Fool in Love spotlights classic R&B outside Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium

Gladys Knight performs during Saturday's Fool in Love festival in Inglewood.

By Mikael WoodPop Music Critic

Sept. 2, 2024 10:31 AM PT

Dressed in white-and-silver paisley-print jackets glittering under the late-afternoon sun, the members of the Stylistics steadied themselves as a rotating stage carried them before an audience gathered on the blacktop outside Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium.

Moments before, Tower of Power had been entertaining the crowd with its muscular, horn-led funk. Now, as that group spun slowly out of view, it was time for the gentlemanly Philly-soul greats — or at least a modern version of them — to take the baton at Saturday’s Fool in Love festival.

“Let’s get pregnant all over again,” singer Jason Sharp said, cuing the band to slide between the still-silky sheets of “Break Up to Make Up.”

The turntable-like stage — a kind of lazy Susan of vintage R&B — was just one part of the plan devised by Fool in Love’s organizers to showcase the dozens of acts on the bill for the inaugural edition of this one-day fest. Among the other performers spread across four stages were — deep breath here — Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Al Green, Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick, Santana, Nile Rodgers & Chic, Charlie Wilson and the Isley Brothers, as well as latter-day iterations of the Temptations, the Spinners, the Delfonics, the Chi-Lites, the O’Jays and Kool & the Gang.

The show began around 11 a.m. and ended about 12 hours later; some acts on early in the day — including the Pointer Sisters and Evelyn “Champagne” King — had all of 10 or 15 minutes to do their thing. At one point in the afternoon, after Knight had started her set a little late, it looked like Khan might come on a neighboring stage before Knight was finished — an epic battle of the divas in the making. Fortunately, they worked out the transition; peace reigned across the grounds of Hollywood Park.

Produced by Live Nation and Redrock Entertainment in coordination with C3 Presents, Fool in Love was the latest in a series of recent festivals built — unlike the willfully eclectic Coachella — around a single genre or scene. Think of last year’s emo-focused When We Were Young in Las Vegas or Besame Mucho, a Latin music smorgasbord served up in December at Dodger Stadium.

The Stylistics perform on Saturday at the Fool in Love festival outside Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium.

Fans eagerly complain on social media about the creature discomforts of these overstuffed shows: the long lines, the high-priced drinks, the overlapping sets that mean you have to choose between your two favorite bands. Yet the consistent popularity of the festivals — both When We Were Young and Besame Mucho are set to return later this year — points to an appetite for a real-world equivalent of digital streaming’s one-stop-shopping experience.

Things to complain about at Fool in Love, which drew a crowd in the tens of thousands, included Warwick’s 12:30 p.m. set time (though you can imagine that may have been by her request) and the nightmarish bottleneck that formed near the so-called Cruisin’ stage as folks struggled to squeeze in to see Robinson and Green; one group of fans solved the problem by tearing apart a section of fencing to create a let’s-call-it-alternate entrance behind a row of portable toilets.

For the most part, though, Saturday’s show seemed to proceed as smoothly as the turning of that lazy Susan — provided you didn’t mind schlepping half a mile to watch Morris Day & the Time after catching the presently Lionel-less Commodores.

So how was the music? You wouldn’t describe any of the heavyweights as being particularly inspired by their proximity to one another; indeed, any number of easy crowd-pleasing wins went unfulfilled: How cool would it have been had Rodgers appeared during Ross’ performance to scratch out his deathless guitar lick from “I’m Coming Out”? Or think about Ross and Richie teaming up to sing their classic duet, “Endless Love,” live and in person for the first time in ages.

Alas, these would-be highlights were not to be — casualties of either routine or a lack of instinct for how valuable viral moments are made.

That said, no one at Fool in Love was anything less than a pleasure to behold, even if Richie could probably have left his goofy EDM remix of “Running With the Night” back in Vegas, where he’s got a residency at the Wynn. He spent more time than you might’ve expected on old Commodores jams — “Easy” and “Brick House,” of course, but also “Zoom” and the lovely “Still” — amid the polished pop hits that made him one of the biggest acts of the 1980s. And he told canned jokes that made you smile in spite of yourself.

“I got more songs,” he said near the end, and that he did: a pensive “Say You, Say Me,” a grandiose “We Are the World” (which he introduced with a hard-to-parse spiel about what he learned during the pandemic about humanity), an inevitable “All Night Long (All Night).”

Lionel Richie performs in a white jacket over a black top and pants at Fool in Love.

Ross glided through her set of Motown oldies and disco bangers with the airy nonchalance she’s been emanating for decades. “You know I’m 80 years old, right?” she asked after changing out of one sequined gown into another. Robinson wore red leather pants to match a billowy red shirt as he tapped into the eternal romantic ache of “The Tracks of My Tears”; Green tossed roses into the audience as his horn section punctuated the gently pleading “Let’s Stay Together.”

At a festival long on eye-catching outfits, Wilson was perhaps the eye-catching-est in a light-up jacket that pulsed in time to the blistering robo-soul groove of the Gap Band’s “Burn Rubber (Why You Wanna Hurt Me).” And Khan, no surprise, may have brought the day’s most impressive vocals, riffing with undiminished rhythmic agility as her tight little funk band chewed through “Ain’t Nobody.”

Were there any grand conclusions to be drawn from Fool in Love? Maybe you left the show thinking about all the ways technology has shaped R&B over the last 70 years. Maybe you noticed the diversity of the crowd along racial and generational lines and wondered what it is about this music that speaks to so many different people. (Probably the eternal romantic ache.)

“You can’t hurry love,” Ross sang in the glorious Supremes song of that title — an aphorism everyone at Fool in Love kept rushing to reiterate.