A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Song 175: “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone Part 1 Different Strokes For Different Folks

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Ever...yday People”. This week we take a short look at the formation of Sly and the Family Stone, and in a week’s time we’ll look at the group’s career after they formed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode, on “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus” by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

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Starting point is 00:00:00 A History of Rock Music in 500 songs By Andrew Huck. Song 175 Everyday People by Sly and the Family Stone Part 1 Different Strokes for Different Folks We're now heading into the darkest part of the 1960s and probably of the story at all.
Starting point is 00:00:25 You'll have noticed that we've actually spent longer in 1968 in this podcast than the year 1968 itself lasted. And there are many reasons for that, and one of them is that the stories have been getting steadily more depressing. Those stories both require a slower pace to tell with due sensitivity, and require a certain amount of time between episodes to recover. They're difficult stories to tell and to listen to. The story of Sly on the Family Stone is one such story,
Starting point is 00:00:54 but it is by no means the worst of them. And indeed in this episode, for the first time in a long while, There are no extra content warnings, other than for some very minor discussion of racism, as this episode takes us through only to the group's formation. Part 2 should be up in a week rather than the normal two weeks, though, and that one will definitely require warnings. And the two songs we're going to look at after this one will be the most disturbing stories we've ever looked at by a long way.
Starting point is 00:01:23 The story we're going to tell in this episode and the next one is hugely intertangled with the issue of race relations and how the civil rights movement changed over the course of the mid-60s. And these changes affected everyone. For example, they affected Muhammad Ali. We heard in the last episode about how he had his boxing title stripped from him, initially just by the World Boxing Association. Supposedly that was for agreeing a rematch with Sonny Liston,
Starting point is 00:01:50 another boxer he had previously defeated. But everyone seems to agree that that was just a pretext. and the reason for his title being stripped was actually that he had joined the black separatist new religious group the Nation of Islam and was publicising its black supremacist views. For those who don't know the organisation, the Nation of Islam has very little to do with Islam as it's understood by almost all Muslims,
Starting point is 00:02:12 though it has been a pathway through which several people, including Ali himself, have later gone on to convert to mainstream sunny Islam. It has as much in common with Scientology as with Islam. Ali later announced his black supremacism after his second conversion. As we saw in that episode, Ali's WBA title went to Ernie Terrell, while he kept the title from the rival WBC. Eventually, Ali was allowed to fight Terrell and attempt to regain his title, a fight which was legendary for Ali's anger at Terrell,
Starting point is 00:02:44 who had referred to him by the name he was known by before his conversion, which Ali regarded as his slave name. Ali pummeled Terrell while repeatedly saying What's My Name? He won the WBA title back, but had it stripped again, along with the WBC title, less than two months later. This time it was for his refusal to be conscripted into the US military, saying, why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home
Starting point is 00:03:10 and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam, while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? but in between being stripped of the title and regaining it Ali had several fights in Canada and Europe and one fight in the USA against Cleveland Williams In an interview before the Williams fight Ali was asked about his fighting style and how it differed depending on his opponents
Starting point is 00:03:35 and his reply is the first known use of a phrase which is now a commonly used expression His reply was I got different strokes for different folks Sylvester Stewart was born to a very religious family in Denton, Texas in March 1944. His mother's name was Alpha, and she had a sister named Omega,
Starting point is 00:04:21 which gives some idea of the level of religious belief in her family. His father, K.C., also known as Big Daddy, by all accounts literally never swore or took a drink of alcohol in his entire life. Casey's father had been a country music fiddler. Casey said he used to play like Roy Clark, grand oldopry kind of stuff. And this is a good point at which to reiterate,
Starting point is 00:04:42 for those of you who haven't listened to the earlier episode, episodes of this podcast, that there was far more cross-racial musical influence in the southern US in the first half of the last century than the popular imagination believes, and that this influence went both ways. K.C. Stewart's father was one of many black country musicians in Texas at that time. Both KC. and Alpha played music around the home, though their own playing was more geared to gospel. Alpha played guitar and keyboards, and K.C. played guitar, fiddle, and harmonica. All their children were musical, and Alpha encouraged them to teach themselves instruments and to sing. They're unlike with many other stories we've seen and will see of people who become
