R E F E R E N C E S
NOTE: It is recommended that readers, once opening this file, leave it open to follow the author's footnotes
1. Boulware and Tudor: Gimme Something Better, 2009: pg. 61
2. Bangs, The Village Voice, 1977;
3. It’s become a commonplace in historical accounts of contemporary pop and underground music-centric cultures that punk and hip hop are analogous responses to the same socio-economic forces during the late 1970s post-Vietman, post-Oil crisis era. Many African Americans were at least as fed up with “disco and jazz rock,” which had essentially become a kind of minstrelsy. Within the black community, the coming together that the development of “soul” had signified (with its combination of gospel catharsis with the secular blues or R&B ‘impulse’ into a “unity music”) had fragmented by the late 70s in ways that paralleled “light rock” vs. “heavy rock” on the whiter stations. It got to the point where so-called “R&B” no longer had much rhythm nor much blues--no wonder many rappers in the 80s called this newer “R&B” form “romance and bullshit.” Hip hop eschewed artificial whiteners as much as possible, not out of defiance so much as to keep it real; given the history of co-optation (as both Baraka and Gil Scott Heron point out), this meant, once again, redefining what “Black Music” meant. If rock and roll helped effect integration in the mid-20th century, punk and hip hop could only reflect the heightened re-segregation that had occurred since 1964. Both economically and socially, punk and hip hop were born out of repression.
4. Maybe my muckraking could even help explain why I dreamt of Ike & Tina Tuner performing the night after I joined SJ on stage in 2008 at the Fillmore.
5. Kaliss, I Want To Take You Higher (2009): pg. 77
6. (Sly was born in 1943, 3 weeks after George Harrison; Kaliss’s book shows how Sly et al, were born mostly during World War II (“war babies”), and moved to the bay area as children during the most integrated generation of the northern city (which was already much more segregated for those born when the band was forming 20 years later).
7. Some R&B songs could even be bigger pop hits than R&B, or “race” hits; in this sense, R&B Radio came close to embodying the strategic separatism Malcolm X advocated in a world in which “integration without self-determination is the ultimately no better than segregation”
8. Houses were being torn down as early as 1948; 75% of the people displaced nationwise was due to the urban renewal projects of the 20th century (PBS).
9. “You can now go to the same school as me, but we’re moving to the suburbs (not because of you, of course).” Whereas, earlier in the century, white supremicists would show up at city planning meetings and express proudly their segregationalist views, now there were various white government bureaucrats with smiling faces acting like they were your friend: we’re not just tearing down the house your family has lived in for 90 years, we are going to give you a certificate for first dibs on a better, newer, cleaner, safer, quieter, one. It will even look like the suburbs so many of us have moved to.”
10. Notice how the Japanese and blacks are played off each other, analogous to the ways Palestinians and Israelis are in the middle east (the only reason blacks were allowed to ‘take over’ the neighborhood in the first place is coz they were needed as cheap labor for the war effort, and soon soldiers in the first integrated army; houses were cheap because the Japanese had been forced to relocate, with the war over and the Marshall Plan in effect, city planners could go back to the same racist policies put into place before FDR’s policies and WW2 helped slowly to create an urban black middle class....
11. Actually, Sly changed it up more than most DJS. See Kaliss, especially 28-32 for a good summary of the range of things that made such a uniquely expressive star on KSOL (and KDIA).
12. E.g: The SF Giants, 49ers and Raiders were recent imports and expansion teams; neither SF nor LA had major league sports until the time of Sugar Pie DeSantos and “Do You Wanna Dance?”--yet the California craze had begun, as Real Estate Developers used the Beach Boys to start luring people just like Merle’s “California Cottonfields.”
13. Paleo, Precious Stone: 6
14. Many of whose luminaries were carpet-baggers from the east and had left by 1964
15. Just in time for the summer fashion season; a paradigmatic model for “indie” culture
16. Sly admits that his heart wasn’t really in the dance craze(s)
17. Certainly there were less lawyers parasiting off musicians in the names of protecting intellectual property rights, getting in the way of a young black man’s artistic freedom by prohibiting the kind of melodic imitation that allows for more stylistic expressive freedom and originality; there was stealing to be sure, “Ain’t No New Thing,” as Gil Scott Heron put it; but Sly was “stealing” right back, with a smile.
