Across four documentaries — the Oscar- and Grammy-winning “Summer of Soul,” “Sly Lives,” “Ladies and Gentlemen, 50 Years of Saturday Night Live Music” and the new “Earth, Wind & Fire (to Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World),” which arrives on HBO Sunday night — Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer and leader of the Roots and musical director for “The Tonight Show,” has established himself as one of the greatest music documentarians of this era.
When artists who are also fans embark on such projects, the results can be too admiring, too fanboy, too hagiographic. But Thompson’s films are clear-eyed portraits of artists or situations — both of which are, of course, created by human beings in all their greatness and imperfection — and while they come out positive, they’re also very realistic about the dark sides as well, which is what also makes them great stories.
“Earth, Wind & Fire” centers around Maurice White, the creator of one of the most influential R&B groups of all time, his troubled upbringing in the segregated South, and crucially, how his mother left him when he was just five years old to seek opportunity in Chicago. She always said she would come back for him, and 13 years later she did, but the hurt never left him — even as he overcame one obstacle after another, beginning as a drummer for the iconic blues label Chess (where he drummed on songs for Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin Wolf and countless others), moving to his work with jazz legend Ramsey Lewis, and finally risking it all to form Earth, Wind & Fire. The group’s first incarnation didn’t gell, so he split it up and started over, integrating magic, mysticism, Egyptology and positive thinking into the group’s pioneering, deceptively complex sound. And as they became one of the biggest groups in the world, he gradually lost hold of it. By the early ‘80s, the group was over, just when their career should have been reaching even greater heights.
As Thompson says below, “all the groups that they influenced in the ‘70s suddenly became gods in the ‘80s — Kool & the Gang, the Pointer Sisters, the Commodores, Lionel Richie, the Jacksons — and Earth, Wind and Fire were the ones left out in the cold.”
Variety caught up with Thompson over Zoom on Friday to talk about the film, finding the hidden moments in an artist’s history, his next projects — and performing with EWF at the Tribeca Film Festival premiere in New York on Tuesday night.
How was playing with Earth, Wind, and Fire two nights ago?
You know, that was a rather poetic moment. The last time I drummed on that specific stage, I was 12 years old drumming for my father — he would play the Beacon maybe a year, during his oldies doo-wop revival era between like ’81 and I guess like ’88, ’89. So yeah, to return there — with Robert De Niro, of all people — I couldn’t think of a better storybook ending. It was everything I ever hoped for.
Had you played with them before?
Yeah. I first met Maurice White in 2000 when Maurice’s son, K.B., would put him onto contemporary acts that he otherwise wouldn’t know about. He told his dad, “There’s a band called the Roots that’s kind of the modern version of you guys.” So we actually worked on one of their albums in, I think, in 2001. And there was a 4th of July concert in 2006 or 2007 in which the Roots and Earth, Wind and Fire did a mini 20-minute combo show together.
It seems like part of your aim with these documentaries is to give overlooked or misunderstood artists or events their flowers.
What I enjoy about the process of any of the films I make is digging deeper. And this is one of the rare cases in which the itch I really wanted to scratch would have been to make this an inside-baseball kind of project, where I would have gone through song after song: What did these lyrics mean? What did that backward symbol mean? Why did you guys go to a 5/4 meter here? But really, I think the gift of Earth, Wind, and Fire is, and I say this jokingly, how they tricked you into eating your vegetables.
I had a feeling, many years ago, that in 2026 we might need a movie that will help people see who Maurice White was. This is the story of someone who, against all odds, confidently walked into situations in which he didn’t have a safety net. He could have just played it safe — he was making good money and had popularity playing with Ramsey Lewis, and he could have just stayed there and become rich and successful. But he had another mission, and those are the people I want — the people that feel they want to be a leader.
Now, people are too afraid — “Oh, man, it’s the worst time in history.” No — this is the moment when our future is going to be defined. And if this film can play any role in how people dream or sit silently before you make a rash decision, that’s the role I want to play in terms of planting a seed.
“Summer of Soul” had a theme of being lost to time, and “Sly Lives” was about greatness and self-destruction and tragedy, but neither of those themes are in this one. Was that leadership the thing that drove your motivation for this one?
This is one case where I didn’t want to be Captain Obvious — like I said, no one is interested in anything that’s going to be good for you. If you’re a kid and I give you Captain Crunch or Shredded Wheat, which one are you gonna pick?
This is the story of a five-year-old orphan who somehow magically discovers the laws of metaphysics. Usually in that story, when your mother gives you away, you become bitter and angry and self-destructive. But for some reason, Maurice always had the focus that “I am going to better myself,” and he did. However, the lesson that I really want people to get is that even with the best intentions for mankind in the world, the one thing Maurice was unable to get out of the system was the anger that he had for his mother for giving him away, even though it was always her intention to always come back for him. And when he was 18, she did, but that level of hurt — he never let it go. So no matter how much he worked on trying to better mankind, he never drank his own medicine. Men are routinely taught to not get our emotions out and be a man and just suck it up, and as a result, if we don’t get our emotions out …
I’ll put it this way. In the last year or so, from D’Angelo on down, there’s been probably the biggest cancer scare that we’ve had. And I believe that the roots of all those things come from when you hold that inside yourself. In Maurice’s case, the anger of not really forgiving his mother for that starts to affect his system. No matter how healthy he is, it kind of backfires. So I want people to learn that, yes, you can be metaphysical and do affirmations and all those things for your mental space, but you’ve also got to clean your insides out and really get right with yourself and with the people in your life, or else you might meet that same fate.
