Living in the Summer of Soul

Woodstock? The Moon? Questlove Knows What Really Mattered

In the 1969 Summer of Soul I lived in a fifth floor walkup with my friend Marya at 15th Street and First Avenue. We had met at Bard College early that spring semester, where I was a sophomore transfer student and she was visiting on a Saturday from a New Jersey high school for an audition (which she passed) for the dance department.

I was sitting on a nice tab of psilocybin, and took it that morning, a solo trip, walked down to the waterfall with a notebook, planning to write poetry. Or "poetry." The morning turned cold, then hard rain. I went to my dorm for a jacket. Some pals were smoking kif (not hash, not weed, but Moroccan kif; we Bardians in 1969 were very particular about our drugs), and the group, including the artist Rick Klauber, were about to drive towards Woodstock. I went along, alerting them to my altered state. They took wonderful care of me. We drove for awhile, up a mountain road, where we saw a pink house. A small pink house better known as Big Pink. We stopped and stared. A bearded musician was going into the house carrying an instrument case.

My friends were nice and stoned on the sweet smelling kif, but I was on a different elevation. I was peaking on the psilocybin and I wandered away. Not far, a few steps perhaps, but far enough to stare through the nearby woods. I could see through the glistening rain-soaked leaves of late winter/early spring all the way to the Hudson. The rain on the leaves looked like crystals. I felt caught in an upward spiral and I started to weep as a word appeared to describe the sensation. The word was "god."

More than 40 years later, Rick Klauber and I were messaging on Facebook. He thought I had been weeping out of reverence for being so close to Bob Dylan. I had to correct him and say, no, I was weeping because I thought I saw God. To some, there is still no distinction. It was a transcendent experience, as William James might describe it. I chased that feeling my whole life, and didn't experience it again until May 6, 2010, when my plan to drink myself into a slow spiritual death was interrupted when the place I randomly chose to begin that sad journey turned out to be an AA convention, the AA Woodstock in Cocoa Beach, Fla.

We went back to campus and I walked into my room. There was a girl, Marya, sitting alone, on my bed. No one else. She was listening to music on my KLH-11 stereo. Specifically, it was the Mother Earth album "Living With the Animals," Tracy Nelson singing "Down So Low."

 It was the most beautiful music I'd ever heard in my life; Marya was the most beautiful young woman I'd ever seen. For most of the the next seven years we were inseparable, except for long months of separation as we pursued our own careers and education, romances, sometimes in the same place, but moving in different directions: at Bard, she stayed, I left; in Boulder, I stayed, she left. Always one of us would return, we'd pick up the beat and move forward. It was a serious friendship.

Marya started a dance company called something like the Resident Dance Group of Chichicastenango, a tribute to the realtor and arts patron Julien Studley, who gave her free use of a loft at Second Avenue and 12th Street. There were some good dancers in the group for our well-rehearsed 1974 performance. There was also me, with an important role in the finale. I sat on an old overstuffed chair, delivering a semi-improvised chat about coffee. "I like coffee." After I'd talked for a while, Marya came out from behind the curtain. At a set moment, I'd get up (full dressed) from my chair, doing a few modern-dance type moves, and catch Marya as she leapt into my arms, naked. Lights, curtain, bow. We were a hit. It was a serious friendship.

The summer of 1969 was also the summer of the moon landing, which we tried to watch, struggling to get a clear view on the small black and white rabbit ears TV. We tried to watch stoned, but my friend S.T., one of those alien types familiar from "Men in Black II," who worked for the post office and preferred heroin and codeine cough medicine, could not cop any weed from any of the doors he knocked on along E. 13th Street; he thought he knew people who might be selling something. I don't know why we didn't buy a bottle of tequila, or a bottle of vodka and mixers. It might have taken the edge off an adventurous but difficult summer.