18. The term “mod” may describe new crop of black musicians, who found themselves caught in between the black and white music scenes of this time (most notably Arthur Lee, Jimi Hendrix and Sly, Billy Preston, Womack, Eddie Grant, Rick James). Through them, R&B managed to not only survive the British Invasion and the killing of Sam Cooke, but became more popular in 1965 with James Brown and Motown attracting working class black and white youth to the Cow Palace.
19. Amiri Baraka, Black Music (in 1966, it would still perhaps be more citified than suburbanized---he doesn’t really theorize white flight so blatantly in this piece)
20. In the film Cadillac Records, when big-time “Break DJ” says “I’ll make you famous,” he looks at Chuck Berry, “and you rich,” looking at Leonard Chess
21. Baraka, The Changing Same, Black Music: 206/07 (1966)
22. Valentino snarl-sings it like “dawg”
23. If the word “mod” was in the dictionary, and had a picture beside it. 1964/5 Sly would be as good as any--but it would have to be a moving picture, singing, playing, and talking and jumping around. According to singer Catherine Kerr, “He was strange! But he was always very sweet to us, always very protective.”
24. i.e. “Down In The Boondocks”--After going underground after songs like “Summetime Blues” had been banned in the name of “payola,” by 1965, The Beau Brummelstones were on The Flintstones and, in the ratings wars, they were blowing away the Jetsons a “stone’s throw” away in the Haight.
25. Jones, Blues People, 40
26. Justin Farrar, “O Pioneers,” SF Weekly, March 1, 2006 (The Charlatans, The Warlocks, and Great Society)
27. In its own right, “Are You Sure?” could have been the A-side; as it builds on the slower, lusher, sadder direction of the third and fourth Elliot-penned BB singles (which were not as popular as their more up-tempo first two national smashes).
28. Paleo, Voices, 15. Was it whispering that caused some to think he’s singing “special friend,” or the fact that Sal was white--though rich white women, like what Baraka calls “the liberal sensual dilletante,” can treat poor white men like specimens too.
29. In the late 1965-Autumn sessions with Preston, you can hear Sly, apologetically (and perhaps passive aggressively), saying “another demo, another demo,” as if Donahue, far from being supportive, was treating Sly’s final sessions with the Brummels and Preston like a dad (on a log in a fog) catching his kid in the cookie jar; a cookie jar Sly had built and was now being farmed out to Grace Slick; not that property is theft or anything.
30. 16, 17, and 18 year olds in 1965 were now born after World War II and increasingly less part of the “integrated generation.”
31. Today, that would be deemed prayola; a no no even on non-professional college stations like KALX (if not KUSF, R.I.P).
32. Sly, at the height of his celebrity, to his credit, could put it behind him, and graciously reached out to Donahue, who was dying at the time, in letting him work on Fresh (Kaliss). here’s a link to the only example of Sly’s DJing I’ve been able to find: http://airchexx.com/2005/01/11/archives-sly-stone-on-ksol-san-francisco-1967-828-scoped/
33. Bill Graham was trying to outsource “the San Francisco sound” (to India, as the RDA was outsourcing the Fillmore to The Japanese)
34. The “free format” DJs that sprang up on these stations were pathfinders, idealists, artists and visionaries, but were used by the conglomerates to break up the organized network of independent labels and stations to re-centralize the entertainment industry that had gotten away from it; see Radio Survivor.
35. Sly, quoted in Palao, Voices: 13
36. No parent/child like the Carter Family or Staple Singers; nor fictional “family values” of the Everlys, The Beach Boys, Cowsills & Partridge Family, more like the Isleys...with a sister (or two).
37. The Ray & Dave collaboration was glorious for decades; and their notorious “Battle Of The Books” in the 90s is still useful for musicians trying to form a band. I’m not saying SFS was influenced by them; only that there are analogies
38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Sound
39. Blues People, 44 (see also: “To my mind, the solo, in the sense it came to be represented on these Western shores, and as first exemplified by Louis Armstrong, is very plain indication of the changed sensibility the West enforced. The return to collective improvisations, which finally, the West-oriented, the whitened, says, is chaos, is the all-force put together, and is what is wanted. Rather than accompaniment and a solo voice, the miniature “thing” securing it “greatness.” Which is where the West is.” (197)
40. It ain’t just Beatles growing mustaches, or Dylan crashing his motorbike, to get out of touring...
41. Baraka, 208--though written in 1966, a year before “Underdog,” in reference more to Coltrane, Ayler, Baraka’s essay uncannily prophectizes the spirit of the “unity music” of Sly & The Family Stone: “The Black Music which is jazz and blues, religious and secular. Which is New Thing and Rhythm and Blues. The consciousness of social re-evaluation and rise, a social spiritualism.”
