I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [77]
The very different scene at the venerable Olympia in Paris elicited memories of Sly's last visit there, twenty-seven years before, and drew praise from the city's Funk-U magazine. "I had arrived at the venue expecting nothing," wrote the reviewer, who took notice of Vet's familiar onstage angst, "looking for a sign of the roadies or sound engineer to know if her beloved brother would finally take her off the hook and finally appear." When Sly did show up to sing "If You Want Me to Stay," the writer determined that "the voice was there, almost unchanged after all these years." Even the trademark basso dip, delivering, The kind of person / That you really are now, had been preserved. The review went on to confirm that Sly, "looking at first pretty weak ... got increasingly confident, thanks perhaps to the unbelievable and immediate response from the audience, which screamed all the lyrics." Sly even leapt off the stage to shake hands with the delighted front row. "You get some, you give some back," he later pronounced from the mike, before tossing his necklace and jacket as relics to the crowd.
In retrospect, the Olympia show stands out as the high point of the European tour. "When I saw him connect to the music again, that was really a joyful moment for me," commented Greg Errico, after watching video segments from the show on the Internet. "And I told him that, last night, on the phone," Greg continued. "And he immediately knew what I was talking about: he said, `That was the night!' I saw him jumping up, dancing, connecting with the music, connecting with the people, connecting with himself, connecting again.... He goes, `I can't believe how rusty I was,' and I start laughing. I go, `Sly, look at all the ball players. We're lucky, we have extended life expectancies, as musicians. Ball players are done when they're thirty. We're sixty! And you know what, you can still do it. But you gotta get out there.'"
It was encouraging, but also a little sad to see Sly retracing the steps of his formerly compelling tours without reaching the assured measure of magic that he and his fans still hoped for. But the reaction of the press and the public had to be assessed within the context of its own inherent foibles, as well as Sly's. On the dark side of America's obsession with fame is the envy that accompanies the admiration of celebrities, and which seems to feed directly into the joy of watching them crumble.
Two days before Thanksgiving 2007, and a couple of weeks later, Sly was happy to make it back onstage in New York City for the first time in thirty-two years, at B. B. King Blues Club and Grill on 42nd Street. The gigs had originally been promoted as a reunion of the Family Stone, but had to be recast after it was revealed that Freddie, Rose, Greg and Larry would, for a variety of reasons, not be playing. Dressed in a white sweat suit trimmed in silver, with sunglasses and Mohawk back in place, Sly was joined this time by two of his most stalwart Family Stoners, Cynthia and Jerry, as well as by Rose's singing daughter, Lisa, and the ensemble from the European tour minus Vet and Skyler. The New York Times reported, "He did sing, sporadically, and quite well, using something close to the eerie, insinuative