Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central, Welcome to the show. This
Speaker 1: is great. I love this. There are few people I
Speaker 1: know who have had more jobs than you and excel
Speaker 1: at more jobs. I know many people who have had
Speaker 1: more jobs than you, but for a bad reason. I
Speaker 1: don't know many people who have had as many jobs
Speaker 1: as you have and just done well. And I was
Speaker 1: one of those people though, because at one point I
Speaker 1: thought there was honor and sort of matching James Brown
Speaker 1: and the hardest working man in the show business. Um,
Speaker 1: once I stop doing everything, than a whole new world
Speaker 1: of magic open that I never knew of. One of
Speaker 1: them is what I called storytelling or directing, which this
Speaker 1: definitely wasn't on my my my bingo card back in
Speaker 1: two thousand five. But if you look at it, everything
Speaker 1: I've done to this point is preparing for this moment,
Speaker 1: this point, because I mean, those forty hours could go
Speaker 1: the forty hours of the footage that set in the
Speaker 1: basement for five decades. I still don't wait. Let's let's
Speaker 1: just talk about that. I still don't understand this because
Speaker 1: nobody has seen all of these performances, nobody has seen
Speaker 1: these moments, nobody has seen what happened in Harlem. In
Speaker 1: I didn't just start with that. So how did you
Speaker 1: even begin to find forty hours of footage of it?
Speaker 1: Would be like it would be like somebody now finding Hey,
Speaker 1: I found a concert was jay Z and Beyonce and
Speaker 1: like Michael Jackson and like just like everyone this film.
Speaker 1: And I refused to believe it. I get word backstage
Speaker 1: to the Tonight show that these two gentlemen want to
Speaker 1: talk to me about these uh so called blackwoodstock and
Speaker 1: I was like, black woodstock, and well, I'm thinking of
Speaker 1: woodstock and you're saying there was a black version of that.
Speaker 1: And then I was like, well, wait a minute. I'd
Speaker 1: like to think that I was a music expert or
Speaker 1: new things, like how come I didn't know that over
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand people gathered in Harlem for a collective
Speaker 1: six weekend affair with Stevie Stevie Wonders last Don't bb
Speaker 1: King maybe Staples, Like how come I didn't know about this?
Speaker 1: And you know, I was like, call another you had
Speaker 1: a Blackwoodstocker dinner. I never heard of it, and so
Speaker 1: I don't understand how that's poassi. I didn't believe it.
Speaker 1: I didn't believe that it happened. So the very first meeting,
Speaker 1: I just thought that these two were trying to just
Speaker 1: scare me for like tonight show tickets or whatever. That's
Speaker 1: what I thought it was. And then they came by
Speaker 1: the next week with a hard drive, and even then
Speaker 1: I was like, well, the footage must be beat or
Speaker 1: maybe Stevie had an off day or right, And everything
Speaker 1: I saw was magic. And to this day that the
Speaker 1: reason why even when I agreed to do this. At first,
Speaker 1: I was just going to compile like seventeen songs, yes,
Speaker 1: like a mixtape, you know, that sort of thing. But
Speaker 1: the curiosity kept burning me inside that Like the question
Speaker 1: I asked is is is black eracer this easy? And
Speaker 1: that's the thing I think oftentimes, when you know, when
Speaker 1: we speak up like back Lives Matter or um, you know,
Speaker 1: is that racist or not racist? I think people think
Speaker 1: of the most extreme definition of it, Like in their
Speaker 1: minds they're saying, well, I've never once hung somebody to
Speaker 1: across or castrated that we're setting more fire, so I'm
Speaker 1: not racist. But there's other there's benine levels of racism
Speaker 1: as well, and even as sort of the sort of
Speaker 1: the dismissal of like, well we'll pass. You know, we're good.
Speaker 1: For a lot of people, their first view of us
Speaker 1: was either in black face or mired in trouble or controversy,
Speaker 1: or you know, getting arrested, getting hosed down. And but
Speaker 1: black joys the component that shows that we're human, you know.
