Wesley Morris Returns with ‘The Wonder of Stevie’

Published Oct 16, 2024, 8:35 AM

Today, culture critic Wesley Morris (The New York Times) returns to Talk Easy for a conversation about The Wonder of Stevie, his new podcast with the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions.

At the top, Wesley unpacks Stevie Wonder’s legendary five-album run from 1972-1976, his recent “battleground states” tour in the run up to the election, and how his relationship to Stevie’s music has evolved in the process of making this limited series.

To listen to The Wonder of Stevie, stream here or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at sf@talkeasypod.com.

Pushkin Wesley Morris, Hi, I say them, how are you? I'm good? How are you doing?

I'm okay. You're talking to a person who has just I've been I'm at work.

I've been working.

You know.

Is this peak Wesley or no? Falling off a cliff.

It's like a little cliffy. But I mean, I'm alright, I'm alright. If I were to screening right now, I definitely would be at that moment in the movie where I'm like, I hope this movie is interesting enough to keep me going and not having me fight to keep going.

You hope you're watching Megalopolis.

I mean, there are parts of that movie where I think it's fine if you fall asleep, Sir.

This episode is following Francis Ford Coppola. We cannot accept the listen.

Here's what I'll say about that movie. I think, you know, I mean, it does operate by his own rhythms, right, and it's sort of like you. I mean, but I also think that it's fun watching people lose their minds over all kinds of aspects of this movie, like and the people freaking out about how little money it made, Like did you just meet this man?

I don't really.

I mean, I know he wants people to see it, but I also think he didn't make a movie to be number one of the box office. I just I don't know. I love the spirit of this thing. It is an unholy mess, but there are so many wonderful culpolaisms in it, and it sort of meets up with reality in these interesting ways, and some of that performances. People are going for it, and I like that.

I also love the spirit of the movie. And usually when we have you on the show, we're talking about movies, but today we're talking about this new podcast of yours. It's about Stevie Wonder. It's called The Wonder of Stevie. The show is produced by Higher Ground, which is the Obama's company, and on the show, actually quite often on the show, you interview President Obama about his love of Stevie Wonder, and then the first question you ask him is why does Stevie Wonder matter so much to you? And I feel like that's a good place for us to start. Why does he matter so much to Wesley Morris?

Ah, I think, you know, the critic part of me just feels like Stevie Wonder is somehow, despite everything under appreciated, you know. I mean, he's got more awards than he can probably cow. His album sales are very, very very good. His career has been long. He's on tour as you and I are speaking.

He's on a ten day tour where he will be performing in battleground states, yes, for the upcoming election, on behalf of the Harris Walls ticket.

I just sort of feel like there is more to say about some of his achievements. I also think that, like one set of his achievements happened fifty years ago. You know, that's an eternity, So like, why not go back half a century and sort of think through something that's happened, something someone did a triumphant artistic achievement that really very few people in the history of recorded music has ever done, to have made five masterpiece albums in a row in a tiny window of time, like five albums and basically officially it's five years. We had a real fact checker research debate about whether we could get away with four years. But well, we're saying five albums in five years because nineteen seventy two to nineteen seventy six is actually five years.

So this is referred to in the show as Stevie's classic period.

Yes.

Yes, for people that maybe haven't put on intervisions recently, explain why you wanted to focus on this.

Period because there's no precedent for what he achieved. Basically, so Stevie Wonder when he's twenty one, decides that he wants to make music for himself. Essentially, he's signed to Motown Records. Motown Records, of course, is famous for its factory approach to hit making, and some of the greatest songs ever written and recorded have come off that assembly line, and Stevie didn't want to make assembly line songs anymore.

And he was on the assembly line since the age of like eleven or twelve, right.

Yes, since he was a very small child in Detroit, Michigan, performing live as part of the Motown Review. His first big hit is Fingertips Part Two, which is a lot like one of the strangest smash hits you're ever going to hear, because it's the second half of a live performance where all the juicy stuff is. And for anybody who's never heard Fingertips Part Two but you have heard Shaka khans I feel for you the it's that little interlude in the middle where you know somebody who in this case is Stevie Wonder says say, yeah, that's that's little Stevie Wonder.

Not a bad impression.

Uh, it's terrible.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

So he gets to twenty one, the age where the average person who goes to college finishes, and he's like, I'm ready to become an adult, Barry Gordy, what are you going to do about that? Should I leave the label? Also, where's all the money that you were holding as part of my kid savings account? Basically, and he negotiates this deal that you know, gets him paid very well, but more important is that it gives him the freedom to it express all of these ideas that he's been storing in his brain for all this time. And he meets these two engineers who are also musicians, named Robert Margoleff and Malcolm Cecil, and they have this amazing synthesizer that Sam, are you a doctor who person? I'm not, you don't have to be, but basically's doctor who gets around the universe traveling in something called the Tartists. This thing is officially nothing like the tartist, but if the tartist had had a funky cousin, it would be this synthesizer called Tanto, which is just a room sized synthesizer that's got all these knobs and plugs and sockets and you stick chords here and pull them out of there. And the three of them managed to pull off four of the five greatest albums anybody's ever made. They did Music of My Mind, which comes out in seventy two, Talking Book, which comes out at the end of seventy two.

Can you imagine you just go, like I'm putting out Music of my Mind. Anyone who would put that out now, we would go like de'angelo take a decade, take two, We'll be ready for you when you come back.

I mean, I think it's like if Frank Ocean, I mean, I have very mixed feelings about Blonde. If Frank Ocean Scene did what Frank Ocean seemed like he could have done in twenty twelve, when Channel Orange came out and you got, you know, a second album six to seven months later, then a year after that, you got an even better album. Nobody's I mean, Kanye West might be as prolific and as great an artist, and he definitely peaked, right.

What do you mean?

I mean, I'm Joe Lokev's.

I was actually gonna answer that question. The thing that's impressive about this streak is it actually happened. You don't have to qualify it at all. There's no look. If you did Elton John, for instance, you'd have to account for the fact that there are some albums in there that aren't as great as mad Man Across the Water or Honky Tonk Chatau or Goodbye yelebrig Road right, but he was feeling it for a good five six years. But Stevie Wonder's situation is much more straightforward, like he made five albums and five years in their aw masterpieces and nobody disagrees. Some people might like some of them more than others, but that is basically the streak or the achievement here.

One of the reasons you've made this show is because quote Stevie Wonder's music is our history, but it's also important because it's our present too. Where do you see him in our present moment? Why him whin now?

Part of this tour where he's touring, this current tour, where he's touring these battleground states, is about how disappointed. The person he was in nineteen seventy two and seventy three, seventy four, seventy five to seventy six is in our present moment the guy who fought to make Martin Luther King's birthday and national holiday.

I should note for the listener the tour is called Sing Your Song as We Fix our Nation's Broken Heart, and it was about calling for joy over anger, which could have been said in nineteen seventy two just the same.

