Let me tell you, Chiffon--the DJ name I eventually adopted--was NOT a funky teen. My musical taste didn't get much blacker than The Supremes and The 5th Dimension until I heard "Dance to the Music" on the car radio in 1967. Sly and the Family Stone followed up in rapid succession with a series of infectious, utterly original singles I'm pretty sure even my Sinatra-loving parents didn't dislike.
The group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, a year later, sealed the deal. At the time, I'm not sure I could have put a finger on why their joyous performance resonated so much beyond the catchiness of the music but I realize now, more than 50 years later, that it completely captured the best of Sixties youth culture in America with its mostly unheralded mix of black, white, male and female people grooving together, quite a contrast to what Walter Cronkite had been reporting on the CBS Evening News. For this epiphany, I have to thank Questlove, whose two recent documentaries, Summer of Soul and Sly Lives: The Burden of Black Genius, have been a most welcome resurrection of a man whose greatest hits collection was one of the first CDs I ever bought, back in the early 1980s.
Of course, Sly's drug use undid him, or at least propelled him into near obscurity in comparison to his heyday. When I saw him sing "I Want To Take You Higher" in Michael Wadleigh's brilliant Woodstock documentary--literally the "high" point of the three-hour film--it (and the triple album soundtrack I added to my record collection) whet my appetite to try weed as much as anything else, although Sly's frenetic moves were more characteristic of a powdered substance that brought down a lot of white musicians, too. Woodstock played at El Paso's Northgate Theater, where my mother and I had earlier seen "roadshow" performances of My Fair Lady and Hello, Dolly! which required advance tickets. I left for college a year later and smoked my first joint with Tom, another marijuana virgin, although by then, The Who, Led Zeppelin and Traffic provided our musical accompaniment.
Flash forward a decade: I'm spending my lunch hour in the Periodical Room of the New York Public Library, where I worked at the time, catching up on the latest magazines. An Esquire profile of Doris Day--who later became my female role model in the Pines--rumored that she and Sly had been an item. It blew my mind but also explained what may have been a subconscious part of his early--and then verboten-- appeal: sexual attraction. I mean just get a load of him in that crazy fringed vest and gold chains on the Sullivan show.
Boom shakalaka indeed!
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