Power In The Darkness

POWER IN THE DARKNESS

In the 60's, Stevie Wonder was Motown's child prodigy. But as he turned 21, he tore up his contract, hit New York, and unleashed the trove of brilliant songs he'd been storing up in his head. Joel Selvin unfolds the flowering of an extraordinary talent.

BERRY GORDY JR, ALREADY LIVING IN LOS ANGELES, CAME BACK to Detroit to host a 21st birthday party for Stevie Wonder at the Gordy Manor. The next day he flew back to California to find a letter waiting on his desk from a lawyer representing the former child star, informing the Motown Records founder that Wonder was disaffirming his recording, publishing and management contracts with Gordy and demanding to be paid in full.

Gordy immediately picked up the phone and called Wonder at home. His wife, Syreeta Wright, a former Motown secretary who married Wonder the previous September, answered the phone and told Gordy she couldn't imagine what he was talking about. She would have Stevie call, she told Gordy. It took about six months for Stevie to return the call.

Within days of his birthday, Wonder pulled into New York City, where he holed up at the distinctly unglamorous Holiday Inn on the west side of bustling midtown Manhattan. He was a man on a mission.

IT WAS MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND 1971 WHEN MALCOLM Cecil looked out of his third floor apartment above the 57th Street studio where he served as chief engineer. He saw friend Ronnie Blanco, a bass player Cecil had known since his first night in New York two years earlier. Standing with Blanco was someone Cecil didn't recognise wearing a pistachio green jump suit and carrying an album under his arm. It turned out to be Stevie Wonder.

"Stevie turned 21 on the thirteenth of May," said Cecil. "When you turn 21 in this country, any contracts you made prior are null and void because you're no longer a minor. So Stevie's contracts with Motown and his publishing contract with Jobete [Motown's song publish arm] were now null and void. Stevie knew he didn't have his publishing. Since he was 18 years old he had been saving songs in his head, because he knew if he played them Jobete would get 100 per cent of them. He had been holding off on them for three years. He had not played them to anyone. They were bursting out of him."

The album under Wonder's arm was Zero Time by Tonto's Expanding Head Band, a 1970 record made by Cecil and his partner Bob Margouleff on the a cobbled together set of primitive synthesizers and sequencers that made the pair pioneers in the rarified early days of analog synthesizers. They called it TONTO The Original Neo Timbral Orchestra and had stormed into the unknown on an electro instrument still in its infancy with an album released on a label run by jazzman Herbie Mann. "As far as their concept, their level of complication, in terms of how it was executed, their album was way beyond anything in the analog synthesizer world at that point," said Bernie Krause, another early synthesizer pathfinder who recorded the landmark In A Wild Sanctuary with partner Paul Beaver in 1970.

They did not come out of the studio all weekend. When they did emerge, they had recorded 17 songs. In one quick, unexpected weekend, Cecil and Margouleff's lives went into lunar orbit and Stevie Wonder had launched one of the most extraordinary outbursts of creativity in popular music history a four year, four album run that would be unprecedented and, as yet, unsurpassed both in terms of the level of artistic achievement and the widespread popular acclaim. He went into that room Little Stevie Wonder, the blind harmonica-playing 12 year old who sang Fingertips (Part 2) on The Ed Sullivan Show. He came out his own man. Before long, his music would be heard in every corner of the globe, forever changing the way pop music was made and played. He brought together the worlds of rock and soul and, for a moment, made the whole world colour blind. It was an extraordinary explosion of talent and determination by a man who would be remarkable by any measure, let alone a blind black kid who grew up poor in Saginaw, Michigan.

Gordy allowed wonder to produce his 1970 album, Signed, Sealed And Delivered, and he and Syreeta co-wrote all the songs for his most recent LP, Where I'm Coming From. He had always strained at the Motown factory formula, at least co-writing his own songs as far back as his 1966 US Top 10 hit, Uptight (Everything's Alright). He watched carefully as Marvin Gaye battled Gordy for his creative freedom the previous fall over What's Going On. He was absorbing all the fabulous music coming from outside Motown - The Beatles, Sly Stone, Burt Bacharach, Jimi Hendrix - and felt his day of reckoning draw near.