But the music was the joy, right. The music was supplying that energy. It was also doing the work of helping to try to heal all this fractiousness and disappointment and anger among black people, but between black people and white people. The music was a tonic for war. It was a tonic for you know, Fricher Nixon's corruption and racism, and you know, just utter bizarreness. It was a tonic for where the economy wound up. By the time forward and Carter in the White House, it's preparing us for the possibility of that Ronald Reagan could be president. The person who made this new I think he understood the power of it. I think he understood musicologically, what music can do for people. But it also was coming from a place that was never audibly anyway, his brain. There's a guy in the first episode, a professor at the Berkeley College of Music, Rick McLoughlin. You know, I could have done the whole show with him. There's something about the way he made me understand and the way he makes a listener understand just what something like you are the sunshine of my life is doing. Is music to your mood is very powerful. So Stevie's aware of the difference he can make. And I think his disappointment right now is that we have forgotten about who we can be and what else is inside us, and he's trying to access that again.

And do you think people are capable of hearing it?

Great question. I have not been to all the shows. I don't know how many you know, people who need to hear this message are out there, But you know, I think more centrally, the thing that Stevie Wonder understood was that, you know, if you listened to Sir Duke, I mean, music is in everybody. You know, you can feel it all over. It's there. It's the language we all understand.

I want to talk about how you made this show because anytime I'm asked about Talk Easy and the dream guest that I'd like to have on, my answer since the beginning, since twenty sixteen, when you first came on on like episode three or four, my answer was, and still is, Stevie Wonder. And as I think you know painfully, well, Stevie doesn't really do interviews. I mean outside of talking to Oprah, he doesn't talk to the press. There's no Stevie Wonder documentary. There's no Stevie Wonder biopic, I mean, at least not yet.

There's no memoir.

There's no memoir. Tell me why was the limited series podcast the medium that he wanted to partake in? Is he a big Still Processing fan?

But he, like Grantland, Well, I should say when I signed on to do this show, I somewhat naive, I now can say naively believed that what the show was going to be was me talking to Stevie Wonder for six episodes. I know, haha.

How how quickly did you realize that that wasn't going to be the case?

Oh well, before we got near a studio, well before we even had our first meeting.

And why was that? I don't know.

I know now that we've made the show that this is a much, much, much different show than me talking to Stevie Wonder about these songs. And I don't think I would be the right person to do that work. Honestly. Like the problem with me as an interviewer sometimes, especially with a person like Stevie Wonder, is I already know how I feel. I know what this work is doing I would benefit from. I mean, to hear someone like Questlove talk to Stevie Wonder is a completely different story, right.

But by the way, I should note Questlove himself, who hosts a podcast, has never had Stevie Wonder on a show.

It's just hard to do Stevie's He's not even a I mean, is he elusive? I wouldn't he? Just he speaks through the music. Music is his mode of communication. I don't think it really serves him intellectually to sit there and explain to you his songs. He did it. Why should he have to explain what he did? That's where I commit. He could easily just be talking to Oprah every night if he wanted to. But I feel like the way that he feels his gift is in his functionality to use a terrible concept for Stevie Wonder, but like his purpose in this world is to spread love, joy feelings to Rile through music, to sit in front of him, sit in the studio and talk to an egghead like me, it doesn't, it doesn't do what he wants to be doing with his life and his talent and his time.

Michelle Obama, who's now his friend, said that talking to Stevie Wonder on the phone, which they do from time to time, she describes it as the Stevie you hear on the song as from songs in the Key of Life is does Stevie you get on the phone? Yes? Was that your experience with him?

Yeah? I mean he also he's so human.

What do you mean by that?

You know, he's got a set of emotions that characterize his personality. You know when you and I talk, Sam, there are things I'm eager to talk about, and there are things that like, I mean, you rarely ask things questions that I don't want to answer. But there's just like ways of thinking about yourself that aren't really fun, Like for you to do a thing that you sometimes do, which is like read me back to me, or something I receive it because it's very kind and also it is illuminating. I did not have that experience with Stevie Wonder. I think it was funny, like the you know, Barack Obama and Stevie Wonder and I was sitting in a studio and this is for the bonus episode that will come out in December. Unless you're an audible subscriber, which means you can hear it now. I mean, I think that our goal was to just try to like learn something about the experience that the President and I had just had having these conversations about this music, and even for President Obama, like this is the music of his childhood, this is music that makes him him. You ask what my experience, You know, what Stevie Wonder means to me very different from what it means to Barack Obama, where like he was elemental a food group but also like a major cool, older brother, rock star sort of person. And to sit in a room with that guy is I mean, I'm imputing feeling to the President, but it had to have been very special. I know for a fact that it was, even though they're in each other's lives in some way, to sit there and interrogate him about his work on a microphone with Stevie wonders sitting at a keyboard answering sometimes in song was not nothing but well, I can say for a fact that Stevie wouldn't have wanted to sit for six episodes of a podcast about one of his great achievements because he didn't do it. There might not be a reason for him to go back. He's not a backlooker in that way. He's not a nostalgist. He has written one nostalgic song in his entire career, and it's one of his best songs. But it also has pointed about remembering where we came from, and it's Sir Duke, oh, two nostalgic songs. Sorry, I wish is the other one.

So you've made these six episodes in which you have looked back and looked forward. You spent three years with this material in an out of production. Another show was originally called The Stevie Years. Now it's the Wonder of Stevie.

Listen, you don't even want to talk about titles.

I do want to talk about it because your former boss, Bill Simmons, he loves to talk about how in documentaries we are increasingly entering this hagiographic era. Yes, yes, And a large part of that is because the participation of the subject is often contingent on final cut. Even your friend Ezra Edelman, who spent years making a documentary about Prince, is now himself facing a reality in which that movie may never come out because the estate has problems with it. How do you navigate that relationship on this show, given Stevie's involvement.

I'd never thought about it. It never came up once. And you know, the thing that makes the answer to your question easy is that we are dealing with some of the greatest music ever recorded. This is not someone who has a track record of cruelty, abuse, racism, corruption. His music is the antidote to that, and it's not a smoke screen for behavior he was participating in the contradicts his brand.

So to speak.

Are you referring to Prince on that.

No, I mean, not with all of those characterizations, but I mean, you know, the thing about Prince is that he was tough. He was really complicated and difficult to work with. And you know, Ezra wanted to make a movie about a person. We wanted to make a movie about a person who made great art. Ezra's mission was entirely different from ours. It's funny because I actually think that his Prince movie and our podcast, they're kind of weirdly in conversation with each other.

How do you mean, I think.

That you know?

And I mean this almost purely formally, and how from the standpoint of rigor right. I'm still upset, for instance, that we do not talk about every single song on all five of these albums. I'm just I'm still upset, like somebody to me the other day that we didn't really talk about I wish I wish we had talked about I wish more like I think I mentioned it once, but you know, I wish we had spent more time in music of my mind. But I think that the presiding thrill of the show, and I can say this is a person who's had to listen to it a lot. And I made it with Josh Gwen who produced it, in Janelle Anderson who produced it, and a bunch of really great musicians who made it sound great, these fantastic engineers. It just brought out the best in everybody. But we also just wanted to make something that was worthy of the man and the music itself, and I think this show it achieves that. And I think Ezra wanted to make something that really got to the bottom of a person that we've never really thought about as a complex human being because the music was so good that it obscured the personal in a lot of ways, and he was such an outside is you know iconic?

You know?

My metric for how famous are you is? Can you be recognized in silhouette form? Is there a silhouette version of you where people are just like, Yep, that's Prince, Yep, that's Stevie Wonder, Yep, that's Michael Jackson, Yep, that's Michael Jordan. Is that Dolly Parton? I think it is. I think that that is true icon status when there is iconography that says this is you.

