Yes, I was a part of the Rolling Stones tour with him.

Back in the summer of 1972, long before she went on to top the billboard charts twice and win four Grammys, Denise Williams had just gotten the gig of her life as a backup singer in Wonderlove, Stevie Wonder's Touring Band. Her first assignment took her in the band all over America, opening for the Rolling Stones. Music of My Mind had just come out that spring into great critical acclaim, but modest sales. And now Motown was looking to make Stevie go even bigger, beyond the Black audience that knew and loved him. There was another listenership out there still to be reached, almost exclusive who's relatively white and just as predominantly male, who mostly wanted to go to concerts, experience some rowdiness, hear the favorite band, and see themselves reflected back to them. These are people who love the Rolling Stones, who've been waiting for the to come back and play in the US. And these were the people Barry and Stevie wanted to reach. What was that like for you being on that tour? Scary as hell. Okay. What was scary It was a little different.

Well, first of all, the Rolling Stones, they got a whole other thing going on.

Denise, I was going to ask, but I didn't want to get anybody in any trouble.

It was a very different environment for him. We He switched into rock and roll. Oh, my God, I was scared. I mean, this little girl from Gary, Indiana, Church of God and Christ, Babe Temple. I didn't know what to expect that with them. They had their own doctor out there to keep them going, and the drugs, and, oh, my gosh. I came out one night to get on the bus to go back to the hotel that was in Chicago, and the police were macing the crowd. So I got maced. I couldn't find the bus. I had to call a cousin in Chicago to come pick me up and take me to the hotel.

Okay, this scene Denise is describing in Chicago, it got repeated at pretty much every stop on the tour that summer. Thirty-one cops injured on the first night in Vancouver, 60 arrests in San Diego, police tear gas in the crowd in Tucson, Arizona, and on and on. When they played three shows in Chicago in late June, the Stones stayed at Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion in the Gold Coast.

The other night, I ended up at the Playboy mansion in a room that in order for me to get out, I had to slide down a stripper pole and trying to get out of there and stuff. I was praying, Jesus, I promise you, you get me out of here and get me away from this. I ain't doing this no more. You got my word. I'm done. I'm done in that. I bleed the blood of Jesus in Jesus name.

I'm done. Did you talk to Stevie about this? Did you tell Stevie, I cannot do this. I can't do it.

I told him. I said, You know what? I didn't say I couldn't do that. I said, But I'll tell you one thing. I called on my angels, and they got me out of there with them deviance and them devils and stuff. You all crazy.

How did Stevie feel about it?

He thought it was funny. I could tell you a bunch of stories.

This is the Ray Parker Jr. Mr. I'm afraid of no ghosts, Ray Parker Jr. He was 18 years old when Stevie called him at his home in Detroit and asked him to join the band. Is there a particular night that was memorable for you?

Well, let me give you one. This is just one of many. We've been partying so hard every night and the band members going and stuff. I think it was David Sandborn who came and got me, said, Okay, man, let's get in the car. We're going out tonight.

David Sandborn, the veteran saxophonist who was also playing with Stevie on this tour.

We were in Chicago. I was like, I'm too tired. We've already partied. And he says, No, no, no. Tonight's not the night to be tired. And where we were going is to the Playboy mansion in Chicago. And I'm trying to pass on the mansion. I don't even know what that is. I don't know who you have in the rest or the Playboy mansion. And then the guys in the band, I think David Sanborn and Steve Madale the tromper player, they were like, No, you're coming with us tonight. You can't miss this.

Ray, why are you not talking anymore? Why did you stop talking?

Yeah. But that's the end of the story. No, it cannot be. Yeah, it's got to be. It's got to be the end of the story.

