Song 175: “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone Part 1 Different Strokes For Different Folks

A history of folk music and 500 songs

by Andrew Hickies

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.

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 and the Family Stone is one such story, 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.

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-sixties.

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, 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 publicizing its black supremacist views.

For those who don't know the organization, the Nation of Islam has very little to do with Islam as it's understood by almost all Muslims, though it has been a pathway through which several people, including Ali himself, have later gone on to convert to mainstream Sunni Islam.

It has as much in common with Scientology as with Islam.

Ali later renounced his black supremacism after his second conversion.

As we saw in that episode, Ali's WBA title went to Ernie Tyrell, while he kept the title from the rival WBC.

Eventually, Ali was allowed to fight Tyrell and attempt to regain his title, a fight which was legendary for Ali's anger at Tyrell, who had referred to him by the name he was known by before his conversion, which Ali regarded as his slave name.

Ali pummeled Tyrell 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 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 before the Williams fight, Ali was asked about his fighting style and how it differed depending on his opponents, 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, which gives some idea of the level of religious belief in her family.

His father, Casey, also known as Big Daddy, by all accounts literally never swore or took a drink of alcohol in his entire life.

KC's father had been a country music fiddler.

KC said he used to play like Roy Clark, Grand Ol Oprey kind of stuff.

And this is a good point at which to reiterate, for those of you who haven't listened to the earlier 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.

KC 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 KC played guitar, fiddle, and harmonica.

All their children were musical, and Alpha encouraged them to teach themselves instruments and to sing, though unlike with many other stories we've seen and will see of people who become performers at an early age, it does seem to have been encouragement rather than pressure.

These weren't stage parents, parents, but just people who were 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 Freddie and sisters Rose and Loretta as The Stuart Four.

I'm all

about

a field about a field for my Lord.

Oh, I promise him that I

could serve him until I die.

You know that I'm all about

the battlefield.

That was released on a small label owned by the Church of God in Christ, the strict Pentecostal denomination to which Casey and Alpha belonged.

Incidentally, some sources have Sylvester's younger sister Vietta, better known as Vet, as the fourth member of that group.

While it would be nice to believe that, as she would later go on to fame singing with Sylvester, Freddie and Mose, she was only two when the recording came out, and Alpha later said it was Loetta 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 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 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, one of the other children had been asked to write their names down on the blackboard, and had written his as Sly Vesta, 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.

I saw your picture

again last night.

It brought back

memory

of you and me.

Oh, why,

why,

why?

I've also seen it stated in multiple books that Sly and his younger brother Freddie, who was also a guitarist and singer, and whose main bond with his brother was music, released singles as The Stewart Brothers on Keene and Ensign 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 But I have to admit that the coasters-style RB of that track doesn't sound much like anything else Sly was doing at the time.

But see what you think.

Open up the door, I won't go out anymore.

Open up the door and let me in.

He did though form a multiracial doo-wop group, the Viscanes.

These were originally called the Viscounts, but then changed their name to the nonsense word Viscanes after another group named the Viscounts had some success.

The name has generally been said to be inspired by the Chevy Biscayne, a popular model of car at the time, but various 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, but given the earlier name starts VISC, my own suspicion is that it was spelled that way as a nod to their old name.

The Viscanes got signed to a record deal by the LA-based husband and wife songwriting and production team, George Mattola and Ricky Page.

You may remember Mattola 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.

The Viscanes' first single, Stop What You're Doing, was actually released by The Viscanes and the Ramblers, and is very much in the same style as Mattola's work with Belvin.

Do you

not what you're

You'd better

stop

or I might cry.

I might cry

over

you,

won't you?

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 houseband was Sly's old friends Joey Piazza and the Continentals, who also performed as the backing band on the B-side of the Viscanes' first single.

The group also backed Richard Berry, the LA RB legend who turned up in several early episodes of this podcast and wrote Louie Louie, on Hully Gully Popper, a track produced by Mattola, which Berry released under the name Jasper Woods.

