One day in 2009, Alec Palao found himself inside a Target in Los Angeles, buying a sweatsuit off a sale rack. He brought it back to a motel near LAX airport and gave it to Sly Stone, who was living there at the time. “He took one look at it and said, ‘Red and black. Man, those are my favorite colors,’” Palao recalls to Rolling Stone. “He put it on straight away. So I dressed Sly Stone. Which I guess is pretty impressive.”
Palao, a reissue producer, archivist, and musician, spent several days with Stone that year, as part of his work licensing the 2010 Ace Records compilation Listen To The Voices: Sly Stone in the Studio 1965-70. “My knees were knocking,” Palao says of their first meeting. “It was like, I’m suddenly meeting Bob Dylan or something. He was extremely gracious and welcoming. I never laughed so much in my life.”
Palao says Stone was “cash poor” at the time (a year later, in 2010, the musician sued his former manager Jerry Goldstein for $50 million over royalties, a legal battle that would continue until 2015, when Stone was awarded $5 million). Palao paid him for the licensing within the first five minutes, but Stone didn’t sign the agreement until four days later. “He could have easily kicked me out or reneged,” he said. “But I learned very quickly that he’s not that kind of a person. One of the first things he said to me was, ‘I feel you, man. I feel you.’ He could understand my genuine interest in his music and his art and what I’d come to talk to them about. I wasn’t asking the same old [questions], ‘Why didn’t you show up?’ and the drugs and all that kind of crap.”
In addition to that Target run, Palao ran other errands for the legend, buying a keyboard to accompany the iPad that Stone was using to make music at the time (recording on GarageBand). He also witnessed Stone’s well-known drug habit.
“It’s not a secret that drugs were a part of his life,” Palao says. “He was smoking crack in front of me while we were chatting, the whole time I was around him, like somebody smoking a joint or drinking a cocktail or glass of wine. His pipe broke and he said, ‘Hey man, can you get me a thermometer?’ Literally, he’s talking about a glass thermometer. So I happily trotted off to the store, and of course they don’t sell glass thermometers anymore. They haven’t for years. They were digital ones. So I thought, ‘What the hell do I buy him?’”
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Palao ended up returning with some ballpoint pens, and Stone took the ink cartridges out of them. “He sticks it in, lights, and of course the plastic starts burning — this horrible smell,” he says. “But that was funny. It was a charming moment.”
Palao spent time with Stone again in 2013, interviewing him while working on the Light in the Attic compilation I’m Just Like You: Sly’s Stone Flower 1969-70. Palao received a Grammy nomination for Best Liner notes in 2015, but lost to the John Coltrane live album Offering: Live at Temple University. “I should have realized — when you’re up against John Coltrane, you never win,” he jokes.
During those intimate visits in 2009 and 2013, Palao was able to get a sense of who Stone actually was. They’d listen to music — ranging from Stone’s own unreleased material to heavy metal — and discuss his career. The interviews were included in the liner notes for the archival releases, and were recently featured in Questlove’s documentary Sly Lives! “Sometimes [meeting your heroes] can be a bit of a disappointment,” Palao says. “But it is meaningful when they turn out to be somebody you can just have a wonderful, fun time being around.”
“I had just a little inkling of how this guy did what he did,” he adds. “It seemed intrinsic to him. If you asked him who his influences were, the first person he’s going to say is Bob Dylan, as much as Ray Charles or the church. He really was very much a complete omnivore of music, and he understood the mechanics of what made songs good. When we were talking about ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime,’ I said to him, ‘That’s kind of like a standard.’ And he said, “Well, I wrote it to be a standard.’ He understood how to do this.”
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Around the time of that visit, the Dutch twins Edwin and Arno Konings, whom Palao calls “the ultimate Sly sleuths,” had released a Stone discography book. (“I call them my twins,” Stone once said. “You can’t help but like them.”) The Konings are also responsible for the rare live album The First Family: Live at Winchester Cathedral 1967, which arrived last Record Store Day and will get a wide release next month.
The concert took place on Easter morning, March 26, 1967, towards the end of Sly and the Family Stone‘s residency at the Bay Area music venue Winchester Cathedral (they served as the house band there starting in December 1966). It was recorded by their first manager, Rich Romanello, who also owned the club. The live album was captured just four months after they formed the band; their debut album, A Whole New Thing, wouldn’t arrive until the fall.
Romanello shelved the tapes after the band signed to Epic, and the twins unearthed the tapes in 2002. When they couldn’t hear any vocals coming through, they recruited Palao. Fiddling around with the tapes circa 2020, Palao realized that it had been recorded on a vintage four-track setup, but they’d been playing it on a consumer-grade machine. “I needed to put it on more of a professional one,” he says. “And voila, there’s the vocal there. But it still wasn’t perfect. It was badly engineered.”
When Palao cleaned it up, he was able to hear how astonishing the band already sounded in their earliest era. “The crowd is hanging on every note, and the energy is completely captivating,” he says. “They already have the Sly and the Family Stone sound completely dialed in.”
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Palao admits that several labels turned the tape down, but he found the right home in High Moon, which specializes in reissuing rarities and cult artists. “It’s not necessarily obvious to everybody, even when they hear it, how historical this is,” he says. “High Moon could instantly see how valid this was, and that we could do the kind of package that it deserved. Myself and the twins are very pleased about the way it came out. We were waiting for the right moment to pass it on to Sly.”
With Stone’s death last week at the age of 82, there’s already renewed interest in his catalog, and the release is a remarkable addition to that — a document of his and the band’s legendary live presence. “In my line [of work], there’s many times when you hear about a legendary recording, and when you finally get the recorded evidence, it’s disappointing, or it’s an anticlimax,” Palao says. “This is the complete opposite. This is absolute empirical proof that this band was absolutely brilliant right out of the gate. They sound unequivocally as good here as they did at any other point in their career.”
