Released in 2021, Summer of Soul (…or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) – a documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival – received rave reviews for first-time director Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson, hitherto best-known as a drummer, DJ and writer. Now he has reunited with producer Joseph Patel and editor Joshua L Pearson for a deep dive into the life and music of one of the first movie’s star attractions: Sly Stone.
Formed in San Francisco in 1966, Sly and the Family Stone – led by songwriter/vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Sly and including two of his siblings, guitarist Freddie Stone and keyboard player Rose Stone – rapidly made a massive impact on national and international charts with their blend of R&B, rock and psychedelic soul. But although seminal albums such as Stand! and There’s A Riot Goin’ On would prove to be hugely influential on musicians including Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder and Prince, Sly’s career from the mid-1970s onwards was frequently over-shadowed by his drug and legal problems, resulting in a series of unrealised albums and short-lived comebacks.
Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) returns the focus firmly to his often astonishing output of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and the extraordinarily turbulent times in which it was made. As well as an abundance of brilliant live footage – much of which has been unseen for decades – there are insightful contributions from band members, collaborators and admirers, including D’Angelo, André 3000 from OutKast, and Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid.
Discussions about the film commenced shortly after the premiere of Summer of Soul. “The first question I asked Questlove was ‘why Sly and what do you think the story is?’ And he said that Sly was very influential on him – one of the pillars of his musical influence – and that he had a lot of vivid memories of Sly’s music from when he was a toddler,” explains Patel. “But then he also talked about this idea that a lot of his peers, himself included, struggled with success and the sort of survivor’s guilt that came with success, and that he thought this could be traced back to Sly as the first post-civil rights Black superstar in America and what he must have gone through to navigate the complexities of American culture; Black audiences and white audiences.”
So it rapidly became clear that Sly Lives! would “not just be the story of Sly, but would also resonate more broadly, [in the same sense that] Summer of Soul is ostensibly about a music festival in Harlem in 1969, but is also about a lot more: memory, history, what we choose to remember, and Black history being American history.” It’s also a film whose social-political themes have surely gained fresh resonance in an America that, under the second Trump regime, seems more wrought by division than at any time since the late 1960s.
Archive quest
Like Summer of Soul, Sly Lives! draws on a wealth of performance footage, much of it from contemporaneous TV shows. “One of the things that benefited us here is that Sly explodes onto the scene at a time when television is a huge instrument in bringing music and culture to the masses – particularly The Ed Sullivan Show and later programmes like The Midnight Special and The Dick Cavett Show,” says Patel. “Sly’s rise really dovetailed nicely with the explosion of TV in America, so we knew there would be some great stuff, [although] we also wanted to find some things that people maybe hadn’t seen or heard before. And a lot of that came from asking people we interviewed whether they knew of anybody who had footage or photos. There was a lot of on-the-ground reporting and investigating.”
The production also benefited from access by Sony Music to original tapes from the first four albums – as a result of which Questlove unearthed some striking outtakes, as well as working with DJ and producer J Period to produce three new edits of Sly classics at Brooklyn’s Electric Garden studios. The extended version of Family Affair is particularly striking: “Until now the only version that was out in the world was the single version that’s three minutes long, but now you have one that’s four-and-a-half minutes and contains all this vamping by Sly and Rose, and it’s really cool.”
Never loses the beat
The formidable musical background of the core production team is apparent in many ways, including in the dynamic editing of Pearson, who Patel describes as “our secret weapon; he’s an incredible talent, and an editor who really understands rhythm.” He points to a sequence in which Sly and the Family Stone are performing Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), which then cuts to producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis talking about hearing the song in a restaurant many years later and deciding to sample it for Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation – footage of which is then interspersed with cuts back to the original Sly performance.
“The whole scene is in time – it never loses the beat – and even when they’re in the restaurant and you hear the song in the speakers there, it’s completely in time,” says Patel. “That’s the kind of moment where you know this is a whole different level of filmmaking.”
In a decade characterised by career-spanning music docs, the two Questlove films have undoubtedly raised the bar. Fortunately, it appears there is much more to come from the core team behind them – Patel is soon to direct a documentary on hugely influential hip hop producer and rapper J Dilla, whilst Questlove’s next project will be a film about Earth Wind & Fire.
You might even say it’s ‘written in the stone’.
This article originally appeared in the April issue of TVBEurope, available to download here.