Starting point is 00:05:23 performers at an early age, it does seem to have been encouragement rather than pressure. These weren't stage parents, but just people who are encouraging their children's natural inclinations. Shortly after Sylvester's birth, the family moved to Vallejo in California, near San Francisco. By the time he was six, he was regularly performing in church. soon joined by his siblings. Sylvester was the second of five children. Sylvester made his first record when he was seven, performing with his brother Freddy and sisters Rose and Loretta as the Stuart Four. That was released on a small label owned by the Church of God in Christ,
Starting point is 00:06:30 the strict Pentecostal denomination to which Casey and Alpha belonged. Incidentally, some sources have Sylvester's younger sister Vietta, better known as Vett, as the fourth member of that group. While it would be nice to believe that, as she would later go onto fame singing with Sylvester, Freddie and Rose, she was only two when the recording came out, and Alpha later said it was Loretta on the recording. As the children continued in their performances, they started to receive small sums of money for their singing from collections taken up at the churches, and Sylvester asked for his share of the money to go towards a guitar. Early on, his ambition was to go into the clergy and become a bishop, but that started to change as he entered his teens,
Starting point is 00:07:12 and felt the pull of secular music. Vallejo was, like most places in the US at the time, segregated, but it was a small enough town that there was only one integrated high school, and so Sylvester was hanging out with an integrated group of friends, and performing on occasion with a local group called Joey Piazza and the Continentals, which featured a white saxophone player, Jerry Martini. By this point he was no longer solely known as Sylvester, at a spelling bee at school in the fifth grade,
Starting point is 00:07:41 one of the other children had been asked to write the names down on the blackboard and had written his as Sly Vester and from that point he would sometimes refer to himself as Sly rather than Sylvester though he would always be known as Sill by family members Sly soon started making his own records on a local label when he was 16 he had a local hit with A Long Time Alone A doo-Wop track released as by Danny Sly Stewart
Starting point is 00:08:35 I've also seen it state in multiple books that Sly and his younger brother Freddy, who was also a guitarist and singer, and whose main bond with his brother was music, released singles as The Stuart Brothers on Keen and Enson Records. Wikipedia says that the Sylvester Stewart credited as writing tracks like Sleep on the Porch was a different Sylvester Stewart, but provides no citation for that. But I have to admit that the Coasters-style R&B of that track doesn't sound much like anything else Sly was doing at the time, but see what you think. He did, though, form a multiracial duop group, the Viscains.
Starting point is 00:09:44 These were originally called the Viscounts, but then changed their name to the nonsense word Viscains, after another group named the Viscounts had some success. The name has generally been said to be inspired by the Chevy Biscane, a popular model of car at the time, but various explanations have been advanced for why the name started with a V rather than a B. Some have said it was for Vallejo where the group were based, others that it was a typo on the label of the first record they put out,
Starting point is 00:10:11 but given the earlier name starts V-I-S-C, my own suspicion is that it was spelled that way as a nod to their old name. The Viscaines got signed to a record deal by the LA-based husband and wife songwriting and production team, George Motola and Ricky Page. You may remember Motola as the producer and credited writer of many of Jesse Belvin's records, and he was something of a minor figure in the LA music industry.
Starting point is 00:10:36 The Viscayne's first single, Stop What You're Doing, was actually released as by The Viscanes and the Ramblers, and is very much in the same style as Motola's work with Belvin. The group made some appearances on a local dance party-style TV show, presented by a DJ named Dick Stewart, no relation to Sly, whose house band were Sly's old friends, Joey Piazza and the Continentals, who also performed as the backing band on the B-Side
Starting point is 00:11:33 of the Viscayne's first single. The group also backed Richard Berry, the L-A-R-N-B legend who turned up in several early episodes of this podcast and wrote Louis-Looie-Looie on Hully Gully Pauper, a track produced by Motola, which Barry released under the name Jasper Woods. The Viscayne's next record,
Starting point is 00:12:22 Yellow Moon, was a Stuart original. He said later he wrote it because Blue Moon was a big hit at the time, and so he just came up with a song with a different coloured moon. That track made number six, on the local charts, but by the time it charted, the Viscaines had split up. There were tensions caused in part by the fact that Sly was dating one of the white girls in the group,
Starting point is 00:13:13 but they had to keep their relationship secret. It was also Sly's first lesson in the iniquity of the music industry. While he had written the song, when he saw the record label, the credit was to Motola and Page. As Stuart put it in his autobiography, when Yellow Moon came out, I saw that the writer wasn't me by George, it was by George, it was by George instead of me. He had a company, House of Fortune, and he kept his fortunes in-house.
Starting point is 00:13:39 He continued working with Motola for a little while, though, travelling to L.A. with him and releasing a new single, Help Me with My Broken Heart, under his birth name. But through all this, Sly was also still only in his teens, and he decided he was going to get a proper education and go to college.
