Sly in the Summer of Soul, and Love
Harlem? Woodstock? Sly Stone Had All the Strokes
Less than an hour after Sly Stone’s death at age 82 was announced yesterday, I got a text message from a number I didn’t at first recognize. It was my friend Betty, longtime Vermonter, reminiscing about that Sly & the Family Stone concert we saw at Madison Square Garden June 5, 1974. The date is easy to look up and remember, for it was the night that Sly married Kathy Silva on stage, in front of 20,000 people, as part of the concert. It was a mess of a show, and a foreshadowing of what Sly would experience, from the pinnacle of stardom to a shadow of his former self, as a musician, songwriter, performer.
But what a Former Self to have. At a time of musical and social change, Stone, a former Bay Area songwriter disc jockey and songwriter (“C’mon and Swim” by Bobby Freeman, a top five isngle in the summer of 1964, was produced and co-written by the man then known as Sylvester Stone), his band, Sly & the Family Stone, was one of the country’s most powerful musical forces. The Family Stone was integrated both by race and gender. Cynthia Robinson, a black woman, played trumpet; Sly’s sister Rosie, played piano and sang; white members included Jerry Martini on sax, and Greg Errico on drums. This is worth mentioning and remembering because most bands didn’t operate that way in those days: Sly created a band that represented the ethos in his songs: “Different strokes, for different folks”: “Everyday People,” “Stand!”, “Everybody is a Star,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” and others from 1968 through 1973.
Sly and the Family Stone exploded after their appearance at the Woodstock Festival had half a million people hearing an amalgam of rock, r&b, something called funk, soul, and pop for the first time. But earlier in that historic summer, Sly & the Family Stone built the bridge on which their music would stand, appearing before a smaller, perhaps more skeptical crowd, at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Mount Morris Park in upper Manhattan. This was the band that could prove its mettle, make itself at home, in an urban park in a Harlem then isolated from the city south of 116th Street, and then in a dairy farm in upstate New York that became a foundational moment in rock’s cultural history. That is just part of Sly Stone’s legacy, but it is one we should value. This is a revised version of a column about the movie Questlove made in 2021, “Summer of Soul…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” which is, of course, televised on Disney Plus, Hulu, and other outlets via subscription or fee.
In the 1969 Summer of Soul I lived in a fifth floor walkup with my girlfriend M. at 15th Street and First Avenue.
The summer of 1969 was also memorable for the Apollo 11 moon landing. On July 20, 1969, which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to land on the moon, though I had foreseen something like this in a short story I wrote in fourth grade in which inch-high but very powerful young Americans, “billio” and “johnnyo,” go to Mars to keep the red planet from going Communist.
We tried to watch the moon landing on East 15th Stree,, struggling to get a clear view on the small black TV with rabbit ears antenna, a relic from a time when one adjusted the TV set by banging on the top of it to stop the picture from skeezing out. We desperately wanted to watch it stoned, but there was a “marijuana drought.” Another friend, S., one of those "Men in Black II" aliens who worked for the post office, said he knew some dealers south of 14th Street, but he also came up dry. I don't know why we didn't buy a bottle of tequila, or a bottle of vodka and mixers. It might have taken the edge off an adventurous but difficult summer.
Going to Woodstock in August was a no-brainer: Of course M. and I didn't go. It was raining hard; we didn't have a car or ride. We were affronted by the Saturday headline on the cover of the Daily News: "Hippies Mired in Sea of Mud." Reactionary S.O.B.'s. But that didn't make us want to be there. We were already too hip for that, and by hip I mean my paranoia around groups of people ran so deep I could not communicate. We each worked day jobs: she for the phone company, me for temp agencies doing clerical or messenger work. At night she took dance classes, I wrote poems. We ate Blimpies and drank Coco Rico, a Puerto Rican soda popular in our neighborhood. What we mostly did was go to concerts, and we’d seen a good handful of the Woodstock bands already for $2 or $3 a ticket at the Schaeffer Music Festival at Wollman Rink in Central Park.
