The Struggle for Sly’s Soul at the Garden

This story was originally published in the October 14, 1971 issue of Rolling Stone.

“I am making my last Herculean effort to save his career,” boomed David Kapralik, personal manager to Sly Stone. Kapralik is an ex-carnival barker who has been known to resume barking at the click of a reporter’s pen, but this time the situation seemed to warrant hyperbole. Sly Stone’s career had recently hit rock bottom.

In the past two years, Sly has managed to rack up the most erratic performance record since Judy Garland. According to his agent, he cancelled 26 of the 80 engagements scheduled for him in 1970 —20 because his stomach was in convulsions and another six because of a clash with Kapralik. He was late for eight shows. This year Sly has cancelled 12 shows out of 40 — ten because of a legal battle with Kapralik and two because his drummer quit. He has been late for two shows. As the cancellations mounted, Kapralik’s slogan — “The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly Stone” — gradually lost its bright, euphemistic ring. Several weeks ago Sly found that no promoter in America would touch him. “Except,” proclaims Kapralik, “the saint that came along, Ken Roberts.” Ken Roberts booked Sly into Madison Square Garden for three successive nights in the first week of September. It was Sly’s last chance.

A week before Sly’s first concert, Kapralik opened shop on the 43rd floor of the Hilton in a suite so elegant that the bed had canopies. Besides being a barker, Kapralik has been: a radio actor; Vice-President of Columbia Records in charge of A&R; the manager of the Sparrow (who later became Steppenwolf) and of Dino Valente; fired by CBS and later reinstated as head of A&R at Epic. He is a compendium of histrionic gestures; his elastic actor’s face begs for a Hirschfeld caricature, the main feature of which would be his dark-circled, hyperthyroid pinwheel eyes.

He dresses in a modified ringmaster’s outfit — lace-embroidered, diaphanous brown shirt; white canvas pants stuffed into high boots. A veteran of Esalen, he makes masterful use of eye-contact and disarming candor. He was in New York on two missions; to alert the Press to the impending drama of Sly’s three critical concerts and to get Sly back in the good graces of Colombia Records. Kapralik was full up to killing both birds with one phone call. When Bob Altschular, head of publicity for Columbia records, rang up, Kapralik glanced at me and said, “Keep your tape running, Timothy.” He proceeded to inform both of us of his newest bravura gesture.

“Sly has not rehearsed the band in two years,” he said into the receiver, as if the receiver were a packed house. “I gave Sly the message that if I did not have the completed album in my hands today and if he didn’t begin rehearsing his group today, that I was on my way to Madrid via TWA Flight 904, and Ken Roberts and my staff would take over. “The album arrived at eight o’clock this morning and I’ve just learned that rehearsal is set for this evening so I may not go to Madrid, but I don’t bluff, ya know? Last time he fucked up on the Cavett show I went to Hawaii for a month. That’s how I communicate to him without talking directly because there arc months that go by when Sly don’t talk to me and I don’t talk to him.”

The first thing that Kapralik explained to each reporter who came to Room 4329 was the difference between Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone. Sylvester is creative, rational, responsible, “and representative of everything that is life-affirming and healthful in our society.

“OK, that’s Sylvester Stewart, he’s a poet. And then there’s also Sly Stone, the street cat, the hostler, the pimp, the conniver, sly as a fox and cold as a stone … that’s the strutter, the street dude who walks up there with that charisma that holds an audience captive, right? — 400,000 at Woodstock and 25,000 at Madison Square. He’s irresponsible, opportunistic and unethical and he pimps our minds if we let him.”

For the past five years, Kapralik has devoted himself to saving Sylvester Stewart from Sly Stone. The one clear message that emerges even from Kapralik’s most overwhelming flights of pea-game hype is that he cares desperately about Sylvester Stewart. At one paint, with two librium trimming his engines to such a low rev that he was actually sitting still, Kapralik leaned back and summed up; “You can take Sly Stone and shove him up the nearest narc’s ass. But Sylvester Stewart — I love him, I would give my life for him. I’m crying, man, ’cause I love him so much.” And indeed, a couple of large tears were trickling down Kapralik’s cheeks.

