‘Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That’s the Weight of the World)’ Review: The Tribeca Festival Kicks Off with Questlove’s Indelible Portrait of the Great but Underrated EWF

From the moment he unleashed “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” it was clear that Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson was a born documentary filmmaker. But there’s a special quality to Questlove’s music films that only emerged fully in his second one, “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius).” And I felt it even more stirringly in “Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That’s the Weight of the World),” the Questlove jawn that opened the Tribeca Festival tonight on a note of rousingly nostalgic but timeless joy.

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What Questlove brings to his movies isn’t just his outlook as a musician but as a scholar of pet sounds. He knows and understands the music from the inside out, the way every note of it can echo through our pleasure centers. And that has a unique resonance in the case of Earth, Wind & Fire, since their music was its own delectable synthesis (as Lionel Richie puts it in the film, “The funk was the funk, but the chords were jazz, classical. Meanwhile, it’s sitting on this tribal African beat”). EWF created some of the most ecstatic songs of their era (their secret sauce was the fusion of funk/soul and pop), and Questlove illuminates that magic.   

I always like it when a music doc includes the voices of critics (as Lisa Cortés’s “Little Richard: I Am Everything” did). And while there are no official music critics in “Earth, Wind & Fire” (though there’s lots of sprightly commentary from the likes of Barack and Michelle Obama and Jimmy Jam and Stevie Wonder and Flea), Questlove fills that crucial space in a different way. The key critical voice in the movie is his. He’s analyzing the music, capturing what was bold and beautiful about it, scrutinizing how it sounded and what it meant, and he’s doing that with every cut and needle drop and impeccably observed detail about how the music was created (the film’s ace editors are Andrew Morrow, Matt Cascella, and Tim Ziegler). As a documentarian, Questlove isn’t an innovator; he’s a classicist, almost conventional in his approach. Yet he’s such a sharp director, with such an intoxicating appreciation of his subject, that he’s able to put the audience right inside the music.

That matters a lot with Earth, Wind & Fire, since as popular and cherished as the group has always been — they sold 100 million albums, had 16 Top 40 singles, and won six Grammys — there’s a way that EWF never totally occupied the place in the critical canon they deserved. Here’s why I say that. The leader of Earth, Wind & Fire, to the point that it was always his group, was Maurice White, the drummer, lead singer, composer, and producer who put EWF together and guided them with a virtuoso vision. White, who died in 2016, was a pop-soul giant. Yet if you listed the following artists — James Brown, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Michael Jackson, Prince — I doubt there are many who would jump up in protest and say, “Where’s Maurice White on that list?” He was the force of Earth, Wind & Fire, but part of his design for the band was to present them as a collective. And while White was a sexy dude, he wasn’t necessarily rock-star sexy (as those other artists were). With his receding hairline and amiable grin, he had a glorified everyman quality; he came off like the backstage soul scientist of EWF, not the demigod star. But he was a guiding light of genius. And in “Earth, Wind & Fire,” Questlove tells the band’s story, and Maurice White’s story, in a way that’s at once thrilling and haunting. He captures their rightful place in the pop cosmos.

White was born in Memphis, in 1941, to a 17-year-old single mother who left him to go to Chicago when he was just five. He was raised by someone named Big Mama, but the trauma of being abandoned never left him. Ten years later, he joined his mother in Chicago, where she had another family; suddenly, he had eight brothers and sisters. He plugged into the Chicago music scene, becoming the house drummer at Chess Records (where he collaborated with the composer and producer Charles Stepney, who would figure into EWF), and this led to his joining the Ramsey Lewis Trio as its drummer when he was just 15.

White wrote jingles for commercials (a gig that informed his future compositions as much as Lou Reed’s dabbling in pop songwriting at Pickwick Records did his). But as prized a place in the jazz world as he now occupied, he walked away from it all to move to L.A. and pursue his dream of a band called Earth, Wind and Fire, which he named after elements in his astrological chart (changing “Air” to “Wind”). White was into astrology and meditation and numerology and Egyptology and a lot of the hippie metaphysics that flourished in California in the ’70s. What he embraced was the vision behind it all — the utopian image of one world, which his multi-piece band would be an expression of. The original Earth, Wind and Fire were jazzy and free-form; they sounded like Sly and the Family Stone crossed with Sun Ra. But White, who craved success, realized they weren’t going anywhere, so he fired the entire band and rebooted it, starting all over (and now using two of his siblings).

