FORGOTTEN HITS: Tuesday This And That / June 10th, 1965

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Tuesday This And That / June 10th, 1965

BREAKING NEWS:

Sly Stone (Sylvester Stewart), the innovative leader of Sly and the Family Stone, has died at the age of 82. His cause of death is given as a prolonged battle with COPD (lung disease) and other underlying health factors.

The Family Stone was a racially and gender mixed group who supplied some of the best, unique and inspirational funk of the early ‘70’s. Between 1968 and 1974 they placed a dozen songs on The National Top 40 Pop Charts including three #1 records: “Everyday People” (1969), “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice elf Agin (1970) and “Family Affair” (1971.) “Hot Fun In The Summertime” just missed, peaking at #2 in 1969, while “Dance To The Music,” their first chart hit in 1968 also made The Top Five.

Sly was a controversial character from the beginning … a recent documentary produced by Questlove (“Sly Lives,” still available “On Demand’ on Hulu) profiles his erratic career both on and off the stage. Stewart earned a bad reputation for not showing up to shows, cancelling gigs, inciting riots and generally just being out of his head due to the tremendous amount of drugs he was taking. A former San Francisco deejay, his band earned a key spot at the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969 which propelled them to national recognition. If you didn’t know the music of Sly and the Family Stone before August of 1969, you sure did afterwards.

So many of his songs qualified as “anthems,” including “I Want To Take You Higher” and “Stand!” among them, despite lower chart peak positions.

His biography as well as a profile written by Joel Selvin are both “must reads” … and we spent last night rewatching the documentary. Our profile of the riot Sly caused here in Chicago in 1970 when he was a no show at their scheduled concert at Grant Park is still talked about some 55 years later. (kk)

https://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Falettinme-Mice-Agin/

https://www.amazon.com/Sly-Family-Stone-Oral-History/

July 27th, 1970

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jun/09/sly-stone-pioneering-funk-and-soul-musician-dies-aged-82

https://www.billboard.com/lists/best-sly-family-stone-songs/i-want-to-take-you-higher-stand-1969/

https://theseconddisc.com/2025/06/10/in-memoriam-sly-stone-1943-2025/

https://www.noise11.com/news/leo-sayer-shares-his-thoughts-on-the-passing-of-sly-stone-20250610

I was just thinking …

Would an appropriate epitaph on Sly Stone's grave or memorial marker be ~~~

"Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)"

What a great artist.

If he had just not gotten hooked on drugs.

His documentary last year was phenomenally great. As an early teen when his hits were on the charts, I never realized how his songs really reached out to try and pull the world together with his lyrics. He really had his heart and head in the right place in the beginning.

Before that, a DJ and producer in LA of Mojo Men, Beau Brummels, and more.

He was REALLY "Everyday People!"

Clark Besch

High Moon Records Sly and the Family Stone Live at the Winchester Cathedral 1967 April Record Store Day

In July, 1968, I went to The Kaleidoscope club in Hollywood on Sunset Blvd with my pal Bob Kushner for a show featuring Sly & the Family Stone, Canned Heat and the Sons of Champlin.

We might have initially gone to The Kaleidoscope in ’68 to watch Canned Heat, who were great, but we were just amazed by the energy and showmanship Sly and his musicians displayed. From the revolving stage they hurled tunes at us like audio swords, including “I Can’t Turn You Loose” and “Are You Ready?”

During 1968, I bumped into Sly and his entourage at the Shrine Exposition Hall in downtown Los Angeles. It might have been a Frank Zappa gig. In a brief exchange with Sly, I cited “Dance to the Music,” which was all over AM radio stations. I pointed out that his horn arrangement was similar to the chart on Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle.”

Stone smiled and replied, “Good ears …”

In May, 2025, check out a terrific CD release by the vaunted High Moon Records label who just issued Sly and the Family Stone Live at the Winchester Cathedral 1967. In April it dropped from the label on Record Store Day on LP. The CD has an extra track.

Triple Grammy-nominated reissue specialist Alec Palao assembled this album that showcases Sly Stone’s band prior to their signing to Epic Records in 1967.

Around his late 1964 and 1965 era recording studio endeavors with the Beau Brummels, Bobby Freeman and the Great Society, with vocalist Grace Slick for Autumn Records, Slyvester Stewart had a popular radio shift in the Bay Area. He had gone to radio school and then forged a program format of soul and rock sounds that influenced future hitmakers.

