Untangled at last – Lansing City Pulse

Lawrence Cosentino A talented, self-taught kid from the east side of Detroit falls in love with music, cobbles together a drum kit, scrambles out of a life of poverty and physical abuse and becomes a top session drummer on both coasts, working with icons like Harry Belafonte and Aretha Franklin. If it sounds like a movie, it is — finally. Lansing recording engineer and filmmaker John Palmer spent six years painstakingly assembling “Spider Webb Untangled: The Life and Times of Legendary Drummer Kenneth Rice,” released Tuesday (Jan. 24) on DVD and the streaming platform Vimeo. Palmer had a minuscule budget and no crew — just himself and Spider. (We’ll call Rice “Spider,” because that’s what everyone calls him, and “Mr. Webb” seems a bit formal.) Yet the film stands proudly in the tradition of “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” the 2002 Paul Justman documentary on the Funk Brothers, the uncredited musicians who created the immortal drum licks, irresistible bass lines and indelible grooves that fueled dozens of Motown hits. Spider, 78, was a Funk Brother himself for a while, but that was only a part of his career. You can hear his drumming on the Temptations’ hits “Cloud Nine”
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