Suffice it to say, whatever happened inside the Playboy mansion that night or in trashed hotel rooms all across America that summer, it was so scandalous that the Stones went to court to make sure that a documentary of the tour, CockSucker Blues, a film they themselves commissioned, not be shown in public because it contained scenes of drugs and sex and general mayhem that were potentially incriminating. The film and the tour became both legendary and legendarily notorious. And Stevie, well, this episode is about how getting mixed up in all of their chaos really worked out for him. I'm Wesley Morris. I'm a critic at the New York Times. And today on The Wonder of Stevie, the second album in Stevie's Classic Period, Talking Book. I want to start actually with Talking Book in '72, right before Talking Book, and ask you about Stevie and the Rolling Stones tour in 1972. What do you know about that tour?

I know that this is a crucial period in Stevie Wonder's development as a musician in terms of giving him a bigger platform. And I guess the big question is, will he step up to the plate?

This is Questlove, host of the Questlove Supreme podcast on iHeart. And one of the executive producers of this show, he's also encyclopedic in his knowledge of, well, pretty much everything about pop music, soul music, funk, and especially the genre known as Stevie Wonder.

He's already a superstar at the age of 12. He's even a bigger star at 16. When he asks for his independence, he basically provides the goods and has the makings of what could be a global superstar. It's unheard of for one demographic to step outside of their comfort zone and grab an entirely other demographic. White artists cater to their white crowd, and this is one of the ways that Stevie Wonder will start living up to the promise of creative genius that can be commercially viable 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 and whatnot.

It felt different. Just having this mixed race bill at all, a Black Black artist and his integrated band opening for these British White dudes who fancy themselves Children of the American Blues. That was revolutionary in 1972. I don't want to belabor this because we're going to get into it later, just about what was going on in the country at the time. But for now, let's just state the obvious. America in 1972 was not the most peaceful place on Earth. There was all kinds of unrest in every category you can There was a war going on, obviously. And one of those other royaling categories involved race, racist violence, a government actively at war with Black people, politics and policies that benefit from and exacerbate racial tension. And so the The idea that Stevie Wonder will go on this tour with the Stones and win the hearts and maybe open the minds and eventually the record buying dollars of hundreds of thousands of amped up white people, that just comes with some genuine risk. It just does. And were the audiences receptive to you guys? Did everybody seem happy to see you?

Yeah, the audiences were pretty receptive to us.

Ray Parker Jr. Again.

We didn't get hit in the head with a tomato. I remember when Prince opened for the Stone, they hit him in the head with a beer bottle.

This Prince story was nearly 10 years after Stevie's tour. 1981, he opened two shows for the Stones in LA. He came out on stage in see-through jacket and thigh-high boots and bikini briefs. Linger, basically. A lot of the 90 something thousand people there to see the Stones just start going batshit nuts. They're screaming for Prince to get off stage, shouting all manner of racist and homophobic slurs, throwing food, then beer bottles. Prince stopped playing four songs into his set and reportedly wept backstage. Then he flew home to Minnesota and refused to play the second show until Mick called and convinced him to come back. That's That's basically how opening for the Stones could have gone for Stevie.

A lot of these groups play in front of the Stones. And if you're not playing hard rock and roll, which they tend to pick somebody playing something different from what they're doing, the crowd is out there playing, Get off the stage, play some rock and roll. But even then at the beginning, they didn't do that to Stevie Wonder.

Take this one show he did at the Boston Garden as an example. Stevie and WNDLUF go out and they play their opening act, but then They learn that come time for the Stones to go on, Mick and Keith Richards aren't there. Not just like not in the arena. They're not even in the state. They got arrested in Providence, Rhode Island that morning after Keith reportedly hit a photographer with his belt. The mayor of Boston at the time actually worked to get them out of jail, but then they had to get them up to Boston for the show. That's at least 45 minutes away if there's no traffic. Now, I don't know how much time you've spent in the Boston of 1972, but it is not hard for me to imagine that that crowd at the Rolling Stones that night might not have been super psyched that the band they paid good money to see hasn't actually taken the stage because they're in a different city. Here's this young Black guy in an integrated band up there playing music that they didn't request. But for a couple of hours, that's what Stevie does. He keeps playing, rolling out songs that aren't on the set list, keeping the crowd happy until Mick and Keith and the rest of the band showed up.