“Sly Stone was the most popular DJ among all my friends when he was on KSOL radio,” Emilio Castillo, bandleader for Tower of Power wrote to me in an email. “He played the best soul music and had a really great radio personality. We loved him!!! He started playing at a nightclub called Frenchy’s in Hayward near me and we would sneak in every weekend because we were underage. They played before and after hours so there were many sets to listen to and they always put on an exciting show. We stood to the side and watched closely in absolute awe!!!”

“The Winchester Cathedral tapes first came to light over two decades ago,” Palo emailed me in February 2025.

“Rich Romanello, the owner of the club and the Family Stone’s erstwhile manager, had made the recordings hoping to capture some lightning in a bottle, as the band's cathartic after-hours performances had quickly become the talk of the San Francisco Peninsula in early 1967, just a few short weeks after the band was formed. Romanello had essentially forgotten about them until Sly researchers Edwin & Arno Konings contacted him in the early 2000s.

“The reels located, Rich brought them over to my home studio to see if the sound could be resuscitated for a potential release. The recorded performance was dynamic and undeniably exciting, but there was an essential flaw in that the vocals seemed to be absent. Disappointed, we left it at that, but sometime later I went back to the tapes and, using a different machine to transfer them as well as the careful application of audio restoration software, I was able to recover enough of the vocals and create an acceptable presentation.

“Sadly, Rich had passed away in the interim, but he always advocated for a release of this historic material, which forms a tangible memento of his stewardship of the band at the very start of their career. The Winchester recordings are a significant discovery in that they showcase a one-of-kind outfit that was already at the peak of its powers, long before it became internationally famous. Even though the set is comprised of contemporaneous soul covers, Sly is fully in command, while the unique arrangements and tighter-than-tight ensemble playing point clearly to the road ahead, and the enduring influence of Sly and The Family Stone’s music (indeed, the recordings are featured extensively within the new Questlove-helmed documentary, SLY LIVES!). The deluxe RSD version will be supplanted by a regular vinyl release, as well as a CD with extra material, in early summer 2025.”

Sly and the Family Stone Live at the Winchester Cathedral 1967 houses “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Skate Now,” “Show Me,” “What Is Soul?,” “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “Pucker Up Buttercup,” “Saint James Infirmary,” and “I Gotta Go Now (Up On The Floor) / Funky Broadway.” The summer 2025 CD and digital release has an extra bonus track “Try A Little Tenderness.”

In 1967, Columbia/Epic Records music executive and talent scout David Kapralik, who brought Barbra Streisand to the Columbia label, steered Sly and The Family Stone to Epic Records after seeing them perform at the Winchester Cathedral in Redwood City in Northern California. Clive Davis was then helming the Epic label and became an advocate of Stone’s musical vision.

In my 2007 interview with Clive Davis, he praised the budding musical scene of San Francisco in 1966, and attended the June 16-18^th 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival where he signed Big Brother & the Holding Company to the company.

“At Monterey in June, 1967, I was really just getting my feet wet. I was in the business side of it for a year. I was working with Andy Williams, the young Barbra Streisand and Bob Dylan, and signed Donovan to Epic in 1966. I was observing.

“I was seeing the business change. I was seeing music change, but I was waiting for the A&R staff to lead into these changes that were showing evidence in becoming important in music.

“In June, I really came to the Monterey International Pop Festival not knowing what to expect, but seeing a revolution before my eyes. I was very aware that contemporary music was changing.”

Slyvester Stewart emerged from the creative climate of San Francisco.

“I think San Francisco was full of all these people who were talented and who were expressing themselves or their rights or playing music,” explained Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane to me in a 2010 interview.

“I think San Francisco has a lot to do with that. I don’t know if it’s the geomagnetic forces of the earth and the ocean but something went on there. It’s a lot different than the rest of the world.”

“FM radio was one of the many things that showed up and was going on in those days,” added Balin’s bandmate Paul Kantner.

“So many things were going on you didn’t take that kind of notice of them. You just assumed that was going on. We didn’t analyze it. We didn’t think to wonder about it. It was just another thing that was going on along with the music, the clothes, the book stores, the poets, the artists, there was a plethora of things and you did not have time basically to take it all in. It existed. It’s part of a whole. In San Francisco we had no restrictions. All we had to do was roll with it. I liken it to white water rafting. There was so much going on you didn’t worry about what was around the next curve. Or what are you going to do on the third curve. ‘Cause you’re right in the river.”