Going to Woodstock was a no-brainer: Of course Marya and I didn't go. It was raining hard; we didn't have a car or ride. We were affronted by the Saturday headline on the cover of the Daily News: "Hippies Mired in Sea of Mud." Reactionary S.O.B.'s. But that didn't make us want to be there. We'd seen many of the bands. There was so much music, and it was an especially banner summer for the Schaeffer Music Festival at Wollman Rink in Central Park.

The Harlem Cultural Festival (HCF), which took place over six weeks in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). Multifaceted genius Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson made the movie, "Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised), " a masterpice of curation, from the film and sound that had not been seen since the event. The sound is outstanding; as Questlove writes in the notes to the recently released and essential Sony Legacy soundtrack album, there were 15 live microphones for the performances. That seemed like a lot to me: No wonder it sounded so good! It made Questlove rethink how he's used to having as many as 96 microphone hookups when he's just playing with a trio.

As he writes in the liner notes to the soundtrack, about the current technical capabilities versus what's heard at the Harlem fest:  "Who needs a perfect product? Or rather, who thinks that a perfect product is in fact perfect? What we want is a human one. This process, the fifteen microphones, the middle ground, the limits that are in fact liberation, produce exactly that result. That’s what’s captured. And that’s what captured me." 

We saw or could have seen many of the Harlem Cultural Festival acts in Central Park: I know we saw Ray Barretto, Cal Tjader, and Mongo Santamaria on the same show that summer for $2 or $3 at the Schaefer Music Festival that summer at the Wollman Rink. They played Wollman Rink on Friday, July 25, according to Setlist.com, and at the HCF on Sunday, July 27, with the addition of Herbie Mann with Roy Ayers and Sonny Sharrock. Mann played the Schaeffer Fest twice that summer, July 11 co-headliing with Eddie Harris, and August 9 with Ayers and Sharrock getting co-billing. In Harlem, it was Sharrock, a black rock/jazz guitarist, who does a controlled demolition job on Mann's take on "Hold On, I'm Coming," guitar with a density that leaves no room to breathe. Mann knows he's got to pour some extra flute soul for this crowd; over Ayers vibraphonic swing, Sharrock lets the listener know there's a riot goin' on, even if the others are playing nice. Jimi Hendrix famously set his guitar on fire at Woodstock; Sharrock burned his guitar in Harlem, from the inside out.

Before I realized so many of the same acts were accessible at the Wollman Rink, I got in touch with Marya to ask her if we would have gone to Harlem, had we known about it. We would have. I blame myself. I was already thinking about being a journalist, and the city was full of newspapers. But I never bought the Amsterdam News. We didn't know where Mount Morris Park was. I could imagine a movie: "Wayne and Marya Get Lost in Harlem." A comedy, with anxiety and panic attacks, because I was prone, but mostly Marya and I had fun anywhere we went. If we got lost, we could go into a barber shop! Marya's hair was naturally quite curly; if she grew it out it could have been an Afro, so maybe a beauty salon. People in the movie said the whole area smelled like fried chicken and Afro-Sheen. We would have enjoyed both.

We could have pulled it off, going to the festival, I'm pretty sure, even when Nina Simone recites the new poem "Are You Ready?" "Are you ready to kill if necessary? Is your mind ready, is your body? Are you ready to smash white things, blow-up buildings?" I could see us both raising our fists and shouting, "yeah!" because by the time anyone noticed, we'd be walking on our heels backwards, right to the Lenox Avenue/125th Street subway. Or maybe not. I was struck at how many people from the audience interviewed at that film were the same age I was: 19, and doing the same thing: being home from college. Members of a vast invisible black middle class that hardly anyone outside the community took note of.

In the movie, young TV reporter Bill Plante, asked members of the audience what they thought about the moon landing, which happened July 20, 1969. Mostly shrugs. It was cool, sort of, in some abstract way, but people wondered why all that money was spent to send some people to a place where nobody lived, instead of spending all that money on people right here who needed food, and shelter, and safety from the crime and heroin epidemic in their community. Harlem was not a ghetto; it was home. The Chambers Brothers note that in the opening performance, "Uptown": Harlem was the safe space for black America. That day when American astronauts landed on the moon, the Harlem Cultural Festival had Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and David Ruffin (all seen and heard) and Chuck Jackson. Ruffin, way overdressed for the occasion wearing a coat with a fur collar on this hot July afternoon, sings "My Girl," alone. A weird performance, but still: People in Harlem were not sitting home to watch a rocket on the moon; they were in the park watching Stevie Wonder.