Again, Just to remind you, this is a tour in which there was some outbreak of violence or arrest or some insanity at just about every stop. It's still making Denise Williams quiver. So this situation in Boston is pretty fraught. But Stevie, he just handles it.

I think as a Black person, no matter how much into the creative space you are, and especially with a figure like Stevie Wonder, who clearly uses his heart as his North Star, I think it's impossible to be a Black entertainer and to not always be on high alert. I think it's impossible to not live in fight or flight. So you're prepared for every situation. Stevie Wonder was basically primed and prepped for this moment, for his spotlight.

Yet, and this feels important to say, live in concert, Stevie's sound wasn't radically different from what the Stones are up to. It's brassier and funkier and more melodic, Blacker. But anybody in the house that night would have known it was still rock and roll. So the longer he and Wonderlove went, the farther along the crowd went with them.

He knows the difference between a hostile environment, segregated audiences down south versus more liberal up north versus Chitlin circuit. So Stevie Wonder knows exactly what tricks to pull from his hat to entertain people. I think oftentimes artists, especially Black artists, I believe that survival is often our motivating factor. How can I bring the single or this particular product to the maximum audience? How do I make money? How do I survive? I think more or less Stevie Wonder was in just a place of, how can I create beauty? I think that Stevie Wonder had the power of knowing how to disarm people from their biases.

Stevie and Wonderlove played their final shows eight days after all that stress up in Boston. And MSG, Madison Square Garden, to be exact, it's July 26, 1972, which is also Mick Jagger's birthday. That's Stevie on keys, and they're all playing this medley of uptime and satisfaction. Stevie's got these sunglasses on, and he looks really happy. This footage is from CockSucker Blues, the notorious unreleased documentary of the Stones American Tour. In it, Stevie is surrounded by a bunch of long-haired white dudes with horns and all the members of Wonder Love are on stage, too. When you go, I'm stepping on the top of my... And that, that guitar look right there, that's Ray Parker Jr. When they shift from Stevie's up tight into the Stones' satisfaction, this incredible thing happens. Mick takes Stevie by the arm, and the two of them bunny hop across the stage, weaving through all the musicians to these two mics that are front and center. You can see Keith and Ray Parker Jr. Jamming, and Denise and the rest of the Wonderlove singers are backing them up. And there are a zillion musicians is having a good time up there. It's like a big party.

In the middle of it all, Stevie and Mick are side by side, and they start doing this little choreographed dance, throwing their hands up in unison and then doing these twerls together. At some point, somebody comes out on stage and throws a creamed pie at Mick, I guess because it's his birthday, and a bunch of it gets on Stevie. One of the last things you see in this video is Stevie smiling this huge smile, wiping whipped cream from his face and just dancing like the happiest person in the world. I don't want to overinterpret this scene, but if the purpose of this tour was to bring Stevie and his sound to an audience of hard rock and roll fans and then win them over, you got to think, well, then it worked out okay because this place seems like it's exploding with satisfaction. Hey, guys. This is Smoky Robinson, and I'm here today to talk about my brother, Stevie Wonder, who is my brother, brother, brother. The first time that I remember going on the road with Stevie was when we took the Motortown Review out. The first stop was a theater in Chicago called the Regal Theater.

There was a circuit of those theaters back in those days, and almost every city had one of those theaters. It was the first tour that Steve had ever gone out with us.

Steve came on.

He was doing his singing. He did his act. I forgot what song he had out then. We had several band leaders at Motown who used to go out with the Motortown Reviews. This particular time, a guy named Beans Bowes. Stevie had gone off, and he was taking his bowels, and Beans Bowes had the band to start a jazz real, and the band was playing that. Stevie took out his harmonica and started to just play what what they were playing because that's who he is. He can just do that. Damn it. But that's what he did. And so they went along with Stevie, and then it just became a party. Now, Stevie and I have been traveling on the road all over the place, and you might be a person who does that, too. In your home, maybe just sitting empty. Why let it be empty when it could be full? Turn it to an Airbnb and earn some money while you're traveling. If you're curious about this, just go to stevie. Com/host and find out more about it. Stevey released Talking Book three months after that Stones tour ended. It was his 15th album, and people came out in droves to buy it.