Margouleff and Cecil moved TONTO downtown to Electric Ladyland, Hendrix's up-to-date studios in Greenwich Village. Wonder relocated his entourage around the corner to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a block from Washington Square. The three of them began recording in earnest. They worked interchangeably in the studio. Wonder would noodle on keyboards, developing the songs, while Margouleff and Cecil programmed sounds under earphones. Either Margouleff or Cecil ran the recording equipment. Wonder played drums. When it came time to make a pass, it could take all six hands to navigate TONTO's cumbersome, bewildering forest of patch bays, knobs and switches. Sometimes Stevie's people were around - girlfriends, his brothers, his assistant, Ira Tucker Jr - sometimes it was just the three of them alone. Sessions often started past midnight and lasted through the following day. They quickly lost track of time. They had done 40 songs "when we looked up", said Cecil.

Wonder wanted to tap the energy of the thriving, vibrant contemporary rock scene. He started putting together his new road band, Wonderlove, with musicians from the recently disbanded Paul Butterfield Blues Band - guitarist Buzzy Feiten, horn players Trevor Lawrence, Steve Madaio and David Sanborn. His new interracial group was not instantly well received in Motown circles. "It was rough going for a while," said Sanborn. "The audience was expecting Little Stevie Wonder and we were all these scraggly hippies. It was a whole different image than they were expecting. We were free forming it a little bit. In Chicago with Gladys Knight And The Pips, we almost got booed off the stage. It was humiliating."

Margouleff and Cecil mentioned attorney Johanan Vigoda to him. A long time music business attorney who cut Jimi Hendrix's first US record deal and handled Richie Havens, Vigoda was a long-haired maverick who looked like hell, but was as sharp as they come ("Forget the fucking costume," one of his opponents once warned, "Vigoda's a shark"). He first met with Wonder in his Holiday Inn room, where Wonder told his prospective representative that he was going to ask for 25 per cent of his earnings across the board; records, songs, performances. "To me, it sounded nuts," said Vigoda.

It would be up to Vigoda to solve Wonder's problems with his somewhat tyrannical, usually inflexible record company. While Vigoda briefly entertained offers from other labels, Wonder always felt an allegiance to Motown and never seriously considered leaving the label, Vigoda said. Of course, Motown had never before granted any artist the kind of control over his career that Wonder was demanding.

BEFORE LONG, VIGODA FOUND HIMSELF IN CALIFORNIA, trying to hammer out a satisfactory agreement with Motown Records President Ewart Abner, who Vigoda used to represent when he ran Vee-Jay Records. "They basically surrounded me with lawyers," Vigoda said. "Every six hours, they would bring in another two lawyers with a fresh draft, around the clock. Berry hired all these outside law firms to cover me. They would have all these fancy lawyers in their suits with their yellow pads and I showed up in jeans, bandana and cowboy boots. I would do yoga, stand on my head, to deal with it."

While Motown's lawyers waited for Vigoda and Wonder to sign the finalised agreement, Vigoda realised they had worn him down to where he gave away some crucial procedural points and, at the last minute, advised Stevie against signing the document. After a long, restful sleep, Vigoda re-read the entire 240 page contract, making semi-legible handwritten changes with a felt-tipped magic marker. He delivered the dog-eared, scrawled-over contract to Motown with Wonder's signature and told them they had 48 hours to return this exact document signed or the deal was off. They brought it back, signed, in six hours.

Vigoda won unprecedented concessions from Motown. Wonder earned the total creative control he sought. The label was required to release the records he delivered "as is", said Vigoda. Wonder had complete command of cover art. The company retained only the right to pick the singles. Wonder won half of all his future publishing for his own Black Bull Music, and he won back half of the publishing to all his previous work. "He needed the freedom," said Vigoda. "He needed the money basically, to fund the freedom. He made more on the initial advance than he netted the entire previous 10 years."

