-Our next guest is a Grammy-winning musician
and a founding member of The Roots,
whom you can see every night on "The Tonight Show."
His fantastic documentary, "Summer of Soul
(...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),"
is in theaters and on Hulu now.
Let's take a look.
-It was the ultimate Black barbecue.
And then, you start to hear music.
♪♪
And someone's speaking.
-For the first time in Harlem, Soulville, USA...
-And you knew it was something bigger.
-Ladies and gentleman, The 5th Dimension!
[ Cheers and applause ]
-♪ Don'tcha hear me ♪
♪ Calling to you ♪
♪ Don'tcha hear me calling to you, baby ♪
-Please welcome back to the show, our friend, Questlove.
♪♪
-Hi. How you doing?
-Good to see you, my friend. -Great to see you.
Great to see you.
Great to -- No, hold your applause, everyone.
[ Laughter ]
Hold your applause.
-Oh, yeah, you guys are spoiled.
You got an audience and everything downstairs.
-You know what, though? I -- I --
You know, I've been a longtime fan of this show.
This was, like, the last thing in the last normal...
-Yeah, yeah, yeah. -...whatever you want
to call it, this is the last thing I did
before I realized how serious the next 16 months
was going to be. But I -- I got to say,
I love the rhythm.
I like -- This feels like public access.
I like it. -Thank you.
[ Laughter ] Oh, my God, thank you!
Well, I hope our -- our NBC paymasters are watching.
-Yes. -And hearing that this is
a public-access show. [ Laughter ]
-No, I love the rhythm of it. -Thank you, thank you.
We do love it, too. So this is a wonderful film
about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.
This is not something I knew about.
-Right. -And --
-Me neither.
-That's the shocking thing, right?
Like, you have all this knowledge of,
especially music history, and when you first got word of this,
you also didn't think it was real.
-I thought I had all the knowledge in the world.
You know, 'cause, you know, I was --
There was a period where, like, I was the guy -- I was YouTube.
I was the guy that everyone called on
for any sort of archive. So, naturally, when I --
You know, when they requested a meeting with me,
you know, I googled and I called a few music experts,
and none of them ever heard of this thing.
So I was very, very --
They hate when I say this, but I -- you know,
I thought they just -- like,
"Why don't they just ask for 'Fallon' tickets?
Like, it's easier." -These were -- these were --
When you say this, these are guys who are calling you,
saying, "We have this footage, and we want you to see it."
-My two producers, David Dinerstein
and Robert Fyvolent, they said that they had
over 40 hours of this mythical Stevie Wonder,
Sly and the Family Stone concert that happened in Harlem.
And, you know, after like nine people told me,
"I never heard of it,"
and they were like of age, at the time,
I just, like, "Nah. There's no way this happened."
-And so, I mean, it must have been, for someone like you,
and for the kind of artists that are in this film,
and what was it like when you first sat down
and started watching this footage?
Was it like the Holy Grail?
-It's -- It's past the Holy Grail.
Like, this is what they call lightning in a bottle.
And then, like, all my arrogance sort of dissipated,
and suddenly, like, I -- I became worried.
Like, why would they even trust me to tell this story?
Like, a first-time storyteller.
So, yeah. I'll -- I'll just say that
I realized that I had, like, the most valuable --
I'm sorry. Am I giving my bracket away
if I say the word "vase"? -No, go for it.
[ Laughter ]
-I'm sorry. "Vayse."
You know, I knew I had an important artifact in my hand.
So, the first thing I did was,
you know, I assembled a crack team of experts.
-Mm-hmm. -Shout-out to my producer,
Joseph Patel, and my editor Josh, you know.
And, you know, everyone else involved with the project.
But, um, I -- I just wanted to do it because, you know,
I'm an obsessive for history, and so...
-Yeah. And it's interesting.
You know, it seemed like it was not just lost,
in that people didn't know what happened,
but it seemed like some of the people you talked to
that even performed at it,
almost, to some degree, had forgotten.
'Cause we have this great thing in the film,
which is you show -- we get to watch people in real-time
watch their old performances.
-Very meta. Yeah. It's -- It's sort of that
"Harry Met Sally" situation where you get to reflect
and watch people watch themselves.
I thought it was important, only because,
just in my research, I had so many goose-bump moments of like,
"Wow, wow, wow!", that sort of thing,
that I wanted them to have the same response, too.
I wanted to catch their -- their reaction when they first saw it.
And, yeah, it was complete --
Like, magic constantly jumps from the screen
when you watch these performances.
-And another magic thing that's happened for you
is that some people have reached out and said
they not only have seen themselves in the footage,
they've seen, you know, departed family members.
