Becoming Led Zeppelin, Surviving Sly and the Family Stone

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. 

The main source of conflict within the latter film is that rock critics didn’t fully appreciate the first two Zeppelin LPs, meaning the quartet had to prove itself to live audiences. Becoming Led Zeppelin has the quaint “band versus the world” narrative of an Amazon Prime rockumentary aimed at Boomers, only with better archival footage. On the other hand: Sly’s rock-bottom failures, like his countless drug-related arrests throughout the ’80s, were incredibly public, but they did not happen in a vacuum. In Sly Lives!, A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip details the phases of being rejected by society as a Black celebrity; “fuck that guy” is the last one. In this way, the movie is bigger than Sly—its themes are present in the careers of Nina Simone, Miles Davis, James Brown, Lauryn Hill, and so many others who suffered in the spotlight. 

Questlove fills his film with scholars, musical luminaries, and artists you could call sons of Sly, who speak to the idea that breaking barriers as a Black artist comes with outsized expectations—which can lead to guilt, paranoia, self-sabotage, reclusiveness, addiction, or worse. “Everybody else’s success rides on yours,” says D’Angelo. “It’s a burden and wings,” says André 3000. Contrast that with Zeppelin’s “great artists steal” style of classic-rock colonialism: “The idea was to take Black music and put it through the ringer,” a dead-serious Robert Plant says at one point. 

As if Sly hadn’t already done that while also preaching a funky message of racial unity. (And when his lyrics leaned more radical and the sound skewed less rock, like on 1971’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, critics didn’t exactly embrace that evolution.) Of course, white rock kids don’t grow up being taught to regard Sly Stone as an innovator, whereas Led Zeppelin is almost a requisite phase for guitar-hero-worshipping teens—a pretty remarkable fact when you consider that Zeppelin functionally ended after drummer John Bonham died in 1980. But there’s always another box set to be compiled, or documentaries like It May Get Loud to be made, so the business of Zeppelin has never stopped. 

The sanitized story of how it all began is what you get with Becoming Led Zeppelin. If you’re already a fan, it’s worth seeing for live performances rather than insights. But by the end of the two-hour runtime, the exclusive focus on the band’s 1960s output made it feel repetitive rather than intentionally zoomed in (like, for example, A Complete Unknown). I actually grew sick of hearing “Whole Lotta Love,” a feat considering the song’s intro served as my ringtone on a flip phone several lifetimes ago. In keeping with the film’s proud spirit, it is conveniently left out that the 1969 Zeppelin hit cribs lyrics from “You Need Love,” written by Black blues singer Willie Dixon and popularized by Muddy Waters, though Dixon was retroactively named a co-writer on “Whole Lotta Love.” Ultimately, director Bernard MacMahon ties his low-conflict ego-stroking into a bow with Page talking about how if you follow your dreams, they really can come true. 

If it weren’t for the title and final minutes of Sly Lives!, you might think Sly Stone was long dead. That’s the twist in Questlove’s semi-tragedy: A sliver of a happy ending. Not through late-in-life reflections on the psychic toll of being young, gifted, and Black from Sly himself, but through his mere existence as a sober “standard old Black man” (in the words of one of his daughters). The feeling I walk away with is that Black genius can’t be suppressed, that there’s ingenuity within Sly’s crooked journey. So I’ll leave you with this:  

After Sly and the Family Stone drummer Greg Errico left the group around 1971, Sly—then on a cocktail of drugs including barbiturates and coke—grew extremely paranoid. Instead of hiring another drummer, he used a primitive drum machine to record the rhythmic backbone for “Family Affair,” and he tweaked where the beat hit, effectively turning it inside out. The song ended up being one of Sly’s biggest, as well as the first hit period to feature a drum machine. Years later, without Sly having to do anything, hip-hop recognized his brilliance by sampling songs like “Family Affair.” In 1989, the R&B producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis built the basis of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” from a few seconds of bass between verses in Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”—a fact they recall in Sly Lives! with awestruck glee. Even when he was in dire straits, Sly Stone could still move the world.