It was wildly more successful commercially than Music of My Mind, which had come out almost eight months earlier. It top billboards R&B album chart. It hit number three on the general billboard album chart. Two of the album's singles, You are the Sunshine of My Life and Superstition. They were huge. Both those songs won Stevie Grammys. And all I'm saying here is that Talking Book was an enormous hit. Something had definitely changed.

Okay, let's roll. Let's do it.

One of the people who lined up right away to buy it was this guy. Hello, Mr. Barack Obama.

How are you, sir? I'm pretty good. How are you doing? I am doing fantastic.

Well, that's good to hear. You're wearing a T-shirt, by the way?

Just like you.

This is Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, and an ardent Stevie Wonder fan, one of the most passionate Stevie Wonder fans ever to walk the Earth, according to him. And he also happens to be the co founder of Higher Ground, one of the companies putting this show out. But the reason to sit down with him and talk about Stevie, one of the reasons anyway, is that he's a fan who graduated to a friend. So he really knows his shit it comes to Stevie's music and background and what it all means in some greater, bigger sense. So this is a real general question I wanted to ask you first, and it's It basically is, why does Stevie Wonder matter so much to you?

Talking Book was the first album that I ever purchased with my own money. It came out when I was 11 years old. Where'd you get that money? Doing chores, extra chores. I had chores, and then there were some extra chores where you got a little bit bonus. I was living in Hawaii at the time with my grandparents, and Stevie and that album somehow captured something in me that I didn't know was there. There was a vibe, there was a sound, a feeling that I connected to. And for a black kid in Hawaii at a time when there weren't that many black kids around, to have this refuge was really important to me. And over time, I kept buying album after album, and those were always get-to sounds for me. And then when I met my wife, it turned out Michelle might be the only bigger Stevie Wonder fan than me. Okay. I exploited that to the maximum, sharing Stevie knowledge that indicated it to her that I was a suitable prospect.

Wait a minute. When did you find out that she was a bigger fan? When did you find out she liked him at all? I mean, not that it's hard.

I think it happened pretty early. It's one of those first dates and you start asking, All right, well, what music you listen to? And she said, Well, no, Stevie's my guy. At which point I said, Stevie's actually my guy. And so we then had a long Stevie conversation. And those are those markers in a relationship where, All right, are we going forward with this or not? I'm pretty sure that that gave me some credibility with her.

Okay. It would be odd if it didn't, is what I would say.

Yeah. It's a litmus test.

So this album, Talking Book, it would have been telling you from the moment you looked at it before you would even have torn the plastic off that something unusual is going on here, and it's deep.

Even you look at the Talking Book cover, he's wearing this shimmering robe, and he's got cornrows, and he doesn't have his glasses on, and he's feeling around some rocks. And you're thinking, Well, what's he communicating here? Right?

Allow me to describe it to you. Stevie's in this soft velvety-looking caftan. His legs are folded underneath and to one side, and he's wearing silver rings and a few bracelets. And one of them has some turquoise or maybe some opal or coral. And around his neck is a column of metallic squares. There's three of them. And the last one ends in three beaded tassels. It's like a dream catcher. And his hair is breeded, too. Eight cornrows on either side of his head.

Part of what he's communicating is that he is looking to transcend these categories that we are somehow being locked into.

Thank you.

Yes. Whether it's as subordinate, but also, for that matter, dominant. Part of what he's saying is, I'm going to upend or scramble a bunch of these hierarchies.

Okay, so let's just talk for a moment about what these hierarchies are.

When I first saw Talking Book, and I saw Stevie Wonder in Cornrows and Beads, a man, Stevie Wonder wearing braids is really central and really significant.

Mikaela Angela Davis writes about fashion, race, gender, hip hop. She was a stylist for, oh, just Diana Ross and Prince and Mary J. Blanche and Beyoncé.