The Viscane's next record, Yellow Moon, was a Stewart 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.

Please let her know

I need her

That track made number 17 on the local charts, but by the time it charted, the Viscanes had split up.

There were tensions, caused in part by the fact that Sly was dating one of the white girls in the group, 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 Mattola and Paige.

As Stewart put it in his autobiography, When Yellow Moon came out, I I saw that the writer wasn't me by George, it was by George instead of me.

He had a company, House of Fortune, and he kept his fortunes in-house.

He continued working with Mattola for a little while though, travelling to LA with him and releasing a new single, Help Me With My Broken Heart, under his birth name.

Somebody come and help me.

Somebody coming.

Well, I need somebody to help me with my broken heart.

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.

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 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 K Soul Radio, the local R and 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.

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.

I'm gonna put a cat on you was the sweetest,

gonest,

wailingest cat that ever stomped on this sweet swinging sphere

and they called you Shaw cat

the naz

that was the cat's name he was a carpenter kitty now the naz was the kind of a cat that came on so wild and so sweet and so strong and so witted that when he laid it wham it stayed there Natsu, all the rest of cat look to see what he's putting down.

Just the man, look at that cat, Blow.

Let the cat go, the man, look at it.

Get out the way.

Let the cat say, man, don't bug me.

Get off my back.

I'm trying to dig what the cat's seeing.

Jackets and cool.

They're

It was also at Casell that he changed his name once again.

Sly Stewart seemed wrong for a DJ, and he was persuaded to take on a different name.

The initial suggestion was that he call himself Sly Sloane, 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 and B charts at the time, but also whatever else he felt like playing.

He would go into long surreal monologues in a sub-buckly manner.

He would bring a piano into the studio and randomly sing 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 outros.

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.

While Casell 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 the Viscanes records.

Donahue, whose nickname, like Stone's father's, 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 co-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.

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 and his scratch band backed headliner Chubby Checker and 19 other acts including Gene Chandler, Jan and Dean, and Near the Bottom of the Bill, Bobby Freeman, a pop RB singer whose biggest hit had been 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 10 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.

talks like talk.

The shimmy, shimmy, a ooh-a-wee.

And you can do the shimmy by watching me.

The shimmy, shimmy is the dance of the day.

The shimmy, shimmy is a here to stay.

The shimmy, shimmy's for old folks, too.

At the Cow Palace show, Freeman, who was from San Francisco, had wanted to impress his hometown crowd.

And so, in imitation of Checker, 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.

It was by Gloria Scott, who had later gone to join the Iquettes, with Sly, one of his sisters, and a cousin singing backing vocals under the name The Tonet.

And Sly wrote and produced it.

He said, Claria, stay out of my way.

Somebody told me about you messing around.

But now I'm gonna have to put you down.

But I know, I know, you love me.

Yeah, I know, I know, you never let me go.

And I know, I know, I don't keep my man.

Try to take it, I'm taking for me.

How to walk right,

talk right.

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 Checker's 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 it with Donahue, who gets half the writing credit under his birth name, Tom Comen.

Come On and Swim featured a 15-piece band, including Sly's old friend Jerry Martini on Sacks, but Sly played guitar, bass, and organ himself.

Some sources say that his brother Freddy is also on the record.

but not so low.

Like the hollygully, but not so slow.

Now baby, swim.

Baby, do the swim.

Do what you wanna do like you wish.

Come on, baby, now and swim like a fish.

Now baby, swim.

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 Five 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.

There were attempts at follow-ups.

Stone wrote SWIM for Freeman, and also wrote his own I Just Learned How to Swim, released as by Sly Stewart.

clothes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've never danced before, now I didn't know how.

But I've learned how to swim, and I won't go with a dance boat now.

Neither of those chartered, but Come On and Swim was a big enough hit that a tie-in album by Freeman was released.

A mixture of cover versions of recent RB hits 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 LA 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 Maya's exploitation films 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 to Crazy Horse.

And under that name, we'll be hearing more about them in a future episode.

