Sylvester Stewart's Most Underrated Album

In June 1967, San Francisco's counterculture dreams were peaking when a local music scenemaker named Sylvester 'Sly' Stewart led a motley-looking interracial, mixed-gender crew, half of whom were from his own family, into a recording session for Epic Records.

Over a few scattered hours, the group that became known as Sly and the Family Stone cut their debut, 'A Whole New Thing', live in the four-track studio.

The album flopped. But their manager and label head pressed Sly to write hit singles—the ingredient they were sure was lacking on their first album.

So he did: 'Dance to the Music'. And ever since, 'A Whole New Thing' has been dissed or ignored.

In fact, 'A Whole New Thing' successfully refracted the wildly disparate elements of Sylvester Stewart's musical experience into a psychedelic blend of soul, rock, jazz, and funk that's seriously adventurous fun full of vibrant playfulness and open-eared inventions.

At least to this reviewer's ear, it's Sylvester Stewart's best and most underrated album.

Here's the incredible story of how that undersung album came to be.

Born in Texas, raised in the Bay Area, Sylvester Stewart was the second child of a religious family whose church encouraged music as a way to proclaim the Lord's glory. No big surprise, then, that like so many other soul stars Sly started singing in church.

When he was eight, he cut his first record, with three of his siblings—all of whom would later start bands and then be members of the Family Stone. All of them were talented. But Sly was a prodigy, mastering keyboards, guitar, drums, and bass by the time he turned eleven.

In high school, though, he kept mostly to the guitar as he joined local groups. A doo-wop outfit called the Viscaynes featured him and a Filipino pal in a then-unusual interracial lineup. They even cut a few singles for the local market, like "Yellow Moon."

Studying at Vallejo Junior College, Sly honed his skills, picked up the trumpet, and mastered composition and theory. The opening and closing of "Underdog" on 'A Whole New Thing' archly reflects that: recasting the "Frère Jacques" melody as a horn riff in a minor key, Sly tips his hat to Gustav Mahler, whose First Symphony did the same thing repurposing the kids' tune as…wait for it…a funeral march.

Around him, the San Francisco scene was already percolating to multicultural visions inherited from the largely white Beats and mostly black jazzers who'd made the City by the Bay their west coast capital. The eager young wannabe soon found a way in.

A local radio station called KSOL was rapidly growing its predominantly black audience by playing rhythm and blues. When Sly started as a DJ there in the early 1960s, he commuted each day from his parents' home in a mostly black, somewhat sketchy district called Ingleside all the way across town to Merchandise Mart on Market Street, where KSOL's offices and studios and 250-watt transmitter were.

Young Sly had the patter and the fire to succeed as one of the DJs who redubbed their station K-SOUL. He stirred popular white bands into the mix he thought would fit because of their obvious R&B influences, like the Animals, the Stones, and the early Beatles.

It's almost like he was on a mission to enact the musical equivalent of racial integration, mutual acceptance and interplay. And it apparently worked: He upped white audience numbers without losing black listeners—a tricky tightrope walk that icons like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke carefully finessed with their own music as they crossed over to mainstream stardom.

Later, Sly would aim to emulate their feat with his own music and succeed brilliantly… for a while.

Meanwhile, the local rock scene was probing exciting new shapes and sounds, the first waves of psychedelia. It was largely white kids, but that didn't bother Sly, who was voraciously absorbing everything he encountered. And opportunities kept finding him.

In retrospect, it looks like Sylvester Stewart was training himself in nearly every aspect of the music business. Besides DJing, he produced records, wrote songs, and backed up touring stars.

A tiny San Francisco label called Autumn Records, run by another local DJ and concert promoter named Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue (he'd coin the term "underground radio"), hired the young man with big ears as its principal producer.

Donahue, an ambitious giant of a man, first heard the teen at a Vallejo sock hop, then hired him to ramrod the house band at his big concerts, like the 1962 Chubby Checker "Twist Party" that landed at the humongous Cow Palace, usually the venue for (what else) livestock shows. That night it held 17,000 fans, making it the first big-time rock concert in Bay Area history.

Sly was quickly slotted in as Donahue's go-to guy on stage and in the studio. He was getting a musical education that filled his toolbox with versatile skills he'd soon use for himself.

But first there was some work and growing to do.

Bobby Freeman, a local singer, was one of the twenty acts on that Twist Party bill, partly because of his 1958 hit "Do You Want to Dance." He met Sly that night, when he ad-libbed a new dance he called The Swim for the first time.

Two years later, he hit national paydirt with the Sly-produced "C'mon and Swim," another in the period's seemingly endless dance crazes. It reached #5 on the pop charts despite the flood tide of the British Invasion. Donahue and Sly co-wrote it; that's Sly on organ and guitar, and probably brother Freddie on bass.

Since the music biz's earliest days, songs pushing new dances had been a reliable way for black artists to get to mainstream white audiences. No doubt young Mr. Stewart filed that knowledge to tap into for "Dance to the Music."