"Cynthia on the Throne"
Greg Amici
11.17.16
The past year was a downer for pop music lovers in general, and an extended dose of Valium for us Baby Boomers in particular. A walk by the Blaupunkt car stereo rusting under the garage workbench, and on past the Altec speaker balancing dusty textbooks in a corner of the attic, evoked more than its usual level of nostalgia as Prince, Bowie, Glenn Frey, Paul Kantner, and Keith Emerson all left us behind. As I write this piece, we've just lost Leonard Cohen and Leon Russell within days. We have also heard the last of some extremely gifted musicians who, though often invaluable contributors to the sound/appearance/spirit of their bands, were often looked upon as sidemen, particularly if they weren't integral to the songwriting process. Nazz bassist Carson Van Osten, Mott the Hoople drummer Dale Griffin (Buffin), and Free bassist Andy Fraser (co-writer of "All Right Now,") departed, along with the Airplane's Signe Anderson, who passed on the same day as Brother Kantner, forty years after she withdrew from the scene to nurture babies and allowed the more Boudiccan Grace Slick to wail, flicker and glow beneath the Fillmore's liquid lights. Unlike most men and women of rock, Signe retired long before she died.
For those born after 1980, 50s, 60s and 70s pop/rock has been distilled into genre, only a bit more widely appreciated than we dug the Dorsey Brothers, perhaps because whereas The Great Generation was defined by its stoicism, and ours is slave to nostalgia, these kids today aren't even aware of what used to be, and don't seem to care much about their indifference. Within the pop/rock genre, the funk family has seen its ranks considerably shrink over the past few years. As we long for Prince, we also miss the boldfaced names of Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White and keyboard shaman Bernie Worrell. We miss the italicized names of Hot Chocolate founder Errol Brown, Brother's Johnson Brother Louis. We miss featured players like Bowie drummer Dennis Davis and Blackbyrd saxophonist Allan Barnes. We miss Gary Shider, the Parliament vocalist/guitarist, dressed as an infant, pacifier in mouth, duckwalking across the stage past his childhood friend Boogie Masson, the bass player who took flight from the Mothership, and the earth that sometimes anchored it, in 2013, three years before The Diaperman.
For me, foremost among the pantheon of beloved funk players who recently departed our sphere was Cynthia Robinson, the trailblazing trumpetress, best known for her seminal work as a founding member of Sly and the Family Stone, the first true funk/rock band in pop music history, and for me, with all due love to Parliament/Funkadelic, the greatest of all time.
Growing up around Jersey jocks in the 60s and early 70s, I was more awed by hell-raising athletes like Joe Namath, Denny McLain, and Derek Sanderson than by rock stars; at least until my 16th birthday, when my best friend decided I might not get punched in the stomach by the smokers in the boys' room if I could enter it talking about a band other than Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons or Elton John, who was rumored to be gay. The only time I even listened to music was when my Mother drove me to karate class (so I could hopefully put an end to the stomach punching) and we listened to WABC AM. It was there I first heard Cousin Brucie, Ron Lundy, and George Michael playing a "funky" song, called "Thankyoufalletinmebemicelf." I didn't take to it as I would years later, but I thought it was way better than "Billy, Don't Be a Hero," which, even to my bubblegum ears, sucked.
Thanks to Hugh Miller's order to the kids who came to celebrate my birthday, I quickly amassed a decent-sized record collection and became overwhelmed overnight by the glories of Album Oriented Rock. Obsessed with all the cool shit I'd missed while wasting my time watching mid-70s pathetic Met games, and thanks to the considerable discount Matt Pinfield's (music professor of my childhood, later to be an MTV D.J.) sister-in-law gave me when she was a cashier at Korvette's (the original Walmart, only shittier), I purchased (sort of) the triple-disc Woodstock album. Over the next few years, I wore out the entire vinyl, but no cut received more scratches than the "Sly and the Family Stone Medley." To this day, I have not heard a more exciting thirteen minutes of music of any kind. In fact, I'd suggest that if God exists, and likes music, that funk symphony must vie for His attention with, say, Beethoven's 9th.
Because this is not a general essay about Sly and the Family Stone, but rather, a personal essay on fandom and a meandering paean to the groundbreaking role Cynthia Robinson had in the evolution of women in popular music, I won't spend more time discussing the band and it's leader's brilliance, other than to say that, a few years later, in the early 80's, after we purchased our first videocassette player and planted it on top of our two hundred pound GE television, one of my premier rentals was Woodstock, the documentary. Seeing the group's controlled on-stage madness, with loose choreography more akin to Alvin Ailey's work than to garbage like the "Beat It" MTV video or other horrendous 1980s bullshit, provided me the visual that did something to me that visualizations of great songs first heard, then witnessed, rarely do – it took up even more space in my soul.
The Woodstock-era Ms. Robinson's pretty, angular face resembled that of the Nefertiti Bust. Long-legged, with a swimmer's body and no aspect of the horn player's tendency toward kyphosis, she jutted and juked in place next to brass partner Jerry Martini. Luminous in pants suits of green, orange or powder blue, she still appeared comparatively subdued beside her upstage fringed and feathered bandmates; Rosie Stone in white wig and tight mini, Larry Graham in Victorian suit and fedora, Freddie Stone in cherry overalls and puffy shirt, and Sly -- a whirling cloud of black curls, white beads, and lamb fur.
