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

narrow and restricted
status of "race" music. Anyone could play rock 'n' roll, and everyone could listen to it.

    Frank Arellano, the musically inclined son of a Filipino father
(a welder at Mare Island) and a white mother, had upgraded from
the Terraces to a middle-class east side neighborhood. He remembers meeting one of his future singing partners, Sylvester Stewart,
newly nicknamed "Sly," when Sly came to play guitar behind a
doo-wop vocal group at a dance. Both Frank and Sly were still in
junior high. "Everybody in the singing group was waiting for him
to get there," laughs Frank. "Does that sound familiar?" (Delays
have indeed dogged Sly Stone performances, right up to his latest
ones.) After Sly's arrival, Frank noted that the guitar was almost as
big as its player, who was several years younger than most of the
other members of the group.
    Just before their first year of high school, Frank encountered
Sly again during a summer league game of basketball. "It was an
elbow here, an elbow there, and `I'm gonna get you after the game.'
So, after the game, everybody was outside and lining up.... Their
team was all black, ours was mostly white.... I saw this skinny little guy, and I went, `I'm gonna get across from him, 'cause he
couldn't hurt me: And that was Sly. We kind of squared off, a few
things were said, and then everybody said, `This isn't cool,' so
nothing ever happened. Little did I know how fast he could be, so
it was probably a good thing we didn't have that fight." At Vallejo
High, though they were at the same grade level, Frank didn't share
many courses with Sly. "Maybe he was smarter than me," Frank
allows, "but I had a bunch of easy courses. I caught my high school counselor groping one of the young lady aides when I went in his
office one time, and after that I got all the easy courses I could get,
any time I wanted." It was Frank's musical inclination that brought
him back in contact with Sly.

    In junior high, with an all-Filipino group, Frank had sung
doo-wop, a term coined in the '50s for the smooth, listenerfriendly mode of vocalizing rhythm and blues, or R & B (itself
named earlier in the decade by Atlantic Records producer Jerry
Wexler). Frank had encountered another precocious doo-wopper,
blonde Charlene Imhoff, at musical events and at baseball games,
where she served as what he called an "athletic supporter," a suggestive way of tagging a loyal fan.
    At Vallejo High, Frank and Charlene assembled several versions of a group they named for her junior high ensemble, the Viscounts. Sly at this time was singing and playing guitar with a black
group, the Webs, who the Viscounts encountered at interscholastic talent shows. Frank told Charlene, "Our harmonies suck, and
I'm gonna ask this guy I know if he'll come help us put some harmony together." That's how Sylvester Stewart came, somewhat
reluctantly, to be recruited into the Viscounts, who happened,
without deliberate intent, to be multiracial.
    Aside from Charlene, Frank, and Sly, the Viscounts ultimately
included brothers Charles and Vern Gebhardt, who lived a couple
of doors down from Charlene, and Maria Boldway, a classically
trained soprano and an alluring, raven-haired ethnic mix of Spanish, Mexican, French, and Native American. For performances, the
girls lined up in flared dresses and high heels, the boys in blazers,
slacks, and dress shirts, cinched by narrow ties. Their hair was as
trim and maintained as their outfits.
    After the group had begun to show professional promise, they
were advised to change their name. There already was a group called the Viscounts, which had made a successful cover of the
moody "Harlem Nocturne" in 1959, the year the Vallejo Viscounts'
formed. The teens considered being called the Biscaynes, after a
popular full-size Chevy model introduced in 1958, but ended up
as the Viscaynes by substituting a V for the B to signal their hometown and to avoid confusion.

    Despite the