I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone Read Online Free

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 could get
girls to join them on the Ferris wheel at the Playland at the Beach
amusement park. For this and other purposes, the underage party
animals had to figure out how to find booze. Sly had copped an
identification card from someone of legal age and had talked
Frank into making use of it at a Vallejo convenience store, even
though the cardholder's "race" was designated "colored." When
Frank somehow succeeded in scoring a large green bottle of
Rainier Ale, the friends shared a good laugh along with the intoxicant. Sly seemed to regard most racial issues lightly. Charlene
recalls a Viscaynes gathering in the living room of the Stewart
household and Sly entering the room from mama Alpha's kitchen. "Now I know," he declared to his fellow Viscaynes sardonically,
"how funny I must look in your house."

    But in one rare instance, Sly shared with Frank a deeper reflection on being a young black man in the '60s, closer to what he'd
express lyrically later in "Underdog," on the first Family Stone
album. "He felt," says Frank, "that he was on a ladder, and that he
was trying to climb up the ladder. And there were people above,
pushing him down, and there were people below him, grabbing
his legs and