Starting point is 00:14:25 He went to Vallejo Junior College, where the music lecturer, David Furlick, took the young man under his wing and gave him a proper grounding in music theory, orchestration, counterpoint, and ear training, so he could read and write music fluently, and with a far better grasp of more complex musical concepts
Starting point is 00:14:42 than most of his contemporaries. He also, at the same time, took a course on radio presentation, and eventually dropped out of college to take a job as a DJ at KSoul Radio, the local R&B and Soul Station. Sly's radio persona was deeply influenced by Lord Buckley, the white hipster comedian whose work was heavily influenced by black jazz musician Slang.
Starting point is 00:15:05 Sly memorized big chunks of Buckley's piece, The Naz, and would recite it on air, as well as using a short chunk of Buckley's recording as his opening. Well, I'm going to put a cat on you, was the sweetest, goneest, wailing his cat that ever stomped on this sweet, swinging sphere. And they called this your cat. The naz That was the cat's name He was a carp in the kitty Now denaz was a kind of a cat
Starting point is 00:15:39 That come on so wild And so sweet and so strong And so witted That when he laid it Wham, it stayed there And actually all the rest of the cat Looked to see what he put him down There's a man, look at that cat blow
Starting point is 00:15:52 Let the cat go there, man look at get out the way, let the cat He said, man don't bug me get off my back I'm trying to dig what the cat's saying Jack and say They're pushing the nass. It was also at Ksul that he changed his name once again. Sly Stewart seemed wrong for a DJ, and he was persuaded to take on a different name.
Starting point is 00:16:09 The initial suggestion was that he called himself Sly Sloan, but he didn't think that was euphonious enough. And he ended up calling himself Sly Stone as a sly drug reference. The newly named Sly Stone would play records, mostly the music that was hitting the R&B charts at the time, but also whatever else he felt like playing. he would go into long, surreal monologues in a sub-bookly manner. He would bring a piano into the studio and randomly sing
Starting point is 00:16:34 happy birthday, on the basis that it was probably the birthday of somebody listening. He got his brother Freddy to sing some advertising jingles, and he would sign off by singing his own version of Jesse Belvin's Good Night, My Love. He would also often play along on the piano with the records he was playing and improvise new intros and outroes, and critique the songs to the audience, saying to them, this could have been a hit if it wasn't for this part, using that understanding to build up his own songwriting ability.
Starting point is 00:17:03 While K. Searle was primarily an R&B station, Stone wouldn't let the format constrict him, and he was as likely to play tracks by the Beatles or Dylan as Solomon Burke or Ray Charles. Stone would work as a DJ until 1967, but that was soon not his only job. Tom Donahue, a fellow DJ at a Top 40 station, had been aware of Stone since he first heard
Starting point is 00:17:26 Viscaynes Records. Donahue, whose nickname, Like Stone's Fathers, was Big Daddy, would later become known as the person who revolutionised San Francisco Radio, creating the first underground FM format. But in 1964 he was, as well as a DJ, a concert promoter who put on most of the big acts at the Cow Palace, and would later cope promote the Beatles' last ever show at Candlestick Park. The first show he put on at the Cow Palace, in early 1962, had been a twist party, a massive extravaganza full of hit acts who gave the services for free because Donahue was an influential DJ.
Starting point is 00:18:03 Sly had put together the band for that show, which had included his brother Freddy on bass. Some sources remember Phil Spector having conducted the band, but that seems to be a false memory. But Sly on his scratch band backed headliner Chubby Chekker and 19 other acts including Jean Chandler, Jan and Dean, and Near the Bottom of the Bill, Bobby Freeman, a pop R&B singer whose biggest hit had been
Starting point is 00:18:25 Do You Want to Dance in 1958? That is of course one of the great classics of 50s rock and roll, and was later covered by John Lennon, T-Rex, the Ramones and the Beach Boys, among many others. But it had been Freeman's only top ten hit, though he'd had a couple of singles reach the lower reaches of the top 40. Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes and I do the shimmy-shimmy. At the Cow Palace show, Freeman, who was from San Francisco, had wanted to impress his hometown crowd,
Starting point is 00:19:59 and so in imitation of Chequer, he had started doing various new dances he'd invented, one of which he called the Swim. This stuck in Stone's mind. In 1963, Donahue had decided to start up a new record company, Autumn Records, and he took Stone on as the in-house producer and arranger. The first record made by Autumn was actually licensed to one of others' records.
