Partway through this new Questlove documentary about Sly Stone, his band, the Family Stone, and the joyous, urgent funk they made, I got a little sad. Not for Stone, per se, and not for fame’s warping effect on his personality and relationships or for the serious drug addiction that maybe helped him cope with being that recognizable. (If “psychedelia” was a look, he looked it: piles of hair often cherried by a hat; capes, tight leather and denim; shirts, vests and jackets that never ever seemed to close.) I got sad because I could predict the notes the movie would hit — collapses, breakups, recriminations, redemption.
I could make that prediction because of all the “Behind the Music” I’ve watched. This movie, “Sly Lives!,” tells Stone’s life as one of those “… and then it all fell apart” stories. Ahmir Thompson, the director better known as Questlove, proceeds with more care — with ardor even — than that series, which ran for about 17 years on VH1 and developed a formula that itself became an addictive experience. You don’t know “binge watch” until you’ve lost an entire day on that show’s roller coaster.
“Sly Lives!,” which is streaming on Hulu, traces the arc of a vital career, and down is where, for a time, it led. Stone is an artist partly responsible for making “too much, too fast,” in the rock ’n’ roll universe, feel inevitable now. And if George Clinton happens to surprise you with the news that he and Stone had been using crack and were arrested in 1981 for possession, withholding that discovery constitutes minor cultural malpractice. Yet how does a filmmaker devise an alternative to the old rise-before-demise template? Failing that, how does a filmmaker enliven the journalism of the format with insight, feeling, personality, an argument?
Questlove would like “Sly Lives!” to brush the dust from Stone’s pop pedestal, to celebrate his music as sui generis polymathic synthesis and as hip-hop’s bedrock, to imply that his ethos, zeal, caution and nerve persist in his scores of studio-wizard and rhythm-vision progeny: for starters, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Lenny Kravitz, Outkast, Erykah Badu, Meshell Ndegeocello, LCD Soundsystem, Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy. But the movie gets lost in the gulf between standard, if illuminating, biography and roiling existential crisis.
For “Sly Lives!” is a title with freight. “The Burden of Black Genius” is what follows in a parenthetical, but “Black” gets a strikethrough. The film opens with its director asking for a definition of “Black genius” from Clinton, D’Angelo, Chaka Khan, Q-Tip, Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis and the guitarist Vernon Reid. Thought bubbles ensue. André 3000’s endorsement of Black genius as a phenomenon he loves “when it happens” is as near an answer as anyone gets. And Stone, who’s 81 now, evidently couldn’t be cajoled into comment.
He was born Sylvester Stewart and reared in Vallejo, Calif. His musical life began in the church and was fortified by playing records on the radio station KSOL and producing songs for other Bay Area acts at Autumn Records. He stopped studying music in college and, in 1966, formed a band of his own with his siblings, Rose (keys) and Freddie (guitar), alongside Cynthia Robinson (trumpet), Jerry Martini (sax), Greg Errico (drums) and Larry Graham (bass). (They all provided vocals. But one of the film’s quieter achievements is the reminder that Stone was the pre-eminent funk singer — growls, yelps, wails; pulpit and pelvis.)
These people found one another at the civil rights movement’s apogee, and their septet — Black and white, men and women — was a union that advertised integration’s frictionless possibility. No band had ever sounded as much like rubber, as sprung, tight, aimed. They were signed to Epic Records. And by 1970, four albums and a pile of inescapable, inventive, deeply grooved songs — “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Everyday People,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” to name but three — had made them stars.
From here, Questlove’s instinct for delight assumes control. Rodgers, Jam, Lewis and Reid freak out as they deconstruct the magic of “Dance to the Music” while a corresponding collage enjoys a brief acid trip. Jam treats the hit “Stand!” as if he’s discovered the meaning of life; and in separate interviews, he and Lewis dramatically re-enact the chain of events that culminated in “Thank You” undergirding Janet Jackson’s anthem “Rhythm Nation.”
Every morsel of archival material weighs something: the clips from Ed Sullivan and Dick Cavett’s TV shows, the images and outtakes from the group’s recording sessions, the images that accompany the scholar Mark Anthony Neal’s on-camera invocation of late ’60s national turmoil, the band’s chemically enhanced set at Woodstock, Stone’s publicity-stunt wedding at Madison Square Garden in 1974, the news reports of his many drug arrests. An old TV interview that finds Stone ruminating on fame’s leeward side provides the meatiest of that material. But after an hour of this, you’re tired. Dexterous montage keeps being passed off as exploratory depth.
