One could argue, persuasively, that Sly & the Family Stone and Led Zeppelin —±are the two greatest rock bands of all time. (Prince might have, for example.) Both are the subject of strong new documentaries; each film deals with the respective legend of its subject quite differently, in part because each has a very different sort of legend.
Becoming Led Zeppelin, directed by Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty, is a “hybrid docu-concert” (their own marketing term) featuring rare performance footage from the band’s first 15 months of existence that hit IMAX and other U.S. theaters earlier this month. The extra-sized screens are appropriate—they just about contain the band’s still-humongous legend, and seeing and hearing entire performances, one after another, of Led Zeppelin in its early pomp is as purely overwhelming as cinematic experiences get. At publication time, no streaming plans have been announced.
Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden of Black Genius) premiered at Sundance last year, but it is a streaming event, out now on Hulu. Sly Lives! is the second Questlove-directed music documentary in the past two months—the Tonight Show bandleader and Roots drummer, along with Oz Rodriguez, also oversaw 50 Years of SNL Music,. With all due respect to MacMahon and McGourty, it’s hard not to see an old truism at work, one discussed at length in Sly Lives!: Blacks in the workplace, particularly in creative fields, having to be twice as good just to compete. Or, maybe, make twice as many films.
Sly Stone reconfigured popular music in ways that have proven more lasting than Led Zeppelin. Yet all too often in assessments of pop-music history, Sly & the Family Stone have been slotted as “R&B” rather than “rock” when both apply equally. The Family Stone was the era’s biggest crossover band; as we see in pretty much every film clip and press clipping gathered in Sly Lives!, particularly after the band electrified the record-setting crowd at Woodstock, Sly was invariably referred to as a rock star. And in the footage, there’s no questioning it—his costumery makes David Bowie and Freddie Mercury look like they dressed for the bodega.
That amazing flair for image-making was more than matched by the music. The hard beats, righteous chants and insistent hooks Sly made his hits from were a key model for the self-contained funk bands that dominated Black music for a decade, from Kool & the Gang to George Clinton’s P-Funk empire. Less commented upon, the Family Stone’s expansiveness, stylistic fluency, dramatic flair, and energy level made a deep imprint on early-’70s rockers like Joe Cocker in his Mad Dogs and Englishmen phase, Van Morrison (who incorporated “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again” into his live shows, as documented on 1997’s A Night in San Francisco) and the pre-Born to Run Bruce Springsteen.
If you’re already familiar with the parameters of Sly Stone’s story, Questlove’s film won’t be terribly surprising—if anything, it leans into the long-running narrative of a genius who reached the top, turned to drugs as a full-time distraction from all kinds of issues (personal, musical, societal), and effectively abandoned the stage.
What differs about this account—and it’s not a small difference—is that, unlike so much that has been written about Sly in the ’70s (some of which the film takes directly to task), it is told not only by a Black director, it’s told by a musician who has seen the story Stone exemplifies—an Icarus figure who’s become known at least as much for the long fall than the incandescent work that preceded it.
Often, talking head-heavy profiles like Sly Lives! are simply larded down by them—there’s Bono again, pontificatin’ about some legend or other—but the ones in Sly Lives! carry weight well beyond that. Hence D’Angelo—someone who has struggled through similar issues of an overwhelming spotlight, creative paralysis, and the expectation not only to do your best work, but to somehow represent all Black people along with it—addressing these topics so intimately simply means more. And it means even more than that if you know the director was D’Angelo’s aide de camp during the making of 2000’s Voodoo, the album that put the singer in a rarified, terrifying—and, for someone who’d paid close attention to Stone’s career, familiar—place. (For more on that, see Questlove’s interview with The Believer, by Touré, from 2003, which also helps place the moment in the film when D’Angelo punctuates an answer to Questlove’s question by calling him “Yoda.”)
Sly Lives! shades in a lot of detail that often goes lost or is simply forgotten. There’s great footage from the early Family Stone performances—on a low-ceilinged stage, surrounded by wood paneling, the band rocking out like they knew they’d be out of this joint in no time. We hear about a post-Woodstock show in Chicago where a riot broke out from Chaka Khan, who attended it. There’s a Riot Goin’ On, released in November 1971, was a Family Stone album only in name—the crew that made it was basically Sly along with an absolute murderer’s row of peers: Bobby Womack, Ike Turner, Billy Preston. Family Stone members were flown in for overdubs and then left. The founding members began leaving one by one. Remaining members and newcomers alike became automatons on the road, playing the same songs without variation for years on end, Sly doing everything himself in the studio. The morale plummeted, and Sly Lives! shows this slow disintegration step by step, rendering it in human terms that are also remarkably clear-eyed.
