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

always told me I was probably the lamest person he ever knew, but,
man, when people would talk to him or ask him things, he'd go off
and say the craziest stuff, and I knew he'd be putting them on. And
they'd just say, `Oh, thank you, Sylvester!"'
    Through all this, Sly began to count on Ria as a good friend in
frisky female form. She'd follow him downtown on Saturdays,
where daddy K. C. Stewart worked in the Higgins Building, and
the friends would ride the elevator, one of the few then in town,
for hours. It was during the formation of the future Viscaynes that
Ria was shanghaied by Frank and Sly, who'd separately become
aware of her musical training and ability. "I was walking across the
campus one lunch hour," she says, "and they grabbed my arms on
either side and said, `You're coming with us.' And they took me
over to Sly's mother's house. It was a nice home on a kind of hill,
it wasn't in an extremely dangerous or bad part of town, and they
had me sing for'em. And Mama cooked us lunch, and that's when
I became a member [of the budding group]."
    After about a year, the friendly simmer between Ria and Sly
heated up to a romance. "I wouldn't call it `dating,' because that
wasn't allowed [between blacks and whites]. I would call it"-she
hesitates-"what would you say? I hate to use the word `sneaking,' 'cause that's such a terrible word. But I don't know how many people knew. We tried to keep it under cover, because my father told
Sly that he would kill him if he found out we were seeing each
other. My mother is a very devout Catholic woman, and she only
wanted my safety and [Sly's] safety, especially from my father or
anyone else who would cause us problems because of it." In a few
years, Sly would be ready and eager to hang out with white women
in the open, though society wouldn't be ready to condone such
relationships for a while longer.

    Sly and Ria's romance built on their friendship. "We could tell
each other secrets, you know, kid secrets," she says. "Talk about our
dreams, spend hours on the phone together. Get away together
whenever we could." In the meantime, they openly dated others
with whom they wouldn't be violating any unwritten code. "I was
dating the football captain," says Ria, "and [Sly] was dating a darling, tiny little black girl. I don't know how he felt about me going
out with other people, 'cause I didn't `share myself' with other
boys. And I don't know whether he did, with this girl or any of the
other girls I heard he'd seen." She did find out, by asking, that he'd
bought his girlfriend a bedroom heater for Christmas, and she
pronounced this act "kind."
    On the Dick Stewart-inspired junket to Los Angeles, Ria
found a legitimate reason to hang on openly and tightly to Sly: it
was his first plane trip, and he was scared. She didn't know it at
the time, but the hotel on Hollywood Boulevard that put the Viscaynes up was one of the few in the area to accept racially mixed
groups at that time. After a late night of relatively tame teen fun,
"I was the only one that would venture to wake Sly up," Ria points
out. "No one else would dare,'cause he would wake up swinging.
I don't know what that was all about. But I would go into his
room and just sit on the edge of his bed and sing to him. He'd go, `I'm asleep!' and I'd go, `No, no, it's time!' And he'd just get
up, sweet as pie."

    The bond between Ria and Sly held after his graduation, and
hers two years later. The Viscaynes, though, didn't continue long
enough to follow up after hitting the KYA charts in the fall of'61.
Frank threatened to leave the group after the L.A. experience had
revealed that he was in effect working for nothing, for shady
management. The management then threatened to sue his parents
for breach of contract, and Frank joined the Air Force, where he
expected to escape persecution. Charlie went off to a university,
while his younger brother, Vern, and Vern's classmate Ria, finished