SLY STONE (1943-2025)

Oh Sly, you great big mixed up ball of confusion! I loved your records and only The Who could have followed your set at Woodstock, the defining moment of your chequered career. But what a mess you made of things along the way. 

        I have written about meeting Sly before but the death yesterday of this musical-genius-cum-provocateur-extraordinaire prompted me to re-read the three editions of Melody Maker in which I wrote about him and reproduce the second – an interview – pretty much verbatim for the first time. 

        The first time I saw Sly was in November 1973, a show at the Hollywood Palladium. “Will he? Won’t he?” I wrote in my review for MM’s Caught In The Act page. “Sly Stone’s reputation is too firmly etched for those questions not to be asked when he’s advertised to appear anywhere in the USA these days. His tantrums and failures to show for concerts are legendary to the extent that his contracts now contain a clause with a heavy penalty for non-appearance. Well, Sly did show at the Palladium but only just. The Palladium was sold out for the funky guy with the panama hat – but Sly made only a token appearance, leaving the stage after just over half an hour, apparently satisfied that the customers had had their seven dollars’ worth on entertainment. It was as big a rip off as I’ve witnessed since I started reporting on rock’n’roll three years ago.”

        I went on to report that while his band was stage for about an hour Sly was present for only half that time, offering his audience endless choruses of his two best-known songs, ’Dance To The Music’ and ‘I Want To Take You Higher’. “When the house lights went up everyone went home surprisingly peaceably. For what there as of it the music was tight and entertaining but other aspects of this show left me with a bitter taste in my mouth,” I concluded.

        Although I didn’t realise it at the time I caught Sly Stone on a relatively good day when I interviewed him in a basement apartment on New York’s West Side in June of 1974. It was his HQ in New York that week because, I was told by his publicist, he didn’t like hotels but after less than an hour in his company I figured it was more a case of hotels not liking him. Either way, bad days outnumbered good ones at this stage of his career, and would go on to do so for much of his troubled life.

As I recall in my Just Backdated memoir, Sly dressed for his Melody Maker interrogation as he would for the stage: a gleaming all-white leather outfit with tassels and rhinestones topped off with a huge afro, his eyes hidden behind outsized sunglasses. Sat next to him on a couch in this cramped, untidy apartment was his fiancée Kathy Silva whom he would soon marry on the stage at Madison Square Garden. She was decked out in a matching outfit save for the petite mini-skirt that exposed a generous amount of thigh, so much so that shortly after the interview began Sly enticed her into the adjoining bedroom for an intimate tête-à-tête, quite noisily too. In the meantime, the mortified publicist and I made small talk and twiddled our thumbs.

I’d been warned in advance that interviewing Sly Stone might be problematic but I’d come away unscathed from an awkward encounter with Lou Reed earlier that year and fancied my chances. Things got off to a bad start, however. It was scheduled for 3.30pm but when I arrived I was asked to return at 5pm because Sly was having a blood test, a legal requirement for his forthcoming marriage. I did as I was bid but there was no sign of him at 5pm, so I waited for a further hour during which his soon-to-be-released LP Small Talk was played for me. “It was only a rough mix but, again, it’s a departure from previous Sly material,” I reported. “All but the two opening songs on the first side feature a prominent violin and many of them are slow, almost waltz-time, pieces. Despite this, there’s still the pounding bass that has distinguished Sly’s recordings from the early days.” 

The new LP offered me a topic of conversation when Sly finally arrived but before we began I gave him a recent copy of MM that contained a feature on him in our Rock Giants series. This was a mistake as he promptly left the room to read it, evidently on the toilet as his return was accompanied by the sound of plumbing. I tried to sound friendly, smiling openly as I asked my first question, about the use of violins on his new album. 

        “It’s different. It’s unusual. That’s probably why I did it. The strings were around so I used them.”

Have you been wanting to do this for a long time?

“Probably. I don’t need to think about it at all to get it together.”

You seem to be forever changing.

“Time changes me, man.”

Will you be introducing strings on stage?

“I got a violin player in the group now. His name’s Sidney. He’s from Sausalito and I’ve known him just long enough for him to get into the group.”

Did you arrange the strings yourself?

“Part of them.”

There’s a lot of slower material on the album. Are you cutting down on the frantic Sly Stone material?

“There’s a lot of songs so I introduced slow songs also. There’s 11 songs. I don’t count which are slow.”

How big is your group at present?

“Nine people.”