One of the pleasures of the movie is that musical performers flows through the movie, although they become background for interviews with musicians, audience members, older now, who were there. The beat goes on. Some have suggested it might have been preferable to see entire performances at full volume. But that is why there is a soundtrack album. All 17 performances on the film are on this live album, with minimal introduction. Some talked during their sets, though, and some of it was profound. My favorite musician then and now, Ray Barretto: his song "Together" was all about life business, not show business. Barretto, one of the greats of Latin music, jazz, and Latin jazz, was Puerto Rican from east of the park: Spanish Harlem. "I know a beautiful truth," Barretto says during the song, never missing a beat. "The blood of mankind flows through me." And he makes the point every artist at the Woodstock Festival upstate tried to make, but none said it better than Barretto when he suggested that we all had to learn to live together here on Earth, "not on the moon."

Play loud the startling gospel segment: The Edwin Hawkins Singers, with their crossover hit, "Oh Happy Day," but you hear the nuance in the line about Jesus: "He taught us to watch, fight and pray." When the Staple Singers do "Help Me Jesus," Pops' guitar makes his family gospel group sound like Slim Harpo doing "Shake Your Hips" before the Rolling Stones covered it on "Exile on Main Street." When Mahalia Jackson comes out with the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the SCLC Operation Bread Basket Orchestra and Choir, there's another inflection moment. Exalted Mahalia Jackson is singing "Precious Lord," but feigns or is feeling overcome by heat, so she passes the microphone to young Mavis Staples, who has to reach like she has never had reach before, take her voice, body and spirit up the ladder, so close to heaven you can imagine she can see golden chariots. You see and hear her transformed from child to woman.

It happens with almost every act. The Fifth Dimension, led by Billy Davis Jr. and Marilyn McCoo, were top of the pops since 1967, with songs by Jimmy Webb ("Up, Up andAway") and Laura Nyro ("Stoned Soul Picnic" and "Wedding Bell Blues") to make them crossover stars. And in the spring and early summer of 1969, their medley from "Hair," the "tribal love rock musical," owned the pop radio with the "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In." There was no age of Aquarius dawning in Harlem, so the Fifth Dimension led in with "Don'cha Hear Me Callin' to Ya," a Rudy Stevenson song that may have been first recorded by Nina Simone on her "Pastel Blues" album. The Fifth Dimension turns it into a plea for acceptance, they needed and wanted that crowd, and there's more church in this version than the group was ever able to put on record.

Harlem met its own friendly space aliens, from the other coast: Sly and the Family Stone: a woman trumpet player. Hmm. A black-led band with a white drummer. Double hmm. Trying to convince everyone they were "Everyday People." They were.

In John Sayles' 1984 movie "Brother from Another Planet," our mute hero played by Joe Morton, learns the way of both white people and black people. A child shows Morton's character a magic trick on the subway: At an uptown train at the 96th Street stop, he makes all the white people disappear.

And this is why we need change the way we teach history in schools: not black history, American history. Tear up the whole curriculum, start over. I'm reading Louise Erdrich's last two novels, "The Sentence" and "The Night Watchman." Some of these stories take place in Minneapolis, where Erdrich owns a bookstore. But much takes place on her family's heritage own turf, the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Native American tribe. I did not grow up knowing these stories. Where I grew up in Queens and Long Island, the local tribes, which had disappeared perhaps 300 years earlier, were the Canarsee (sic) and the Rockaway. We just know them as neighborhoods in the area. We should start from there. We didn't fail history. The teaching of history failed all of us. Questlove's masterpieces visual and audio of historical re-creation might ignite a spark.