Jukebox: Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir: Sly Stone with Ben Greenman ...
A musician's story unleashes memories and puts at least one rumor to rest
As I open Thank You, memories take flight, words releasing them from the page. There’s KDIA and KSOL, my choir teacher and father of a friend David Froehlich, Clyde McPhatter and Jessie Belvin and scores of other musicians I loved then and love now, both their hits and the B sides on repeat in my brain. There’s November 22, 1963, Sly on the side of the road, listening to his car Booty Green’s radio and crying.
There I am, under the covers, my pink and gold plastic clock radio next to me, under the pillow, the volume low so my mother doesn’t yell to turn it off, my longing to hear just one more song finally giving way to sleep. The loneliest night of my young life is the night JFK is murdered, as all the radio stations in the Bay Area shift to classical music. I am under the covers, my silent clock radio glowing.
Thank You is like this, its frequent staccato sentences evoking things much bigger than themselves, opening space for memories to escape and unfold themselves, as mine do, with each new page.
Until 11th grade, our monthly school dances featured recorded music, 45s that students brought. I took stacks of 45s that I still have, arranged alphabetically on a shelf I had built just for them. I’ve been carting them around since I was 9, when I was allowed to buy my first records, “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes and “Susie Darlin’” by Robin Luke. At 49 cents each, I could buy two records a month if I saved my 25 cents a week allowance and more if I pilfered change from my mother’s purse. I think I averaged about ten a month.
There was a box for requests. I filled it, requesting song after song after song after song, a de facto DJ and not for the last time.
Sly Stone was a rumor, a song heard on my record player, school speakers, blasting from a car radio. One day, that song was “Candy Apple Red Impala” by Little E and the Mello-Tone Three, and it came on the radio of my mother’s ’55 Chevy as we were driving through Vallejo, skirting the edge of a small ghetto not far from my grandmother’s house. I always begged my mother to drive this way, hoping the song would come on when the Impala was in the driveway.
One day it happened and I was thrilled as I stretched to see over the dashboard and then turned to keep that Chevy in my line of sight.
It would be decades before I owned that 45, decades before I learned that Little E was Emile O’Connor, who went on to release songs under his full name and to play with Sly.
Sly – him, his voice, his fingerprints – was everywhere, always, even when we didn’t know it.
One New Year’s Eve, I am at my local bar, waiting for my boyfriend. The phone rings, my name is called, I take the phone from the bartender.
“Listen!” my boyfriend says.
I stand there in the noisy bar, the headset pressed to my ear, “It was a great big, real big candy apple red Impala . . .” on the radio, this time KPFA.
I had not heard the song since those early days in Vallejo, and now a rumor is put to rest. The song is real, not my invention, not a figment of my imagination.
Another night, another call.
“Hey, Michele,” the bartender shouts, “who did “Endless Sleep?”
“Jody Reynolds,” I reply instantly, my reputation intact and my friend winning a round of Trivial Pursuits. (A couple of decades after this, a new friend warns, “Never play music trivia with her.”)
Another call, another answer: “Cry Baby” is by Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, I reply. This time, my knowledge earns me a nickname, Garnet, which I like.
Back to Sly. Is that really him singing? Yes, we all say, but without confirmation, which would not come for years.
That’s how it was in those decades before the Internet. If I wanted to hear a certain song and did not own a copy, I flipped between stations, over and over and over. Sometimes I called in requests and sometimes they were granted. Sometimes a song based only on a rumor would come on the radio. Ahh, relief, release, sweet palpable release: “I Shot Mr. Lee,” the follow-up to the Bobbettes’ “Mr. Lee,” “Elephant Walk” by Donald and the Delighters, not Henry Mancini,“Talk To Me” not by Little Willie John but Sonny and the Sunglows, a blasphemous choice with a single exception, slow dancing. “Yellow Moon” by the Viscaynes.
Searching mirrored the teenage lust we all felt, before we understood or had even heard of what most kids both know and do today. Delayed gratification is so delicious, the search itself such a sweet indulgence. I searched for “Candy Apple Red Impala” for 18 years, eventually finding a collector in Martinez with a copy. I paid him $75 for the record, which lives on my jukebox, a 1953 Seeburg Select-O-Matic.
Those 18 years made it all the sweeter once I heard the song again but now it is free on countless websites, most that credit the late Joe Bailon with creating the color for the cars he painted. Youtube and Spotify make almost everything available in an instant, no longing required, no motivation necessary, gratification, such as it is when all is available all the time, minimal.
