Several cities played outsized roles in the life of Sly Stone, the musical innovator who died on Monday at 82. There was Denton, the northern Texas town where he was born; Los Angeles, where he spent his later years; and even New York City, where he played several memorable concerts, including a Madison Square Garden date in 1974 at which he got married onstage. But no place was more central to Stone’s formation and rise than the Bay Area. His family moved there shortly after he was born, and it’s where he got his professional start and rose to stardom amid the multiracial psychedelic ferment of the 1960s. Here are five Bay Area spots important in his life.
Sonoma Community College (formerly Vallejo Junior College)
Stone’s first encounter with music came as a child in Vallejo, Calif., north of Oakland. His father was a deacon at a local congregation affiliated with the Pentecostal sect the Church of God in Christ, and when he was 8 years old, Stone, whose given name was Sylvester Stewart, and three siblings recorded a gospel track. Stone appeared in several bands in high school. And then for a stint in college, he studied music theory and composition — and picked up the trumpet, to boot — at Vallejo Junior College, today known as Sonoma Community College.
Toni Rembe Theater (formerly the Geary Theater)
He was best known for funk and psychedelic rock, but Stone’s eclecticism can be heard in the slow, firmly 1950s-style doo-wop music of the Viscaynes, one of his earliest groups. In an instance of foreshadowing, the Viscaynes, like the Family Stone, were multiracial at a time when that was exceedingly uncommon. (“To me, it was a white group with one Black guy,” Stone wrote in his memoir.) The Viscaynes recorded in downtown San Francisco underneath the Geary Theater, now known as the Toni Rembe Theater, and associated with the nonprofit company American Conservatory Theater.
KSOL and KDIA radio
Stone attended broadcasting school in San Francisco and was then a D.J. at two local AM stations: KSOL, based out of San Mateo, and then KDIA, in Oakland. Both were aimed at Black listeners; KSOL, Stone wrote, had even changed its call sign to remind listeners that it played soul. But Stone again broke the mold, playing not just soul and R&B, but the Beatles and Bob Dylan. “Some KSOL listeners didn’t think a R&B station should be playing white acts,” he later wrote. “But that didn’t make sense to me. Music didn’t have a color. All I could see was notes, styles and ideas.”
Mid-Century Monster
Sly and the Family Stone’s second album, “Dance to the Music,” was their first hit. Led by its title track, a Top 10 single, it introduced the wider world to the group’s syncretic blend of psychedelic rock and soul. On the album’s cover, the group is backed by blue sky and stares meaningfully at the listener while arrayed upon an abstractly shaped, pea-green sculpture. The piece, known as Mid-Century Monster and sculpted by Robert Winston, still stands — or sprawls — in a park on Lake Merritt in the middle of Oakland. And yes, you are supposed to play on it.
The Fillmore West
Perhaps nothing better symbolized Sly and the Family Stone’s amenability to kinds of music (and music fans) beyond soul and R&B than their memorable four-night stand in December 1968 at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. The venue fell under the aegis of the famous promoter Bill Graham, best known for his decades-long association with that other local institution, the Grateful Dead.
Stone existed in overlapping circles with the Dead, Jefferson Airplane and other like-minded acts. (Stone and Garcia even appeared on a track together on an album by fellow San Francisco group New Riders of the Purple Sage.) Stone and company also played the Fillmore East, Graham’s theater in the East Village: After a 1968 gig there with Jimi Hendrix, The Times’s Robert Shelton concluded, “Better in person than their recordings, Sly and the Family Stone promise to be widely popular.”
Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York.
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