“In 1967 I got a chance to record on an album for the first time,” reminisced Chris Darrow co-founder of The Kaleidoscope, who encountered Sly Stone when he was cutting his group’s debut LP, A Whole New Thing.

“The Kaleidoscope was recording our first album, Side Trips, on the first eight track recording machines in America, and in the same studio that Benny Goodman and many of the greats had recorded before. It was all very new to me and I would sometimes arrive early to hang out at the CBS Studios on Sunset Blvd., and just roam around. Moby Grape recorded in the next studio over, sometimes the Byrds, and Donovan, who I met later, worked there as well. The studio served our label, Epic, of course Columbia and also Okeh Records, the R&B label headed by the great, Larry Williams.

“One day on my searching I ran into an interesting Black man in the hallway. He had the look of the ‘cool’ jazz musician of the day. He could have been a member of the Modern Jazz Quartet, with Milt Jackson, John Lewis and Percy Heath, the way he looked. He was friendly, but also dead serious, and carried a slim briefcase. The man said he was a jazz DJ from San Francisco who was obviously also a musician,” continued Darrow.

“We walked into one of the unoccupied recording studios in the building; he sat down at the grand piano, pulled out some lead sheets and started to play. It was then that I took my leave. His name was Sylvester Stewart, ‘Sly Stone.’

“By 1969 Sly and the Family Stone had become a huge act and I was into recording with my new band the Corvettes and rehearsing at the house of our producer, Mike Nesmith. Michael was obviously very successful after the Monkees and he had just made a production deal with Dot Records.

“The house had a number of rooms, a studio, an indoor/outdoor pool, 13 cars in the large drive, a trained guard dog and an electric gate. The house was on the top of the hill off of Mullholand Drive and had a great view. There was always cold Dos XX in the refrigerator by the pool. One day Nesmith announced that the house had once belonged to Sly Stone. Full Circle! ‘If You Want Me to Stay’ is my favorite Sly Stone song.”

Bobby Womack for years was a neighbor of mine and always available for a local meal and interview.

One afternoon I asked him about Sly Stone. They had a personal and musical relationship.

Bobby replied, “Me and the songwriter Jim Ford became brothers and went to each other’s houses all the time. ‘Harry The Hippie.’ Not just to write but to hang out and eat. I spent a lot of time with Jimmy but that’s when I knew that drugs was a serious bad thing for a serious creative person. Jimmy introduced me to Sly Stone. Another Pisces, like you.

“I was just going through divorce at the time and Jimmy said we should meet each other. ‘You’re both Pisces and you all gonna relate.’ But he would always say, ‘never go over there without me.’ After a while I couldn’t see myself always calling Jim Ford, ‘I’m goin to Sly’s.’ He may not feel like it that night. So, I’d say ‘I’m going over there. It can’t be that bad…’ believe me, he had a lot of power, but sometimes when it becomes power in a negative sense, I don’t care how talented he was.

“Sly was in the hills. But the thing I understood about him was that Sly was a genius and one of the sweetest guys in the world but he let the negative side of this business turn him into another person that he’s not. I noticed it when he was the biggest thing that came along. Before Earth, Wind & Fire.”

High Moon Records Statement Regarding The Passing of Sly Stone

All of us at High Moon Records were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of a true American titan, Sly Stone. There are few who made such an impactful and lasting change on the fabric of not just black music, but pop culture in general.

Instrumentally ambidextrous, musically omnivorous, compositionally ingenious – Sly’s work reverberated – and continues to reverberate - throughout our collective consciousness. He brainstormed a band amongst bands, Sly & The Family Stone, stocked it with the finest local players, and guided them through an incredible run of iconic chart smashes – 'Dance To the Music', 'Everyday People', 'Family Affair' - and the essential albums Stand! and There’s A Riot Going On. Rarely has there been a career both trailblazing and populist to match that of Sly Stone.

Sly was a true artist and a beautiful, one-of-a-kind human being. The world has lost one of the all-time greats.

-- Alan Wolmark

CEC Management

Port Washington, NY

From Timmy ...