David Morgan | Deadline
Panelists: Amir “Questlove” Thompson (director/executive producer).
Key quotes:
He just happens to be the first domino of a new revolution to a bunch of rules that we are still using today in making music. Sly was at the very beginning of multi-track recording, like the idea of being the ‘bedroom musician,’ doing everything yourself — Stevie Wonder Prince and Todd Rundgren and all these geniuses do all the work themselves. That was unheard of before his period. — Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
[On Sly’s early days as a radio DJ in the San Francisco Bay Area]: He’s very much like that character that Robin Williams played in Good Morning, Vietnam, like that morning jock, “What’s up, cats and kittens?,” like had comedy sketches and would do his own commercials and everything without [being paid for those]. He would make Wheat Chex commercials and Tidy Bowl commercials. And there was no one like this guy. And what I realized was that Sly was sort of seed planting and growing, grooming, raising the first generation of counterculture because those same 11, 12, 13-year-old kids with AM Radio transistors listening to the sly back in 1963, ’64, as he’s introducing them to the Beatles, as he’s introducing them to James Brown, as he’s introducing them to Motown, those same teenyboppers will [become] Bay Area hippies. — ThompsonIn my opinion, I think Black genius is just the ability to see another day, which sounds like hyperbole, but I promise you we’re all just one half hour away from making the wrong life decision that will instantly put us in the position. And even in making this film, I would have to put myself in that category. Life after that Oscar [win, for Summer of Soul] was a 12,000 percent turnaround, which luckily I was in the mind frame, with therapy and whatnot, to maintain. So for me, with this film and the other subsequent films I’m doing that have similar subjects, I’m trying to plant seeds in artists to learn to get out of their heads and get more in tune to what they feel inside. — Thompson
Click HERE to watch the video interview
Deadline Studio at Sundance presented by Casamigos