It was the same with lyrics. We couldn’t just look them up on line. Most 45 sleeves did not include them, nor did album jackets early on. When I wanted to see lyrics, if I wanted to the see the words on a page, which I often did, I would listen to the song over and over and over, writing as I listened. Once I’d transcribed all the lyrics, even the hard-to-decipher phrases, my sense of accomplishment was profoundly satisfying. Sometimes I copied the words in colored ink onto parchment and hung them above my bed atop squares of midnight blue velvet. I liked looking at them.
At our last 7th grade dance of the year, a neighbor is the parent chaperone in charge of music and she indulges my requests all night: “Oh My Angel,” by Bertha Tillman, “The Dance Is Over,” by the Shirelles, “Yellow Moon” by the Viscaynes. I dance all night with him, the young Hawaiian boy who captured my heart years earlier, when I was nine.
“The Marvels’ ‘Blue Moon’ was a hit at the time,” Sly writes in Thank You, adding “I wrote one of my own, same moon, different color. I rhymed “love” with “above.”
Yellow moon, shining down from above, please let her know I need her love.
I have two copes of “Yellow Moon,” both versions. One record has a small chip in the edge which means it can’t go on the jukebox. I know of nothing more evocative.
I close my eyes and let him pull me close. By now, my pale blue dress with its three layers of ruffled sleeves trimmed in dark blue rickrack is drenched where our bodies meet. His shirt, too, is wet and clinging to his young form, so lean and brown and beautiful. His right thigh presses against mine and moves a bit, as if to gently coax my legs apart. I wonder now if he did it intentionally or if he was as innocent and unknowing as I was then, feeling his way by instinct, by the erotic yearnings that create us all.
With two older brothers and two older sisters, he is likely not as unknowing as I am.
He shifts his head a bit, moving it so that his cheek and mine touch, something easy to do because we are – were, I remind myself, were – the same height. He pushes on a little further, trying to slide the touch into a kiss, which would have been my first. I barely grasp how babies are conceived and have no way of understanding, no reference for the erotic heat that consumes me or the way my knees nearly buckle as he pulls me to him. Even as I resist, the look of him, his stunning beauty, eclipses nearly everything, seeping through both my peripheral vision and my watery eyes, damp from all that I am feeling.
In that moment, like a cygnet unsteady on spindly legs waddling to keep up with that graceful creature ahead of it, I imprint on his raven black hair, thick and wavy, resting against his copper skin. This vision, the line of his hair and how it rests against his skin, will haunt me for decades and lead me into no small amount of trouble, until I finally remember the genesis of my obsession.
Too soon, the moment passes: The song ends, the lights come up, and we stand blinking in the startling brightness, weak with longing. What would have happened if that song had gone on a minute longer? Would it all be different now? Would he have pushed past my terror and kissed me, dismissing all that came next into a dustbin of history that never happened? Could I have saved him?
Fast forward a few years. I am at the Senior Banquet with my new boyfriend, who is older. Once again, I am wearing a pale blue dress.
The music is live, the Five Souls. Rumor has it that Sly is one of the founders and we wonder if he might show up. I hear about this because the bass player, Joe Wagner, is married to my boyfriend’s oldest sister, Carolyn.
For the next several years, I hear about Sly frequently from Joe, about their time together in David Froehlich’s music classes, about the Five Souls, and, before too long, about Woodstock, which was not easy viewing for Joe, who by then was my brother-in-law, too. Did Sly really ask Joe to be the bass player for The Family Stone? Did Joe really turn him down? I search Thank You for his name but don’t find it. A mystery remains, a rumor persists.
When Joe goes to see Sly at the Playboy Club in San Francisco, Sly is too high to recognize his old friend. The disappointment in Joe’s face, disappointment tinged with humiliation, is heart-wrenching. We don’t talk about Sly so much anymore. Rumors circulate and many of us, bonded by our years in Vallejo, wonder not if but when we will hear the news of another casualty of drugs. That we didn’t, that we haven’t, is one of the joys of Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) A Memoir.
Thank you, Sly.
This essay first appeared in Greil Marcus’s Real Life Rock Top Ten, which was also my first appearance on this platform. Thank you, Greil! If you are not yet a subscriber to Greil’s substack, I recommend that you scurry over and subscribe. He is an extraordinary writer and takes my breath away with his brilliance on a regular basis.