It was at this point that Sly and Kathy retired to the bedroom. They were gone for about 15 minutes and returned together, Sly looking rather pleased with himself. I resumed my questioning as if nothing had happened. 

Tell me something about the bass player.

“That’s me. I play bass on all my records. I play most everything on all my records. I just overdub everything.”

[Later in the year I would interview Larry Graham, the bass player in the Family Stone, who refuted this.]

Wouldn’t the group like to be on the records with you?

“Sometimes they’re on the records also, but they feel good about it [not being on the records]. They like it this way and they’re pretty honest about what they like. I‘ve recorded like this ever since the Stand album, ever since ‘Dance To The Music’ I guess.”

Bass is such an important part of your sound. Have you ever felt like playing bass on stage yourself? 

“Sometimes I do.”

“It’s in his heart,” chipped in Kathy who by now had returned from the bedroom and re-joined Sly on the couch. He plays it so good that he’d like to play everything on stage if he could. He’s only one man but he has a million thoughts.” 

Do you get bored with always playing the very familiar material like ‘Dance’ and ‘Higher’?

“No, they like it and they keep on liking it and you gotta keep telling people you like it too. I love every period of my career.”

Where you do you write?

“My songs come from environments. I just go about my day an as things come to me, I write them down. I write on the toilet ‘cos no one bothers me there.”

Are you trying to change your image by getting married and releasing slower material? Is the image mellowing these days? 

“I’m not trying to. Vibes just leave me. I’m still as crazy as I always was, if crazy is the right word.”

Will you actually turn up for shows?

“I won’t ever be predictable.”

But there have been reports of you not turning up.

“It’s bad promoters, man.”

Your performance in the Woodstock movie helped you enormously in England.

“Sure. I enjoyed playing there. All my gigs are good.”

Are there other highlights of your career that you remember?

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t know about them.”

Because I was the wrong country?

“It’s not the country you’re, it’s the skin you’re in. And it’s not the colour at that. I enjoy myself best on the toilet and I wouldn’t invite you there.”

“This last remark brought the interview to an inevitable conclusion,” I wrote. “Sly’s PR showed me to the door while the man himself curled up on the soda with his fiancée. ‘You know something,’ said his PR girl. ‘He really opened up this afternoon. Usually he just grunts at writers. He’s done a few interviews this week and he’s said more this afternoon than he’s said all week’.”

A triumph, then.

A week later I reported on Sly’s nuptials at the Garden in my New York news column. “The ever-unpredictable Sly Stone married the mother of his nine-month-old son in front of 20,000 fans at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday evening,” I wrote. “Following a set by Eddie Kendricks, Sly’s mother came on to the stage to call for quiet. Then she introduced Sly’s 12-year-old niece who sang a gospel hymn like someone twice her age before the stage filled with friends and relations all dressed in gold costumes.

Sly & Kathy on the MSG stage as they were marred. 

        “A dozen girls holding palm leaves high in the air formed a backdrop as Sly himself loped out last, dressed all in gold with a gold cape. The preacher – brought in specially from San Francisco – called for hush and the service began. Appeals for the audience to keep silent because of the solemnity of the occasion were largely ignored, but the words of the marriage service were clearly audible through the PA system. When the words ‘Do you, Sly Sylvester Stewart, take this woman’ were uttered, a huge cheer went up. The service closed with the traditional ‘Let no man put asunder’ line which prompted the crowd to go crazy.

        “Then everyone trooped off. The whole affair was over in less than 15 minutes. There was another delay before the band came back on, followed by Sly who ripped into a long set, at least by his standards. 

        “The new Family Stone included a violinist and there were several new songs in his repertoire as well as old favourites,” I informed MM’s readers. “‘Dance To The Music’ opened and closed the set. Musically, Sly was as good as ever, alternating between organ, guitar and harp. He seemed to rise to the occasion and actually addressed the audience between numbers instead of merely jumping from one number to the next to hurry the proceedings over as quickly as possible.”

Two years later Sky and Kathy separated. “He beat me, held me captive and wanted me to be in ménages à trois,” Kathy later told People magazine. 

THE WHO ALBUM BY ALBUM by Dante DiCarlo

In the manner of Revolution In The Head, Ian McDonald’s acclaimed book analysing the music of The Beatles, Dante DiCarlo attempts something along similar lines for The Who, and while his writing style falls somewhat short of McDonald, this is a workmanlike effort at evaluating The Who’s 14 studio albums, track by track, 168 songs in all. It helps that DiCarlo is a guitarist himself, thus enabling him to analyse the songs from a musician’s standpoint, recording which keys Pete Townshend plays in, D being his preference as anyone who’s ever essayed ‘Substitute’ surely knows, and chord progressions. 

