Days of future passed

Summer of Soul shows what was and can be again

I finally got to that Summer of Soul doc about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival at which dozens of great black musicians played multiple free concerts in Mt. Morris Park to huge crowds who were very much digging it. As it happened I was watching it right on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing — which landing happened in the middle of that festival. Director Questlove does some cool interspersing of documentary footage throughout the movie and his best play is a series of clips of people getting interviewed by newsmen about the moon landing and the white people saying it’s great and “I felt the world got closer today” etc. and the black people at the Festival saying, essentially, nah. I especially liked one young man who tells newsman Bolt Upright, “As far as science goes and everybody that’s involved with the moon landing and astronauts, it’s beautiful, you know. Like me, I couldn’t care less… the cash they wasted as far as I’m concerned in getting to the moon could have been used to feed poor black people in Harlem and all over the place, all over this country. So, like, never mind the moon…”

It’s a familiar sentiment at the moment as PR men try to make us care about Jeff Bezos’ space trip. Also interesting: The young man doesn’t show anger — on the contrary, he has this sly grin throughout, like: You asked, and I got no reason to lie. Neither does he expect Bolt to get it. This is a fellow who knows how long the game is.

Like other documentaries about any event of any significance, Summer of Soul has a lot of people looking back and talking about how important and epochal the thing was. The historical framing clips (shootings, lootings, Panthers etc.) are pretty much a necessity, and some of the talking heads are very eloquent on their own terms (check Sheila E. talking about Latin drumming). But whenever someone tells me how historic something I’m watching is, I feel like I’m being muscled, and I did with this, too — at least at first.

But the concerts themselves, shot on broadcast-grade videotape (and props to whoever cleaned that shit up) by a crew that originally had hopes of peddling it on the concert film circuit (that didn’t pan out), show people who really are making the history of their time, just by doing what their talents told them to do. They look like it, too — like everyone from the 60s, they’re a little shaggier and scruffier than our present-day artistes, in fact they look like they’re from the audience and having as good a time as they are.

It’s not just the acts. There are tantalizing glimpses of show-runner Tony Lawrence, the kind of black mover-and-shaker who used guile and politesse to give his artists their due. It’s something to see how he glad-hands and even slightly strong-arms Mayor John Lindsay, whom he calls his “blue-eyed soul brother,” onstage. How many people like him kept black culture clothed and fed over the years!

And there’s the people of Harlem in the audience; they are a joy to behold in their 60s summer clothes and attitudes ranging from begrudging tough-guy head-nod admiration to joyful dancing in place. I especially like the guy to whom David Ruffin calls out, “How you doin’, my brother,” as he sits about thirty feet up in a tree, popping his fingers with one hand while holding on for dear life with the other. (You know the musicians loved what the crowd was giving them; Sly took his “Higher” call-and-response to Woodstock later that summer, but I can’t imagine even that five-times-larger crowd beat what Harlem had.)

There’s joy, too, in the sheer range of the acts, from the Fifth Dimension to Hugh Masekela to Sonny Sharrock. We see Stevie Wonder turning from prodigy to full-fledged genius, beating up his clavinet and pumping a wah-wah pedal, and Sly Stone cooking up his new hippie-soul synthesis. We see the intense MLK tribute performance of My Precious Lord with Jesse Jackson preaching the story of King’s death and Mahalia Jackson asking Mavis Staples to help her out on the song and the amazing rafter-hitting riffs they trade. And we have Nina Simone, no longer content to merely tell the truth about what her people suffer but calling out loud for them to make revolution: “Are you ready, black people?” she chants. “Are you ready to do what is necessary?... Are you ready to kill if necessary?... Are you ready to smash white things, burn buildings, are you ready?"

The crowd says they are, but we all know how that went. The elegiac feeling at the end is unavoidable. Came Nixon, came Reagan, and everyone had to put away their dashikis and dress for work. The artists had their destinies, some good, some bad, but they left us music and that’s all good. The world they passed through, however, seemed to get duller. Harlem ain’t what it was, certainly; there’s less crime and also less of everything else except money. The funk and solidarity that racism accidentally created has been dispersed by real estate values.

And the country — well, we see that nightmare every day. It seems like the reactionaries are getting crazier by the minute — witness the current anti-CRT lunacy, with Texas now the pointy end of the Klan hood, trying to chase even MLK out of the curriculum. But reactionaries react, and what they’re reacting to is the rest of us letting them know we caught their act. Forget about “campus” “indoctrination,” most of us aren’t college students, but cell phone cameras at protests and police riots, and social media talking back to propagandists, have given a lot of people a lot of education that, though it’s history to us, is news to them. Maybe in a way history summoned this movie, too, to fill the folks in on what was once and can again be their destiny. So let the talking heads talk. Hell, maybe music can get that good again too.