I can't wait until the next podcast to do and the cover art is a silhouette of you.

I don't think that I have a very distinctive silhouette, to be honest. But also, I mean, just like we're out, we're running out of those honestly, truly, I mean, but anyway, the point is basically that Prince's silhouette ossensibly obscures and penumberates all the things that make him human and Ezra, I mean he spends no nine hours basically discovering, extracting, listening to people talk about princess humanity, and it's just it is I mean, it is just. It's a great achievement and you know, a crime that we might not ever see.

It well before people hear the pilot of this episode. Okay, I want to ask you one or two more things. You spent all this time with the material, all this time thinking about Stevie, talking to his collaborators, talking to the Obamas, about Stevie talking to Stevie himself in that time. Now that the show is out and no longer only yours, has your relationship to him changed? Oh?

Of course, I mean it's deeper. I mean I really really feel like I understand this music in a way that I hadn't previously. And this was music I knew right before we started.

What do you hold more dear about the music?

Now?

That class period between seventy two and seventy six.

It changed music in an interesting way, Like it's not like Giorgio Moroder, you know, in Craftwork, kind of pushing us toward electronic music. But Stevie Wonder definitely is alongside Moroder in craft work, pushing, pushing, pushing, using this technology to find new ways of expression. He meant a lot to a lot of people, and not for no reason. And I think that he is important to our understanding of ourselves, and he should be as important to our understanding of ourselves as someone like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. He is a civil rights hero, but he also is something. He's in some ways a product of the movement in that, you know, his music realized, you know, one of the early hopes of the movement, which was to bring people together to share humanity and to acknowledge an quality among us. I think that was something I'd never really considered before. The idea that I'm comparing Stevie ones that are Martin Luther King and meaning it and not hedging. I don't think I could have done that before I made this show. So that's a deepening. But also just like as music, Oh my god, unbelievable, I'll never hear. I mean, I forced myself to pick a favorite album.

Of those five of those five, do you want to share it? Oh?

It's episode four, fulfilling this his first finale where I do declare that it's my favorite of these five albums.

This is maddening. I almost threw my phone when I heard this.

Oh, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people, Well, what's yours?

Music of my Mind?

Oh well, that's I mean, that's still not the other three.

It's not.

Or the two that everybody recognizes as their favorite. Innervisions are songs on the Key of Life is not fair songs in the Key of Life.

It's basically two records. It is two records.

I can't choose that, right, No, I agree with you, but we're in a strong minority, right. Music of my Mind sometimes is really number two because it's a musically the densest, richest, most playful musically, and you know, personality wise, Of the five, it's the one where he's figuring out how to use this synthesizer technology, and it's the one where you can hear him expressing emancipation from Barry Gordy's you know, from getting under Barry Gordy's thumb in ways that only a twenty one year old would or could by like being lusty and saying the N word, and you know, doing things that you know he couldn't do running around the offices of Motown as a kid. The nine songs on that album, they're all every single one of them is a soupy, chowdery gem. This is a person who is not done. He still wants to be making music that is speaking to the thing that is most important to him and ever gonna not be important, which is like, we need to get our shit together and fix this place and hurry up.

Stevie may not want to hear about this great streak, but I thoroughly enjoyed hearing it, and I think our listeners will be excited to hear it. This is an earnest question to end.

I love this show because it's the freest face to be ernest. Honestly, I always say this to you. It's like, you know, I've I have a real therapist, and sometimes you.

The question is in this moment, as he's on this tour, I asked you about whether people can hear the music, But the real question is can they hear the message?

You know?

People I don't know, I really don't know. I mean, well, I will say that one thing about this show is that even for me listening to it, I'm like, oh, I forgot that. I thought that that is a really interesting insight. Landa Adams, who's one of the guests on the show. You know, Rick McLaughlin has every single one of these people, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Jenellmena, so many of the other people.

You know.

I mentioned Rick Alex Pappadina's Questlove. There's so much insight here about people's personal relationship to this man and his music. I think it'll be instructive for people to hear this music in a deeper, more conscious way, and it will no longer be passive. I don't know if people can hear the message, but I think a show like this will lead them toward it.

Well, I thank you for that, and as always, I appreciate you sitting and talking, even if it feels vaguely like therapy.

I love therapy. Please, I mean, don't misunderstand earnestness therapy. I love it.

And now here is the first episode of the Wonder of Stevie from Lesley Morris.

Thank you, Sam.

Please listen to that bassline. That's an engine pumping. We're about to drive somewhere. No no, no, no no, We're about to.

Fly and Yallona Fly Maya.

This is the beginning of Love Having You Around, the first song on Music of My Mind, the first album in a run of albums by Stevie Wonder, a run almost universally understood to be the most miraculous, most inspired streak in the history of American popular music. They call it Stevie's Classic Period and.

Nothing to Do.

This song is the sound of someone turning into someone else. You don't often get to hear what that sounds like, but that's what's happening right here in this song. Musical adolescents becoming musical adulthood, acts, body spray getting swapped for cologne. The song is the moment that little Stevie Wonder Motown Records boy Genius becomes just Stevie Wonder, the visionary who's about to change everything himself. Motown our understanding of what pop music can even sound like, and our understanding of who he is and what he's capable of. I'm Wesley Morris. I'm a critic of the New York Times, and I write about popular culture and the relationship between the present and the past, and not frequently race is involved in that relationship, and I'm just gonna say, I love Stevie Wonder. I love his love of Black people, I love his love of all people. I love his emotional honesty. I love that he's an explorer, curious about life as a person, curious about life as an insect, as a plant. And also I love that this run of albums contains a story of both the man who made them and a story about life in this country for our purposes. This classic period starts with Music of My Mind, which Motown released in nineteen seventy two when Stevie was just twenty one years old. Months later he was back with the second album in this streak, Talking Book. The following year, Stevie releases Inner Visions the year after that. It's fulfilling this first finale and finally the culmination of the run nineteen seventy six's Songs in the Key of Life. Five albums in less than five years, and it's worth looking back at the musical scope and big heartedness developed in such a short, fraud period of time because it hasn't been matched by any other artist. We're talking about Stevie Wonder's music today because it's our history, yes, but also because it's important to our present too. There's so much in this music stev made over fifty years ago, still so much that is still moving us, delighting us, surprising and inspiring us. He's left a legacy that still impacts tons of people. People we're gonna hear from, like Michelle Obama, Babyface, Landa Adams, Barack Obama, Jimmy jam and so many more people. To put it simply, for the next six episodes, we're gonna be luxuriating and as Jenoe Monet describes it, Stevie Bana Friez, motherfucker get this is the wonder of Stevie Today, Episode one, Music of My Mind. Okay, so it's nineteen eighty six, Come back with me. It's Thursday night, eight pm. I'm ten years old and I'm watching The Cosby Show. I know, just shut up. I'm watching The Cosby Show, Season two, episode eighteen, and Denise Huxtable has just gotten her license and has begged for a car. Now, Denise was the coolest Huxtable, but even at ten, I knew cool ast Denise was going to mess this driving thing up, and mess it up she did. At some point she and her brother Theo come blowing into the living room with some breaking news.

Believe what happened to us?

