I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [7]
Aside from Charlene, Frank, and Sly, the Viscounts ultimately included brothers Charles and Vern Gebhardt, who lived a couple of doors down from Charlene, and Maria Boldway, a classically trained soprano and an alluring, raven-haired ethnic mix of Spanish, Mexican, French, and Native American. For performances, the girls lined up in flared dresses and high heels, the boys in blazers, slacks, and dress shirts, cinched by narrow ties. Their hair was as trim and maintained as their outfits.
After the group had begun to show professional promise, they were advised to change their name. There already was a group called the Viscounts, which had made a successful cover of the moody "Harlem Nocturne" in 1959, the year the Vallejo Viscounts' formed. The teens considered being called the Biscaynes, after a popular full-size Chevy model introduced in 1958, but ended up as the Viscaynes by substituting a V for the B to signal their hometown and to avoid confusion.
Despite the pressures of school and of most of the guys' athletic involvement (Sly avoided organized sports), the Viscaynes accelerated practice sessions to five evenings a week in the Geb- hardts' rec room. They all had fine and flexible voices, with Sly able to sing high or low across a two-and-a-half-octave range, and Frank ascending in a heady falsetto. By 1961, when most of the group was in the last year of high school (Vern and Maria were two years younger), they felt ready to sing in a contest promoted by the Dick Stewart Dance Party television show, a San Franciscan echo of Dick Clark's nationally broadcast American Bandstand. They beat out the competition, appeared on local TV, and were placed under management by associates of the television host. As graduation approached, they were encouraged to record several 45-rpm singles, with dubbed accompaniment by Joe Piazza and the Continentals (including future Family Stone member Jerry Martini), at San Francisco's Geary Theatre. Less than satisfied with this effort, their new management flew them down to Los Angeles for another recording session (using songs written by husband-andwife team George Motola and Ricky Page) and an appearance at a dance party event at Pacific Oceanside Park, alongside a young Lou Rawls.
Boarding at a hotel and recording and performing in Tinsel Town amounted to quite an adventure for the Vallejo adolescents. "We swam, we were treated like royalty," recalls Maria, commonly called "Ria" by her friends. "The boys ran around doing crazy stuff, dumping ice water on us when we'd be sleeping by the pool." Treatment by their handlers turned out to be chillier. In a move sadly common on the lower rungs of the music business, the Viscaynes were told to sign their checks for performing over to management, and they never got to bank any of the proceeds themselves. The Viscaynes' "Yellow Moon" placed at number 16 on KYA radio's Top 60 chart in the week of November 13, 1961, and stayed aloft for a few weeks, but the group had long since dispersed.
Inside and outside the Viscaynes, Frank Arellano had gotten closer to Sly than most of his schoolmates. "We were everyday friends," says Frank, now retired with his own teenage son in Palm Springs, California. "We would drink, do crazy things. We were always on the edge of the law, but never getting caught, never anything we could go to jail for." This reputation would have helped justify the morphing of "Sylvester Stewart" into "Sly." "And we were out trying to get girls," Frank continues. "We cruised downtown, mostly in Sly's car. He had a '56 Ford Victoria." When they had enough pocket money, the pair would extend their cruising west, across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, where they