Starting point is 00:20:22 It was by Gloria Scott, who would later go on to join the Iquette, with Sly, one of his sisters and a cousin singing backing vocals under the name The Tonette, and Sly wrote and produced it. But by this point, Autumn had managed to sign Freeman, who hadn't had a hit in two years. His first single on Autumn was also Autumn's first single, a remake of Chubby Checkers Let's Twist Again, retitled Let's Surf again. But the second was a song that Sly wrote inspired by that dance Freeman had made up nearly two years earlier. Depending on who you ask, he either wrote it on his own or co-wrote.
Starting point is 00:21:29 with Donahue, who gets half the writing credit under his birth name Tom Corman. Come On and Swim featured a 15-piece band, including Sly's old friend Jerry Martini on sax, but Sly played guitar, bass and organ himself. Some sources say that his brother Freddy is also on the record. Come on and Swim went to number five in the charts, even at the height of the British invasion. House of the Rising Sun was at number one on the same chart, and the Dave Clark 5 were at number four. It became Freeman's biggest hit and earned Sly a gold record and was the last of the big dance craze hits that had dominated the charts in the early 60s.
Starting point is 00:22:38 There were attempts at follow-ups. Stone wrote S-W-I-M for Freeman and also wrote his own, I Just Learned How to Swim, released as by Sly Stewart. Neither of those charted, but to come on and swim was a big enough hit that a Italian album by Freeman was released, a mixture of cover versions of recent R&B hit
Starting point is 00:23:27 and new songs written by Stone, most of which were uninspired songs like Do the Monkey and Speedo the Monkey Man, but one or two of which might be familiar to fans of Stone's later work. But Autumn Records, like most other labels of the time, had decided that what they needed to do now was to create their own Beatles, and Sly Stone was going to help them do just that. There were several attempts to find a rock band that would hit big for Autumn. One band who were apparently tried were a group from L.A.,
Starting point is 00:24:24 who were originally known as Danny and the Memories, but who renamed themselves The Circle, spelled P-S-Y-R-C-L-E. A single by that group was released, produced by Stone, on a subsidiary of Autumn Records named Lorna, after Lorna Maitland, a star of Russ Mayer's exploitation films
Starting point is 00:24:41 who was dating one of the group. The single, Baby Don't Do That, was, according to some sources, limited to a thousand copies, while other sources claim it remained unreleased. Either way, I've been unable to find a copy anywhere. That wouldn't be worth noting, except that the group would soon change their name again to the Rockets, and then after that, it's a crazy horse. And under that name,
Starting point is 00:25:04 we'll be hearing more about them in a future episode. There was also a group called the Spearmint, spelled with an apostrophe before the last S, whose little one didn't set the world on fire, but is enjoyable enough as a bit of Tommy Roe-styled bubblegum garage. But autumn records finally hit guitar band Pay Dirt with the Bo Brummels, a group who had taken a name that sounded British, and, according to some sources, was chosen to be as close alphabetically to the Beatles as possible, and who became the first successful rock band to come out of San Francisco.
Starting point is 00:26:08 The group's first single, produced like almost everything on autumn, by Stone, was Laugh-Laff, and it made the top 20. Several of the group members thought it would have done even better on the charts had it been on a label with better distribution. But the follow-up, just a little, made the top ten. Stone produced the Bob Rommel's first two albums, though the group have claimed that by the second album they were essentially producing themselves. On the initial recordings, though, Stone was incredibly involved, as he was with all his productions at this point. By all accounts, Stone wanted to play most of the instruments himself. He was a better multi-instrumentalist,
Starting point is 00:27:48 than almost anyone in the bands he produced. But the only instrumental contribution he made to a Vogue Rumble track was playing the timbales on the very fade of just a little. One record that it has been claimed by some that Stone did play on is the original version of a song that later became one of the most important records to come out of the San Francisco scene. The Great Society, a group whose core members were singer Grace Slick, her then-husband Jerry Slick, and Jerry's brother Darby Slick,
Starting point is 00:29:21 were signed to autumn but found they could not get on, at all with Sly. When they attempted to play someone to love, which was later renamed Somebody to Love, when Grace's next band Jefferson Airplane re-recorded it, they apparently did an okay performance the first time they played through it in the studio, but that was just for setting levels. And when it came to the actual recording, they'd worn themselves out with the first run through and took 45 takes to get the track done, with Stone walking out in frustration at one point. Darby Slick said, he started
Starting point is 00:29:52 coming over to some rehearsals and started having ideas how we should change this and that. We flatly refused to do anything he suggested because we knew where it was at. We didn't want to take any correction from anybody. Getting in the studio was a real nightmare for him and not that much fun for us, because we wouldn't accept any of his ideas there either.
