—By Bill DeMain
Ten seconds into the 1971 hit “If You Really Love Me,” Stevie Wonder lets out a little cry, roughly translated as “Aaa-ee-yeh!”
It lasts about half a second, but in this musical pixel, you can glimpse the big picture of who Stevie is. The “Aaa-ee-yeh!” is pure joy. It’s unrestrained and soulful. It’s optimistic, especially in the face of the heartbreak that lies ahead in the lyric of the song. And that could be a working definition of Stevie’s brand of soul music: optimism in the face of heartbreak. His life has been full of both.
Steveland Morris Judkins was born May 13, 1950 in Saginaw, Mich. Four weeks premature, he was kept in an incubator. When too much oxygen was pumped in, he developed a condition called retrolental fibroplasia, which created a fibrous membrane behind each eyeball, leaving him blind.
The handicap never slowed him down (“I think you create a sense of very vivid places you can go to, and see what’s going on in your mind,” Stevie commented recently to The Guardian). By age 8 he was making prodigious noises on piano, harmonica and bongos, and singing songs by his heroes B.B. King and Bobby “Blue” Bland. When his family moved to Detroit, Stevie took his one-man show onto the stoop of a neighborhood building. Word got around and landed in the ear of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, Jr.
Gordy encouraged Stevie to hang around Hitsville after school and on weekends. Insatiably curious, Stevie would sit for hours in the studio with the Funk Brothers, Motown’s house band, picking up tips on everything from how to arrange songs to how to score with women.
Stevie was a notorious prankster. In a John Swenson-penned biography, Stevie recalled, “I knew the intercom numbers of everyone at Motown, and I’d change my voice and say things like, ‘This is Berry, and I want you to get Stevie that tape recorder right away. He’s a great new artist, so it’s okay to spend the money and buy it for him.’”
After playing student and court jester at Motown for a time, a 10-year-old Stevie released his first single, “I Call It Pretty Music,” remarkable now only for the fact that the label made Stevie Morris into Little Stevie Wonder. More singles followed over the next year but flopped. The problem? The records lacked the fiery energy the kid generated on the live Motortown Revues. Even up against Marvin Gaye, Smokey & The Miracles and Martha Reeves, Stevie stole the shows, rousing audiences like a tent-revival preacher.
The ever resourceful Gordy then recorded Stevie where he was at his best: on stage. The result, an ebullient call-and-response workout called “Fingertips, Pt. 2,” went to No. 1.
Over the next decade, Stevie would outgrow the boy genius tag, stumble through adolescence (with some cringe-worthy missteps, like his shuckin’-and-jivin’ Stevie at the Beach album), write his first songs, experiment with styles from gospel to folk, all while staying present on the charts with top-notch hits such as “Uptight,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” “My Cherie Amour” and “For Once in My Life.”
In 1971, Stevie turned 21. His contract was up for renegotiation. His earnings, which had been held in a Motown trust fund, were now his, to the tune of $1 million. Stevie fled Detroit to New York City’s Electric Ladyland, the studio Jimi Hendrix had built. There he holed himself up for nearly a year of self-produced sessions, which would yield Music of My Mind, a rite of passage LP that delivered Stevie into funky adulthood.
“I had gone about as far as I could go,” Stevie recalled in his biography. “I just kept repeating ‘The Stevie Wonder Sound,’ and it didn’t express how I felt about what was happening in the world. I wanted to see what would happen if I changed. I just barricaded myself with the instruments in the studio. I didn’t have a band. I just had myself. I wanted to learn to do this. I wanted to express the way I would have everything sound, the way I would do everything, so I played all the instruments to get that.”
In New York, he also hooked up Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, two experts on synthesizer technology, who taught him the ins and outs of waveforms and oscillators. With his deft touch, Stevie would almost single-handedly humanize the synthesizer in pop music. “I think a lot of people looked at a synthesizer as just another freaky instrument, but I looked at it as another tool for expressing myself,” Stevie said.
Like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Stevie’s Music of My Mind broke with the Motown tradition of albums as mere vehicles for singles. It was meant to be heard as a whole, and it became the stylistic prelude for the four masterpieces which would follow—Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974) and Songs in the Key of Life (1976)
Stevie’s output in the early ’70s was a high watermark in R&B, pushing the form to new socially conscious and conceptual heights. Layering his voice in harmony atop ingeniously complex arrangements, he created a sound that to this day is as unmistakable as it is fresh. Tackling everything from race issues to poverty, from his near-fatal car crash to his failed marriage to Syreeta Wright, Stevie’s pen was on fire with songs such as “Sunshine of My Life,” “Superstition,” “Living for the City,” “Higher Ground,” “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” “Boogie on Reggae Woman” and “Sir Duke.”
He also contributed songs and production to records by artists including the Jackson 5, Minnie Riperton, The Supremes and most memorably, Chaka Khan’s Rufus (with the funk classic, “Tell Me Something Good,” which he wrote and arranged). During these golden years, Stevie was so consumed by music, that he averaged three hours of sleep per night.
In the ’80s, his output slowed. Despite continuing to win Grammys (he’s collected 25 in all) and being involved with one of the decade’s biggest hits (Paul McCartney’s duet “Ebony and Ivory”), his notorious perfectionism kept him in the studio, rethinking and remixing his own records.
In the ’90s, Stevie was even more reclusive, releasing only two albums: the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever and his own Conversation Peace. It would be 10 years before his next album, 2005’s A Time to Love.
“I think part of [the lag between albums] is that as you get older, you get more things you’re dealing with,” Stevie told Grammy Magazine. “I have other responsibilities now—family, making sure that everybody’s okay. Music has changed obviously, and I’ve always taken the position that I don’t want to put a record out just because I’ve got to put a record out. I spend a lot of time listening, I really do, because I think there’s a lot to be said. And I want to make sure that when I say it, I have sampled enough to understand the pulse or the pace and the time signatures that are happening.
“The only way that you can really stay innovative in music is to be in love with life,” he adds. “You have to live life to be innovative in music.”
—by Bill DeMain
From Performing Songwriter Issue 94, June 2006
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