According to Kapralik, the last two years have been an extended battle for Sylvester’s soul, with the “militants of nihilism” aligned against the “militant of affirmation,” Kapralik. In other words, the Panthers were trying bard to enlist Sly’s talents and influence for their own purposes. At the same time, certain members of the Stewart family were fighting to maintain their own vested interests in Sly. Both these forces were out to dispose of Kapralik, who had left his executive post at CBS and sold all of his CBS stock in order to invest his money and his time in Sly.

When they first met, says Kapralik, Sly was a cynical 23-year-old disc-jockey and street-hustler. And Kapralik worked to bring out all that was “beautiful and life-affirming” in Sylvester. “Hey, a black man who’s bright who says ‘You can make it if you try’ — that’s important!

“During that period last year, Sylvester Stewart had enormous pressures on him to get rid of me — the whitey Jew manager — and to align himself with the voices of despair and nihilism and parochialism and separatism, and I pulled with all my energy to keep him from becoming a spokesman for those things. And Sylvester stood shoulder to shoulder with me. That poor kid was torn apart. And when you are torn apart that means a lot of pain. And one of the clinical ways to ease the pain is cocaine.”

At times, the struggle generated such bitterness between Sly and Kapralik that Sly refused to work. There were assassination threats against both Sly and Kapralik. Sly developed all the symptoms of a bleeding ulcer, though not the ulcer itself. Kapralik says that he himself got deep into cocaine and attempted suicide three times. Perhaps it was as a result of the feud that Kapralik invented the Sly/Sylvester dichotomy — so that he could vent unlimited spleen against Sly while remaining totally loyal to Sylvester.

Last January, Kapralik sued Sly for $250,000 in loans and back commissions. Faced with the threat of having the box office attached at every concert, Sly declined to perform. The suit was withdrawn when Sly agreed to accept certain changes in his road operation. “It was an idle threat,” says Kapralik’s attorney, Peter Bennett. “We just used that economic pressure to get Sylvester to cut down on the number of people who were totally valueless to the operation.” So Sly dropped what Kapralik calls the “parasites, syncophants and ass-kissers.” He took on Ira Seidel, a seasoned road manager who has handled the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes and Frank Sinatra. “Ira had never seen a road operation so fucked up,” says Bennett.

Although Kapralik refused to tolerate chaos on the road, he let Sly take his time in making a new record — two years to be exact. Sly showed up at the studio at all hours of the day and night and slept in a camper parked outside. Sometimes the engineers waited for him and he never appeared. At other times he sat in the studio and felt around for new tunes on his guitar, at $140 an hour. Columbia finally put Sly on suspension for failing to deliver “product.” That meant that Sty couldn’t collect his back royalties, which were substantial, until he handed over 30 sides worth of material.

“How do you get them to understand what really has been happening for those last two years?” asks an indignant Kapralik, “Because Sylvester Stewart does not create ‘product.’ Sylvester Stewart is an innovator, he is inventive, he is a seminal source of new sounds, new fusions, new concepts. Ya don’t turn them out like you turn out pizzas or you turn out records. They’re life statements.” He winds up with the zinger. “Two years,” he says, “is a short time to wait.”

Kapralik’s account of his campaign at CBS is one of his great set-pieces and he performed it to perfection for more than one reporter. Beginning sotto voce, he set the scene. While the CBS executives were convened in their weekly meeting, he gathered 20 publicity photos of Sly and scrawled on them in magic marker, “Two years is a SHORT time to wait. [Goes to desk in hotel suite and produces sample photo with a flourish.] I had to get a message across in behalf of Sylvester. [Voice growing, crouches in seat of high-backed armchair.] So I went doin’ my thing past the secretaries, past the everybodies, up on desks, up on filing cabinets [stands in armchair, raising himself to his five-foot seven-inch height] with my Scotch Tape [pulls off two-foot long ribbon from Scotch Tape dispenser with a flourish] and pasted the photo on their walls. And by the time they came down from their meeting, baby, there was a message they couldn’t avoid. Two years is a SHORT time to wait … for new statements from one of the most creative, relevant human beings now expressing himself through the medium of recordings.” Collapses.