Starting point is 00:30:10 They did, though, eventually start listening to him once he brought in his friend Billy Preston, who they respected because he had played with Ray Charles. According to Grace Slick, Sly could play any instrument known to man. He could have just made the record himself except for the singers. It was kind of degrading in a way. And on another occasion, she said that he did end up playing all the instruments on the finished record. The track was only released as a promo single.
Starting point is 00:31:00 At this time, Stone was working with a lot of other acts who would go on to have success and be the foundations of the San Francisco scene. It's been estimated that whatever the label credits, he was involved in 90% or more of what Autumn put out. he was producing the Mojo Men. Later, Janariko, the singing drummer from another group that Sly was producing, the vegetables, joined them and they had a hit with Sit Down and I Think I Love You, though by that time they were working with Lenny Warranker,
Starting point is 00:32:01 who took over many of Stone's groups later in the 60s. Sly also produced demos for a group called the T-Kees, though apparently by the time their initial autumn records release came out, he had stopped working with them, and someone else produced the records. The T-Kis later renamed themselves, harper's Bizarre, and became an ultra-soft pop vocal group who had a hit with the 59th bridge song Feeling Groovy, before their leader, Ted Templeman, went on to produce records for
Starting point is 00:32:59 Captain Beefheart, Van Halen and more. Stone also supervised unsuccessful sessions for the charlatans, the band that influenced all the other San Francisco bands and were the center of the scene. And according to some sources, he was also present when the emergency crew made their own unsuccessful demo for Autumn Records, though most say he was Rapt in mothers wines and cheats, asbestos foods on flaming feet, dreaming of forbidden treats when uniforms are nighttime beats where I'm going and what I eat I'm sleeping set free. The emergency crew, as we heard in the episode on Dark Star,
Starting point is 00:34:32 was a name that was taken on very briefly by the band that had been called the Warlocks before they renamed themselves The Grateful Dead. So Sly was deeply involved in the growth of the San Francisco rock music scene, both as a DJ and as a producer for Autumn Records. But Tom Donoghue soon sold Autumn to Warner Brothers, and the acts Sly had been working with were taken over by Lenny Warenker, who made many of them into vehicles for the early work of Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks and Leon Russell.
Starting point is 00:35:01 But he was equally involved in the R&B world. In particular, he made a lifelong friendship with Billy Preston. Thurston was a gospel-trained organ-playing prodigy who had played with Mahalia Jackson by the time he was 10 had starred age 12 as the young WC Handy in the film St. Louis Blues. Nat King Col had played the adult handy and had then played with Little Richard
Starting point is 00:35:22 with whom he had travelled to Hamburg and become friends with the pre-famed Beatles, Ray Charles and Sam Cook. He don't want no hen in the barnyard Lennox for nobody else. Preston and Stone would never officially be in the same band together, but they would be musical associates and guests on each other's records throughout their lives. Their first collaboration was on an album Billy recorded for Capital in 1966,
Starting point is 00:36:12 the wildest organ in town, which Stone arranged and played on. The album was a mixture of organ instrumental cover versions of contemporary hits like A Hard Day's Night, Satisfaction, Uptight and Midnight Tower, and new songs written by Preston and Stone. One of those songs, advice, might sound familiar to those who know Stone's later work. But Stone was wanting to make more of his own music. Jerry Martini had been repeatedly telling him he should sing more of his own material, and he had been performing for a while in a band called Sly and the Stoners with his friend Cynthia Robinson,
Starting point is 00:37:15 a trumpet player and vocalist, often skipping his radio show to go and play gigs with them. But other than Robinson, most of the Stoners were not very good or committed to rehearsing. but Martini kept pushing Sly He wanted to be in a band with Sly rather than continuing in the band he was currently playing with. Meanwhile, there were two other groups in the family. Freddy, who, like Sly and their other siblings, took the name Stone, had his own band,
Starting point is 00:37:40 Freddy and the Stone Souls, which featured drummer Greg Aricco, the cousin of Janariko, the drummer with the vegetables and the mojo men. Eriko, like Martini, was white, and Stone liked the idea of having a group that was multiracial and multigens. He also wanted his sister Rose to join the band, but at first she was reluctant.
