(L-R) Questlove, Sly Stone and CommonAP; Sundance; Mega By Dominic Patten As Sly and the Family Stoneâs 1971 tune says, itâs a family affair, Less than two weeks after his directorial debut Summer of Soul (âŠOr, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) was picked up in a multi-million dollar Sundance Film Festival deal, Ahmir âQuestloveâ Thompson is heading back behind the camera for a documentary on Sly Stone â with some long time collaborators on board. âIt goes beyond saying that Slyâs creative legacy is in my DNAâŠ.itâs a black musicianâs blueprintâŠ.to be given the honor to explore his history and legacy is beyond a dream for me,â the Roots drummer and musicologist said in a statement today on MRC Non-Fiction project. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Stone formed and fronted the genre and culturally defining Family Stone. This latest film on Stone is expected to focus not just on his successes, but also the consequences and cultural expectations of that rise in an era of expanding media, shifting societal norms in the Sixties, the Black Power movement and the backlash that followed. The one-time Bay Area DJ and his multi-racial and multi-gender crew spawned a plethora of iconic hits like 1969âs âStand!â And âI Want to Take You Higherâ and the previously mentioned and much covered âFamily Affair.â The psychedelic soul band was immortalized on film by a Woodstock performance that was merely one highlight of a distinctly contrarian career. The still living Stone has been a major influence on almost everyone else in contemporary hip hop, soul, funk and rockânâroll. From Thompson and now Tonight Show house band The Roots, to The Temptations, George Clinton and Funkadelic, Aerosmith, Prince, GunsânâRoses and many more, the reach of the Family Stone remains long and deep. An infrequent and often unreliable performer in recent decades, the eccentric Sly has pretty much stayed out of the public eye of late except for a prolonged court battle with his former managers over royalties. âSlyâs influence on popular music and culture as a whole is immeasurable, and what his career represents is a parable that transcends time and place,â MRC Non-Fiction chief said Amit Dey declared Friday. âQuestloveâs vision, sensitivity and reverence brings the urgency that Slyâs story and music deserve, and weâre excited to be working with him to bring Slyâs story to life.â This new focus on Stone is also a return to form for Questlove coming off Summer of Soul. A stunning performance...
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By DAVID BROWNE Looking back on a troubled period for the fabled roots rockers, the guitarist-songwriter explains why he needed to right old wrongs on a new 50th-anniversary reissue “There was severe drug experimenting going on, and I was herding cats,” Robbie Robertson says of the lead-up to the Band’s third LP, ‘Stage Fright.’Norman Seeff* Ahead of a new 50th-anniversary reissue of the Bandâs Stage Fright, Robbie Robertson would like to apologize. âI made a mistake,â he says from his L.A. office. âAnd now Iâm so thrilled that I could undo that mistake and make this record what I thought it was, and the experience I thought it was.â Recorded in their home base of Woodstock, New York, and released in 1970, Stage Fright was the Bandâs third album, home to future concert staples like the title song and âThe Shape Iâm In.â But the running order of those songs, Robertson says, never sat quite right with him. At that point, the Band were in a fragile state â the moment âwhen everything changed for us,â Levon Helm wrote in his memoir, This Wheelâs on Fire â and for the sake of unity, Robertson says he began pushing the others in the group to collaborate on songs with him. They did, to varying degrees, and when Stage Fright was finished, Robertson put together a track sequence for the album, which would open with a rollicking tribute to traveling tent performers, âThe W.S. Walcott Medicine Show,â and end with the slinky, late-night âThe Rumor.â âWhen I first sequenced this record and listened to it, I thought, âWhat a journey, what a fucking ride this is,ââ he recalls. âAnd I loved it. They were really doing justice to the songs I was writing.â But according to Robertson, the other members of the Band werenât as enthused and demanded that some of their collaborative efforts â like âStrawberry Wine,â his co-write with Helm, and the two Richard ManuelâRobertson songs, âSleepingâ and âJust Another Whistle Stopâ â be moved up in the track sequence. In fact, âStrawberry Wineâ became the opening song. âThe guys were like, âMan, you know, some of the songs you were really pushing us for our part, theyâre buried in the sequence,ââ he says. âSo I thought, âFuck it, Iâm going to push all of that way up front.â And it was a mistake. We werenât falling apart, but we were wrangling and we never had to wrangle before.â This Friday...
