Becoming Led Zeppelin, Surviving Sly and the Family Stone
Two recent documentaries capture the rise of era-defining bands in the late 1960s and early ’70s—but only one gets to revel in a legacy.
Near the end of Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), the new Questlove-directed, Hulu-distributed documentary about Sly Stone, the R&B hermit D’Angelo muses on the difference between Black legacy artists and their white counterparts. “I hate to say it but these white rock’n’rollers, these motherfuckers go out in style, they go out paid, they go out with their kids around them, like the fucking Godfather movie. They die in their tomato garden with their grandson, laughing and shit… That’s what we’re supposed to be doing.”
Obstacles to accumulating generational wealth are just some of the burdens of being a Black creative genius—a reality that serves as the backdrop to Questlove’s portrait of the Sly and the Family Stone leader. The radio-DJ-turned-producer-turned-polymath broke the mold on pop music in the late 1960s with his multi-racial, multi-gender band of rock’n’soul virtuosos, before losing his way with drugs and spending the last several decades as a reclusive myth and cautionary tale about the way the system eats up Black visionaries.
I couldn’t help but think of D’Angelo’s quote while watching Becoming Led Zeppelin, the band-authorized theatrical release charting the canonical English rockers’ path to fame. The time period covered in this documentary overlaps with that of the Sly film, but the approaches are vastly different. Zeppelin’s surviving members—guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant, and bassist John Paul Jones—are shown watching footage of their young selves while sitting on throne-like chairs in a dark, sumptuous room, reminiscing about being kids, making ambitious records, and conquering America. For a band with a list of myths as long as a Tolkien epic, these motherfuckers really gave up none of the dirt; it should come as no surprise, then, that darker details of the wild days, like their involvement with underage groupies, are never accounted for. Instead we hear about Page cockily telling Atlantic Records, upon signing in 1968, that the label couldn’t change a thing on Led Zeppelin’s debut—that theirs was an album band, not a singles factory.
Seeing the Sly and Zeppelin documentaries within days of each other, I was struck most by which artists are allowed to present revisionist histories and sweep the ugly parts of their legacies under the rug. The clear difference in treatment between Black and white musicians decades ago is reified even now, in filmic foils. One is the type of movie that fans watch to enjoy the sick riffs they already know and love, and not think about the unsavory stuff; the other is a cultural observation told through one artist’s trajectory. Put another way: Sly Lives! is an attempt to correct and clarify the record; Becoming Led Zeppelin is an attempt to further muddle it.
