One day in 2009, Alec Palao found himself inside a Target in Los Angeles, buying a sweatsuit off a sale rack. He brought it back to a motel near LAX airport and gave it to Sly Stone, who was living there at the time. “He took one look at it …
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One day in 2009, George Baer Wallace was at the New York City apartment of J.D. Martignon, the onetime owner of Midnight Records. The Chelsea storefront, known for its stellar bootlegs section, had closed several years earlier, but Martignon still sold records out of his apartment. Wallace began rifling through …
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The funky farewell number from a rare concert recording of Sly and the Family Stone, from 1967, shows how playful the group was in their early days. The medley, “I Gotta Go Now (Up on the Floor)/Funky Broadway,” opens with climbing organ and horn lines and a funky drumbeat as …
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Lotti Golden wasn’t about to miss her big chance. At the age of 17, while still a senior at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn, she’d landed a staff songwriting job with Saturday Music, a song publisher in midtown Manhattan. But Golden had bigger ambitions. So, when her boss, Bob Crewe, …
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