Faced with Kapralik’s ardent campaign, a sharp lawyer, and a completed album, CBS has lifted the suspension. And when Kapralik walked to the stereo and put on the acetate of the new album, it became clear that there was truth in his campaign slogan. Intensely autobiographical and disconcertingly original, the album could only have come from long and unrestrained experimentation. It contained a healthy number of hit singles, but it was also threaded with new and complicated rhythms, new textures, and new stands of blues and country. And like the Lennon albums, it was clearly the work of a man “ripping into his soul” (to use Kapralik’s expression). At its center is a song called “A Family Affair,” Sylvester’s comment on the crisis that forced him to divide his loyalties between his family and Kapralik: “You can’t leave, ’cause your heart is there. But you can’t stay, ’cause you’ve been somewhere else.”

After listening to the album, Kapralik spelled out its special significance. “Sly once told me, ‘Sometimes a man has got to risk losing everything just to check himself out.’ By whatever has gone down in the last two years — missed concerts, late performances, lawsuits, no records out — he has abdicated his having three or four million dollars. But he checked himself out and now everything is coming up that life-affirming, humanistic perspective. Everything is coming up Sylvester Stewart!”

Despite these auguries of Sylvester’s moral and psychological well-being, the fact remains he is broke. “Sly has lost more money in two years than the average rock group would have earned in that period of time,” says Peter Bennett. The legal fees and penalties have added up: Sly has sometimes had to pay inflated penalties to promoters who attached his equipment. And he has spent a good deal of money to maintain his own regal lifestyle.

As a result of his losses, Sly recently found that he couldn’t make the mortgage payment on his $250,000 studio-equipped house (which had once belonged to John Phillips). He was evicted. A friend found him an apartment in a plush, high-rise Beverly Hills apartment house. Sly played his tape recorder until five or six in the morning, but no one complained to him. Then, two weeks ago, Sly woke up to the news that the landlord had filed a $3 million lawsuit against him for conspiring to drive all the tenants out of the apartment house. Some of the tenants have since countered with a petition asking Sly to stay on the grounds that he lends class to the building. But for the moment, Sly is homeless.

For the past six months, Sly’s performance record has been relatively spotless. His agent and Kapralik’s lawyer cannot agree as to whether he did or did not miss one show by oversleeping. He has been late to two shows through no fault of his own. (In one case, his chartered plane couldn’t fly because of engine trouble and one of his aides finally had to flag down a private jet on the La Guardia runway and pay the pilot $600 ready cash to take Sly to Richmond Va.). When his drummer, Gregg Errico, quit in a disagreement over a couple of weeks of back pay. Sly canceled one show in Walpole, Massachusetts, and another in New Orleans.

But just as Sly started to straighten out, his old reputation began to catch up with him. His Madison Square Garden contract, for instance, was ominously studded with penalties — $5,000 if he wasn’t at the Garden every night by eight o’clock, $20,000 if he had not gone on stage by 10:30.

On Wednesday, the day of the first concert, Sly missed six flights in a row in Los Angeles. Finally at 4:30, word came that he bad arrived. Kapralik called his suite and uttered the new catch-phrase: “Everything’s coming up Sylvester Stewart.” He listened for a moment, turned to the company and announced: “Do you know what he said? lie said, ‘That makes Sly happy, too!’” The company, all thoroughly drilled in the Sly/Sylvester dichotomy, laughed heartily.

By the time Sly arrived at the Garden, just after 8 p.m. there were already problems. Ruth Copeland, the first act on the bill, had been prevented from entering the Garden for an hour by security guards because she couldn’t prove she was Ruth Copeland. Ruth started late and sang ten extra minutes. Rare Earth went on and played 20 extra minutes. The stage was finally ready for Sly at 10:50, and he was supposed to have finished his set at eleven. The band filtered out of the dressing room; Sly came last, picking up his knees like a drum majorette and grinning a steely grin. He walked a gauntlet of agents, attorneys, promoters, old guard members of his retinue, new guard — there was a queasy tension about the whole scene; nobody who had been in the retinue these last two years had come through unscarred. Kapralik caught up with Sly in the corridor, took hint by the biceps, looked him hard in the eye, and puffed at him. Sly puffed back.