Yet four years ago, we were invited to behold a more purely arresting portrait of Sly and the Family Stone, from 1969, by this same director, a snapshot, really, in Questlove’s concert jamboree “Summer of Soul.” The sight of the seven of them working hard together, as hippies hatched from a macramé U.F.O., felt then, as André 3000 surmises here: “so future.” The impression you got from “Summer of Soul,” watching as they rock the multitudes of Black spectators gathered on the lawns of Harlem’s old Mount Morris Park, was that everything looked and sounded possible. Yet a 2021 vantage of those concerts conjured subdued tragedy: Even if you try, you still might not make it all the way. The movie trusted that we could sit with that. Its makers lucked into a trove of special material and they guided every minute toward some kind of wistful message-in-a-bottle transmission of perseverance. “Sly Lives!,” which Questlove made with Joseph Patel, isn’t that. But you can feel it struggling to transmit anything that wrings you up or winds you up.
IF YOU’RE EMBARKING on a musical journey, Questlove’s thoughts about wherever you’re headed feel necessary. Two years ago, I spent a couple of hours talking to him for a show I helped make about Stevie Wonder’s work, and there were times when I thought we should phone the fire department because his mind was just that avidly aflame but the tape was just too good to extinguish him. The general concern is that he’s up to too much: films, podcasts, appearances, deejaying, drumming, books. He feels ubiquitous — not overexposed but stretched thin. Just last month, NBC aired his “Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of S.N.L. Music,” which he made with Oz Rodriguez. There, his passion for music, audible curiosity about musicianship and visual sense of rhythm keeps bashing all 10 pins, a badger in bowler’s parlance. The opening montage, which already seems to have achieved immortality among the people who’ve experienced it online, builds what feels like every act that ever played a note on the show into six minutes of heaven. By comparison, “Sly Lives!” is a split.
Most of the Family Stone turn up in interviews, as do his children, almost as if on their father’s behalf. Although, I’d say the music still answers for itself. The film’s artist-experts observe that the joy goes missing from those 1970s albums — on “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” “Fresh,” “Small Talk.” Drugs certainly helped do in the music’s easy exuberance. But the complexity remains transfixing, even after Errico quits the band and Stone pours his sorcery into the drum machine, a development that the film’s expert-musicians agree sets his music down a wide Yellow Brick Road.
How enlightening it would have been to hear much more from the movie’s master producers on what they believe is happening within the band’s last albums. (Stone had essentially become a solo act by the end of the decade.) To my ear, disappointment and disillusionment has seeped into everything. By 1971, the elasticity and whimsy of the early music has disappeared. The songs don’t turn into anything anymore. “So future” seems so gone. They denote the present, snicker at and lament it. They are what they are, not what could be. Just what is. With “Skin I’m In,” from “Fresh,” you can hear something restless, scratching in that bass as it critter-crawls from time to time.
The band sounds remarkably different in the wake of 1968’s upheavals: bluesy — the funkiest bluesy might ever have been at that point. But also just blue. “Keep on Dancin’” is practically a ballad of “Dance to the Music,” a eulogy for its euphoria. Then there’s “Que Sera, Sera” which stop-step marches as if it’s preceding a casket. We’re stranded among the shards of civil rights but amid the edifices of the Black Arts Movement. On “If It Were Left Up to Me,” the band pleads to the nation and to Sly, too: Will you tryyyyyyyy? And Stone sounds at pains to get up there with the girls on that “try.” If you believed in the promise of that late ’60s music, the downbeat tension on “Fresh,” especially, can be emotionally unbearable. You can practically hear the band all but pulling Sly off the floor. The album’s a masterpiece of circulatory funk that works your body but whose indignant resignation and few hopeful embers also break your heart. A vision’s fading. Gravity is defying them.
THE RISKS AND REWARDS of music business success are weighing on “Sly Lives!” Questlove asserts that the risks are actually more vertiginous for a Black performer. “As a Black artist, how hard is it to be vulnerable in front of a world watching you?” he asks. No one’s shown offering much of an answer, although God bless D’Angelo for chewing on it.
The line of questioning in that old TV interview the movie relies on is probing enough to elicit some self-searching from Stone. It also exposes the airiness in Questlove’s mode of inquiry. He’s searching, too, though. I’m just not sure that he knows what he’s found. He’s gathered his friends, former collaborators and peers to consider the meaning of and the burden on one of his heroes. And I wonder if he can feel what I felt once the movie’s over, that this burden is also on him.
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