We were in a wreck, Only they don't seem like they're in a wreck. They seem psyched. It's like, Denise, did you hit somebody? Or did you hit on somebody? Because I can't tell. They're telling this story like the accident is the farthest thing from their minds. They hit this other car and then and then the back door and gets.

Who steps out.

Stevie Wonder YadA, YadA, YadA. The Huxtable family hangs out in the studio with Stevie, who's in these big sunglasses and a milky sweater with four big colorful rectangles up around his chest. He's sitting at a keyboard and he gets them to tell him something for him to record. But their little starstruck even cool last Denise, who's immortal line to Stevie is I don't know what to say.

I don't know what to say, I don't know, I don't know.

And that he turns into music. What I couldn't have known at the time is that Stevie was basically in what I'll call him phase three. Stevie beloved popular, a member of Black People's fan, family's uncle Stevie. Basically, you know how it is with stars and kids. You don't know the history. All you know is what you see. And all I saw in nineteen eighty six was a kind of cultural totem, a stuffed animal nobody could leave the house without. I mean, just imagine that you're ten years old and the first Beyonce song you ever heard was cuff It because somebody on TikTok issued a dance challenge. Now imagine your aunt telling you then after the song is over, oh honey, you don't know nothing about that, and shows you the Coachella Homecoming performance. She shows you the formation video and the one for single Ladies, and you weren't there. You don't know, so now your brand's on fire. And then she's like, hm, honey, there's more, and then she plays to Destiny's Child and you maybe feel like your whole life has been a lot. This show it's about that before, about how Phase one Stevie evolved into Phase two. It's about what came before Denise Huxtable crashed that into Stevie Wonder. These next six episodes are about when Stevie Wonder crashed into us. Here's how we're gonna do it. Each episode in this series is going to delve into one of the albums in Stevie's extraordinary five album run. We're gonna start now with Music of My Mind. But before we get to that, how this classic period began, you kind of have to understand how Stevie began as a music prodigy. Raised in the motel machine. He's born in nineteen fifty Stevelin Hardaway, Judkins and Saginaw, Michigan. In fact, he arrived ahead of schedule, and his being born early resulted in a condition called retinopathy of prematurity, which left him without sight. His mother, Lula May Hardaway, insisted Stevie not be treated any differently than his four sighted siblings, and so he had a vibrant childhood. He was blonde, but he and his family would never call his blindness a handicap. Lula May said as much in a TV interview from nineteen eighty nine alongside stev with the UK's Terry Wogan, because when the Brits love you, they want to know everything.

He was saying.

He used to try and ride bicycles as a kid, and did he do all those things, climb trees all that.

Oh yes, clamp tree.

I mean, how did you get done again?

I just jumped down and got done.

Did you know from the start that he had great musical talent?

Yes I did, I did.

Stevie was writing his own songs, and one day he was out in the family porch playing his bongos, and he got on one person's last nerve, not because he was loud, but because he was blasphemous. Apparently he was making the Devil's music. According to a neighborhood deacon familiar with the situation, this little boy needed to let the Lord in his life, so off the church he went and play the Devil's music there and there at church as a young man named Ronnie White saw Stevie and was floored, and Ronnie happened to sing with this act called symbolism alert the Miracles as in Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Ronnie was so impressed that he arranged for Lula May to bring Stevie into this new record company called Motown and to meet the young cad who founded it, Barry Gordy. Stevie and Lula May arrive at the Motown offices on twenty six forty eight West Grand Boulevard and twenty six forty eight was a house just like a modest turn of the century home that in the late nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties would have been impressive for a black family to own. But for the label that's about to redefine American popular music, you kind of can't believe this is it, even after they hang a huge sign outside that says Hitsville, USA, that's also Motown major American Recording or not, and Connie, your uncle's house. When Stevie and Lula may get there, they're putting this rehearsal room in the basement that's also known as the snake pit, and Stevie just starts playing some of the instruments, and there's some other people in the room, and as the story goes, at one point, one of them, this Motown exec named Mickey Stevenson. He runs upstairs to Barry Gordy's office and says, you gotta come here this kid.

Now.

Barry heads down, enters the pit and notices the crowd that's formed around Stevie, including the Supremes, who are the current babies of the label, and he sees Stevie behind the drums.

And I could see he was blind. He was just moving his heads and he's playing and going and doing everything and.

Was great, you know, but I was winning.

What's the big deal because I wasn't in the market for drummer.

That's Berry Gordy, apparently unmoved by the side of a pint sized blind boy just killing it on the drums. He remembers watching Stevie go from one instrument to the next, and after a minute I had nonchalance. It kind of started the thaw.

And then he left the drums and he started playing the bongos and.

He did that and it was okay.

It was nice.

And then he of course sung.

You know, I.

Wasn't thrilled with his boys, particularly, but it was okay.

He was good.

And then he went to the harmonica. Now that impressed me.

With that, and pretty much on the spot, I should say, Motown signed Stevie to a rolling four year recording contract and a three year artist management deal. They worked out an agreement with the Michigan Department of Libra so that Stevie would be allowed to work. Stevie was a minor, obviously, so his mom Lula May represented him. There was this two part TV special from the late nineteen eighties called Superstars and Their Moms. Carol Burnett hosted it with her daughter Carrie Hamilton. I used to love Carrie Hamilton. And everybody else is in it too. Debbie Allen and Felicia Rashot with their mom, Schaar and her mom, and Whitney Houston with her mother Sissy, and then Stevie and Lula May.

You know what I feel shy seeing where my mother straight out?

What's round with?

Do you feel bad collecting rocked yourself?

It's Stevie.

It is such a deeply nineteen eighties artifact. At some point, Stevie and Lula May are at the piano together and he's doing this lyrical ballot that he dedicates to her. You know just how much he loves her, and just as he's ending it, he kind of can't help but just turn the funk up. Then she starts to tell this story of Stevie getting his first big paycheck and Stevie still at the piano, playing underneath her while.

She talks, he was first began going on to Motown. I know he don't remember this. They're playing drums, but a temptation company.

It was kind of cold.

He had on this little coach, you know, he comes stepping in there. He gives me a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars. So here, mamay is seven hundred and fifty dollars, and you know what that's seven hundred and fifty dollars mean just as much to me as seven hundred.

Me and in always will.

You don't remember that doing it?

Actually, I remember that money, and I want that check back.

Motown seized control of all of Stevie's finances and put his earnings and do a trust that he would not have access to until he turned twenty one. Motown also gave Lula Mayne Stevie a stipend that she used to keep the family going, and Stevie's portion started it two dollars and fifty cents a week. The innovation of Barry Gordy's Motown one of them, anyway, is that it's a blackground music company with a stable of black artists in an industry white men control. Still, he took out an eight hundred dollars loan from his family to get it up and running, and his first acts included Smokey's Miracles, of course, Mabel John and Mary Wells and the Marvelettes. Then come Martha and the Vandellas, and the Supremes and the Four Tops and Marvin Gay.

My dream was that an artist could walk in to one door, just a normal kid off the street, and come out another door astar so the machinery once they got in there, so there were producers, there were writers.