For a Black man to wear such a clearly African hairstyle, to so clearly connect his body to his ancestors, to so clearly communicate that I know that we are from here and that we were enslaved, and this is the hairstyle of the people that were stolen.

This is the hair that gave you messages. This is the hair that were maps. This is the hair that hid rice and okra seeds. This is the hair that can hold beads. No one did that. Cornrows hold things.

And hold stories and did something no white rock and roll guy could ever do.

They cannot. There's one other There's another especially striking detail here. Stevie, who's rarely seen in public without his sunglasses, isn't wearing any, and the sun is out. This is the only one of his album covers where he's not in glasses. So This is a choice. You're being asked to behold the eyes of a blind person. And the whole thing, the shaman get up, the high desert setting, the way Stevie's hands are gently touching the Earth like he's communing with, like he's tuning It's deepest vibrations. I mean, it's practically begging you to call him a prophet.

I remember staring at the album cover going, What?

He does give you like Jesus. He gives you Black Jesus.

He's giving a spiritual leader. Look at that image on Talking Book. I would follow him.

Which is another choice because blind people have been contending with that particular stereotype of prophethood pretty much since the beginning of time.

I mean, in some ways, TV is contending with the same thing that every single blind person contends with on a daily basis. You walk into a room and people either assume you are helpless or you're some mythical superhero, or you're like an omen that has been sent to them to deliver a biblical message.

That's Will Butler. He's a long-time music critic. He's written for the New York Times and Vice and The New a New Yorker, and now he works in accessibility communications for a company in Silicon Valley. Will's also blind. There's a few tropes around disability and specifically, blindness.

There's the blind auger, the all seeing, all knowing mythical figure. There's the blind villain or the disabled villain who is bitter because of their disability. There's the blind begger who's helpless on the corner with a tin I think more recently, there's the blind superhero or the blind genius.

And you see a lot of that pop up in the 20th century.

Stevie, I think, bears the brunt of that.

I'm looking at the cover of Talking Book. I'm listening to Will Butler talk, and I'm thinking, is Stevie embracing the stereotype here, suggesting that he actually is in touch with the divine, and that this music is somehow spiritual or prophetic? Or is Stevie Wonder, one of the most famous blind people in the world, transcending the stereotype? Maybe nobody other than Stevie can answer this. Maybe he can't even really because he's an artist. I don't know, sometimes art can't always be boiled down so neatly to this thing or that thing. But there's no question that this album cover, Being What It Is, is engaging with the fact that all sorts of people project things onto blind people.

People attribute this super sense to blindness, not because they want to pigeonhole someone and put them in a little box.

I think people see the humanity in blind people, and so they want to see their potential. People know intellectually that blind people can achieve great things, but they lack the imagination to think about what is the process of practicing and rehearsing and learning that you have to go through to get there.

They can't imagine all the steps it would take to get from not knowing anything about a drum kit to being able to play like he does.

Without being able to visualize that process, you take this shortcut to like, well, it must just be some super sense. Will's right. For Stevie, this recording process isn't as simple as sitting him down in front of a bunch of instruments and letting some superpower do all the work. There is real intent behind this process. Craft, not just to help him create in the best way possible, but to create in a way that would be extremely accessible for him. When I talked to Bob Margalev, Stevie's longtime collaborator and one of Tonto's engineers, he told me how their process worked. I like to say, Stevie was the Rocks, and Malcolm and I were the Water.

He filled the space, and we filled the spaces in between to support him. There were little things even in the studio. When I walked into the studio with him, first couple of times, I said, There's three steps here.

Walk down, now turn to the right. And we set up all the instruments that needed to be set up. And there were little common things, making sure that the mic stands were high enough up on the booms that Steve wouldn't walk into and bang his head or get thrashed and stuff.

We had to make really sure that the rooms were friendly for him as being unsighted. And as soon as a couple of days into it, he was moving around the studio. You wouldn't even think he was unsighted because we kept things very predictable. We gave him the maximum amount of freedom. He was totally confident in moving into space, and it was important for him to be able to feel that way.