“It’s something we do when things are going well,” Kapralik explained. “We give each other breath.” Sly’s girlfriend, a striking black lady with high Indian cheekbones, trailed along behind him and patted his enormous Louis XV bouffant Afro into place. Sly went on to tepid, tired applause.

The set lacked fire. The new drummer, an eager, amiable Texan named Jerry Gibson, who had played mostly in night clubs, was still hovering when he should have been pile-driving. He took a while to latch onto the tricky offbeat in “Stand”; meanwhile, the band started to fall apart. Sly was singing way off pitch. In between songs, he made barely audible announcements. He told crowd to get the new album when it came out. “We’d love to do our album now,” he said, “but you wouldn’t know it, and we’re so into the album we want to play it exactly right. If you’re a janitor, clean up the best. If you’re a musician, play it the best.” They played most of the Greatest Hits, wandering off into endless raggedy jams by way of segues. When Sly finally attacked “Higher” with confidence, the crowd used all of its waning energy to stomp.

Sly finished his last encore at twenty past twelve. The delays by the other acts had cost him $7,500 in overtime fees. On the ride back to the hotel, Kapralik was unusually quiet.

On Thursday night, Kapralik ushered me into the cinderblock dressing room, which was dark as the Land of the Shades. In one corner, discernible in his white jumpsuit, was Sly. Sly was itching to make a pronouncement, for he didn’t like the Sly/Sylvester theory that Kapralik had been purveying.

“Right or wrong, good or bad, Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone are the same person,” he said softly. “Sometimes they give you two names, your real one and your ‘also¬known-as.’ But we’re the same people — Sly, Sylvester and the whole Family Stone. We’re all one, you got that?”

Sly gave the group a pep talk before they went on stage. He gently warned Jerry to be careful with the beat. He told them all to “watch out for surprises.” They went on at the stroke of ten and played a transformed set. No mumbling rap, no jams, just one unbroken, hysterical climb. Sly guided the group with microscopic signals — a look, a twist of the back, a telling change of key. Jerry played for his life, sweat pouring off his face. He was much, much better. The group exited at 10:59. As Sly walked down the stage steps to the waiting limbo, he was still beating out a riff on his tambourine.

There were delays again on Friday, costing Sly more overtime fees. But by now it was clear that Sly was back in business; he had broken the house record at the Garden, he was going to clear over $100,000 for three nights, and Ken Roberts was planning 30 more dates for him. The show went well until, in the middle of set, a kid jumped onto the stage and told a roadie that someone in the audience was aiming a shotgun at Sly. Sly got the word, walked behind the amps, and huddled with Kapralik. Kapralik: “I’ll go on if you don’t want to go back on.”

Sly: “I’ll go back man. Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen.” Sly returned and did a neat bit of crowd engineering. “Look around you,” he said. “and make sure the person next to you doesn’t have a shotgun. We just want to play for you.” With one stroke. Sly had acquired 24,999 bodyguards. (A suspect was seized later by Garden security guards, but no shotgun was discovered).

But the incident was disturbing. Kapralik may be right about Sly Stone. There is something dangerously, provocatively arrogant about his glorified gang leader looks. As he walked down 42nd Street that afternoon on a shopping expedition, one street dude after another had approached him to pick a fight. Now he had whipped into “Higher” and 25,000 people were grunting “hey, hey, hey,” like the Russian Army Chorus. Early on in Sly’s career, it became a cliche to say that his concerts looked like Nuremberg Rallies: but as every fist in the house began to punch at the air, it was that which came to mind.

Apparently Kapralik was flashing the same idea. “Can you imagine how I felt when the reviewers called him a Neo-fascist after his first New York concerts!” he shouted over the uproar. He gestured at the array of fists. “Thank God it’s life-affirming, you know what I mean! My life is a small price to pay for that!” His eyes rolled up toward the vaulted Garden roof and beyond. “Thank you God,” he shouted.