By the time Stevie comes onto the scene in nineteen sixty one, the company is already making enormous hits like the Miracles, Shop Around and Please Mister Postman by the Marvelettes, and everybody at Motown is young. But Stevie Wonder is a child at work all dagon day. So while the Supremes are supreming and Mary Wells is a well in and the Temptations are out tempting in the Four Tops are a toppin, all becoming international sensations, Stevie's there too, so can all this in learning how to write and produce and perform. And when he's not working and learning at Motown, Stevie's enrolled at the Michigan School for the Blind. He's got a tutor that Motown provided named Ted Hull, who was partially cited and Stevie's also busy being a regular kid. Sometimes he'd just swoop into a recording session and interrupt because he couldn't see the red light, saying don't go in recording in progress. He'd ride bikes and pretend to be reading books, call up Barry Gordy's assistant and convincingly pretend to be Burry on the phone. Dion Warwick, Yes, the Dion Warwick told me about this prank that Steve played on her. It involved the Charrelles, the Hall of Fame all girl group famous for dedicated to the One I Love and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, among other gems. For some reason, the Cherelle's did not like this red dress deonad, so they get Stevie to talk to her about it.

He said, can I say something to you and you won't get upset?

I s of course.

He said, you know that red dress you wear? It kind of fundoed me. First of all, I know it was red?

Is he yes?

He said, don't wear that anymore? Just look good on you. I said, what, how do you know it doesn't look good? He says, I know, I know. I thought he could see. I really did. I thought, well, this kid can see.

Between prank Stevie was also getting tutoring at Motown that Tedholl didn't provide. The label had a whole finishing school. Artist development is what they called it. When an act got signed to Motown and had a hit and seemed destined to tourist part of the Motown Review or maybe even as part of their own show. Going to artist development was mandatory. That's where you'd basically be made presentable in long sessions of comportment and movement in properness. It was like going to school. Who yes, it's smoky Smokey Robinson.

It was mandatory. It wasn't your option. You had two days a week when you were in Detroit. Did you want to artist development? No matter who you became or who you were at the beginning?

Okay, Motown was going to sand off those rough edges. Allow me to introduce you to Suzanne de Paz, who worked at Motown as Berry Gordy's creative assistant. She helped launch The Jackson five. Also, she's the one that Vanessa Williams played in The Jackson's and American Dream that miniseries It plays every Thanksgiving. She also really knew the Motown formula to success.

What was unique about artist development in Motown was that there was a great deal of time and effort put into not only singing and dancing, but sort of an approach to how to do an interview, how to present themselves.

Basically, even after a few coats of artist development, you still got to be yourself, but in a sleek tailored suit with a gleam. When you winked or smiled, or got out of a car or off a tour bus, you'd be all. I suppose a question one could ask is why another might be for whom these are fair questions? Of course, the implication of that question is that Motown was grooming these performers so white people wouldn't mind looking at them. Also fair, but there was a politics at work in this grooming. Motown arrived during the TV age, and its acts were basically performing in people's homes. Most white people wouldn't have seen black people dressed like this, either on the street because they'd fought to be an accepted being segregated from them, or on TV because the very few black people there were service people in service uniforms or rags. So the application of etiquette was as much a revolutionary act of politics as a lunch counter sit in, as far as I'm concerned, maybe even more subtly effective, since seeing four dapper black men called the Temptations might actually tempt a skeptical white person to think of them as human. At the same time, Motown's respectability approach would have certainly thrilled, delighted, and moved black people, black people who yearned to see other black people as glamorous as the white stars Hollywood was inventing. I talked to the Smokey Robinson about this dilemma back in those days.

Man, if you if you weren't being played on white radio, you were in trouble, you know what I mean.

Was there ever a conversation among you artists and with Burry and some of the other people at the label in the executive branch about this question of being proper and being respectable and making yourselves palatable to a whiter audience. Is that ever a conversation you say to a or wider to a white audience.

Basically, it was hard to get played on white radio if you were black back in those days, you know what I mean. But we got to the point where his white rodio was calling us asking us could they please have the records? Okay we had so we bombarded them with so many hits back to back to back to back, they had no choice. They would call us and say, can we get the new Supremes record first? Can we have that new Stevie? Can you give to That was white radio calling us, you know what I mean. So, yeah, you wanted to groom yourself because that's where the money was. Man, That's where the money was.

That's where it still is. I'm saying.

So that's nothing new.

Right about now, Ladies did would like to continue with Ovis show right introduce to you a young man that was only twelve years old and he is considered as being a genius of our time. Ladies didn't let you and I make him feel happy with a nice ovation as we meet and Greek lit Steven wonder.

How about that?

Anybody who saw Little Stevie live would have seen him on stage and his blazer and slacks, looking as sophisticated as the label's grown ups playing in a turing act called them Motown Review these shows that are kind of big band arrangement, and everybody basically wore versions of the same formal get up. I want to talk about this one night in nineteen sixty two at the Regal Theater in Chicago, because it's magical. The MC brings Stevie on and he's let out to a chair a little aggressively from my taste, and he puts a set of bongos in his hands to play a song called Fingertips.

Let us John and I want to do a song tipping for my own the jazz soul a Little Stevie. The name of the songs called Fingertips.

He's ready to turn them on and turn this song out. He starts by telling them to clap their hands and stomp their.

Feet, jump up and down, doing anything that you want to do.

Yeah.

I should say first that Clarence Paul and Henry Cosby, two of Motown's great songwriters, wrote Fingertips for Stevie's debut album, which was called The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie. And I just want to also say that his jazz soul was all of twelve. It was an instrumental album that's pretty party jazz and it's supposed to show off his percussion and keyboard and harmonica skills. You could be forgiven for hearing it, and assuming you've been placed on a brief hold, but live at the Regal, Stevie meets the audience and this chemical reaction starts. The crowd is ready to lose it. Eventually, he stands up and switches to the harmonica and does some dazzling, pretty sophisticated harmonica playing. Again, he's twelve. Anybody looking at this moment today with any knowledge of who Stevie would become would say, ha ha. This seems kind of important. This is the beginning of Stevie finding an extension of his physical voice with the harmonica, a pocket size organ that the mouth plays and that Stevie uses to express the blowest of blues and the highest of highs. The harmonica was a way to manifest the music of his mind with his literal fingertips. Anyway, and about the performance is halfway point, Stevie pivots into what becomes the song's much more famous second part. Everybody say yeah, and they.

Do say yeah, say yeah, yeah yeah.

