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.
