I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone by Jeff Kaliss

Author:Jeff Kaliss
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History & Criticism, Rock groups, Individual Composer & Musician, Entertainment & Performing Arts, General, Rock musicians, Music, Rock, Biography & Autobiography, Genres & Styles, Composers & Musicians
ISBN: 9780879309848
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Published: 2009-10-15T04:29:16+00:00

You Don't Have

to Come Down

1972-1974

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

-HENRY DAVID THOREAU

I was really tired of R & B sounding the same. I think Sly taught me that. I think that it's important for Black music to always, always grow.

-RICK JAMES

HE LONG WAIT FOR RIOT helped it debut at the top of Billboard's pop charts in 1971, and three of its tracks also charted as singles. The follow-up album, Fresh, is seen in retrospect as Sly's last dealings with anything like a major hit. Work on Fresh, in 1972 and '73, brought him back to the Bay Area and to his long-ago employer Tom Donahue. Among the other engineers credited on the album are Bob Gratts, Mike Fusaro, James Green, Family standby Don Puluse, and Tom Flye. The latter had gone west, from New York City to Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, to launch the Record Plant recording studios there. At the point they hooked up, "Sly had recorded [most of] Fresh, but he wasn't happy with it, so Donahue said, `You ought to go to the Plant and see Flye,"' explains Tom, who still lives within a short drive from the Plant. Before his move, he'd briefly worked with Sly in New York. "I mixed his part of the Woodstock album, [on which Sly and the group] played very well. And not everybody did."

For Fresh, "We rerecorded everything in place on the tape, and we just dubbed over whatever was there. And the way he kept it together, since it was piecemeal-one instrument at a time-was that he had a Rhythm King drum machine. He called it the Funk Box, because there were rhythms that had a groove to them. It was like a glorified click track [the term for a sort of analog electronic metronome]. You could adjust the tempo, and ... you could preset different beats and change them a little bit." An advancement over the preexisting Rhythm Ace, the Maestro Rhythm King generated a sterile, "dry" tone lacking the acoustic properties of a real drum kit but making for its own kind of supple groove.

"[Sly] was so innovative in the process of recording," Tom continues. "He was the first guy to record piecemeal, one track at a time, using this click track. 'Cause quite often, he'd play all the parts," and would need the coordinating guidance of the clicks. "If someone could play it better, fine. But usually he played it better than anybody-everybody except for his brother Freddie." Tom had determined early in his long career to accommodate the recording process as much as possible to his clients' needs. He'd been a professional drummer in the '60s for Don McLean (on the anthemic "American Pie") and for a moderately successful group called Lothar and the Hand People. He'd experienced what it was like to be

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