He'd actually wanted his stage name to be his birth name Steve Land Judkins, but the folks at Motown were so by Stevie's talon that the only stage name that made sense was Stevie Wonder, so that's what everybody called him, Little Stevie Wonder. It took years from Motown to figure out what to do with all of Stevie's wonder. Initially, Barry tried stuffing him into a Ray Charles mold. The result was an unimaginative ripoff called Tribute to Uncle Ray. Other than being blind and astonishingly talented, Stevie's nothing like Ray Charles. The live version of the song Fingertips Part Two did top the album chart in nineteen sixty three, but nothing Motown tried for Stevie after made much of an impression, and it wasn't like he wasn't trying to break through. But as hard as he appeared to work, bringing some soul and wit to songs that didn't really know what to do with either, he seemed poised to become a novelty act. By the time he was fifteen. Everybody knew he could sing and play, but Motown only l let him do that on songs other people had written, and not even songs by its pop masters. It wasn't until he hooked up with the songwriter Sylvia Moy, another Motown powerhouse, that anybody knew what would happen if he got to sing and play music. He played a part in writing songs that originated with him. At the end of nineteen sixty five, the label got its answer when it released the song Moy wrote with Stevie Uptight, Everything's all right, great song, and it sounds like the nineteen sixties and like Motown and at last like Stevie, But his voice had actually begun to change, to both deepen and grow more elastic, and the song went to number three on the Hot one hundred. For years, Barry Gordy had had the wonder, but it wasn't until he was helping write his own stuff that the wonder really went. Wow finally seemed to make complete artistic sense at Motown, a company that in nineteen sixty five was still changing the way black people were seen and the way they saw themselves. Ever since the first Africans were shipped here enslaved in the seventeenth century, one question for white Americans whether they own black people or believed in their freedom was what would freedom mean, what would it look like? How would it sound? One answer I would argue was Motown. Barry Gordy started the label hoping in part to nationalize black music. Black culture had been elemental in the development of American pop music, either through blackface menstrualcy, which white performers invented, or through black forms of expression like spirituals like rag time, like jazz and the blues. The genius of Motown, at least according to me, is that it took the music you would have been hearing on Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon, because you know how church is, sometimes it starts to nine and into three. It took black church music, the belt at harmonies, all those big feelings, the call and response, and combined it with the music you would have been hearing the night before, music you would have been going to church praying to God that you could get out of your system. Take Martha and the Vendela's in their jam heat Wave. You can hear an actual palm slapping a tambourine on that song. That's exactly what you be hearing if you were in church on Sunday, and you can hear in the way the vandellas are calling back to Martha Reeves something else that happens in church, which is basically the congregation calling out to the preacher when the preacher's doing a sermon. The music that came out of this shotgun wedding between the sacred and the secular, between gospel music, western orchestral sounds, strings, woodwinds that didn't sound like anything else in the radio. The clean beauty of do wop plus the boisterous noise of a packed club. Let's just take anthrop Peculiar by Marvin Gay, that tambourine again, those handclaps, the tightness of the rhythm section.

Long but still rages Valcu.

Plus Marvin's angelic delivery of romantic bewilderment. You don't know what hit him. These are gospel ideas that sound like dance music, secular yearning, fun right. But how by nineteen sixty five, when this song sold more than a million copies and had hit number eight on the pop chart, the motown sound was basically at the center of American culture and therefore also in America's living rooms.

There's a kind of music, for instance, the black music which originates from the church, a gospel church.

This is Davie talking on Rage Music Program, an Australian music show, just like.

The English music for instance at the Beatles, which a lot of writing eleanor Rigby for instance, Oh yesterday, I think maybe a little while back could have been some of the music that originated from the church in a different way. So we've all been influenced in the sense by the church music.

And this is really important for two two reasons. The church's influence in the Motown can't be understated, and therefore it's influenced in Stevie's music can't be understated because Americans would have been grooving to grooving with the best dressed, best choreographed people in pop negros as opposed to n words. I'll just say it again, no white person would ever have seen such resplendent black people before, nor would any black person really not on TV. Motown was fueled by vision and talent and risk. Lots of people had become rich, famous and adored, but over time that system began to demoralize some of the artists, and before he was even twenty years old, Stevie was one of those people. So at an age when a lot of young adults are head into college or figuring out their lives. Stevie is churning out hit after hit, like for once in my life when he's eighteen years.

Old, one since my life, I have some want.

Me and my Sharia Moore also when he's eighteen.

Shelly Lovely as a summery.

And science.

He will deliver when he's twenty.

Delivered in that time. I win, said gun back.

But even with all this success, he had begun to sense that his growth wasn't necessarily an alignment with motowns. And one of his guides to that realization was a motown secretary named Serta Raight.

How did you meet your husband? Stevie Wonder?

Stevie Wonder heard a record that I had done with Nick Ashburton Valie Simpson and what that record was called, I Can't give back the love of feel for you. He heard my voice and said, no, I think I need to meet her.

This is her in naeen ninety on Healdo Rivera's Sane talk show, and she's talking about their meeting. Toward the end of the nineteen sixties, Stevie's in his late teens and Sota's doing her secretary work, but she's also singing back up on records by acts like Martha and the Vendelas a lot of the women Stevie would work with s Rita, Minie, Riperton, Denise Williams. They have these sweet, almost angelic sopranos, a perfect compliment to Stevie singing. You can hear the way Serita's voice flutters on a song, like her version of Smokey Robinson's What Love Has Joined Together from nineteen seventy two and Jill Together. Not long after they meet, Stevie encourages Sorita to write her own songs, including.

With him, And so he stop up a meeting and I went in and with him he wrote a song, went in and tried to sing it. And I don't know, I've never been starstruck, but I could not sing to get this song called winda Love, And I tried. I was sonbarrassed. So I'm supposed to be a quick study for songs. I couldn't get it, and I feel terrible. But I think he must have done something, you know, did something so that he could come back and we could meet again. That's what happened.

This is Sorita's way of saying YadA, YadA, YadA, we fell in love. I wrote songs with him, he wrote and produced for me, and we wrote some songs together, some gems. They marry in nineteen seventy and divorce about two years later, and eventually meet and marry other people, start separate families, yet creatively remain very close. Something deep and intangible is going on in that YadA YadA. Sorita Wright is a crucial factor in the transition from Little Stevie to Stevie. She was his personal artist development program. So that brings us to nineteen seventy one, the year Stevie turns twenty one, a time lots of people graduate from college and start to figure out the rest of their lives. Nineteen seventy one also the year is contract, the one we mentioned at the beginning of the episode is set to expire, and it's going to be a thing. Barry Gordy wants Stevie to re up that contract, so he tries to sweepen the deal a little bit by planning Stevie a big twenty first birthday party. We were in Detroit.

On his twenty first birthday and we had a little party for Stevie and we sat at the table and we were having so much fun.

So that contract Stevie's mom signed a decade ago and he was eleven, and then renewed at sixteen a two percent royalty on his record sales and Motown handles his finances and his earnings go into a trust that he can access when he's twenty one. We're talking about an estimated three point five million dollars. Guess who's got a birthday coming and guess who's surprised to discover that the money Motown's given him is nowhere near what he believes he's owed. Imagine Stevie shock and hearing about the enormous deductions Barry's been charging his Stevie's account for his tutor, Ted Hall, who Motown fired when Stevie graduated from high school for Stevie's allowance. Whatever that means when you subtract all of that, Not only did Stevie not get three point five million dollars, he got about three point four million less than that. Anyway, back to the birthday party Barry's throwing for Stevie. Yay.

When I got here, there was a wire from Steve's attorney disaffirming every contract that he had with Motown.

I couldn't believe it.

My favorite move when a businessman in his call with his hand in the cookie jar is when he's like, I don't really understand what's happening here. They're just cookies. Sorry, Berry, his business.

Baby, I'm saying with this man, and I thought, surely Stevie's leaving the company. He disaffirmed everything.

He's twenty one.

Now he's gonna go out and get bids from all the other companies when he's got to be he's gonna leave the company. I mean, that's why else would he do this telling me anything?

