How’s this for a hot 45? In 1969, Sly and the Family Stone released the song “Stand!” as an A-side. On the B-side: “I Want to Take You Higher.” A and B are considered two of the greatest rock songs ever.
Most people have lost sight of the astonishing brilliance of the band and its driving force, the enigmatic, original, incredibly creative Sly Stone. His genius has been obscured by his slow-motion implosion, as Sly became known more for drug addiction and erratic behavior than for his musicianship. But the impact of Stone and his group is restored and examined in Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and produced by Joseph Patel, Oscar winners for Summer of Soul.
The new film, from Onyx Collective and streaming on Hulu, shows how Sly Stone innovated in multiple facets of music-making: in production, in style – fusing rock, soul, funk, psychedelia, gospel – and in forming a band that was integrated both in terms of race and gender.
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“[Sly] just happened to be at the helm creating the language and the alphabet for which even to this day, we are still using his tools and his tricks of the trade to express ourselves through music. But it’s also extremely, it’s very possible for all of that to get lost to history,” Questlove sad as he and Patel appeared on a panel for Deadline’s Contenders Television: Documentary, Unscripted & Variety event. “And that’s kind of what this is about … What Joseph and I want to know is why would you get to the mountaintop and then just walk away from it? So, that’s pretty much the 10 trillion-dollar question.”
The documentary opens with Sly being interviewed, decades ago, by a young Maria Shriver.
“In the beginning when she’s restating his accomplishments, you see him sort of white-knuckling the corner of the sofa,” Patel observed. “There’s a sweetness to him, but there’s also a caginess and coyness and really a sort of unease with his success. And we liked that bite to start the film because it shows a few things. It shows 1, his accomplishments; 2, how uneasy he is with them; and 3, sort of the audacity of her to [tell] him, ‘And then you blew it.’ And so to us, it really struck a chord for some of the themes that we wanted to get into in the film right at the very beginning.”
Sly Lives! explores the intense pressure Stone faced after the band rocketed to fame. Unlike white artists (David Bowie, for instance) who could shape-shift at will and dabble in politics if they liked, Sly was expected to resolve the contradictions between the objectives of the civil rights movement (integrationist in nature) and the emerging Black Power movement (to some extent, separatist in nature). He carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“On one side, you have to cross every ‘t’ and dot every ‘i’ and represent and speak for yourself and your entire generation and your people,” Questlove said. “And then on the other side of that pressure, it’s, ‘Okay, you’re representing us, so don’t mess up and don’t embarrass us. Don’t do anything that will make us look at you in shame.’ So, there’s pressure coming from both sides.”
Questlove continued, “Is the burden real enough to stop him from progressing or is all of this stuff self-inflicted? And that’s what we investigate not only with him, but practically this is for every artist, myself included.”
What does Sly – 82 now, and sober as of several years ago – think of the film?
“We heard that he loved it,” Patel said. “The part that I was told was his favorite was seeing his kids in it… His kids have every reason to hate him, every reason to disassociate from him, but they love him, they adore him.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.