RSSThe Big Lookback: In Tiny Tim's Footsteps
The Big Lookback: New York Dolls: A report from Sly Stone's Madison Square Garden wedding, from "Newsday," June 7, 1974.
I'll begin contextualizing this Big Lookback by explaining a headline that few humans under age 50 are likely to understand. Born Herbert Khaury in upper Manhattan in 1932, Tiny Tim was a high-voiced novelty act who had a 1968 hit with a fey revival of the 1929 ditty "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," and more or less like Sly Stewart although the comparison is somewhat ludicrous, made a performance out of marrying Victoria Budinger, who he dubbed Miss Vicki, on a widely watched December 17, 1969 episode of the Johnny Carson show. The marriage lasted eight years, a lot longer than Sly Stone's union with model and actress Kathy Silva, which I reviewed in the Newsday report reprised here, and later Mr. Tim also married Miss Jan and then Miss Sue, the latter of whom was reportedly a Harvard graduate.
Sly Stone's marital history was considerably less strange yet also less stable—he had countless sexual partners but only one wife. He did, however, leap at the chance to make a showbiz production of his sole nuptial, which took place June 5, 1974. I covered the event for Newsday, attending with Ms. Carola Dibbell, who I would wed before an audience of dozens in her parents' parlor some six months later, and also, she recalls, my father, so presumably it wasn't so hard to hondle an extra press ticket.
Over the past week or so, inspired by first the Questlove-directed 2025 documentary Sly Lives! and then the Ben Greenman-coauthored 2023 Sly Stone autobio Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir, I've been singing or anyway typing Sly Stone's praises. A titan. But in Consumer Guide terms, which conform pretty well to the general critical assessment, 1974 was when I believed Sly's richly idiosyncratic music was diminishing. And it was also when the only marriage and wedding of my life was clearly in the cards—I'd been cohabiting with my wife-to-be for almost two years. So when I encountered Sly's recollection of these nuptials in his autobio, more than two decades after the fact, I was struck by how elaborate they were and also his estimates of 20,000 or 25,000 attendees in a Madison Square Garden this attendee reports was a less than full house. To his credit, Sly does report that the presiding clergyman he'd flown in from the Bay Area did at one point call Sly's future wife Kathy Cynthia: "A slip of the lip can sink a ship, but we went on." Your faithful reporter, however, took it as an omen, which given how long the two were together I'd say it was. He also goes on at some length about the mobbed Waldorf Astoria reception. How good the music was I no longer recall, but given the ancillary details I think I was within my critical rights to focus my review on the ceremony not the concert.
My parents were sent copies everything I published in Newsday. How often they commented on or for that matter read it I couldn't tell you. But I know my father read this one, because he folded it up and kept it in his wallet for many years.
To compare Tiny Tim and Sly Stone may seem like a deliberate absurdity of scale, but it does happen to be true that they are the only rock-era pop stars to choose to transform their weddings into entertainment events. And if opposites attract, they make a perfect couple.
It may have been foolish for Tiny Tim to marry Miss Vicky on Johnny Carson, but it is undeniable that Mr. Tim believed—and probably believes—in the holiness of both marriage and stardom with an intense naivete unparalleled in modern media. It is equally undeniable that if an unfathomable ironist like Sly Stone believes in anything, it is probably the modern media themselves.
In any case, nothing in Sly's previous behavior suggested that he revered either marriage or stardom. His union with Kathy Silva, whom he married Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden, produced a child eight months before it was sanctified. And his love-hate relationship with his fans, marked by legendary no-shows, latenesses and the inspired but oppressively pessimistic turnabout of his fifth album, There's a Riot Goin' On, goes back five years.
It's not just cynicism to suggest that he may not have scheduled the ceremony before a concert just to share it with all us made-it-all-possibles. Sly's drawing power has not been increasing. In fact, despite the wedding, his record-breaking 11th Madison Square Garden gig showed a lot of holes in the upper balcony and the seats behind the stage.
The opening act at the wedding was the Thin Man, Mr. Boogie Down, Eddie Kendricks, which was a mistake—more excitement would have been generated by an organist playing "Oh Promise Me." The brief intermission lasted 35 minutes. Then a bevy of comely maidens bearing palm fronds appeared. All participants except the maidens and the clergyman who performed the ceremony wore gold outfits, which the designer, Halston, had promised would out-glitter the glitter stars. They did. What Halston didn't understand is that the purpose of glitter is to look tacky. His designs looked tackier.
For a while, I hoped that the moral force of Sly's mother, an imperial woman who looked as if she would have preferred black or white to gold—natural power needs no accouterments—might combine with the irrepressible spirit of his cousin Cynthia and the rest of the band to make the event seem dignified, or spontaneous, or something. No such luck.
This is the only wedding I've ever witnessed where the bride appeared first and waited for the star to show. And although I was glad that Sly's home bishop, or rather, his mother's home bishop, officiated (rumors had given the job to a San Francisco disc jockey), it would have been nice if he hadn't called the bride Kathy Sylvia and Cynthia before getting her name right.
Sly has said that his marriage reflects a more positive state of mind, and on the evidence of the music he played Wednesday that may be true. Its textures were rich and contradictory as a good marriage. Its rhythms had a natural but no longer simple forward drive, which combined the good-time trucking of the music that brought him stardom with the more constricted pace of his more recent work. And in a rare burst of confidence, in us and in himself, he played not only "Family Affair" and "If You Want Me to Stay," the hits from his two most recent albums, but two songs from his forthcoming LP, Small Talk.
In the end, however, Sly relied on the old reliable, "Higher." I got up with the rest, but not without sense that I was being compelled to do so. However misguided his wedding ceremony, I wish Sly nothing but luck in his marriage. I hope he won't think me uppity, though, when I remind him that if a marriage or a music is to survive, incalculable work, flexibility and love are required from its creators—more than ever seems possible.