BEFORE: OK, here's that big blow-out summer concert I was talking about - from 1969. Hey, I never said it was going to be a concert from THIS summer. I missed this somehow when it aired on ABC, but that's OK, it's still on Hulu.
Jesse Jackson, B.B. King, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, Dinah Shore and Stevie Wonder all carry over from "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street".
THE PLOT: Documentary about the legendary 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival which celebrated African-American music and culture and promoted Black pride and unity.
AFTER: I don't know, this was the Oscar-winner for Best Documentary Feature last year, and for some reason, I'm not feeling it. Like everything's in place, but is there something wrong with me? Is this not my kind of music? Am I the wrong color to enjoy this? I watch films about black performers all the time, but this one just didn't thrill me somehow.
Maybe it's the exact material, which doesn't feel like A-list material, if I'm being honest. I'm not a fan of Nina Simone, I don't know any of her songs, so of course "Backlash Blues" is just going to leave me cold, I've got no frame of reference. I've never really been a fan of Sly and the Family Stone, either, but at least I know his songs - to me "Everyday People" is a very stupid song, but one with a very important message about racial harmony and acceptance, so I kind of give it a pass. But all that "so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby" stuff doesn't do it for me. Then there's a line about a blue one who can't accept a green one for living with a fat one - well, I don't think there are any blue or green people, so I'm always kind of scratching my head when I hear this song.
I've never heard of Ray Barretto, or Herbie Mann, or Abbey Lincoln either - sorry if I seem out of touch. Really, I'm trying to find something here that appeals to me, and it ain't easy. OK, there's Gladys Knight & The Pips doing "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", finally something I know - but as I said after watching that documentary about Motown last year, their version is just too frantic and arythmic for me - it predated the Marvin Gaye version, and the CCR version, both of which I prefer over this one. This version of the song sounds like a mess, like the performers haven't quite figured out how to sing it yet. I know, I know, this version of the song was the original, but quite often I like cover versions better.
Then there's the Edwin Hawkins Singers, which was really just a church choir, and that's when this Harlem Festival got a bit too preachy and religious for me. The festival organizers justified this by saying that they wanted to bring some church stuff into the program because church attendance in NYC was declining, but did they ever think maybe there was a reason for that? Maybe more and more people didn't LIKE church, so then why bring in a church choir? To remind everybody of the thing they hate, which is church? Or just to be a big pain in the ass?
B.B King shows up, with another song I've never heard of - and same goes for the Chambers Brothers, they couldn't sing their hit song "Time"? David Ruffin was there to sing "My Girl", but he was the only member of the Temptations to make the concert? So people paid to see four Temptations but only got one? That seems like a rip-off. And I loved the Staples Singers so much when they sang on "The Weight" with The Band during "The Last Waltz", but here I just wasn't impressed by them. OK, so Mavis Staples killed it on "Precious Lord Take My Hand", and so did Mahalia Jackson, but that's another church song. And it was Martin Luther King's favorite hymn? I'm tempted to ask "So what?" but that would probably get me into trouble.
I'm going to say that the highlight of this whole concert was The 5th Dimension doing the two songs from "Hair", they recorded a medley of "The Age of Aquarius" and "Let the Sunshine In", and I liked everything about that, even the story that Billy Davis Jr. and Marilyn McCoo told about how they managed to see the Broadway show and convinced the producers of a mostly-white musical to let them record those songs as a single. And then finding out that they appeared at the Harlem Cultural Festival to counter accusations that they weren't black enough when they covered songs by white people. That's fascinating, all the way around.
There's an interesting effect in merging the musical performances with the interviews, in addition to talking to some people who attended the festival, the filmmakers also interviewed some of the performers who are still alive, like Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder, and other people who weren't there, like Chris Rock and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and got their reactions to watching the same footage that the audience just did. That all helps place this festival into proper historical perspective, but then part of me wishes that this film could have just been about the music, and also that the music could have been...better? I hate to say that because "good" is subjective, and to some people this music might all be GREAT, but I just don't see it that way.
The complaint among the Harlem community is that this festival took place the same year as Woodstock, but Woodstock got all the attention, with two feature films and a double-album, and the Harlem Cultural Festival was largely ignored, and it took fifty years to turn the footage into a documentary. OK, I get that, but have you HEARD the music from the Woodstock Festival? It totally kicked ass, except for Richie Havens and Sha Na Na. TV producer Hal Tulchin recorded about 40 hours of concert footage in Harlem, and two TV specials aired clips from the festival in 1969, but that was it, the tapes then sat in a basement for 50 years. The festival organizers tried for years to claim this was "the black Woodstock", but was it? Also, you can't complain about Woodstock getting all the attention and then try to ride its coattails like that. Plus, if you're going to do that, you might as well call this festival "Hoodstock".
If you ask me, perhaps TOO much emphasis was placed here on the importance of this festival, there are cutaways explaining the Black Power movement, the rise of the afro, black fashions like the daishiki, and how significant it was that this many black people gathered together over the course of six Sundays in the summer of 1969. You know, sometimes I just want to hear the music from a concert and not be bombarded with propaganda every five minutes. I'm glad this was an important event for a lot of people, but give it a rest already. If it were a festival with mostly white performers and they were quoting the importance of white history and white fashion between the songs, and saying how great it was that so many white people assembled together in one place to celebrate being white, that would be very wrong, right? Of course it would. Just saying.
I don't know, maybe I'm just in a bad mood, I've got anxiety in my life right now because I'm not working much this month, so money's kind of tight. I feel like either job could go away at any moment, and it troubles me. I congratulate this film for winning the Oscar, and I acknowledge that the concerts were culturally significant, but they're just not my scene. I read on IMDB that there were 40 hours of footage that got cut down to 24 hours, then 3 and 1/2, and finally 2. Maybe that means the film would have been radically different if other choices had been made? I'd be kind of interested in learning what material didn't make the cut.
Also starring Ethel Beatty-Barnes, Barbara Bland-Acosta, Billy Davis Jr., Dorinda Drake, Sheila E., Margot Edman, Greg Errico, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Cyril "Bullwhip" Innis Jr., Musa Jackson, Gladys Knight (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Adrienne Kryor, Alan Leeds, Darryl Lewis, Sal Masekela, Marilyn McCoo, Jim McFarland, Lin-Manuel Miranda (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Luis Miranda (last seen in "In the Heights"), Denise Oliver-Velez, Roger Parris, Raoul Roach, Chris Rock (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Al Sharpton (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Greg Tate, Hal Tulchin, Allen Zirkin,
with archive footage of Ray Barretto, Ben Branch, Stokely Carmichael (last seen in "Da 5 Bloods"), The Chambers Brothers, John Chancellor (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Walter Cronkite (last heard in "Becoming Cousteau"), Sonny Fortune, Redd Foxx (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Marcus Garvey Jr., Berry Gordy (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Sly Stone (ditto), Edwin Hawkins, Walter Hawkins, Chuck Jackson, Mahalia Jackson (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Julia"), Robert Kennedy (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), Tony Lawrence, Abbey Lincoln, John Lindsay, Moms Mabley, Malcolm X (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Herbie Mann, Hugh Masekela, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Max Roach, Abe Rosenthal, David Ruffin, Mongo Santamaria, Nina Simone, The Staples Singers (also last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Willie Tyler, Blinky Williams.
RATING: 5 out of 10 plugs for Maxwell House coffee
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