For all those years Barry had complete financial and creative control over his artists. Now one of them was pushing back hard, and he's got nothing to lose. Here's Barry in a place he's rarely ever been before life or death compromise. He's got to give something up or he's gonna lose Stevie. You might be hearing me say this and wonder what were the financial consequences? What about his mother, Lula May, who originally signed this deal. Did Stevie really ever consider leaving Motown in any serious way? And most importantly, after being this misled by Barry, why would he stay? You know, these are all the existential questions that are probably unknowable to anybody who isn't named Stevie Wonder, And who knows, Maybe one day I'll get to ask him, But what I will say is it. In Gerald Posner's book on Motown, a man named Thomas Beans Bowles, who managed the kid's accounts, is quoted as saying the problem was that Barry kept those accounts going for too long. He didn't know when to stop treating people like kids, so put a pin in that. In the meantime, though, Stevie's new contract ran to more than one hundred and twenty pages. One hundred and twenty pages of Stevie mapping out his independence from a man who had been his boss and a father figure to him for so many years, And it.

Just turned out that Stevie was twenty one, and he wanted to show me that he was twenty one.

Now, and he wanted no respect.

And he ended up making me pay him thirteen million dollars to sign up another whole new contract with him, which was unprecedented at the time but probably one of the best deals I ever made.

You can say that now, Barry Gourdy, hindsight being what it is. And besides the thirteen million, Stevie wanted his own publishing company that would own the public pishing rights instead of Motown twenty percent royalties, total artistic control of all his songs. He wanted to choose who played on these records. He wanted to choose what songs appeared on the album and what the first single would be. Basically, he wanted absolute autonomy from Motown's classic way of doing things. Stevie was at least as big as the music factory that discovered him, Signed, sealed, delivered free.

A lot of people talk about the whole thing of me reaching twenty one and everything happened and everything broke and everything this, and I begin to rebel, And here's Stevie.

Talking about that on any series biography.

It didn't start at twenty one.

It started, really.

And it starts anytime that I get bored with what I'm doing. So I've done a lot of writing a lot of songs, and I just felt that as much as I knew that Motown felt they were doing what they thought it was the best for my career. I had a feeling as to how and what I wanted.

To do And what does twenty one year old Stevie want to do with that newly acquired freedom. He does this please Mama, Mama, be.

R and I wanta fly my.

Love having you around. It's the song we started this episode with, the first song on Music of My Mind, the first album in this streak that this whole show's about. Stevie would never be the same after this album. He would never sound the same. The album isn't just the sound of an emotional breakthrough or some sort of philosophical breakthrough. This is the sound of a technological breakthrough. Stevie had discovered a sound, a technology that produced a sound that he could hear in his head, but that no Motown factory, no houseband, no matter how good it is, no regular instrument was going to produce. It's a sound he went looking for, and when he found it, it was as revolutionary for him as when he picked up a harmonica for the first time, or when he got that new contract from Motown, something that would take his sound into the future. That is a song called Cybernot from an album called Zero Time. Cyberknot sounds like a Stevie Wonder record with a flat button. It was written by a couple of self described experimental stoner hippie music geeks named Bob Margolev and Malcolm Cecil. When Stevie heard the album Zero Time, it blew his mind. Bob and Malcolm were part of an act called Tonto's Expanding Headband. The Tonto referred not to the Lone Ragers Native American side gig, thank God, but to a synthesizer, a souped up, complicated behemoth of a synthesizer that was able to create really weird, very specific sounds. So he hears this other worldly sound, and he goes to New York City to Bob and Malcolm's studio. He's never met them, they don't know he's coming. And then, well, I'll just let Bob tell it.

It was Memorial Day weekend in nineteen seventy one, the studio was closed. Malcolm was a chief engineer of media sounds, so they gave him an apartment over Delicatessen, which was approximately the very next door to the studio, one flight up, so he could look out the front window and see the studio entrance below and it was very quiet because there's a holiday. It was very little traffic, and it was kind of warm. It was late in the afternoon, and I hear it Malcolm. Malcolm and Malcolm and I stick our heads out the window and look down at the entrance to Media Sound, and there's Ronnie Blanco, a fellow bass player, standing there with a tall black guy in a sharks whose drum suit with our album under his arm, and that was Stevie.

They invite him in, and there's a room full of instruments and speakers, and before long, Bob and Malcolm and Stevie starting noodly around playing music together. And over in the corner of the room is this big ass synthesizer. Except it doesn't even look like the diet piano thing you're probably used to seeing, especially when Stevie performs live. This thing is a console of keyboards and knobs and jacks and wires whose purpose is to synthesize sound, not simulate analog instruments. In this case, the synthesizer in the corner of that room is a six foot tall circular machine, a wall an edifice that could extend to twenty five feet in diameter and weigh one ton and probably get you to oz. Obviously, that thing is calling Stevie's name.

Stevie put his hands all over it. There's plenty of wires sticking out of the front of it. I put up a sound on the synthesizer. We had it plugged into the studio, into the speakers, and he says, Bob, Bob, there's gonna be something wrong with it. And I said why. He says, well, I play in all these notes and just it skips from one note to the next. I don't know what's going on. And we had to explain to him that the synthesizer in a way was sort of like a saxophone. He only played one note at a time.

And so begins an artistic relationship with Tanto, with Bob, and Malcolm with Stevie that would last for the next four years. As a force him, they helped Stevie get it sounds he'd never been able to communicate before. After that first meeting, they made one song, and then another. Few songs became seventeen, and seventeen became the makings of a library. Stevie finally found the tools and collaborators that could take his power which was awesome and make it a superpower.

Steve said, oh, you know this is I got a lot of stuff on my mind and we said, yeah, it's a good album titled Steve. So that's how Music of My Mind came out.

Music of My Mind is an album full of swinging moods.

To be a SUPERB.

But one thing about Stevie is that he knows his way around a love song, and love and loss are all over this record. He and so Rita were mid divorce when he recorded these songs, and the album culminates with the realization that you can love, love, love the person who used to be your better half and all.

The things she wants to be she needs to leave behind very well.

The second song on this album, it's a seamless marriage of two songs put together to make one shaker called Superwoman. Where were You When I needed You? This marriage of two songs is extra poignant when you think about each side being about separation. Even a I don't know a middle schooler can hear the disappointment in that.

I remember I was like ninth grade and totally in love with this girl and she was leaving that summer.

This is babyface and look, we talked to a bunch of people just to hear what Stevie's music means to them. This guy has twelve Grammys, he's one of pop music's great production minds. He's a peerless writer of earworms. But even with all that acclaim, all that success, all those Grammys, all that talent, in nineteen seventy two, Babyface was just a kid named Kenny Edmonds with a broken heart because the girl he liked didn't like him back. And Stevie Wonder was the place he drowned that sorrow.

It was like the end of the year came and she was going away, And I remember going home and skipping past Superwoman and playing where were You When I Needed You? Because the way that he used those sense that almost sound like strings, and it felt like it was talking directly to me and directly to my emotions and the state that I was in. And I just kept playing that song again and again, and every time I hear that song to this day, it takes me right back to the summer of nineteen seventy three and that lonely feeling that I had of this girl that was going away for the summer. And I also knew that she was going away to see this guy that she liked.