The packaging for Talking Book also included a Braille inscription. It reads like this. Here is my music. It is all I have to tell you how I feel. Know that your love keeps my love strong. I'd say the cover of Talking Book is reappropriating blindness, transfiguring it. Stevie might not be saying, Look at me, the blind shaman, but he certainly is saying, Look at me, the Black artist, the blind artist. That, I'm going to argue, is what made this album a powerful political statement. As powerful in its way as any other Black art, as any art being made at the time.

There were folks who were trying to be explicitly political, and there were folks who were shying away from politics. And somehow, Stevie was able to write music that lifted up the dignity of Black people and made day-to-day living as a Black person in a country that was still burdened by racism and oppression. He could find beauty and joy and irony and hypocrisy and anger and love in all that in a way that made you feel we were seen and could define our own reality as opposed to having to depend on somebody else's definitions.

Now, the album cover is important, and Really, I could talk about the covers of Stevie Wonder albums all day. But obviously, the other thing that matters is the music. There are things going on on Talking Book that are so nuanced and sneaky and brilliant and also easy to overlook because Stevie Wonder makes everything look so easy. Here's Quest Love again.

I'm a person that really takes for granted Stevie Wonder's gift of songwriting.

Yeah, we all do.

That's why we're doing the show. Yes, exactly. Even to the point where a downright gorgeous Sonic equivalent to the Mona Lisa song, You are the Sunshine of My Life.

Quest Love, let's talk.

That song is so beautiful, and the song is so spellbinding and so magical that it's probably not even in my top 50 Stevie Wonder songs. That's the danger of being Stevie Wonder, where his Steph Curry level of marksmanship, his marksman assassin standing 10 miles away from his target and still hitting it bullseye, that zone that he's about to enter in is so... You take it for granted.

Until fairly recently, You are the Sunshine of My Life was so omnipresent that it became a Sonic wallpaper. At some point, you'd be hearing it all the time, other versions by so many different people in elevators and grocery stores as hold music. It's easy to casually listen to it and think, Easy listening. But you should not think that. It's also easy to imagine, say, Frank Sinatra doing a cover of it back in the day, which, of course, he did. It's pretty good. But by the time Sinatra is covering it, it's an American songbook staple. That's because there's so much more going on in it. This song is working on so many complex levels, both as a song, obviously, and as the first thing you would have heard when you placed the needle in the groove on Talking Book. Track one, Talking Book. That's Rick McGloughlin. He's a musician, an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music, where he teaches, I swear to God, a class on Stevie Wonder. And Rick is one of those rare people who has a deep knowledge of Stevie's music, how it works, and he's got an intense, unquenchable belief in it.

Imagine a class about Stevie. Imagine Rick gathering the kids around him in this class and telling them a story about this very foreign experience, the hoopla that surrounded the release of a physical album, a thing you held in your hands. And imagine specifically him telling them about the morning of October 27th, 1972, the day Talking Book came out.

On a Tuesday morning, you go to the record store, you're first in line, and there's 50 other people behind you. You buy that record and you take it home, and the first thing you hear is that chiming sound.

It's an electric piano.

What he plays is actually this whole tone scale thing. It's weightless.

I actually think that You are the Sunshine of My Life is a great song because you are immediately destabilized by whatever it is you think this song is going to be.

Absolutely. You are the sunshine of my life.

So my version of you running home with your copy of Talking Book and putting this song on is, A, who is this singing? Right. And then B, who is this other person singing? My God. Forever you'll stay in my heart. Three, when is Stevie coming? Exactly.

I feel like The singing he does on that record is, in contrast, it feels to me the timbre is really clean on those first two verses.

And then Stevie shows up and he turns it sideways.

There's something about the succession of those sounds, plus there's actually two forms of weightlessness that happen in the introduction.

One is something called a suscord suspended.

Then this whole tone thing that we talked about a little while ago, the whole thing is waiting for Stevie to come in. Then what were the lyrics that you just said when he I feel like this is the beginning. That's the story right there.

