KSOL DJ Sly Stone, pictured in a 1967 Billboard feature on the San Francisco radio market

Before he and his band conquered the universe, Sly Stone was one of the most popular DJs in the Bay Area. The alumnus of the Chris Borden School of Modern Radio Technique and former staff producer for Autumn Records worked as a disc jockey during the mid-‘60s, moving from San Francisco’s KSOL to Oakland’s KDIA (“Boss Soul Radio”). In 1966, when he was leading Sly and the Stoners, Stone’s day job was cueing up singles at 1450 AM, and he was still reading the weather report in 1967, when Epic released Sly & the Family Stone’s A Whole New Thing.

Happily for posterity, Stone’s listeners included Rolling Stone writers Greil Marcus and Ben Fong-Torres, who recorded their memories of The Sly Stone Show. Marcus’ Mystery Train sketches Stone’s radio personality:

Sly went to radio school and got a job on KSOL, the number two black station in the area. Fast on the air, he was a hit. A brilliant, kinetic DJ, he found the straight soul format a fraud on his taste, and salted it with Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

Stone’s approach was pretty free, according to the Family Stone’s saxophonist, who used to visit the station:

“Why don’t you sing the whole show tonight?” Jerry Martini remembers asking him one evening. “And he did just that. He sang all the commercials, everything.”

 

 
Ben Fong-Torres’ Rolling Stone profile of Sly & the Family Stone, reprinted in edited form in Not Fade Away, encapsulates Sly’s radio career:

Turn on the car radio, and you hear the big voice: “Hi; Sly.” And the little voice: “Hi-i, Sly…I wanna dedicate to my sister Velma, to all the queens of soul in room one-oh-four, and to you and yours.” “All right, sister,” punch, “Hi-i, Sly….” And all the time there’s a tape loop, boop-boop, Aretha chugging “Chain of Fools,” and Sly does three solid minutes of dedications, as musical, as tight, as produced as anything he’d air.

In his first radio job, at KSOL, he brought in a piano and sang “Happy Birthday” to listeners. “Just radio,” he’d say. “I played Dylan, Lord Buckley, the Beatles. Every night I tried something else. I really didn’t know what was going on. Everything was just on instinct. You know, if there was an Ex-Lax commercial, I’d play the sound of a toilet flushing. It would’ve been boring otherwise.”

People used to dig listening to Sly from 6 to 9 P.M. on KDIA, then switch to KYA for Tommy Saunders, then being called “the Terry Southern of radio” by Ralph J. Gleason in the Chronicle. Then they’d hang on for Russ “The Moose” Syracuse and his all-night flight. AM radio never sounded better.

“But Sly was always itching to move,” said Bill Doubleday, KDIA general manager and program director in Sly’s days there. “He didn’t want a full-time job; he wanted time for his band. Finally, around Christmas of ‘67 he went to Las Vegas, and that did it.”

Sly was itchy—but not because of hyperactivity with his band.

“In radio,” he says, “I found out about a lot of things I don’t like. Like, I think there shouldn’t be ‘black radio.’ Just radio. Everybody be a part of everything. I didn’t look at my job in terms of black.”

Still, Sly was getting such high ratings that station managers simply couldn’t hassle him about the revolutionary things he was doing. He started off at KSOL, then took off to tour with Sly & the Family Stone. Then a return to radio, to the bigger black station, KDIA in Oakland, when the band didn’t jell immediately. It was rough. Sly writes about it, relives it, on his first album. There was no positiveness, no affirmation then.

Below, you can hear nearly an hour of Stone broadcasting on KSOL in 1967. Remember, this is an MP3 of a tape of an AM radio broadcast, so it is not a high-fidelity experience, and only the beginnings and endings of the songs in Stone’s playlist have been preserved. The patter, news, call sign jingles and ads for Preparation H, Schlitz and True cigarettes, however, are intact. DJ Ronnie Dark takes over somewhere around the 50-minute mark.

I’m Just Like You: Sly’s Stone Flower 1969-70, a collection of singles from Stone’s short-lived label, is now available from Light in the Attic.