Jimmy Jam On Questlove’s Emmy Nominated ‘Sly Lives’ Documentary: “It’s A Masterpiece”

When Sly Stone died in June at the age of 82, one of those mourning him at his funeral was in a unique position to appreciate the full extent of his musical gifts, as a brilliant talent himself – the Grammy-winning producer and songwriter Jimmy Jam.

“Sly is just top of the top as far as I’m concerned,” Jimmy Jam tells Deadline, “not only someone who musically affected me in a big way, but also my love of music and seeing it in a different way than the groups that my mom and dad showed me.”

Jam and his musical partner Terry Lewis, André 3000, Nile Rodgers, Clive Davis, and Suzanne de Passe are among the industry insiders and musicians who lend their expertise to Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), the Emmy-nominated documentary directed by Oscar winner Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. It’s competing for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special.

Stone, né Sylvester Stewart, was born in Denton, Texas in 1943 but grew up in a multiracial and sonically rich environment in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Occasionally in history — you see it with the way that Thriller unleashed itself in ’82, the British invasion happening in ’64, the beginning of Rock and Roll in the early ’50s — once in a blue moon, you have a paradigm shift or someone just hits the zeitgeist right at the right time,” Questlove notes. “In Sly’s case timing is everything, from him being a five-year-old prodigy studying classical music, leading his church at that young of an age, him as a DJ in the Bay Area, sort of planting seeds in the minds of people that we will later call hippies when they’re 18, 19, 20 years old from listening to his radio show. And he just happened to be at the helm creating the language and the alphabet for which even to this day, we are still using his tools and his tricks of the trade to express ourselves through music.”

When Stone formed Sly and the Family Stone in the 1960s, he did what was then unthinkable, stacking the band with a rainbow of performers, both men and women – a roster that included his sister Rose Stone, brother Freddie Stone, bassist Larry Graham, trumpeter-vocalist Cynthia Robinson, saxophonist Gerald Martini, and drummer Greg Errico.

Jimmy Jam draws a direct parallel between Sly and the Family Stone and Prince and his band, the Revolution.

“Sly was so instrumental in the way that Prince formed his group, multiracial, multi-gender. I know that came from Sly,” he says. “And even Freddie Stone, Sly’s brother, is probably the closest rhythm guitar player to the style that Prince plays.”

Questlove shines a light through the documentary on Stone’s remarkable skill as a bandleader, an element of the film that Jam appreciates.

“He’s humanizing [Sly] by not only showing the musical talent, which is beyond, but also the collaborative talent that he had in really making each of his band members the best, putting them in the best positions to win,” Jam observes. “And I think there’s a talent in doing that. I think Questlove shows that, but then he also shows the human side and the things that people have to deal with that you’re not even really thinking about. It’s a masterpiece to me, just the way it’s done.”

Questlove included a performance by Sly and the Family Stone in his Oscar-winning documentary Summer of Soul, produced by Joseph Patel who returns as producer on Sly Lives!

“The Sly part of that movie was so intriguing that I just wanted to know more about that,” Jam says. “I was so happy when he said, ‘That’s going to be my next one.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s awesome.’ Because I just think it’s one of those things that’s the right story in the right hands.”

The young Sly Stone of Sly Lives! is sweet, a bit shy and vulnerable at times, deeply thoughtful, supremely talented, but constricted by society’s expectation that as an African American artist he make definitive political statements on the Black experience. He couldn’t just make music, just evolve and explore like a white artist could – David Bowie, for instance.

“Can you imagine being Sly Stone in 1969 or 1970? You’re 26 years old, you’ve just headlined Woodstock. People are looking to you like you’ve solved race relations through your music. You’re on the cover of Rolling Stone. What do you do as a Black artist in America with all of that on your shoulders?” Patel, the film’s producer, tells Deadline. “That was sort of the conversation we had at the very beginning. And I think Ahmir wanted to look at Sly’s story with a lot of empathy because no other artist had been in that position before. Sly, he’s the biggest Black musician post-Civil Rights era, with this sort of unique burden of having to satisfy a Black audience and a white audience and what that must’ve been like for him. [Author] Mark Anthony Neal says this in the movie, there’s no Black Elvis that you can consult to say, ‘What do I do next?’ And that’s really where I think Sly’s problems start is that unease and not knowing what to do next, and then sort of self-sabotaging in the face of that.”

The film charts Stone’s tragic descent into severe drug addiction, sapping the creativity that had astonished the world. Jam was impressed by how Questlove handled that dimension of the Sly story.

“It’s not Titanic necessarily, but it’s kind of like the ending is not going to be a happy ending,” he affirms. “And it’s so tough to craft something where going into it, you already know this is not going to end well, but to hold the interest and then to still appreciate the greatness of someone even when the end is not as you would want it to be…”

Stone and his children got to see the film before his passing. He has entered the realm of history now, leaving behind an extraordinary body of work – songs like “Family Affair,” “Thank You,” “Everyday People,” “If You Want Me to Stay,” “Stand!” and many more.

“I have an affinity towards ‘Thank You,’ because I think it’s one of the funkiest songs ever to come out and there’s still not a song that really sounds like it today,” Jam comments. “I think it’s very singular in its funk.”

He cites another key song in the Sly canon.

“Thinking about a song like ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime,’ those songs are so singular in that they were influential, but people never really copied the spirit or the essence of it,” he says. “They could copy the idea of having dunh dunh dunh dunh dunh dinh dunh dunh…– think about the simpleness of that — but if you try to copy it, it either comes off wrong or it just doesn’t have the feel.”