I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone Read Online Free PDF Page A

high school. Charlene got a job and got married. Sly, though, had
already sensed that his fate lay in music, and he was determined to
stay on course.

     

You Have You
to Complete

1961-1966

    Do you know what the secret of success is?
Be yourself and have some fun.
    -TITO PUENTE
    LY STAYED AROUND VALLEJO
and expanded his interests and
skills with a variety of keyboard
and stringed instruments, and harmonica, working them in a
number of R & B bands. Shortly after graduating from Vallejo
High in 1961, he also decided to focus on continuing his academic
education, studying music theory with David Froehlich at Vallejo
Junior College. David and Sly developed the sort of studentmentor relationship on which so much great achievement has
been built, throughout the histories of both Western and Indian
classical music, folk traditions, and more recently in jazz and pop.
With uncharacteristic magnanimity, Sly has credited David for this
again and again, on the liner notes to his albums, in his rare print
interviews, and in TV appearances. And although they've spent
practically no time together since those college days in Vallejo, the
affection seems certifiably mutual, still treasured by David in his Vallejo home, where he now stays up to speed on jazz piano and
ready for the occasional gig, long past his retirement from the educational system.

    David grew up south of Vallejo, in Oakland, in the 1930s and
'40s, when he'd pay thirty-five cents to see and hear and maybe
later chat with Count Basic, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford,
Fats Waller, and other black jazz greats visiting Oakland's Sweet's
Ballroom. After becoming a skilled pianist and being discharged
from service in World War II, David entered a junior college in San
Bernadino on the G.I. Bill and met his own mentor, a theory
teacher named Russell Baldwin. "He was so deeply sincere about
the value of music," David remembers about Baldwin, "and about
how fortunate we were to be into such a field, which I've always
believed since." Baldwin inspired his student to proceed to graduate study at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York,
from which David returned to the Bay Area, which in the '50s,
looked and sounded quite hospitable to both jazz players and fans.
Clubs abounded in San Francisco's North Beach, Fillmore, and
Tenderloin districts. To help pay for his pleasures, David found stable daytime employment teaching music theory and English to a
multiracial mix of high school graduates in Vallejo and leading
their college dance band. "They were beaten, some could hardly
read," he reflects, "but we had fain together."
    In the early 1960s, David was approached by an intense young
man he'd seen around campus, playing guitar at student assemblies. Sly Stewart told the teacher that he "wanted to do more, to
become a professional. And he was in the position I was in when
I started school in San Bernadino, never having heard the nine
symphonies of Beethoven." For David, the classics of the Western
canon were treasures he was eager to share, because "the longer
we live, the more we realize their greatness, their truth, their majesty." The teacher made the old masters work for his pupils. "A
big part of our program was ear training, based on the Bach root
movement," says David. "The theory part was [from composer and
academic] Walter Piston, but ear training was something different." David disseminated miniature classical scores so that students could see the structure of what they were listening to and
noted that "Sly wasn't used to seeing such a thing." Years later, former Epic Records exec Steve Paley reports that Sly could be seen
strolling through a studio with one or another of the Walter Piston theory tomes under his arm, a tangible influence on his distinct and sophisticated approach to popular music. For Sly, more
so than for most rockers, informed sophistication mattered as
much as unschooled instinct.

    While he was