Sly Stone & Little Sister “You’re The One” Medley
Recorded exclusively for video cameras at the Metromedia Square studios on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood during September of 1973, these songs aired as part of the third episode of a popular nationally syndicated rock concert TV program, the first episode to be produced entirely within the Metromedia production facility in Hollywood.
Despite high demand. this archival footage has yet to be formally reissued. This footage was given to me on a privately pressed DVD sourced directly through Sly and the band’s original drummer Greg Errico, and I’ve been sitting on it for ten years. Some of it has been previously uploaded, but I have not seen the whole sequence with Little Sister anywhere.
This rarely seen Sly Stone set features an opening number by the vocal backing group Little Sister including his youngest sister Vaetta Stewart. Sly was in the process of promoting “Fresh” his 7th consecutive gold album, featuring the single “If You Want Me To Stay” performed here at the end of this clip, live on national TV for the first time.
In the middle of an elongated version of “Stand”, Sly addresses the crowd to inspire the room of mostly placid audience members sitting under hot TV production lights:
“Seems like every time you get a whole bunch of lights on you, people have the tendency to want to sit down, and check you out, you see. They wanna sit down and check you out, so they can go home and say, ‘man… that wasn’t nothin’. Shoot. They ain’t did nothing.’ You in it too! This song is about all of us! You know what I mean? If you believe in anything at all, what do you believe in? What? Well then stand on up for it then, what’s wrong with you?”
To hear some rare and unreleased material from the early Sly Stone era check out this compilation from Light In The Attic that my friend Pat Thomas helped put together and officially license from Sly directly