Sly & the Family Stone Band Members on Glory Days and Being ‘Too Weird’
“We were at the top of our game then,” Greg Errico, drummer of Sly and the Family Stone says of the group’s 1968 stand at New York’s infamous Fillmore East. “The band was just killing it. There were moments that made my hair stand up, where that stage lifted off like a 747 and flew.”
Excerpts from the shows Errico remembers so enthusiastically were recently released on a highlights-only LP, curated by the Roots’ Captain Kirk Douglas for Record Store Day last Spring, titled Live at the Fillmore East. Now the entire four concert run – two shows each night in October 1968 – will be released on July 17th as Live at the Fillmore East October 4th & 5th, 1968, showcasing a band both fully formed and on the cusp of greatness. (The box set is available for pre-order via Amazon.) Below, you can listen to the group’s intense and grooving rendition of “M’Lady,” from the October 5th early show.
“From the moment we got together, Sly knew exactly what he wanted,” Errico recalls of the group’s enigmatic, groundbreaking leader. “He knew he wanted to mix all of these musical elements and he knew he wanted a mixed race band.”
Sly Stone had been a trailblazing DJ in the mid Sixties on San Francisco’s soul station KSOL, slipping the Beatles and the Stones, who were edgy at the time, into his playlist. From his earliest notions of starting a band, Errico says, Sly wanted to bring that same penchant for pushing the line to his own group. And did he ever: Even in the ultra-progressive Bay Area of 1967, the multi-racial Sly and the Family Stone made an impression.
“The first time that we got together, we didn’t even play a note,” Errico says, remembering the day Sly convened the group. “We talked a lot about what we were going to do. And we all quickly realized what Sly was doing when we looked around at each other. There were race riots going on at the time. Putting a musical group together with male and female and black and white, to us, it felt really natural and cool and comfortable, but it made a statement that was definitely threatening to some people.”
“At first, Bill Graham thought we were too weird,” saxophonist Jerry Martini recalls of the legendary promoter, who also booked the Fillmore. “He auditioned us, but there was just no one like us.”
Even a rock & roll pioneer like Bill Graham had never seen a band full of long-haired white and black musicians, Martini says, with the women standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the frontline with their male counterparts.