To a certain extent this book renders my own Complete Guide To The Music Of The Who (1994 & 2004, the update written with Ed Hanel) redundant, though DiCarlo omits live albums and compilations, thus disregarding those singles (like ‘I Can’t Explain’, ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, ‘Substitute’ and a handful of others) that appear only on collections of hits, tracks on the Ready Steady Who EP and ‘bonus’ tracks that have appeared on certain compilations and reissues. Most, however, get a mention in the text that prefaces each LP, especially those that somehow align with Townshend’s various musical concepts. My Who music guide was one in a series of 46 books designed in the shape of CD cases and, through necessity, was considerably more concise than Album By Album, even it did include live LPs and compilations, of which there are now too many to count. Album By Album contains far more detail, not just in the scrutiny of the actual songs but in the background essays that introduce each LP. 

So, beginning with ‘Out In The Street’ from My Generation (1965) and ending about 200 pages later with ‘She Rocked My World’ from WHO (2019) we get the low down on The Who’s recorded oeuvre, most of it positive though DiCarlo doesn’t shy away from critical assessments, mostly, as might be expected, on tracks from the post-Moon LPs. Those songs that might be regarded as landmarks in the group’s career – ‘My Generation’, ‘Pinball Wizard’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, for example – get the five-star treatment, with up to three pages of worthwhile analysis.  

        DiCarlo was born in 1983 and thus missed out on The Who’s classic period and with this in mind he’s written a book aimed at newer fans of The Who, by which I mean those who’ve picked up on the group after Keith left us in 1978 and possibly also John Entwistle in 2002. For such Who fans this is a valuable guide to their legacy and to the way their long career has panned out. Older fans won’t find much here that they don’t already know if they’ve paid attention along the way and read all the books but DiCarlo has done his research well and produced an accurate, interesting summary of the group’s output. 

Of course, 168 songs (plus maybe a dozen or so that don’t make the book) in what is now a 60-year career is by no means prolific. The Beatles recorded 213 songs, 188 of which they wrote themselves, in eight years, a work-rate that exposes The Who as shiftless slackers. But that doesn’t consider The Who’s brilliance as a live act, which is what really attracted me to them towards the end of the 1960s, turned me into a rabid fan during the 1970s and has kept me banging on about them for years. This, for me, is where their true greatness lies. Perhaps, therefore, a follow-up book might consider their live legacy, contrasting and comparing all their many concert releases, even though the songs they perform haven’t changed that much over the last 40 years. 

Album By Album contains 16 pages of colour photos, many taken by the author, the vast majority from the new millennium. It’s 220 pages long with a useful index and costs £25 (£19.85 on Amazon). 

RICK DERRINGER (1947-2025)

Rick Derringer was everywhere in New York when I lived in the city in the 1970s, backstage at gigs, record launch parties thrown by labels, hanging out in the rock’n’roll clubs all over Manhattan. He and his first wife Liz were social animals and good hosts too, throwing parties at their downtown apartment where, one night, Rick showed me a guitar he’d had made that was constructed from granite. It was too heavy to wear on stage, he explained, but the tone was unique. 

        Rick was the main man in The McCoys who had a massive hit in 1965 with a song called ‘Hang On Sloopy’, also covered as ‘My Girl Sloopy’ by Jeff Beck’s Yardbirds, superior bubble-gum I guess you’d call it, but Rick went on to far greater things in the seventies and beyond, both as a session guitarist and record producer. His death last week saddened me, and prompted me to look up a very long interview I did with him for the March 16, 1975 issue of Melody Maker.  

        What follows is the first half of that interview, dealing with the rise and fall of The McCoys. 

The gold disc rests on the mantlepiece, taking pride of place as it justly deserves. There are two more on either side of it, but the gold record is the one that sticks out a mile, the one that’ll be remembered as the classic of its time and the one on which the laminated gold will never fade with age.

It bears the simple inscription: “Presented to Ricky Zehringer. The McCoys. Hang On Sloopy. Number 1 in the Nation.”

Oh, what a record that was! The ultimate pop commercial single out of America in the mid-sixties; the record that every discotheque danced to in 1965, the record that was played at every party and on every transistor radio.

