• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 317 0

to recreate a Sly, that was the last thing I wanted to do." He hoped, though, that the enterprise might, somehow, some time, tempt Sly to join in. After the gig, at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, Greg summoned Jerry, Cynthia, Vet, and Tiny to team up with bassist Bobby Vega and guitarist Gail Muldrow (both of whom had played on High on You) and vocalists Skyler Jett and Fred Ross, in a group called the Funk Family Affair. "I was getting offers, and I saw it very clear in my mind what to do," says Greg. "But I found myself wrestling with the understanding of what it was, what it could be, and just trying to get it done."

The new group was booked for "Quiet Storm" radio station KBLX's Stone Soul Picnic, on Memorial Day 2004 on the Cal State, Hayward campus. For Greg, it was "a musical letdown.... We went onstage and it just fell apart." Greg determined to form yet another band, the Family Stone Experience, with singer Ian Neville, son of the Neville Brothers' Aaron, from New Orleans, and without Vet. Greg arranged for this band to showcase for booking agents in Las Vegas, but soon began experiencing dissent among the players. "Some of the individuals in the band thought they should be making a fortune 'cause this was `the Family Stone,"' Greg attests. "There was a lot of misconception of perspective of reality." Jerry, says Greg, specifically challenged him about leadership of the group. Ultimately, Greg "stepped out of the way. I went, if I'm gonna do this anymore, I'm gonna do it with the Man [i.e., Sly] himself ... because you don't know how many times, over the last thirty years, people have come up to me and said, `Well, c'mon, we'll kidnap Sly and bring him up to the country and put him in a studio and he'll want to do it.' I've heard every kind of story you could imagine, knowing none of them could ever work. And everybody's tried everything, from Clive Davis to Jerry Goldstein to who knows what."

Thus began the schism that resulted in the formation of two Family Stone spin-off bands: the Family Stone Experience, under Jerry's leadership, and the Phunk Phamily Affair, under Vet's. Greg went off, in 2005, to form Unity Music with producer Sam Beler and singer Jamie Davis, primarily devoted to showcasing Jamie's impressive, mellow chops in a big-band jazz setting. Meanwhile, the funky canon he'd helped create and had tried to resurrect started appearing on display stands alongside the lattes and Wi-Fi in Starbucks, under the title Higher!, a user-friendly compilation of Sly & the Family Stone hits, within the coffee giant's new Hear Music Opus collection of market-friendly CDs. Starbucks also marketed Different Strokes by Different Folks, a re-imagining of several Family Stone hits by young "urban" performers. These were apparent efforts to appeal both to older Sly fans and to their contemporary offspring. Vet's band got booked for an August 15, 2005, performance at L.A.'s Knitting Factory, a venue for jazz and "new" music, like the older club of the same name in New York. Vet, who now lives in a comfortable house in a newer section of her native Vallejo, had been in touch with her older brother, who, she says, "was kind of moved that I would take this on, after all these years, doing all the old songs, as opposed to something new." She called Sly and asked him to transport her to the Knitting Factory and was surprised when he assented. No one had seen him in public for a long time.

"I didn't think I was going to hold him to it," she says. "So on the night of the gig, I went to his house [in Beverly Hills], and I said, `The gig's in about an hour.' And he went down and said, `Something's wrong with the bike."' A sometime collector of cars old and new, luxurious and not, Sly had recently begun to accrue motorcycles. "I said, `You just gotta flip that switch,"' Vet continues. "He forgot that he told me how to work the bike. So ... he went upstairs and got dressed, I was dressed up, and he came down and said, `We're gonna stop by Hollywood Boulevard.'

"So I'm on the back of his bike, and we go down and stop