So I believe there’s a deeper story in there, but I want people to discover it on their own without me having to spell it out.
And actually, that is the tragedy — he was afraid people were going to leave him, so he wouldn’t let anyone get close. On a lighter note, your films always have a sort of simple, defining musical moment that most people haven’t uncovered. In this one, it was the time in 1973 when Earth, Wind & Fire opened for Parliament-Funkadelic and got blown off the stage and booed. Was that story out there? I never really heard that before.
Well, this is the thing. We feel like Earth, Wind & Fire came ready-made, with the space suits and the large band and these positive songs — they’re legends, they’ve always been here. But there’s actually a lot we don’t know, and as a result, I was rather shocked to find out that they got booed mercilessly in my hometown of Philadelphia! And their answer to it was to sit in a lotus position for eight minutes straight.
Bill Burr went through the same thing. He was an obscure comedian, and he went to Philly one night and went through the same exact thing: They started booing him, and you know what? He just took it: “All right, I’ll wait.” And sure enough, four minutes into it, we started to respect him — like, “Yo, he took that beating like a champ! We love this guy!” And literally, that’s what Earth, Wind, and Fire had to go through, so I didn’t know they got their asses handed to them a couple of times.
I also didn’t know how radical they were. I learned from Sly and the Family Stone that dressing in your street clothes was a no-no back then — you had to have a suit on, “We’re safe! We’re wearing tuxedos. We’re singing Sinatra covers!” And to show up in your dashikis and your street clothes? No one did that. So I didn’t realize how much they had to go through in order to normalize.
I have cousins who went to [see EWF] concert in ’77, and none of them were the same when they got home. They transformed people back then. And for them to not get to the promised land like all their disciples did — Kool & the Gang, the Pointer Sisters, the Commodores, Lionel Richie, the Jacksons, all the groups that they influenced in the ‘70s suddenly became gods in the ‘80s, and then Earth, Wind and Fire were the one left out in the cold. There’s a lot that I didn’t know about what they had to go through.
Not to be that guy, but in Maurice White’s autobiography he said that he and Booker T. Jones of Booker T & the MGs and David Porter, who wrote so many classics with Isaac Hayes, were best friends in school. Why isn’t that in the film?
Booker’s in there! He’s the one telling the story of [White’s] childhood and how his parents kind of abandoned him, he pretty much was there. But you know what, there’s a lot of [details] that I did want to pack in [that ended up on the cutting room floor]. Like, there’s a brilliant story of [White] poaching [future R&B star] Deniece Williams away from Stevie Wonder’s Wonderlove group to sign with him.
The first thing I asked Booker T. Jones was, you [and Porter] will be the architects of Stax Records, and [White] is there with you. But the story that Booker told about [White] getting beaten up on his paper route, and that pretty much made him a recluse and a homebody, and he vowed never again to go across the tracks to the other side of town. But if he’d done that, he would have been a drummer in the Stax organization, more than likely. But his story happened as it should.
You’re basically the world’s biggest Prince fan, you knew him and performed with him and know his music inside and out. How have you not done a Prince documentary?
You know what, sometimes you wanna get right into the fire. Prince’s story — I’m way too close, his story is way too close to my existence, and I’m almost afraid that I would make it a love letter, no matter what. And I know his story is very complex. I will also say that I believe that Ezra Elderman has made the definitive Prince documentary, although the estate doesn’t agree. [The Prince estate has very publicly disavowed the film and blocked its release.]
So you’ve seen it!
Yes, I’m in it and I’m one of the lucky maybe 30 people that have seen it. Maybe it’s just not time now. But it changed my life — that film affected my storytelling. Without that documentary, I don’t know if the Sly doc or the Earth, Wind and Fire doc would have turned out the way they did.
OK, this is my last question — apart from, that is a photo of Michael Jackson and Goofy on your shirt?
(Laughing and opening his jacket) Yes, it is.
What’s coming up next?
I’ll tell you, it’s been an overflow of “Whatever it is you want to do, now’s your open window.” That really started with “Summer of Soul,” and this particular doc marks the end of a very weird period. I don’t necessarily suggest any other creatives or filmmakers do what I tried to do, because at one point I was working on Sly, Earth, Wood and Fire, and the “Saturday Night Live” music doc at the same time. And there were moments and mornings in which I’d come to work and I think I’m prepared, but “Wait, we’re working on what?!” So I don’t recommend it.
However, that said, there are three projects that I’m starting right now that are sort of in the same vein. I’m not at liberty to say who they are, but I can hint that 1988 was a very classic year for hip-hop music. So that’s the most I can get into it. But yeah, it’s not stopping.
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