‘Fever dream’ will come true when Rudy Love Jr. joins The Family Stone at Riverfest
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In Rudy Love Junior’s life, there have been two constants.
Family and music.
One has never existed without the other, not even after the death last year of his father, iconic musician Rudy Love Sr.
For Rudy Love Jr., the musical legacy of his father and his family will come full circle Saturday night in downtown Wichita when he steps on stage with a band his father once played with, The Family Stone, during their performance at Wichita’s Riverfest.
The funk and rock act, more famously known as Sly and the Family Stone, will take the stage at Kennedy Plaza for a show that starts at 7:15. The show will also feature The Love Family Band, as well as pay tribute to both Rudy Love Sr., and another famous Wichita musician that died recently: Mike Finnigan.
Some of the earliest memories of music and family that Rudy Love Jr. can recall include watching his father and his aunts and uncles whipping a crowd into a dancing frenzy at Mama Loves, the former Old Town soul food restaurant ran by his grandmother Ahnawake Love.
Love recalls how he and his cousins would peer out through a second floor office window that looked down over the diner space during performances at night. Tables were pushed back to make room for dancing, and the Love Family Band would tear through a set of R&B classics and originals. The performances left a mark on him.
“We’d sit there in that window and just watch,” Love said. “Everybody dancing and having a good time. Dad playing. That was such a huge influence.”
As he got older, Love became more aware of his father’s incredible music career, most notably, how we performed, wrote and recorded music with Sly and the Family Stone in the mid-70’s, around the time of band’s dissolution in 1975 and during Sly Stone’s work as a solo artist afterward.
Love says his father was about 25 when he met Sly Stone.
“Sly puts him in his rolls Royce Royce, they’re driving and he says ‘I heard you sing?’ and dad said ‘yeah.’ So Sly started playing a new song and he said ‘Sing to that’ and so dad started singing to it and Sly said ‘brother, you’re with me now.’”
It was a tumultuous times in the band’s history as excessive drug use created rifts in the band or caused members to miss performances altogether. The elder Love, just a young musician at the time, was often tasked with having to manage affairs for the band, and at times even re-teach music parts to members that they had forgotten.
The time and music was a huge influence on father and son.
“Any chance he got, he would show me that music, but show me it in a different way than if I had just turned it on and listened to it,” Love said. “He’d talk about the relationship between how Freddie (Stone) was playing guitar with Greg (Errico) playing drums.
“I learned a lot from them. They’re probably my strongest influence outside of my family’s music.”
When Adam Hartke called and suggested a show where Love joined The Family Stone onstage for a show that would honor his father and Mike Finnigan and reunite the Love Family Band, Love said he was almost speechless.
“I didn’t really know what to say because I thought he was joking. Because for me, that’s like a fever dream,” Love said.
“My biggest dream as kid was that. Riverfest was the epitome of a stage in Wichita. I always though ‘man if could just bring the Family Stone, and dad would be here and we’d all play this big show together,’” Love said.
“The only thing about this dream that sucks now is dad won’t be there.”
Last weekend, Love joined his aunts and uncles, the Love Family Band, for a rehearsal. It was the first time they’d preformed together since the day of his father’s burial seven months ago. Emotions were high and tears came when Love sang parts once reserved for his dad.
But Love says one of the many lessons his family taught him was how to use his emotions and translate them into music.
“The one thing they taught me how to do was, when I get on that stage, whatever way I’m feeling — I can be feeling sick, I can be feeling tired — but you have to use that for something that’s bigger than you.”
“That’s the way I see this performance,” Love said. “It’s a tribute to dad. It’s a tribute to Mike Finnigan. So I will be emotional.
“But I’m gonna keep it together. There’s no other option.”