Long considered the definitive account of the meteoric career of the pioneer funk-rock band, Sly & the Family Stone: An Oral History by Joel Selvin, the 1998 classic that has been out of print for years, returns in a new, updated edition next month from Permuted Press.
Selvin, an award-winning journalist and best-selling author, conducted more than forty interviews from all the group’s original members – the sole exception being the notoriously reclusive Sylvester Stewart himself – and the group’s closest associates in a spell-binding account of the dizzying climb and terrifying descent of the band’s career. The book is an unflinching look at one of music’s most influential and enigmatic figures.
Writing in Vanity Fair, David Kamp noted the classic status of the work, “Joel Selvin, the veteran music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle published a thoroughgoing, book-length oral history of the group in 1998 that is as disturbing and chilling a version as you’ll ever find of the ‘dashed 60s dream’ narrative: idealism giving way to disillusionment, soft drugs giving way to hard, ferment to rot. It’s agreed upon by everyone Selvin interviewed—which is pretty much everyone in Stone’s family, band, and circle of hangers-on, apart from Sly himself—that the bad craziness began when he forsook the Bay Area for Southern California, in 1970. Exit the music of hope and the gorgeous mosaic; enter firearms, coke, PCP, goons, paranoia, isolation, and a mean-spirited pet pit bull named Gun.”
Sly and the Family Stone was the groundbreaking aggregation of Blacks and Whites, men and women that symbolized the Woodstock generation and crossed over to dominate pop charts with anthems like “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music,” and “I Want to Take You Higher.” The book offers first-person accounts of the rise of the band not only from its members but also from Sly’s parents, other members of the family as well as rock figures including Grace Slick, Sal Valentino, Bobby Womack, Mickey Hart, Clive Davis, Bobby Freeman, and many more. In their own words, they candidly share the triumphs and tragedies of one of the most influential musical groups ever formed. It’s a collection of “different strokes” from the immensely talented folks who were there when it all happened that tells a story that is both compelling and cautionary.
Sly and the Family Stone perform “You Can Make It If You Try at The Harlem Cultural Festival, June 19, 1969:
The key to unlocking the real story of Sly and the Family Stone was finding Hamp (Bubba) Banks, a character of immense proportions; a former Marine and pimp, young Sly’s best friend, brother-in-law and de facto manager who had never before shared his story. Selvin embarked on a quest to locate him by knocking on hair salon doors up and down Third Street in San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point neighborhood. Banks not only gave hours of riveting interviews, but also arranged for Selvin to speak with many other subjects including some of the career criminals who surrounded Sly Stone at his height. Along with Freddy Stewart, Sly’s brother and Family Stone band member, and San Francisco mayor London Breed, Selvin was one of three speakers at Banks’ funeral earlier this year. The new edition of the book is dedicated to Banks in recognition of the role he played in setting the Sly and the Family Stone record straight.
The world Banks and his associates revealed to Selvin was a scary, drug-crazed planet without clocks or even common sense, where Banks would eject Miles Davis from Sly’s apartment because Sly objected to the music Davis was playing on keyboards, where Gun, the vicious pit bull, would be set loose on marathon recording sessions while musicians ran for cover, where the mercurial and magisterial Sly Stone presided over every detail of everyone’s lives and treated all with reckless abandon. This nightmare vision comes even more alive in the words of the people who lived through it.
With the passing of key players like Hamp Banks, the band’s manager David Kapralik, and others interviewed for the 1998 book, the story Selvin captured can never again be told so fully. In fact, the interview transcripts from the original book have been subsequently utilized in both Selvin’s own August 2001 Mojo magazine cover article and the 2009 Sly Stone biography I Want to Take You Higher by Jeff Kaliss, prompting a disclaimer from Sly himself: “I don’t even know no Joel Selvin.”
Selvin is the author of more than twenty books on pop music. Director Rob Reiner has announced plans to make a feature film of Here Comes the Night, his biography of r&b songwriter/producer/label chief and mob intimate Bert Berns. His book with rock star Sammy Hagar, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, was a number one New York Times best-seller, and his recent Hollywood Eden tells the story of the kids whose music launched the myth of the California dream at the dawn of the 1960s.