The long-fall section—the film’s final third—may have a familiar shape, but there’s a lot here that even a longtime Sly fan might not know, or have forgotten: that he opened the 1977 P-Funk tour featuring a hydraulic Mothership. In the film, Clinton refers to his and Sly’s friendship as “ninety percent of the times, chasing the drugs. By then . . . we were crackheads.” (They were arrested together in the early ‘80s; charges were later dropped.) There are harrowing stories from Sly’s kids of growing up with a notorious addict for a father—in particular, his young daughter Phunne once grabbed some chalk and one of the razorblades her father had sitting around the house, and began snorting lines of “cocaine” with her friends through rolled-up Monopoly dollars.
Happily, we learn from Sly’s kids that he has been clean for a while. But the film’s ending is curious—an explanation, from several tellers, that Sly’s tale isn’t merely cautionary. It isn’t, of course—but it’s also no surprise that the dark, biting Riot and its follow-up Fresh (1973) have become Sly’s canonical works, more than the hopefully bright ‘60s hits that made his name. That early optimism, while still thrilling to encounter, in the film and elsewhere, is also simply harder to imagine a way into now. The downfall resonates as much as the heights.
That’s also true of Led Zeppelin. Stephen Davis’s bestselling Hammer of the Gods, published in 1985, made their mad-dog road-warrior mythos notorious, and they’ve been living it down ever since. But that book, along with the persistence of classic-rock radio (including its satellite permutations), has helped keep Led Zeppelin an ongoing industry in the 45 years since drummer John Bonham died and the band called it quits.
What is maybe most valuable about Becoming Led Zeppelin is that it spends so much time laying the band’s groundwork. Archival footage of the band’s heroes and predecessors— British skiffle pioneer Lonnie Donegan, American bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson II—grounds what the band will eventually do—loud and clear, especially through IMAX speakers.
The film offers lengthy-to-full airings of recordings that the teenaged Page and Jones, as busy, proficient, and markedly younger-than-usual session players, prominently appear on—big middle-of-the-road hits like Lulu’s “To Sir with Love” and Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger.” We marvel at Page’s guitar and Jones’s bass on these records —in this light, they point straight at Led Zeppelin. But they also exemplify a single-oriented approach that Led Zeppelin would reject outright—upon signing to Atlantic in the U.S., Page explains, he forbade any 45s from being released. This was an album band.
Becoming Led Zeppelin’s directors also tracked down rare footage of the young band members. (Drummer John Bonham’s voice appears through an audio interview.) Though some was provided by the band, more of it was found by the filmmakers. As co-director Bernard MacMahon told Stevie Chick of The Independent, Zeppelin’s first year-and-a-quarter of operation was “the least-known part of the Led Zeppelin story, one shrouded in mystery.” Ditto their pre-history; we see the teenaged John Paul Jones leading a church choir on organ, though he professes to have been a nonbeliever.
All this material allows us to see and hear the band take shape in front of us, one performance at a time. Nearly all the songs are shown in their entirety, and each seems to build on the one previously seen, to take things a step further. Here, the guitar pyrotechnics are more savage; there, the rhythms are chugging unimaginably harder. These four men knew how good they were, and how tough they sounded. They also knew how to be subtle within their huge sound—to modulate not only volume but also playing dynamics in ways that could make a room stop and stare in anticipation of when the tension would finally burst apart. There are performances in Becoming Led Zeppelin when the band pushes a climactic repetition just beyond our expectations, guiding the moment with a display of full power without taking their eyes off the target. In an era of hippie excess, that sort of command was rare from any quarter.
Just as rare is a display of trust toward outsiders from within Led Zeppelin itself. But co-director Bernard MacMahon also made American Epic, a documentary miniseries from 2017 about American roots music. All three Zeppelins loved it, Chick writes: “The band members’ willingness to cooperate was driven largely by their admiration.” Page, Plant, and Jones shared personal items, including a demo, never before heard, by Plant and Bonham’s pre-Zeppelin group, Band of Joy, which is part of the film’s soundtrack; the three saw themselves as part of the blues-based lineage of American Epic.
That’s not inapt, but there’s an undercurrent as well. In Becoming Led Zeppelin, Plant explains that the lyric of “Whole Lotta Love,” cribbed from Wille Dixon’s published and copyrighted and already well-known lyrics, represented him skimming from the cream of Black music (to paraphrase him), as if it were therefore there for cribbing without credit. Which is what Led Zeppelin did at first—only after Dixon’s lawyers came calling was his name added to the songwriting credits, sixteen years after the song’s release.
If you know this history, it’s a fleeting sour moment in the film. It also points to why Becoming Led Zeppelin is not the first of a series. “The Led Zeppelin story ends in tragedy,” co-director Allison McGourty told Chick, “and it’s difficult for Robert to talk about it. He lost John, his best friend—why would he want to revisit that?” One might wonder much the same for Sly Stone. He didn’t sit for the camera and does not appear as a talking head in Sly Lives! It’s too bad; it’s also completely understandable.
‘Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden of Black Genius)’ is streaming now on Hulu.
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