It was so simple but so effective. Three chords repeated over and over again, same as ‘La Bamba’ and ‘Twist And Shout’ but slower and mellower, with vocal harmonies layered on top to produce that good-time feeling that pop was all about nine years ago today.

It’s changed now, of course, Ricky Zehringer is Rick Derringer. The McCoys are all involved with Warner Brothers. The music is hot, heavy, fast and complex. Derringer is now an ace record producer; lessons have been learned, experiences shared and good time spent. Everyone’s a little wiser and a lot richer, Derringer especially.

The first thing you notice about him is how small he is. Rick Derringer is tiny and this, coupled with what could be described as a baby face, gives him the air of a worldly teenager. Actually he’s 25, but he could pass off as 17 or 18 without difficulty. Only the rings below his eyes betray his real age. 

Rick began his musical life with The McCoys and they began as a high school band in Union City, Indiana. “The McCoys started when I was 14 or 15 years old, way before ‘Sloopy’,” he recalls, almost as if it was yesterday. “That was when I was in school. I’d just graduated when the record came out but we’d been together almost four years by then.

“We were playing all the top 40 songs. We just got together to make friends and play the local dances and have the kids come up to us and tell us we were cool. We’d be making a little money so I’d have something extra to spend on clothes but usually I’d save up for a better guitar. At the same time I never really went into it with the attitude that someday I would make records and be in the music business. We were just an ordinary little high school band.”

In 1965 The McCoys made THAT record – almost by accident. 

“One night we were playing with The Strangeloves in Dayton, Ohio. It turned out they were the act on a record called ‘I Want Candy’ and they’d told everyone they were from Australia and were sheep herders. In reality they were three record producers from Brooklyn, and they asked us whether we’d like to go to New York and make a record called ‘Hang On Sloopy’. We said ‘great’. We’d heard the record about a year before by The Vibrations when it was a number one R&B record in the States.”

The next day Rick’s parents packed the band into their car and drove to New York City. “We drove up on Sunday and went into the studio on Monday. We did the music part first and then the producers gave us a disc of the vocal and a portable record player and told us to go out and come back when we’d learned it. We practised it note for note and then went back and did it. The producers jumped up and down in the studio, saying ‘number one, number one’. A few weeks later we heard it on the radio. Two weeks after that it really was number one.”

The McCoys then began an endless series of tours in the United States. “The band hadn’t changed at all,” says Rick. “No one had ever explained anything to us so we just carried on doing exactly what we’d been doing before, which was top 40 material. And we’d throw in ‘Hang On Sloopy’ as the last song.

“In those days having a number one record meant you were like The Beatles, so all the kids would scream and flip out and try to pull our clothes off. It didn’t matter what kind of music you played because no one could hear it anyway.”

The McCoys had two other big singles after ‘Hang On Sloopy’. ‘Fever’ got to number three and ‘Come On Let’s Go’ reached the twenty. They made a total of nine singles but most of them never made the upper reaches of the charts.

“When that first one was number one, it made us think that everything was going to be easy because it was. We just did what we were told, they yelled ‘number one’ and it was number one. The second record was number three and the third was number 40 and that scared us so we made a better one and that reached the twenties. Then the fifth was in the fifties and the sixth was in the sixties and we got worried.”

The group also made two albums, the first of which had a classic introduction during which the band introduced themselves into the music. The second was very similar and the introduction was taken from their stage act when it was the done thing for the guys in the band to introduce themselves on stage. 

After a couple of years, The McCoys realised that their albums didn’t actually contain the music they were playing on stage. They switched to Mercury Records where they made two more albums, this time containing the wide variety of music that they used in their act. They didn’t sell well but Derringer says they are soon to be re-released as a double package. 

“When we went to Mercury we were in high spirits because we were being allowed to do the music we wanted to do, but because we didn’t have anyone to guide us we became entrenched in the whole psychedelic period in what we thought was supposed to be hip. The records weren’t selling and we were naïve enough to believe that if we made what we thought was good music, people would go for it.”

It was Steve Paul who came to the McCoys’ rescue. Paul was managing the Winter Brothers, Johnny and Edgar, and he offered his help to The McCoys. “We met him through playing at his club in New York and we told him that anything he could do would be appreciated. What he did was to give us the chance to stop working in these weird places and go and live in the country and straighten ourselves out. Then we met Johnny and started playing behind him and that’s when The McCoys ended.”

Later, of course, Derringer would join Edgar Winter’s band and go on to play on, or produce, records by countless other artists, among them Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, Bonnie Tyler, Barbra Streisand and Cyndi Lauper.