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Jimi Hendrixâs Woodstock anthem was both a protest of the violence of a wholly unnecessary war and an affirmation of aspects of the American experiment worth fighting for. Photograph by Larry C. Morris / NYT / Redux By Paul Grimstad The summer before seventh grade, I started wearing my dadâs Stetson hat and paisley bathrobe, which I believed approximated the bell-sleeved garment that Jimi Hendrix wore in the poster on my bedroom wallâa strange rendering in iridescent pastels, with Jimi looking like a dandified cowboy, playing a righty guitar lefty so that it was, fascinatingly, upside down. I wore the outfit for a class presentation that fall, brought in my own electric guitar and amp, and did the opening ten or twelve bars of âPurple Haze.â The amp was way too loud for the room, the window casings rattled, my classmates looked frightened. But I had put work into learning the song and was determined to share the entire solo. A vinyl copy of âAre You Experienced?,â found at the public library the year before, had led to hours spent hunched over a turntable, slowing down the r.p.m.s to make it easier to parse the solos on âHey Joe,â âThird Stone from the Sun,â and âThe Wind Cries Mary.â By going full Talmud on Hendrix, Iâd taught myself to play the guitar, and had become an indefatigable Hendrix proselytizer. Kids had spray-painted âClapton Is Godâ on the walls of the London Tube station, I explained to anyone who would listen, but the real God was Jimi. I knew that he had performed at Woodstock, that mythic experiment in living free from status-quo strictures held on a farm somewhere in New York (I tried to imagine the farms in the Wisconsin village where I lived holding such an event), and soon I was able to acquire a VHS cassette of Michael Wadleighâs epic documentary of the festival. After all the footage of scaffold assembly, the interviews with stoned pilgrims, the endless P.A. announcements (watch out for that brown acid), the rain and mud, and the often great music, there came, near the end, footage of Jimi playing âVoodoo Child (Slight Return),â a tune I knew well, which then segued into âThe Star-Spangled Banner.â There are lots of examples of song renditions whose power and uniqueness make them definitive versions: Miles Davis doing Thelonious Monkâs ââRound Midnightâ; John Lennonâs ecstatic run through Chuck Berryâs âRock and...
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BY PAUL ZOLLO Part 1. Arlo & Pete Seeger Arlo and Pete played their last show at Carnegie Hall. Pete was 94 and worried he wouldnât remember all the words or sing well enough.Arlo said, âPete! Look at our audienceâthey canât hear like they used to hear. It might not be a problem!âPete laughed and everything was okay.âAll songwriters are links in a chain,â said Pete of the historic and artistic connection between all songwriters. Pete connected us with Woody Guthrie and also his boy Arlo, and performed extensively with both. Arlo picked up Pete and Woodyâs musical torch, and has kept it lit all these years.This is our first part of an extensive interview with Arlo, conducted during this season of lockdown, 2020.He was born into a family of history and moment. His mother Marjorie Mazia, the daughter of a Yiddish poet, was a dancer with the Martha Graham troupe. His father was Woody Guthrie. He grew up on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island with brother Joady and sister Nora. Woody is now known to be one of the greatest songwriters America has known, writing beloved anthems of American splendor and inclusion, such as âThis Land Is Your Land.â He was a pioneer, both poetic and pointed, inject reality in his songs but always with flair, such as âDo Re Mi,â âI Ainât Got No Homeâ and âDeporteesâ that showed the dark side of the American dream. Woody had Huntingtonâs Disease, which stole most of his last decade from him. He was confined to a hospital in New Jersey where young folksingers, like Bob Dylan, would come to meet their idol. The first song Dylan wrote himself and recorded was âSong for Woody.âHey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a songâBout a funny olâ world thatâs a-cominâ alongSeems sick and itâs hungry, itâs tired and itâs tornIt looks like itâs a-dyinâ and itâs hardly been born Woody died in 1967, the same year Arloâs career got going. It was sparked by one remarkable song, a folk/rock American epic which established forever the singular brilliance of this man. âAliceâs Restaurant.â Itâs an expansive, hilarious, infectious folk-rock masterpiece showing the madness and folly of our ongoing war in Vietnam. It was the new generation walking in Woodyâs footsteps. That song got him his record deal, and the album Aliceâs Restaurant came out with that great title song taking up the entire first side...
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