42. The Rutles featuring Eric Idle & Neil Innes, recorded a parody called “Love Life,” which uses The Battle Hymn Of The Republic in lieu of the French National Anthem.
43. The Impressions, The Young Mod’s Forgotten Story (1968), “your black and white power is gonna be a crumblin’ tower.”
44. When he sings “my own beliefs are in my songs,” he doesn’t just mean the words.
45. Kaliss
46. Voices, 9; Baraka 202. which may explain why it couldn’t be his first hit
47. This may make sense of the version of “Somebody’s Watching You” on 1969’s Stand.
48. “I Can’t Make It,” in particular, is like 3 “normal” r&b songs in one. It’s beautiful, and weird, and tight
49. Greil Marcus, Like A Rolling Stone, 45
50. This is the deepest meaning of Limbaugh and Fox’s phrase “The Liberal Media”--i.e. a music radio playlist that was actually determined to some extent from the ground up by music listeners (see other chapter); there’s still a deep (if repressed) longing for this buried in contemporary pop culture, as in Contemporary Country star Tim McGraw’s “I Miss Back When” (“I want more for my money”).
51. Betty Davis, Gil Scott Heron, Santana, Chicago Transit Authority, KC& The Sunshine Band, Earth Wind and Fire, etc. even Genesis’s “Misunderstanding” steals, to lesser effect, the main riff of “Hot Fun In The Summer Time.”
52. That hardly anybody I speak to remembers how important Sly Stone was to San Francisco music seems even more tragic, though more to the city than to Sly. White and black, let them wear their Bob Marley T-shirts; or show some local pride in what your city could have been, while Sly is living out of his car waiting for his royalty check. Not a statue, nor a revival: Not A Bill Graham Arena or Beat Museum; but maybe a Sly Stone studio or radio station or dance craze that’s also a retirement home. wish I was in a position to offer him a paying gig like he had on KSOL-AM, even if it had to be RADIO XM. He could do it from his home. Who knows if he’d want to, but has anyone asked? Without even having to go out of his way, he could really help revitalize radio! There I go, putting pressure on him just like all the others!
53. You’ll pay ten bucks to see me on a fifteen foot high stage/ fatass bouncers kick the shit out of kids who try to dance. ---Dead Kennedys,“Pull My Strings,” an anti Bill Graham song; “it doesn’t make you BIG coz white people like you.”
54. (given the way Graham treated Sly in his hometown, it’s quite possible Graham’s problem with Woodstock was precisely that The Family Stone stole the show!) He soon returned and tried in vain to rekindle his former glories because he was upset that no one on the otherwise paradisal Greek island knew who he was. Graham, never known for his “ear,” later died in a plane crash on the way home from a Huey Lewis and The News show not long after Nirvana ushered in what Thurston Moore, with tongue-in-cheek, called “the year punk broke,” a rich, but bitter man. Today, Si Perloff of Outside Lands ensures that Graham’s legacy of killing local music by speaking for it is alive and well.
55. or Florida, Texas & California, the three states with the most rapid growth; code for “White Flight”
56. Inflation is a tricky way of lowering people’s wages while making them think they’re getting a raise You only had to look at the nearest gas station to see the cracks in the facade of the 70s expansive music economy: the Vietnam War debt coming home to roost in the form of inflation and increased segregation.
57. When the local DJ was rendered obsolete, so was the central relevance of charts.
58. In the lyrics of 1970s radio, arena, album-oriented corporate rock, labor became increasingly unglamorous. Although babt boomer rock historians usually claim this was a reaction to the overweening obsession with “relevance” the late 1960s free-format DJS had, far less of the LP album-oriented concept album artists from the late 1960s were ever as blatant about labor as were singles from the 50s and 60s; this blue-collar backdrop to seemingly benign throw-away 2 minute songs that embrace poverty and not just “as other” like the hippies often did.
59. The question of whether “rock is dead” misses the point; it’s the medium and the particular modes and means of cultural production that enabled rock (and other music) that are dead. Music itself has become central to American social-life as the rich get richer
60. Mike Douglass Show July 17, 1974