There was also a group called the Spearmints, 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 Rowe-styled bubblegum garage.

one's falling in love with you, my little one, little, little, little, little, little, yeah.

Little one, little, little, little, little, little one.

This is my story, sad, but true about the little one, little, little, little, little, little one.

Now she is falling in love with you, your little one.

But Autumn Records finally hit guitar band Pay Dirds with the Beau 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.

The group's first single, produced like almost everything on autumn by Stone, was Laugh, Laugh, and it made the top 20.

pleasure.

Life, life, I thought I'd die.

It seems so funny to me.

Life, life, you better die.

Love you how it feels to be

lonely.

I was so lonely.

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 10.

Can't you see?

Stone produced the Bo Rummels' 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 than almost anyone in the bands he produced.

But the only instrumental contribution he made to a Bob Rummels 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, 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 had 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 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.

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.

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.

hands,

dance with me,

eat love grains

When you hear that beach, loud and sweet, get out of my feet,

later Jana Rico, the singing drummer from another group that Sly was producing, The Vegetables, joined them and they had a hit with Sit Down, I think I love you, though by that time they were working with Lenny Wamanker, who took over many of Stone's groups later in the 60s.

Sly also produced demos for a group called the Tikis, 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 Tikis later renamed themselves Harper's Bazaar 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 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 wasn't.

I'm flying down deserted streets, wrapped in mother's wine and sheets.

Asbestos foods on flaming feet, dreaming of forbidden treats, wearing uniforms on nighttime beats.

Ask me where I'm going and what I eat.

I answer them with a voice so sweet.

I can't come down, flame to see.

I can't come down.

I've been set free.

Who you are and what you do, don't make no difference.

The emergency crew, as we we heard in the episode on Dark Star, 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 Donahue soon sold Autumn to Warner Bros.

And the acts Sly had been working with were taken over by Lenny Warinker, who made many of them into vehicles for the early work of Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, and Leon Russell.

But he was equally involved in the RB world.

In particular, he made a lifelong friendship with Billy Preston.

Preston was a gospel-trained organ-playing prodigy who had played with Mahalia Jackson by the time he was ten, had starred aged twelve as the young W.

C.

Handy in the film St.

Louis Blues.

Nat King Cole had played the adult handy, and had then played with Little Richard, with whom he had travelled to Hamburg and become friends with the pre-fame Beatles, Ray Charles, and Sam Cook.

He don't want no hin in the barnyard.

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, 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 Hour, 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, 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, Freddy and the Stone Souls, which featured drummer Greg Arico, the cousin of Jan Arico, the drummer with the vegetables and the mojo men.

Arico, like Martini, was white, and Stone liked the idea of having a group that was multiracial and multi-gendered.

He also wanted his sister Rose to join the band, but at first first she was reluctant.

However, his other sister, Vet, 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 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 Dinah Washington, and whose repertoire was similar to Washington's, jazz standards and a little classy

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.

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 lead guitarist.

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, a slightly different technique, with a very different sound.

For slap bass, you have two techniques to get a more percussive 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 frets, creating a buzzing tone.

Here's Graham demonstrating the technique.

Okay, so that kind of made up for the bass drum.

But now the snap drum thing,

I had to compensate for that too.

So I did a little bumping in the plucking line.

And here's how that sounds in context in one of the new band's biggest hits.

With Graham, the group was now complete.

Slyam Freddy Stone, Cynthia Robinson, Jerry Martini, Gregor Eco, and Larry Graham.

Three black men, two white men, and one black woman, plus the three black women and little sister, who were billed 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, 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 still, you could see he was thinking about 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,'cause 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 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 streetwear 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.

And so the group was called Sly on 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 of my backers on Patreon.

Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast.

This week's is on Je Tem, Moi Nom Plu by Serge Gainsburg and Jane Birkin.

Visit patreon.com/slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month.

A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available.

Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes.

This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser.

Visit 500songs.com that's 500 the numbers songs.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.

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Thank you very much for listening.