We read newspapers every day, including the Black Panther paper if someone was selling it on the subway, but it was my bad for never buying the black community’s Amsterdam News. Then we might have known about the Harlem Cultural Festival (HCF), which took place over six weeks in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). Multifaceted genius Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson made the movie, "Summer of Soul (. . . Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised), " a masterpiece of curation, from the film and sound that had not been seen since the event. The sound is outstanding; as Questlove writes in the notes to the recently released and essential Sony Legacy soundtrack album, there were 15 live microphones for the performances. That seemed like a lot to me: No wonder it sounded so good! It made Questlove rethink how he's used to having as many as 96 microphone hookups when he's just playing with a trio.
As he writes in the liner notes to the soundtrack, about the current technical capabilities versus what's heard at the Harlem fest: "Who needs a perfect product? Or rather, who thinks that a perfect product is in fact perfect? What we want is a human one. This process, the fifteen microphones, the middle ground, the limits that are in fact liberation, produce exactly that result. That’s what’s captured. And that’s what captured me."
We saw or could have seen many of the Harlem Cultural Festival acts in Central Park, too. I know we saw Ray Barretto, Cal Tjader, and Mongo Santamaria, my holy trinity of Latin music, on the same show that summer for $2 or $3 at the Schaefer Festival. They played Wollman Rink on Friday, July 25, according to Setlist.com, and at the HCF on Sunday, July 27, with the addition of Herbie Mann with Roy Ayers and Sonny Sharrock. Mann played the Schaeffer Fest twice that summer. On July 11, he co-headlined with Eddie Harris, and August 9 with Ayers and Sharrock getting co-billing. In Harlem, it was Sharrock, a black rock/jazz guitarist, who does a controlled demolition job on Mann's take on "Hold On, I'm Coming," guitar with a density that leaves no room to breathe. Mann knows he's got to pour some extra flute soul for this crowd; over Ayers vibraphonic swing, Sharrock lets the listener know there's a riot goin' on, even if the others are playing nice. Jimi Hendrix famously set his guitar on fire at Woodstock; Sharrock burned his guitar in Harlem, from the inside out.
I was already thinking about being a journalist, though too shy to approach strangers. This was cured when I acquired a steno pad notebook and pen, which I traveled the city with anyway to jot down song lyrics or poetry fragments. John McPhee, the great non-fiction author and writing teacher, has an essay called “Elicitation” that I used to replace a textbook when I taught Craft of Interviewing for 10 years through 2024 at St. John’s University. In “Elicitation,” he tells the young interviewer to think of your notebook as a fishing license that permits one to interrogate newsworthy subjects.
We didn't know where Mount Morris Park was. I could imagine a movie: "Wayne and M. Get Lost in Harlem." A comedy, with anxiety and panic attacks, because I was prone, but mostly M. and I had fun anywhere we went. If we got lost, we could go into a barber shop! M’s hair was naturally quite curly; if she grew it out it could have been an Afro, so maybe a beauty salon. People in the Questlove movie said the whole area smelled like fried chicken and Afro-Sheen. We would have enjoyed both.
Race relations were not great in New York in the summer of 1969. But we could have pulled it off, going to the festival, I'm pretty sure, even when Nina Simone recites the new poem "Are You Ready?" "Are you ready to kill if necessary? Is your mind ready, is your body? Are you ready to smash white things, blow-up buildings?" I could see us both raising our fists and shouting, "yeah!" because by the time anyone noticed, we'd be walking on our heels backwards, right to the Lenox Avenue/125th Street subway. Or maybe not. I was struck at how many people from the audience interviewed at that film were the same age I was: 19, and doing the same thing: being home from college. Members of a vast invisible black middle class that hardly anyone outside the community took note of.