-Yeah. That -- That, to me, is my favorite part
of this whole process.
Um, all throughout social media, like, every day, there's a --
a guy who hasn't seen or has any photos of his brother
who passed away when he was like 20,
like, during like 1970, '71, and we have a close-up of them.
So, like, the whole family is like, you know,
they get their opportunity to see their uncle as a teenager.
There's a woman that discovered her great-grandmother
in the front row, screaming at Stevie Wonder.
You know, and daily, I get things of,
"Oh, that's me when I was 14!" You know?
So that's -- that's what's happening right now. Yeah.
-Um, you had actually seen footage of this before,
but you didn't know what it was for.
You were in Japan. -Yeah.
-And where did you see it? -Okay.
So, when The Roots first went to Japan, in 1997,
back when things were, like, more localized
and the Internet didn't connect the world at the same time,
um, if you wanted to see anything from my childhood,
old games, toys, artifacts, afro pics, whatever,
you went to Tokyo. -Really?
-Because, I mean, they have such an affinity
for, like, '70s culture over there.
And so, my translator looked at my afro and was like --
She kind of put two and two together like, "You know,
you remind me of Don Cornelius from 'Soul Train,'"
and so, I was like, "Okay."
And then, she took me to a place called the Soul Train Café,
which is basically kind of like a Friday's...
[ Laughter ] ...with better fonts.
-Yeah. -And there was, like, monitors
all over the restaurant, and I just happened to see
maybe a two- or three-minute clip of Sly and the Family Stone
from one of the far-away cameras.
And so, at the time, I didn't realize I was watching
the Harlem Cultural Festival.
I thought it was like Montreux Jazz Festival
or something, like, in Europe.
-And you -- I want to refer back to something you said
about how you used to be YouTube.
You took this very seriously. You carried around, like,
bags full of tapes, because people had this expectation...
-Yeah. -...that even when you traveled,
they could ask you for this sort of piece of arcana
that no one else could get. -So I had two Kipling bags,
probably the size of this couch right here.
-Uh-huh. -And then, once I went
to the Soul Train Café -- you know, again,
this is before the Internet, before you can
instantly look at -- back at something from your childhood.
All I have are memories at that point.
And so, I asked this woman, like,
"Where can I find, like, these clips?
You talk about 'Soul Train.' I haven't seen that in 25 years.
Like, where is it?" And, um, she took me to this
magical, like, Video City in Tokyo.
And I stayed an extra two days.
Like, I probably purchased, easily like $15,000 worth of --
-That's vase -- That's vase money.
-Yeah, vase money. Yeah, getting it back into
the States was a little bit weird.
But every -- from 1997 to about 2004,
if you saw me in the streets of New York,
I didn't have a backpack on.
I had two giant Kipling cases that I took with me everywhere.
And this is what -- Like, when I worked on, like,
Erykah Badu's record or D'Angelo's record
or Common's album or any artist I worked with,
we'd spend five hours just going through
what we call, like, the treats.
And that's how we made, like, the records
that I'm sort of associated with and known for.
Like, it's just based on that.
And then, YouTube came and put me out of business.
[ Laughter ] So...
-You -- You also mentioned going to Japan for festivals.
Obviously, this is -- you know, it's a film about a festival.
-Yeah. -And The Roots were
a festival act for a long time. -The Roots Picnic, yeah.
-And what was it that drew you guys to festivals?
Were you just -- you know, were you building a fan base?
Like, is that what the festivals helped you do?
-So, the whole goal of festivals,
especially when you're new at going to Europe,
you want to do the summer circuit.
It's fishing. And, so, like, back in '92,
if we're playing like Reading Festival or Glastonbury,
behind -- you know, they're waiting for Jamiroquai
to come on, and let The Roots do their 45 minutes.
You want to make an impression. So our whole goal was always,
like, to lease -- "Okay, there's 40,000 people out there,
but we just need 5,000 people."
And then, you come back in December.
And when you play clubs and theaters,
those people that saw you at festivals,
there are your new fans. -That's --
And what a cool thing to have gone through and done.
And this is really -- Congrats on this film.
-Thank you. -"New Yorker" has already
called it best movie of the year.
I mean, you couldn't have expected, right?
-You know, this was -- this was my -- my -- my pivot
in pandemic sort of thing that just kept me sane.
You know? -Yeah.
-While we were waiting for what was happening.
But I didn't realize that what was my passion project would --
would even resonate with the world like this.
So I'm -- I'm very excited. -Well, it's really special.
I can't recommend it enough to everybody.
Thanks so much for being here, my friend.
"Summer of Soul" is in theaters and on Hulu now.