The revolution is finally televised
The scene: Thousands of music lovers packed around a stage. Guitars, drums, keys, horns, harmonicas all playing together, and together getting heads to bob and bodies to sway. It’s the summer of ‘69, and this isn’t Woodstock.
It’s the Harlem Cultural Festival, which attracted more than 300,000 to Mt. Morris Park over six weekends that summer, was recorded by TV and film cameras, and had had to wait until now to surface.
Ahmir Khalib Thompson, known professionally as Questlove, has chosen a doozy of a project to try his hand at filmmaking. His film triumphs when it stays close to the music and the musicians, but falters when it tries to expand into yet another history lesson of the Black experience in America.
Conceived by impresario and nightclub singer Tony Lawrence, the festival aimed to provide a safety valve to a punch-drunk community that had been battered by the assassinations of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. “We were trying not to repeat what happened in ‘68,” said Rev. Al Sharpton, himself a fiery 15 year old orator in ‘69.
The expansive lineup included expected stars like B.B. King, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Fifth Dimension, Stevie Wonder, and Mahalia Jackson.
Thompson interweaves performance footage with current interviews, letting the performers react along with us. Sometimes we’re treated to amazing stories, like how The 5th Dimension discovered “Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” intercut with images of the band on stage, dressed as only they could in ‘69, with banana high-cuffed shirts accented with deep red scarves and fringed leather vests, and finished with brown, yellow, red square-patterned bell bottoms. Sock it to me! Even better, Thompson finds a concertgoer, just a kid at the time, who fell instantly in love with Marilyn McCoo (who couldn’t!). “I didn’t want to leave that concert,” he remembered, “I didn’t want to leave her!”
The film presents acts much like they might have appeared to someone who wandered in off the street, with a parade of bands interspersed with dignitaries like New York Mayor John Lindsay, and an impressively psychedelic Jesse Jackson.
The film’s high point features Gladys Knight and the Pips, who’d perfected a sound and a choreography that held the audience spellbound. We’re treated not only to the history of the band, and how their neighborhood was replete with musical talent, but also to how they had to practice hour after hour in a stuffy basement with an unsympathetic teacher to hone their show. The result is… impressive
Unfortunately, the energy and the spirit of the event are badly dissipated, and we feel lectured to when the film attempts to broaden into a Black history lesson. We’re subjected to the same images of Vietnam, MLK’s assassination, and social unrest that we’ve all absorbed time and again. This direction is all the more puzzling, since there seemingly would have been ample additional musical footage to show, and many more musical stories to tell.
Summer of Soul will inevitably be compared with Woodstock, the 3.5 hour 1970 Michael Wadleigh film that sourced so many canonical ‘60s musical and culture images. Where the counterculture ethos of peace, love, and openness lent that film its thematic spirit, the spirit of Summer of Soul is tempered by its need to connect with the larger and very tragic story of the Black experience in America.
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Summer of Soul opens today in theaters, and streams on Hulu.