In the movie, young TV reporter Bill Plante, asked members of the audience what they thought about the moon landing, which happened July 20, 1969. Mostly shrugs. It was cool, sort of, in some abstract way, but people wondered why all that money was spent to send some people to a place where nobody lived, instead of spending all that money on people right here who needed food, and shelter, and safety from the crime and heroin epidemic in their community. Harlem was not a ghetto; it was home. The Chambers Brothers note in the opening performance, "Uptown," that Harlem was the safe space for black America. That day when American astronauts landed on the moon, the Harlem Cultural Festival had Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and David Ruffin (all seen and heard) and Chuck Jackson. Ruffin, way overdressed for the occasion wearing a coat with a fur collar on this hot July afternoon, sings "My Girl," alone. A weird performance, but still: People in Harlem were not sitting home to watch a white dude walk on the moon; they were in the park watching Stevie Wonder.
One of the pleasures of the movie is that musical performances flow through the movie, although they become background for interviews with musicians, audience members, older now, who were there. The beat goes on. Some have suggested it might have been preferable to see entire performances at full volume. But that is why there is a soundtrack album. All 17 performances on the film are on this live album, with minimal introduction. Some talked during their sets, though, and some of it was profound. My favorite musician then and now, Ray Barretto: his song "Together" was all about life business, not show business. Barretto, one of the greats of Latin music, jazz, and Latin jazz, was Puerto Rican from east of the park: Spanish Harlem. "I know a beautiful truth," Barretto says during the song, never missing a beat. "The blood of mankind flows through me." And he makes the point every artist at the Woodstock Festival upstate tried to make, but none said it better than Barretto when he suggested that we all had to learn to live together here on Earth, "not on the moon." That was Sly’s point, too.
Play loud the startling gospel segment: The Edwin Hawkins Singers, with their crossover hit, "Oh Happy Day," but you hear the nuance in the line about Jesus: "He taught us to watch, fight and pray." When the Staple Singers do "Help Me Jesus," Pops' guitar makes his family gospel group sound like Slim Harpo doing "Shake Your Hips" before the Rolling Stones covered it on "Exile on Main Street." When Mahalia Jackson comes out with the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the SCLC Operation Bread Basket Orchestra and Choir, there's another inflection moment. Exalted Mahalia Jackson is singing "Precious Lord," but feigns or is feeling overcome by heat, so she passes the microphone to young Mavis Staples, who has to reach like she has never had reach before, take her voice, body and spirit up the ladder, so close to heaven you can imagine she can see golden chariots. You see and hear her transformed from child to woman.
It happens with almost every act. The Fifth Dimension, led by Billy Davis Jr. and Marilyn McCoo, were top of the pops since 1967, with songs by Jimmy Webb ("Up, Up andAway") and Laura Nyro ("Stoned Soul Picnic" and "Wedding Bell Blues") to make them crossover stars. And in the spring and early summer of 1969, their medley from "Hair," the "tribal love rock musical," owned the pop radio with the "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In." There was no age of Aquarius dawning in Harlem, so the Fifth Dimension led in with "Don'cha Hear Me Callin' to Ya," a Rudy Stevenson song that may have been first recorded by Nina Simone on her "Pastel Blues" album. The Fifth Dimension turns it into a plea for acceptance, they needed and wanted that crowd, and there's more church in this version than the group was ever able to put on record.
Harlem met its own friendly space aliens, from the other coast: Sly and the Family Stone: a woman trumpet player. Hmm. A black-led band with a white drummer. Double hmm. Trying to convince everyone they were "Everyday People." They were.
In John Sayles' 1984 movie "Brother from Another Planet," our mute hero played by Joe Morton, learns the way of both white people and black people. A child shows Morton's character a magic trick on the subway: At an uptown train at the 96th Street stop, he makes all the white people disappear.
And this is why we need change the way we teach history in schools: not black history, American history. Tear up the whole curriculum, start over. I'm reading Louise Erdrich's last two novels, "The Sentence" and "The Night Watchman." Some of these stories take place in Minneapolis, where Erdrich owns a bookstore. But much takes place on her family's heritage own turf, the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Native American tribe. I did not grow up knowing these stories. Where I grew up in Queens and Long Island, the local tribes, which had disappeared perhaps 300 years earlier, were the Canarsee (sic) and the Rockaway. We just know them as neighborhoods in the area. We should start from there. We didn't fail history. The teaching of history failed all of us. Questlove's masterpieces visual and audio of historical re-creation might ignite a spark.