Wonder ran up studio bills in excess of $250,000 of his own money. By the time an album release neared, Motown had to send out someone to straighten out all the paperwork and administrative details that had been ignored.

With the contract he needed in place, Wonder gave the label his first new album, Music Of My Mind. Released in the spring of 1972, everything about the album - from the title to the fine print on the back of the cover: "This album is virtually the work of one man" declared it to be the personal statement of the artist, now a man completely in control of his destiny. His overdubbed vocals criss-cross and bounce off each other with the exuberant joy of the freedom."

I had all the instruments set up in the studio in a circle - the piano, the clavinet, the Rhodes, the Moog, everything," said associate producer Bob Margouleff. "Stevie could go, just like Braille, from one instrument to the next. They were all plugged in all the time. It was like a huge, instantaneous recording media. We fixed a lot of the instruments, modified our sound. We were using guitar boxes on the Rhodes, doing all kinds of experimental things."

"We didn't make albums," said Cecil. "We made songs." At the same time as they were piling up tracks that would become Music Of My Mind, they were also recording an album with Syreeta, even though the marriage was breaking up after a year and a half. Cecil and Wonder came to London to add string parts, simultaneously, to both Syreeta and Stevie Wonder tracks. Eric Clapton sat in on a session, but couldn't cut it, according to Cecil. "All he could play was the blues," he said. "He was out of it." Jeff Beck, on the other hand, showed up at Electric Ladyland in June 1972, ready and eager to dump a guitar part on a couple of Wonder's tracks (horns and guitars were the only instruments on the records Wonder didn't play himself).

The record labels arranged this summit meeting and, in exchange for his guitar playing, wonder was supposed to write a song for the rock guitarist. Beck and his band heard Maybe Your Baby at the studio, but were told there were already plans for that song when they asked about it. Later, Beck was sitting at a drum kit, pounding out a simple, mundane tattoo, just goofing around, when out of nowhere came this monster riff from Wonder behind the clavinet. Wonder scratched out some quick lyrics and Beck left the studio with a dub copy of the track, called, at the time, Very Superstitious. Although he tried to cut the song with his musicians at Ladyland, Beck fired the entire band as soon as they returned to England (the bass player took a swing at Beck during the Wonder sessions). He didn't get around to recording the number for several months, by which time Wonder's version was already shooting up the charts. Beck made some snide comments to the music press.

"But I did promise him the song," Wonder told Rolling Stone later that year, "and I'm sorry it happened and that he came out with some of the arrogant statements he came out with. I will get another tune to him that I think is as exciting, and if he wants to do it, cool."

(Beck would have a 1975 worldwide hit with an instrumental cover of Wonder's 'Cause We've Ended As Lovers from the second Syreeta album.)

Beck wasn't the only key Wonder used in his attempt to unlock the white rock audience. He hired a New York based publicity firm, Wartoke Concern, to court the rock crowd (they also, oddly enough, booked Wonder for appearances on TV game shows I've Got A Secret and What's My Line). But the breakthrough came when he landed the plum assignment opening shows on the 1972 summer US tour by The Rolling Stones, the most popular rock band in the world at that moment. "That Stones tour crossed him over to a white audience," said Margouleff.

"I hope it will do just that - make more people aware where I'm coming from," Wonder told this writer at the time, between Stones shows in San Francisco. "I think the brothers know me - I just want more people. When you begin as a young artist, certain problems develop. You know, like `Little' becomes your first name or middle name or something like that. Fortunately I did do a lot of my own writing. The character of my tunes did express where I was coming from. Now I've just got to get to more people."

Beck finally got around to cutting Superstition with Beck, Bogart And Appice in December 1972, a month after Motown released the song in the US as the first single off Wonder's new album, Talking Book. Superstition blasted its way to Number 1 in February 197 3. As powerful as his version sounded, it would be impossible to blame Wonder for using the track (he nevertheless always pointed out that it was the label picked the singles from his albums). The track just went off like a grenade on the radio. The groundswell the Stones tour stirred up for Wonder on the rock scene paid off with instant attention on the newly powerful FM rock stations across the country.

