It's a sad week when we lose two musical luminaries: Sly Stone and Brian Wilson.
Sly
& the Family Stone's Greatest Hits was one of the first albums I selected from the Columbia Record Club my family belonged to just after my 13th birthday. It opened with, "I Want to Take You Higher" and was full of positive, uplifting messages like, "You Can Make It If You Try" and "Everybody Is a Star."
"Everyday People," the band's first
#1 hit, was a perfect transition for me from nursery rhymes to rock and
roll, in the rhythm of a jump-rope rhyme with a funky twist:
There is a blue one
who can't accept the green one
For living with a fat one,
trying to be a skinny one
Different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby
Ooh, sha-sha
We got to live together
The man who became known as Sly Stone was born as Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, and raised in the Bay Area city of Vallejo in Northern California, where he performed gospel music starting at the age of 4 or 5 with his siblings (and future
bandmates) Freddie and Rose. Already a successful songwriter and music producer by the age of 19, he produced Grace Slick's song "Somebody to Love" for her original band The Great Society. He soon became a popular D.J. at the San Francisco radio station KSOL.
That
was when I completed my name. Back then, when they added a new on-air
voice, they usually made up a DJ name. I was already using the Sly from
the blackboard, but I didn't know the rest yet. "Sly Stewart" didn't
sound quite right. Someone at the station, maybe Tom Johnson, tried to
pin "Sly Sloan" on me. That didn't work at all-you couldn't even get it
out of your mouth right.
"Give me a few days to think of something better," I said. It didn't
take that long.
In his memoir "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," he writes of that time:
I went on the air and introduced myself as Sly Stone. I was cooking with a bunch of ingredients. It sounded right. I was already smoking marijuana. And
there was a tension in the name. Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was
solid. (Ray Charles would even have a song called "Let's Go Get Stoned,"
too, but that wouldn't come out for a few years yet.) Once I had
my name, I started making up little rhymes around it and putting them
on-air. I'm Sly Stone of KSOL, goodness for your mind, body, and your
soul.
He then wrote about Very Important Pothead Lord Buckley:
One
of my main inspirations was a comedian, Lord Buckley, the king of
hipster slang. He was gone by the time I got on the radio, passed away
in 1960, but his routines lived on. My favorite was "The Nazz," which
brought the story of Jesus into line with his lingo: "Well, I'm gonna
put a cat on you... the sweetest, gonest, wailingest cat that ever
stomped on this sweet swingin' sphere. And they called this here cat ...
the Nazz." I memorized the whole thing and recited pieces of it on my
show. The rolling Stone is with you to treat you right, a KSOL brother
that is out of sight.
By
1966, Stone was focused on his own music and was fronting a group called
Sly and the Stoners, while his brother Freddie was playing with
the white drummer Gregg Errico in Freddie & the Stone Souls. The two
groups fused in 1967, becoming Sly and the Family Stone. As demonstrated in their breakthrough hit "Dance to the Music," the band featured Larry Graham Jr. adding some bottom (so
there's a dancer that just won't hide) with his bass and baritone voice, along with keyboardist Rose and trumpeter Cynthia Robinson also adding vocals.
“We
all quickly realized what Sly was doing when we looked around at each
other,” Errico told Rolling Stone in 2015. “There were race riots
going
on at the time. Putting a musical group together with male and female
and Black and white, to us, it felt really natural and cool and
comfortable, but it made a statement that was definitely threatening to
some people.”
Stone's complicated history is documented in the film "Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)" by Questlove. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this January 23, and was released on February 13 on Hulu and Disney+.
Brian Wilson in his autobiography "I Am Brian Wilson" writes about the influence
marijuana had on his life, and his songwriting, revealing he wrote
"California Girls" after taking LSD, and hit upon the refrain to "Good
Vibrations" after smoking pot.
Wilson also started making music as child with his family, while growing up in Hawthorne, California. When his brothers Carl and Brian and their cousin Mike Love sang together, the beauty
and purity of their close harmonies would bring their other family
members to tears. Dubbed a musical genius by many, including Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney, Wilson was abused by his father and struggled with mental illness.
"The
drugs started like they started for lots of people: sort of innocent,
not very intense, because they were around, because they were part of
what it meant to be a creative person in the 60s," he wrote. "I first
started smoking pot in late 1964. It was great that first time. I had a
glass of water and I couldn't believe it. The water tasted so good, you
know? And it made me less nervous, which was always my biggest problem.
The first song I wrote when I was smoking was 'Please Let Me Wonder.' I
got stoned on pot, went to the piano, and I wrote that song in a half
hour.
"The
Beach Boys Today!" which came out in early 1965 "was the first time I
could do songs like 'Please Let Me Wonder' that had all this space in
them. I was also smoking a little bit of pot then, and that changed the
way I heard arrangements," Wilson wrote, adding, "But that was also the
beginning of control issues. Capitol didn't get the hits they
wanted...After 'The Beach Boys Today!' they put pressure on us to bring
them big sales. If it's what they wanted, it's what I wanted to give
them."
The band's next record, "Summer Days
(And Summer Nights!!)," produced the hits "Help Me, Rhonda," and
"California Girls," the song probably most associated with the Beach
Boys. "It's our anthem song," writes Wilson. "The music started off like
those old cowboy movies, when the hero's riding slowly into town,
bum-ba-dee-dah. I was playing that at the piano after an acid trip. I
played it until I almost couldn't hear what I was playing, and then I
saw the melody hovering over the piano part."
"Complicated
ideas and simple ideas—so much of rock and roll is both of those,"
Wilson muses in his book. "People thought rock and roll was party music
at first. They liked hearing about the simple things, about partying and
girls and teenage life, and that's what rock and roll showed them.
There were always complicated things in my life, but I kept them in or
put them off to the side. But then things around me started changing,
and things in me started changing....Everything started shifting. Maybe
some of it was because of smoking pot and relaxing. When I wasn't quite
so nervous I wasn't quite so afraid of things being complicated."
"There
were times I thought I was building on the foundation and times I
thought I was tearing down what we had built and starting a whole new
foundation.... The one case where it's easy to talk about the new
foundation I was building is 'Good Vibrations,'" he wrote. "How it got
made was that I was high after smoking pot and sitting at the piano,
relaxed, playing. Mike came through with the lyrics for me on this one.
He heard me playing and singing the 'Good, good, good vibrations' part.
That excited him and he went from room to room talking out the idea of
good vibrations–what it meant, that it was connected to the peace and
love happening in San Francisco and everywhere else. When I started the
song, I was thinking of it differently. I was thinking of how people
sense instinctively if something is good news or bad news–sometimes when
the telephone rings, you just know–and I was thinking of how my mom
used to say that dogs could read a situation or a person immediately."
Although
elsewhere Wilson reportedly described his first LSD trip as "a
religious experience," he writes that acid "put voices in my head. That
was a bad drug. I'm sorry I did it." He also expressed a fondness for
Seconals, and said, "when I wrote 'Sail On Sailor,' there was coke
around."
"Spirituality was the other side of
drugs back then, or maybe it was its own kind of drug, in a way," Wilson
wrote. He tried meditation after meeting the Maharishi, and "it worked
great for about a year. It really calmed me down. Then it stopped
working. At some point I was so nervous that I couldn't even relax
enough to meditate. That sent me back to [unspecified] drugs. The drugs weren't
something that I liked for themselves. They were ways of dealing with
the fact that my head wasn't right. But they didn't solve a thing."
Paul Dano and John Cusack portray Wilson in the 2014 biopic "Love + Mercy."