Speaker 1: And this could have been that moment had it allowed
Speaker 1: been you know, the spotlight that Woodstock had had gotten.
Speaker 1: It was also a crucial time as well, you know,
Speaker 1: some of six. So many things will have in America.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot was changing in the country. And
Speaker 1: I remember watching this. I had never seen it. I've
Speaker 1: never seen something like this. To your point, a lot
Speaker 1: of what you see from that time period is a
Speaker 1: very one dimensional view of black America. So it seems
Speaker 1: like Black America has only existed in strife for a
Speaker 1: long time exactly, and only strife, I should mention. And
Speaker 1: then you watch this and you're like, man, this this
Speaker 1: is I couldn't believe the scale. I couldn't believe the
Speaker 1: party people were happening. I couldn't be having I couldn't
Speaker 1: believe like who was there and how they were there,
Speaker 1: who was performing and what it's signified when you when
Speaker 1: you told that story, what do you think the significance
Speaker 1: of this event was the significance of the event, at
Speaker 1: least what I got from it was that this was
Speaker 1: a community trying to heal. And so for me, shall
Speaker 1: I say a really beautiful ah, gander into the infinite
Speaker 1: possibilities of what the future is. You're seeing Stevie under
Speaker 1: a mirror two years before his his genius period. You're
Speaker 1: seeing Nina Simone give one of her very first non jazz,
Speaker 1: non love song, non Broadway musical performances, like Nina Simone
Speaker 1: stepping into her activism shoes in real time. So you're
Speaker 1: seeing all these artists, but really you're also just watching
Speaker 1: the people. And that's the thing, like when I say,
Speaker 1: like we were robbed of that not just as black
Speaker 1: people put the world to see, you know, oh, families
Speaker 1: just like mine, just like mine, Happiness just like and
Speaker 1: that's and that's sort of the that's sort of the
Speaker 1: missing fiber element and telling our stories from the civil
Speaker 1: rights period. People don't know. You look at America's story
Speaker 1: over and over. It's such a giant country, you know,
Speaker 1: where if people don't have an interaction with the people
Speaker 1: on the ground, you don't know a black person, you
Speaker 1: don't meet a Hispanic person. You don't know. Do you
Speaker 1: get what I'm saying, don't? I mean, maybe you don't
Speaker 1: even That's what I loved about this documentary. I think
Speaker 1: it's to what you're saying, is it showed a joy,
Speaker 1: it showed a normality, it showed a there's just a
Speaker 1: human element that I didn't even know I was looking for,
Speaker 1: Like because I didn't know that this was going to
Speaker 1: invoke some sort of emotion out of Merlin mccou and
Speaker 1: she's watching herself. I'm thinking, like you hosted Solid Gold,
Speaker 1: Like how do you remember this very specific show back then?
Speaker 1: But you know when she started to really open up
Speaker 1: about code switching and you know, something that every black
Speaker 1: person relates to on the professional job, and even I
Speaker 1: needed to see that, like, Wow, even when you're the
Speaker 1: number one singing group in the world, like you still
Speaker 1: have to code switch, and you still have to always
Speaker 1: be on guard, and you're never comfortable, and you know
Speaker 1: you have longings for just love from your people. You
Speaker 1: just want to be accepted. I won't. Like, I think
Speaker 1: I think you deserve every award that this film has
Speaker 1: one and is going to win because it's you know,
Speaker 1: you know what it is. It's it's it's telling a
Speaker 1: story from history that is lost. It's sharing a joy
Speaker 1: from history that is that is lost. And I think
Speaker 1: it's something that people need today where you go like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, we can fight here, we can argue here,
Speaker 1: we can we can we can deal with what we
Speaker 1: need to deal with. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: don't forget joy, because that's what makes us human. So
Speaker 1: thank you man, thank you for being here, thank you
Speaker 1: for the documentary. Thank you. I'm not I'm gonna watch
Speaker 1: it again. I watched the clip and now I'm back.
Speaker 1: It's currently streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus, and it
Speaker 1: will make its broadcast television debut February on ABC. The
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Speaker 1: Central podcast