Starting point is 00:38:02 However, his other sister, Vett, was at that point singing with a gospel group called the Heavenly Tones, who had recorded an album under the supervision of Reverend James Cleveland, the same man who had been a mentor to both Aretha Franklin and Sly's friend Billy Preston. Sly recruited three of the four members of the Heavenly Tones to be a vocal group, who were renamed Little Sister. as both Sly and Freddie were guitarists, but Sly could also play piano. Sly became the group's keyboard player. Sly's vision of a multiracial, multi-gendered group
Starting point is 00:39:06 that could show the possibilities of integration and working together in harmony was almost complete. They just needed a bass player. The one they chose was Larry Graham, who had almost by chance invented funk bass while playing old standards with his mother. Del Graham was a singer and pianist who apparently sounded exactly like Diana Washington. and whose repertoire were similar to Washington's,
Starting point is 00:39:27 jazz standards and a little classy blues. She formed a trio with her son on guitar and a drummer, and when they played a venue with an organ, Larry started playing bass lines with the organ pedals while continuing to play guitar. When they moved on to a different organless venue, they immediately noticed that they were missing the bottom end, and so Larry reluctantly moved from guitar to bass.
Starting point is 00:39:50 He still thought of himself as a guitarist and played melody lines rather than the then standard root notes that most bass players would play, and he had no interest in learning normal bass technique, because he was going to go back to the guitar real soon now. And then they lost their drummer too. So suddenly, Larry Graham was the whole rhythm section, and he had to be percussion as well as low end, all while still thinking of himself as the league guitarist.
Starting point is 00:40:16 The solution he came up with was similar to the way that Rockabilly double bass players had played to compensate for the lack of drums, what was known as slapback bass, like we talked about in episodes on Bill Haley and Elvis. But while, as we often say, there is no first anything, as far as anyone is able to tell, Larry Graham was the first person to do it with an electric bass,
Starting point is 00:40:38 a slightly different technique with a very different sound. For slap bass, you have two techniques to get a more because of sound. You slap the string with your thumb, giving a deep booming sound, unlike the normal sound you get from plucking a string, or you pop it, pulling the string away from the body of the guitar and allowing it to snap back and hit the fret,
Starting point is 00:40:59 creating a buzzing tone. Here's Graham demonstrating the technique. And then when we ended up without the drummer, I started thumping to make it for not having a bass drum. Okay, so that kind of made it for the bass drum. But now the snare drum thing, I had to compensate for that too. So I did a little thumping in the plucking line.
Starting point is 00:41:39 Every day. And here's how that sounds in context in one of the new band's biggest hits. With Graham, the group was now complete. Sly and Freddie Stone, Cynthia Robinson, Jerry Martini, Greg Aricco, and Larry Graham. Three black men, two white men,
Starting point is 00:42:34 and one black woman. Plus the three black women and little sister, who were willed separately, but always part of the group. Sly's multiracial, multi-gendered utopia idea was coming true, although even at the first rehearsal there was some brief tension,
Starting point is 00:42:48 as Larry Graham suggested they take a vote on who should be the leader of the group. According to Cynthia Robinson, everybody turned and looked at each other and said, What is he talking about? It's obvious who the leader is because he went and handpicked everybody. And Sill, you could see he was thinking about
Starting point is 00:43:04 just how he was going to say this. There's not going to be any vote, this is my band, I'm the leader of it, and if you don't like that, there's the door, because there ain't going to be no vote. There was no question to anyone in the band who the leader was. But even though it was Sly's band, something else was made equally clear. This was a family. Not just because Sly's brother was the group's guitarist and his sister one of the backing vocalists, but because the band's whole concept was meant to be unity and diversity to show that people can be different but still
Starting point is 00:43:33 the same. This was even shown in Sly's concept for the stage clothes the group would wear. whereas most black groups of the time would wear identical suits and the white rock groups were increasingly starting to wear their normal street wear on stage Sly told the group they all had to shop at the same store and later he would say they all had to wear clothes of the same colours, red, black and white, but that they could buy any clothes they wanted from that store. There would be a unity there, but everyone would be able to express their own sense of style too. They were a family.
Starting point is 00:44:05 And so the group was called Sly and the family stone. And it was agreed early on that when they were asked which ones were blood relatives, they'd say, we all are. And in the next episode, we'll hear about how that family became, for a while, one of the biggest bands in America, and about what happened when that utopian vision hit the reality of the America of the late 60s. Join us again in a week's time. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by The Generosity,
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Starting point is 00:45:18 This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000-0-the-numbersongs.com. to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion,
Starting point is 00:46:02 is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening.

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