But it was the album's second consecutive Number 1 single, You Are The Sunshine Of My Life, the song that launched a thousand bad lounge versions, that galvanised his sudden ascent into the stratosphere. Wonder didn't even sing on the track until the chorus - background vocalists Gloria Barley and Jim Gilstrap handle lead vocals on the opening verse. The recording had been sitting around finished for more than a year. Wonder originally passed over the song, written under the euphoria of a burgeoning romance with background vocalist Barley, because he didn't think it fitted the mood of Music Of My Mind, which, with darker cornerstone pieces like Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You) or Keep On Running, felt more like a meditation on the dissolution of his marriage.

Margouleff and Cecil considered themselves true collaborators on the new album. Not only did they work on every second of music on the album, but Margouleff took the candid cover photo that showed Wonder without dark glasses. Cecil even accidentally came up with the title, he said, arguing with Wonder about the large number of tracks Wonder wanted to stuff on the two album sides. "It's an album," he said, "not a talking book." For two years, they had lived in Stevie Wonderland, where clocks don't count and days turn into nights, nights into days. "It was a star crossed couple of years," said Margouleff. "Day and night, we worked for Stevie Wonder. That's what we did."

"Stevie Wonder can't see, so everything is round-the-clock craziness," said guitarist Ray Parker Jr, a teenager who was playing in the house band at Detroit's Twenty Grand Club (and sitting in on the occasional Motown session) when Wonder summoned him to New York to join the band. "He's not on the same time schedule as the rest of the planet."

With Talking Book hovering near the top of the charts, Wonder headlined baseball stadiums that summer with the Kool Jazz Festival. He made it clear to the feverish audiences, however, that he was moving on - his sets concentrated on material from the as-yet-unreleased, unfinished Innervisions. He wrote and recorded Higher Ground in a three-hour blitz in May and was featuring as many as seven new songs in the hour-long sets. Most of the new album was being recorded at Record Plant in Los Angeles, where Wonder had switched the centre of his operations. Margouleff and Cecil packed up TONTO, dutifully moved all the gear across the country and continued their work, credited as "associate producers". Up to the last minute, Cecil was arguing with Wonder about the length of the album, complaining that anything over 18 minutes per side would mean sacrificing volume level. He found a brand new mastering suite and somehow managed to cram more than 22 minutes on each side.

It was long past midnight August 6, 1973 and John Harris, Stevie's cousin was driving through deep forests in the heart of the Carolina tobacco belt on Interstate 85. Wonder was asleep in the passenger's seat. They had played a concert earlier in Greenville, South Carolina and were zooming through the night to Durham, North Carolina for a benefit the next night at Duke University. Innervisions was just leaving the pressing plants for the record stores. A logging truck in front of them was weaving and rolling. Harris decided to pass. As he accelerated into the passing lane, the truck lurched and braked suddenly. Giant logs spilled off the truck and smashed into their windshield. The sleeping Stevie Wonder, seat belted in place, took the blow right in his face.

He was rushed to nearby Rowan Memorial I Iospital in Salisbury NC, and lay in a coma in intensive care for three days, his head swollen like a watermelon. Diagnosed with severe brain contusion, he was transferred to the neurological centre at Baptist Hospital in Winston Salem, where he stayed in a semi coma for seven more days. It was Ira Tucker Jr, his long time associate, who got him to tap his finger in time while Tucker sang Higher Ground into Wonder's ear. Two weeks after the crash, he was flown out to UCLA Hospital in Los Angeles, where he gave Associated Press a brief interview.

"The only thing I know," Wonder said, "is that I was unconscious and that, for a few days, I was definitely in a much better spiritual place that made me aware of a lot of things that concern my life and my future and what I have to do to reach another higher ground."

Four months later, as Elton John settled back for brief flight from New York to Boston on his private jet, the Starship, he was surprised to discover the pianist in the plane's lounge was none other than Stevie Wonder. He joined Elton John that night at the Boston Garden for a duet encore of Honky Tonk Women and then led the band in a rousing Superstition to frenzied emotional applause. It wasn't Wonder's first public appearance since the accident - he had been jamming briefly earlier with Edgar Winter at a Greenwich Village nightclub, the Bottom Line - but it set the stage for an extraordinary series of comeback appearances.