That wasn't me as necessary as this album is for setting Stevie up to innovate on the albums that follow. And for as much as some of us like me love this album, it didn't make much of a splash in nineteen seventy not in the charts, not on the radio. The album's biggest single, Superwoman, Where Were You When I Needed You? It didn't even crack the R and B Top ten. Is that because the music wasn't as immediately accessible as some of Stevie's earlier hits. Was it because art that's revolutionary always takes a while to catch on. Is it because music critics at the time were pretty much all white guys and they couldn't fully appreciate what Stevie was up too thematically? I'll keep my answer brief. Yes, all I can say is with music in my mind, they sensed something good stylistically was changing with Stevie. They even liked the album more or less. What they were sensing had to do with the nature of the sound of this music, and Rolling Stone Vinceletti called it indulgent and egotistical, but he also noticed something important. Wonders is one of the very few down to earth uses of the synthesizer. He wrote, no attempts at space music here, no swollen overwrite breaks and gulfing two thirds of the album. Only funky, exuberant music of the sort we've come to expect from Stevie Wonder that sound Vinceilltti was picking up. One was Tonto, and the way that Stevie and Malcolm and Bob used Tonto wasn't normal. It wasn't routine. It's not how producers tended to use synthesizers and music.

It's like, normally for a song to be emotional, it was violins, it was strings, it was Cello's.

This is the producer and songwriter Jimmy jam who, along with Terry Lewis, has made some of the greatest pop songs of anybody ever. That includes the masterpieces he made with Janet Jackson.

It was French horns, it was Obo's, it was all the traditional If you think about the motown system, all of those things existed, and what made those songs so beautiful was those string arrangements. In that Stevie took all of that away, and now He's doing what a horn would do on a synthesizer, and that was so revolutionary. Up to that point, synthesizers were kind of a lot of blips and almost sound effect type things. The fact that he was using the synthesizer as like the main instrument for chords and beautiful textures, and actually finding the emotion in the synthesizer where it wasn't this cold electronic thing all of a sudden, there was a nuance to it and a warmness to it, And you know, that really made you feel emotional about an electronic sound.

The revolution of music of My Mind is also the revelation of this album. It's that Stevie had found warmth in all of that machinery. He found a deep human frequency in it. The ground he broke is that electronic music was no longer just for robots and sci fi, for geeks and freaks and outer space. It could make real sense right here on earth. He could use it for joy and pain, and he knew instantly, instinctively how to adjust the temperature on those emotions with this device to get Tanto from robotic to romantic, like he does on the next song track three, I Love every little thing about you. He immediately chases the uncharacteristic bitterness and superwoman, where were you when I needed you? With what sounds to me like an atonement one that starts with this chiming opening, and then it swells to this blissed out melody, I love every little thing about You has one of my favorite Stevie Wonder choruses. Ever, it's pretty simple, just that title repeating over and over, but it's God, a gospel song's bigness and certainty. He loves, he loves, he loves the way congregants love Jesus, He loves this woman. And then it ends very softly with Serrita whispering about candy and sugar and Stevie growling about a big old piece of cake.

Cook.

There's ecstasy on Music of My Mind. There's such sympathy in rich poetry. There's also this playfulness. Take the second to last song on the album, Keep On Running, which starts with the opening rattle of church, where the preachers reving the house band up that throbbing mog baseline, a tease of what sounds like a wah wah tar, some snake rattling tambourine, and Stevie tell somebody something's about to jump out of the bushes and grab you, and this one man jam session takes off, rising and building and then tumbling apart before funking up all over again.

And some gon grab.

The idea of this song always makes me laugh. It's church music in a mini skirt with a drink in one hand. That's a classic Motown idea, but with Stevie rejecting Motown's efficiency and rigor. This song, like the rest of Music of My Mind, is about playing with form, about being rigorous in some new way that chiefly involves a determination to define Independence is almost literally doing everything yourself, including taking everything you've learned from your colleagues and mentor to invent some new thing that doesn't want to get boxed in or be concise or musically simple. It wants to sound exploratory because the man making it is on an adventure to discover himself. I love every little thing about this album. I loved it before I knew anything about how it got made and how important it was to Stevie's becoming his own artist. I love the assurance and craftsmanship of this album. I love the daring of Stevie Wonder to abandon the comfort of Motown's innovations and renovate himself. I love that Stevie didn't care about these questions of artistic purity when it comes to so called genre music black music, jazz, R and B, soul, gospel, blues, reggae, as if these forms didn't come from the same source, as if electronic music didn't come from the same source. Here's the thing about the synthesizer. It was never a dead end for him. For Stevie, it was the key to unlock his musical mind and an escape patch out of everybody else's. It was a way to do what Motown did, combine the church, the party, and the symphony. Only he didn't need a whole orchestra. He was a one man funk brother. What becomes obviously irreversibly true about Stevie and his ingenuity starting with Music of My Mind, and what'll become even clearer and more electrifying just months later with his next album, is that even though he had this enormous piece of technology he's going to use to bring all these new ideas and feelings together, his vision transcends the technology itself. See as important as Tanto was for making Stevie's dreams come true, it was just an instrument. The reason these albums mattered at the time, the reason they still move is as much as they do. It's pretty simple. The real synthesizer it was Stevie. This album declares his independence. The next album in the Street Talking Book makes him bigger than he'd ever been.

He basically provides the goods and has the makings of what could be a global superstar. And this is one of the ways that Stevie Wonder will start not only living up to the promise of creative genius, but also in terms of a creative genius that can be commercially viable. This will help in that direction because he's going to face an entirely different audience that otherwise just knew him as that guy that sing that one song or the other song or whatnot.

That's next time on the Wonder of Stevie. This has been a Higher Ground than Audible original. The Wonder of Stevie is produced by Pineapple Street Studios, Higher Ground on Audio and Audible. Our senior producer is Josh Gwinn. Producer is Janelle Anderson. Associate producer is Mary Alexa Cavanaugh. Senior managing producer is Asha Salujah, Executive editor is Joel Lovell. Archival producer is Justine Daum. Fact checker is Jane Drinkard head a sound in engineering is Raj Makija. Senior audio engineers are Davey Sumner, Pedro Blavira and Marina Paiz. Assistant audio engineers are Jade Brooks and Sharon Bardallas mixed and mastered by David Sumner and Raj Makija. Additional engineering by Jason Richard, Scott Gilman, Javier Martinez and Lian Doe. Score and sound designed by Josh Gwenn and Raj Makija. Original score performed by car Les Music and Raj Makijo. Additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. Hosted in and executive produced by Wesley Morris. Higher Ground executive producers are Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Grin Gilliard Fisher, Dan Fierman, and Mook de Mohan. Creative executive for Higher Ground is Jennay Marrable. Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Jena y Sperman and Max Lynsky. Audible executive producers are Kate Navian and Nick DeAngelo. The Wonder of Stevie is also executive produced by a Mere quest Love, Thompson, Anna Holmes and Stevie Wonder. Questlove is a producer of this show courtesy of iHeart and can also be heard on Questlove Supreme from iHeart Podcasts. Special thanks to Jonasante, Britney Payne, Benjamin Lee, La Day, Sam Dolnick, Hayley Ewing, Kevin Garlitz, Amos Jackson, Rob Light, Alexis Moore, Joe Paulson, Nina Shaw, Chris Sampson, Eric Spiegelman, and Zarah Zolman. Recorded at different fur patches, The Hobby Shop and Pineapple Street Studios. Head of Creative Development at Audible is Kate Navian. Chief Content Officer is Rachel Guiazza. Copyright twenty twenty four by Higher Ground Audio, LA WELLC. Sound Recording copyright twenty twenty four by Higher Ground Audio LLC.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, activists, and 
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