips in imitation of what he and his peers, including Jerry Lee Lewis and Conway Twitty, had observed, sometimes covertly, at Southern black churches and dance halls. Black teens, meanwhile, found their race represented alongside whites in the pantheon of early rock by such perform ers as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and any number of black doowop groups. Rock may not yet have sought the sophistication of jazz (where black and white musicians were already relatively well integrated), but it had gotten beyond the narrow and restricted status of "race" music. Anyone could play rock 'n' roll, and everyone could listen to it.

Frank Arellano, the musically inclined son of a Filipino father (a welder at Mare Island) and a white mother, had upgraded from the Terraces to a middle-class east side neighborhood. He remembers meeting one of his future singing partners, Sylvester Stewart, newly nicknamed "Sly," when Sly came to play guitar behind a doo-wop vocal group at a dance. Both Frank and Sly were still in junior high. "Everybody in the singing group was waiting for him to get there," laughs Frank. "Does that sound familiar?" (Delays have indeed dogged Sly Stone performances, right up to his latest ones.) After Sly's arrival, Frank noted that the guitar was almost as big as its player, who was several years younger than most of the other members of the group.

Just before their first year of high school, Frank encountered Sly again during a summer league game of basketball. "It was an elbow here, an elbow there, and `I'm gonna get you after the game.' So, after the game, everybody was outside and lining up.... Their team was all black, ours was mostly white.... I saw this skinny little guy, and I went, `I'm gonna get across from him, 'cause he couldn't hurt me: And that was Sly. We kind of squared off, a few things were said, and then everybody said, `This isn't cool,' so nothing ever happened. Little did I know how fast he could be, so it was probably a good thing we didn't have that fight." At Vallejo High, though they were at the same grade level, Frank didn't share many courses with Sly. "Maybe he was smarter than me," Frank allows, "but I had a bunch of easy courses. I caught my high school counselor groping one of the young lady aides when I went in his office one time, and after that I got all the easy courses I could get, any time I wanted." It was Frank's musical inclination that brought him back in contact with Sly.

In junior high, with an all-Filipino group, Frank had sung doo-wop, a term coined in the '50s for the smooth, listenerfriendly mode of vocalizing rhythm and blues, or R & B (itself named earlier in the decade by Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler). Frank had encountered another precocious doo-wopper, blonde Charlene Imhoff, at musical events and at baseball games, where she served as what he called an "athletic supporter," a suggestive way of tagging a loyal fan.

At Vallejo High, Frank and Charlene assembled several versions of a group they named for her junior high ensemble, the Viscounts. Sly at this time was singing and playing