The new EWF literally found its groove during a performance at the Uptown Theatre in Chicago, where White started playing the small African harp called a kalimba, and the rest of the music was layered on top of it. In the documentary, you see them, and the crowd, catch fire. Yet even that was just the baseline sound. There’s a terrific clip of the group’s early hit, “Mighty Mighty,” inspiring dance moves on “Soul Train,” but they didn’t become the Earth, Wind & Fire we know until 1975, when White was invited to record the soundtrack for a movie called “That’s the Way of the World.” He brought in Charles Stepney to collaborate on composing and arranging, and when you listen to the title song, it’s breathtaking, because you literally hear a whole new world. The sound is a balm. And the lyrics, laid against those percolating cadences (“Child is born, with a heart of gold,/Way of the world, makes his heart so cold”) was the entire Civil Rights era distilled into two lines, which felt as transformative, in its way, as a speech by MLK.

On the same album was “Shining Star,” and if you want to hear the difference between Sly and the Family Stone and Earth, Wind & Fire, it’s right there in that song. The groove of “Shining Star,” built on that chicken-scratch intro, is nasty hot-house funk; it’s pure Sly. But if it had been a Sly song, it would have just gone on like that. The EWF vibe kicks in during the chorus (“You’re a shining star, no matter who you are”), with the chords suddenly bopping around, talking to each other as if on happy pills. The verse is tethered to the earth; the chorus glides like a 747. In the movie, Stevie Wonder shocks Questlove, who is interviewing him, when Wonder admits that “I Wish,” which came out one year later, was heavily influenced by “Shining Star.” You can hear it; but how often do you hear Stevie Wonder admit that he ripped someone off?

It was White’s dream, which he made manifest, for Earth, Wind & Fire to become bigger, tighter, more enraptured, more melodically grand, more embracing of the cosmic wonders of Afro-futurism (their album covers started to resemble Afrocentric dioramas crossed with alien visitations), in ever more spectacular chest-baring costumes. He added a horn section, and he pumped up the group’s stage show by recruiting George Faison, the great Broadway choreographer of “The Wiz,” to orchestrate their moves, and Doug Henning, the world’s preeminent magician, to create such stunts as Verdine White, the group’s leonine bass player, levitating on his side while continuing to play the bass (an amazing effect, actually). This was transcendent spectacle. And the artists who came and saw it all included Michael Jackson (who would come to a show with a legal pad to write down ideas) and Prince.

Maurice White preached a New Age vision of no drugs and alcohol, but we get a fascinating glimpse of his complexities from his longtime partner, Marilyn White, who still views him with affection. During the last third of the film, his problematic side begins to creep in. He was a horndog who insisted on his right to sleep around on the road (“I’m a star,” he told Marilyn). He had several children out of wedlock and treated the other band members in a more and more exploitative fashion, chronically underpaying them and denying them credits. Philip Bailey, the great EWF singer with a shining star of a voice, is refreshingly candid about how angry he was at White. And the whole movie, while nothing short of celebratory when it comes to EWF’s music, does not fall into that category of music-doc-as-feel-good-hagiography. Questlove is too much of a humanist to soft-pedal’s Maurice White’s contradictions. They only make the story the film is telling more indelible.     

White, at a certain point, became convinced that he was being visited by aliens. That was part of his ’70s-mystical thing, but according to the film it was partly out of this conviction that he spun the song “Fantasy,” which was eye-opening to me since it’s my favorite Earth, Wind & Fire song. Questlove has it play over the closing credits (behold its supernal beauty). That said, he’s right to have the movie culminate in a glorious group meditation on the majesty of “September,” which it presents as the quintessential EWF song. Just watch this sequence! It’s such a great song, but it’s also intoxicating filmmaking, doing justice to a pop miracle.