“If you want me to stay / I’ll be around today / To be available for you to see I’m about to go / And then you’ll know / For me to stay here, I’ve got to be me.“ If, like me and many of the fans of his ’60s and ’70s hits, you wanted Sly Stone to stay, be assured that he’s now 70 staying with a life in music. He began six decades ago as Sylvester Stewart, the featured boy singer in The Stewart Family Four, a juvenile Afro-American gospel group out of Vallejo, California. In the local school system, where he took on the nickname Sly, the future bandleader demonstrated his determination to get the most out of everything musical, writing songs and singing with a racially integrated high school a cappella group called the Viscaynes. After-hours, he played guitar at R&B clubs late into the night. Soon after graduation and some coursework in junior college as a student of music theory, classical music, and jazz, the multi-talented Sly frequented the burgeoning Bay Area rock ’n’ roll scene, where he was recruited by KYA-AM DJs “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue and Bob Mitchell to write songs and produce for their new Autumn Records label. Sly created a hit on Autumn for Bobby Freeman in 1964, “C’mon And Swim,” which both revived Freeman’s career (he’d scored with “Do You Wanna Dance” in 1958) and made Sly enough money to help his parents, K.C. and Alpha Stewart, move from Vallejo to a large, handsome home on Urbano Drive in San Francisco. Sly also wrote for The Mojo Men (“My Woman’s Head”) and helped launch The Beau Brummels, a group of young locals who gained national notice with what sounded like an echo of the “British Invasion.” But Sly wasn’t content to just write and spin dials. He made the most out of his Autumn connections by recording “I Just Learned How To Swim” and “Scat Swim,” spin-offs from Freeman, built on Sly’s punchy pop progressions and jazzy scat singing. (For more about Sly’s launching his own recording career in the wake of Freeman’s, see the scintillating track notes created for this box by biographers Edwin and Arno Konings.) Sly waxed other originals, including “Buttermilk” and “Temptation Walk,” and numbers like “Dance All Night,” copped from the song lists of local bands he gigged with. In the studio, his instrumental and vocal performances were bolstered by brother Freddie, sister Rose, and newfound keyboard mentor Billy Preston (for whom Sly cut an early version of “I Remember”). None of these sessions scored radio play, and the young producer/songwriter decided to take his seductive baritone voice and showy but playful personality into a radio career of his own. Sly, who still insists that, “I’ve never seen me white or black,” pushed his playlists beyond R&B and soul and into the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan. Eager to also elevate
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Sly Stone, lyrics to “If You Want Me To Stay,” 1973. © 1973 Mijac Music. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Sly custom belt buckle - 1999 Sylvester Stewart school yearbook photo, Vallejo, CA - 1955 The Stewart Four - 1952 Left Page: High On You cover photo shoot - 1975
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