Larry Graham

“We were different. We were a rainbow. The music was a combination of all types of music. You could hear R&B, jazz, rock, even country. Plus, it was a self-contained band. We played the instruments as well as singing all the parts. There was male and female, black and white - mixed up every kind of way you could think of.”

“Everything that has happened to me has happened when I didn't plan it.”

“The two biggest influences on me as a bandleader would be my mother, and then Sly.”

“At 15, my voice just dropped. I was singing men's ballads, Tony Bennett, Billy Eckstein.”

“My biggest influence was actually my mother's left hand. Because, before I went to bass, I was playing guitar. And when she would solo, I would play bass lines on my guitar. And when I would solo, she'd play bass lines on piano with her left hand. That's the way she played anyway, before I started playing with her.”

“The 'Riot' album was for the most part overdubbed.”

“Bass players usually play overhand, with their fingers. That's a carry-over from upright bass playing. My style is different because I came to the bass from the guitar.”

“It's one of the things I really admire about Sly - we were all allowed to use our creativity, to have freedom of expression in how we played.”

“It was a turning point in the careers of Sly & The Family Stone, Santana, Jimi Hendrix and so many other people. None of us had ever done anything even close to Woodstock. Then, all of a sudden, we had the attention of the world. If you were part of that, it just turned everything around.”

“I've never stopped writing and creating, because that's what I do.”

“After we first met, Prince told me Graham Central Station was one of his biggest influences - then he went back and listened to Sly & the Family Stone.”

“I would say that generally the others was us playing together with some overdubs. But 'Riot' was recorded a totally different way than we recorded, in that I didn't play anything, to my recollection, with the rest of the band.”

“My mother is a pianist and vocalist. When I was 15, I was playing guitar in her Dell Graham Trio.”

“For me, on a music level, I see the good that came from Woodstock. I also appreciate the fact it was a time when that many people could come together for an event and form a little city, and that there was a focus on peace and love.”

“If you were a musician playing our tunes, you had to play the bass like me for the song to sound right. Then, when these people started writing their own music, the bass players kept using that style. I never thought it would be anything new.”

“When we came into Woodstock, it was dark and you couldn't really see all the people that were there. We knew it was a lot of people, and - later on - we found out it was half a million. But, even when we were on stage, you could only see the first few thousand, so it wasn't really that big a difference from other big concerts we played.”

“There was one lady in a club we played regularly who was also a fan of Sly Stone on the radio at the time. She used to call him up on the phone and say, 'You gotta go hear this bass player.' Eventually, she was persistent to the point that he came down to hear me.”