In January 1974, he tested the waters with a pair of European appearances. January played the Rainbow Theatre in London before all of England's reigning rock royalty - Paul and Linda McCartney, Ringo Starr, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, David Bowie. Still he whipped out brand new songs - The Bumblebee Of Love, Sky Blue Afternoon and the instrumental, Contusion. He travelled to France to appear before a tuxedo clad audience of industry executives at a music business conference in Cannes.

Nominated for six Grammy Awards, Wonder arrived at the televised ceremony at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium on March 2 on the arm of his mother, Lula Hardaway. He dedicated the first Grammy to her (also mentioning his brother, Calvin Hardaway, who pulled him from the car wreck). By the end of the night, he won an historic five Grammys stretching across both of the previous year's albums. He won awards for both Superstition and Sunshine Of My Life from Talking Book, and Innervisions was named Album Of The Year. He gave his Best Engineered Album award to Margouleff and Cecil. He made his mother accompany him to the stage to accept the final award, waved it over his head and then gave it to her.

A week later, Wonder held a press conference in Los Angeles and announced that he planned to move to Africa. He said he had already made contacts with people in Ghana and that he planned to complete the move within two years. He hoped to work with the under-privileged in Africa, particularly blind children. He allowed he would probably conduct a nationwide tour before leaving to raise money for African charities. He also said his next album would be released in a month.

The next week, he walked on stage before a capacity crowd at New York's Madison Square Garden, pointed dramatically heavenward and then pointed at his own battered forehead. The place went nuts. For the finale, he held hands with Roberta Flack, Sly Stone and Eddie Kendricks of The Temptations - a representative pantheon of the day's soul Olympians -while they all sang Superstition.

The next album wasn't finished for six months (Wonder also dropped his plans to move to Africa). When the album was done, he titled it Fuffillingness' First Finale. `Fulfullingness' was his name for Malcolm Cecil. It was the last album Margouleff and Cecil would make with Stevie Wonder."

After four albums, we had gone to all the creative places we were going to go to," said Margouleff, "and we were starting to repeat ourselves. I think Steve had said all he was going to say for a while. I think he went on to imitate the style of those records for another record or two, but they were never as successful, in my eyes, as those four albums."

Even during the album's production, the "associate producers" were drifting away from Wonder, who they found even more remote since the accident, surrounded by yet greater labyrinthian entourages and inaccessible in new ways. They were chafing at being kept in the shadow of Stevie Wonder - "His credits kept getting larger and ours kept getting smaller," said Margouleff, and their lawyers were unable to wrest any royalties out of Wonder for their participation as "associate producers". The Isley Brothers were calling and the pair found themselves jetting between Teaneck, New Jersey and Fight The Power, and the Record Plant in Los Angeles and Boogie On Reggae Woman. Cecil was getting so angry, he stopped showing up for the sessions.

"After the accident, that's when the changes occurred," said Cecil. "Stevie became more black-oriented in terms of the people around him. He didn't want anybody who didn't absolutely have to be there who wasn't black."

"He was never quite the same person," said Margouleff. "Stevie became much more controlling and less free with himself. I think he began to realise he was mortal. I think he took a lot of medication after the accident because it was very severe. I think it gave him a very different perspective on his life. He became more and more famous and we became less and less important."

To Johanan Vigoda, it is not so simple. He thinks everybody grows and changes, that you can only spend so much time with people like Coretta Scott King or Jesse Jackson before it begins to affect how you see yourself. He thinks a 24-year-old man, at the top of the world after surviving a brush with death, is very different to a 21-year-old young man freshly emancipated, looking to make his own mark. He remembered talking to the artist backstage at the Rainbow Theatre before he went out to play his first show anywhere since this disfiguring accident, in front of every famous rock musician who was in London that night. "Aren't you afraid?" Vigoda asked his client.

"What do you mean afraid?" Stevie Wonder asked.