Well I came upon a child of God, He was walking along the road, And I asked him tell where are you going. This he told me: Said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, Going to join in a rock and roll band.
—“Woodstock,” as performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,
written by Joni Mitchell (1970)
Many of Rick’s early Motown songs were great dance tunes, and Rick had become an expert at writing dance music. He was so good at it that sometimes, in songs he wrote that had both original, relevant words and excellent dance music, the latter overrode the former.
One of the reasons Rick’s early dance music was so good was that much of it was created by his Stone City Band. Led by Levi Ruffin Jr., Rick’s longtime friend, the band included Clarence Sims, Al Szymanski, Oscar Alston, and Lanise Hughes. Its horn section, added later, included Danny LeMelle on saxophone plus LaMorris Payne and the brothers John and Cliff Ervin. Many others joined and left the band over the next decade. Most of its members were black, with the most visually obvious exception being the very white Tom McDermott, whom Rick referred to as “my light-skinned brother.”
Ruffin remembers the day Rick recruited him for the band. “Rick came by the house and said, ‘Hey, Levi, who’s doin’ it? Who’s the hottest shit happening right now?’ And at the time I was playing in Bootsy’s Rubber Band, and Rick sits there and says, ‘Levi, we can do better than that,’ and I said, ‘Are you kiddin’ me?’ And he says, ‘Man, we can do better than that. Are you in?’ And I said, ‘Hell yeah.’ And that started it right there.”
Rick said he named his band the Stone City Band in honor of Sly and the Family Stone. He told the Associated Press that he wanted his group, like Sly’s, “to be an integrated group” and hoped “it would catch on with both black and white people.” This ambition certainly fits in with Rick’s ability and desire to work creatively with white people in Canada.
Stone’s version of black music, which the book Rock of Ages called a combination of “ominous bass guitar lines, intricate implacable rhythms, and a polemicized edge” influenced Rick’s music and lyrics. And both Stone’s music and Rick’s were a much different form of soul music than what the book cites as the “chipper, choreographed, commercial form” that Motown had developed.
Rick kept having his fun by telling various interviewers that the Stone in Stone City Band referred to him and the band being serious, or to something serious, as in the phrase “stone blind.” But, LeMelle insists, “Sly was Rick’s muse. It was going to be Rick James and the Stone City Band like it was Sly and the Family Stone.”
Not only did Rick want to follow Sly’s musical path, he wanted to follow the success that Sly had had until his original group had disbanded in 1975. As Rick put it, “After the demise of Sly and the Family Stone, I thought I could have a group as big as his.” He was very aware that there hadn’t been any black superstars in rock since Jimi Hendrix and Stone. Rick admired both Motown and Sly for building a massive audience by attracting both white and black listeners. He noted in 1979, “Right now, there’s no black group that can go onstage and be like the Rolling Stones. This racism thing that comes down blows my mind. A lot of black and white crowds still have trouble mingling. In a lot of cases, whites won’t go into a black show.”
The Sydney Morning Herald said that Rick was a modern version of Sly, America’s first black rock star. It also noted that onstage, Rick acted flamboyant, cocky, surly, and bawdy, just like Sly had. But just as Rick saw Sly and the Family Stone as his career model, Rick’s many critics saw his chronic tardiness, dishonesty, drug addiction, and general irresponsibility as reminiscent of none other than Sly. Rick, however, still relatively unencumbered by his drug use, would eclipse Sly with his very first album.