Her staccato counterpoint to each song's main themes, in lockstep with Martini's saxophone, along with her ecstatic vocal howls ("Get up and dance to the funky music!"), precursors to the exclamations of hip hop's hypemen, combined with her cheery attire, projected the image of sassy sidewoman, raucous and jovial. But there was also a moodier side, a restlessness in the manner that she attacked notes; she had the professional's polish, but also a good deal of the rebel's spit. In some of the band's publicity stills, her gaze beneath arched eyebrows, with her tongue not so much in cheek but pushing through it, was defiant. Her lithe androgyny contrasted with the girlish, curvaceousness of compact, 60s-a-go-go dancing Sister Rose. And when she grew her straight hair out into an enormous Afro, in her big soul sunglasses, next to her smiling bandmates with their oversized Godspell knit caps, she seemed Pantheresque. Angela Davis with a horn.
In July of 2015, forty-six years after the Woodstock gig, a friend who publishes a New Jersey fanzine asked if I wanted to interview some of the members of The Family Stone, the touring band that included three original members: Mr. Martini, Mr. Errico and Ms. Robinson. Taking advantage of my press status, I sat in the first row of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, directly in front of the brass section. In an amazing and poignant reminder of the swift current of my own life (yes, as a tail-end wistful Baby Boomer, not a stoic), and of life in general, I was struck by the physical transformation of Ms. Robinson. Her huge Afro had been compressed into a straight blonde wig, her unadorned powder blue pants suit resembled something one might find in Hillary Clinton's closet, and her cocksure smirk was now Grandma's smile of content. Albeit a hip grandma. She and her daughter Phunne, the group's female lead vocalist, alternately juked and embraced throughout the show, and the Newark audience went delirious each time she roared out a command to "get up and dance" or to "sing… a simple song." Her instrumental chops were as sturdy as ever, her unity with Martini just as deft – and, though she did cough on occasion, presumably because of the strain of playing such a demanding instrument at an advanced age -- no one in the audience could possibly imagine that she was dying of cancer. But she was, and her soul departed this earth only a few months later on November 23, 2015. And so I write this ersatz elegy two years to the day of her passing.
Because of her unique position as one of the key players in the first interracial intergender American pop band, I think her immense talent has been somewhat underplayed in summations of the group's legacy. Most often, she and Martini countered Sly's melodies with terse, staccato stomps, pushing against the flow of cresting and cascading notes on the mostly uptempo hits ("Thankyou…, chorus of "I Wanna Take You Higher"), creating an undercurrent of tension in the otherwise mellifluous mid-tempo pieces ("Hot Fun in the Summertime," "Stand") and waxing impish on Sly's carnivalesques ("You Can Make it If You Try," most literally, on "Life").
Last summer's release of Live at the Fillmore East, recordings from a series of 1968 concerts, has proven to be one of the great popular music rediscoveries of the new millennium. For a funk fan, it was akin to unearthing a series of previously unknown Coltrane gigs performed at the Village Gate that had been lying in a recently-deceased engineer's attic for fifty years. The concerts reveal Ms. Robinson's playing at its most deliberate and astringent, conjoined at the hip, as always, with Mr. Martini on staples like "Are You Ready?" and "Color Me True." As always, she can swing from the "sloppy tight" that Sly demands to the "raggedy clean" that he commands.* As ever, she is both precise and lyrical. She and Martini punctuate the comedy in the taunting "Chicken" by emitting onomatopoeic hen bahks on their horns to tease the recipient of Sly and Freddie's vocal baiting.
While on recordings, Sly rarely afforded his players opportunities to go off on tangents, on stage he would encourage them to showcase their considerable talents. As visually transfixed as I was by Ms. Robinson in the Woodstock movie -- the frantic bobbing and blowing under smooth skin and cool eyes make her seem almost cherubic –her brief blast of a solo is, in itself, a skeleton shaker. On Live, we receive an unexpected gem with six and a half minutes of Ms. Robinson riffing on an exotic, extraordinary arrangement of the centuries old folk/blues song. Her snarling horn slashes and stabs through the harmony like a scimitar, until she comically twists the melody into a motif from "The Hoochie Coochie Dance," before adding mute to achieve the plangent, naked coda, showing her wide range of tonal colors and adroit use of dynamics throughout the progression.
My own experience seeing and hearing Cynthia Robinson perform was that one brief but glorious evening with The Family Stone at the New Jersey Academy of Arts in the Summer of '15. She sounded great and looked happy. And that made me feel great and happy. Unaware of her condition as I sat before this regal lady, in my mind's eye I traveled backwards through a range of her life's landmarks that I was privy to: performances on the Ed Sullivan Show, Soul Train, a magnificent full length concert at the Harlem Music Festival, and of course, the early morning chaos she and the band created in upstate New York, back in the day when rock stars were rock gods, not endorsers of product and politicians. When early in the Newark show, Ms. Robinson exhorted us all to get up and dance, we all did, even on the creakiest of knees. And we never sat down… the squares went home… Cynthia on the throne.
* Sly Stone as quoted in the liner notes from the Sly and The Family Stone box set, "Higher!"