Ed: Now, two of the Funk Brothers were in poor health during the filming, right?

Allan: Yeah--both of the drummers. A bunch of them were in poor health, and they still are, but they just play. But "Pistol" Allen had lung cancer, and unfortunately, died right after filming was complete. Uriel Jones needed a quintuple bypass. He had it right after we finished filming.

Ed: And yet, both of them played astonishing well onstage.

Allan: Oh yeah, because they knew they'd never get that chance again. They were willing to die, if need be, to get their stories out. They knew that this was it; they'd never get another chance.

Artists and Repertoire

Ed: How did you choose the songs and artists for the movie?

Allan: There were some differences of opinion between the director and I, but we had to have a certain amount of predictable big hits. Because, to the older generation, you take a song like "My Girl", and it's been overdone. But a lot of young kids haven't heard "My Girl", and have no idea what tunes like that are all about.

But by the same token, for the older crowd, I didn't want to do what I refer to as the "bar mitzvah-wedding medley", which is "Dancing In the Streets", "Heat Wave", "My Girl". I didn't want everything to be predictable; I wanted to get a couple of nuggets in there like, "My Baby Loves Me", and some of the lesser-known songs.

Whereas the director really wanted to go after the big hits. So we mostly went on that thing, and most of the songs are pretty much blockbusters: "Grapevine", "Heat Wave", "Ain't No Mountain", and songs like that.

Ed: Joan Osborne's rendition of "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" was a real knockout.

Allan: Well, that's the highpoint of the performances. And that comes to the second part of your question. The stars we got were the ones who were the takers. You can't name a major star that we didn't go after, but most of them wouldn't give us the time of day. And it floored me, because I figured that people would be crawling all over each other to play with these guys, but it wasn't that way--it was very difficult getting people to play with them. So the people who stepped forward for our film are heroes to me.

Ed: I think you had mentioned on the DVD that Osborne was one of the first stars who agreed to be in the film.

Allan: We had asked her seven years before, when we had a different deal on the table, and she said yes, and she was hot as hell then--she was right in the middle of her tour for "What If God Was One of Us". So she had a lot of heart to agree to do the movie back then.