Yes. The story Rick is talking about is also the story of a shift in tone from a generic easy listening sound into what I can only describe as a Blacker way of singing. He brings a touch of stank to this music, seasoned it, singing the word heaven so low that it could be hell. The way we say bad whenever something something is good. His choice of reasoning, it's not as explicit as something like James Brown, Say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud. It's just a way of presenting your Blackness as undiluted and personal and natural to who you are. You're just being yourself, and this is who you are. Caftans, cornrows, coral, dream catchers. This is the beginning.

At this particular time, in thinking about the '70s, it's about introspection.

This is Lorna Simpson, One of America's great visual artists and photographers, she's a deep thinker of the human condition, too. Black humans conditions. She breaks down how Stevie brings the interior to the exterior on this album.

If you think about Black introspection and a Black interior, then all the albums and all of the ways of thinking about Black life is to signal that there is a Black interiority. That was particular period where people, artists, were thinking about their relationship to being in America, very specifically, and what they saw going on, and that they could not do it through the mold of the music industry that their career started in. So I think there is the '70s creates this opportunity for personalized introspection, not to say that they weren't in the other thing, but the vehicle by which their music was crafted did was completely different than this period that we're speaking about.

Okay. Amen. It's the freedom to explore yourself, your feelings, your people without the constant constraint of spectatorship or the obligation to interpret. This is part of what gives Talking Book its beauty. It just sounds free, musically and emotionally. The second track, On Side One, Maybe Your Baby, it's a funk tune set to the old blues concerned about being stepped out on by your woman. The song is the polar opposite of the song we just heard. For what it's worth, Stevie's marriage to Serita Wright was on the rocks while he was making this album, but their creative partnership was still intact. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that they might have been working out the demise of their love through music.

I'm often wondering if the end of You are the Sunshine of My Life has an abrupt ending like a pop, and then he's woken up to reality, and then suddenly, this is when reality sets in.

Quest Love, again.

Because You are the Sunshine of My Life starts like a dream, and it feels like a dream. You know what I mean?

Yes, yes. Those chimes, the chiming of the keyboard. Yes, yes.

If it weren't for the fade out of the song, it's as almost if... I feel an amateur would have been capt and obvious of... A person like me, I would have actually segued those two songs in a very abrupt manner. So abrupt that it's almost as if you were jilted from a dream, and now this is reality because maybe your baby is the exact opposite of You are the Sunshine of My Life, and he's dealing with betrayal.

For the Sunshine of My Life.

Always the early adopter of new technology, Stevie finds a new trick with the song to express betrayal. It's a technical achievement. One of the tricks of maybe your baby that is so influential is that Stevie Wonder does this technique, really not successfully seen, or at least commercially, since the days of Alvin and the Chipmucks. And that's called recording his vocals in Very Speed.

Wait, what's very speed?

When Stevie Wonder is set to sing his vocals, he will have the engineer slow the music down to a very slow pace. Then Stevie Wonder will sing the song in his natural voice. So when said music is sped back up to its normal place. Then Stevie Wonder's voice will sound like this. So much in your favor. So it's weird for me because I see Maybe Your Baby also as a cinematic movie in which I feel like the normal voice Stevie Wonder, which is the lead vocal, is just realizing that love has been betrayed. Maybe Your Baby Done made some other plans.

It probably would have been enough for him to settle for the vocal trick, right? A new toy.

But remember, whole, not parts.

So Stevie's using an old trick, one of the oldest tricks in the book, a guitar. And to play it on us, he enlisted Ray Parker Jr.

The first song I worked on was Maybe Your Baby.

Maybe Your Baby is nearly seven minutes long, and half of it feels occupied by Ray doing three solos that he performs like it's the last time he's ever going to touch a guitar.

To me, I never even heard sounds like that. When I heard, whoa, I was like, what the heck is that? And where does the guitar go if that's going on there? To me, it was like something altogether new.

How does he explain to you what he wants you to do on this record?

Well, he just tells you right about here, I can use some guitar, play what you feel. And then he finetunes what you feel in case you end up on the wrong note at the end or something that he's not trying to express. So you try to read his mind and you interpret what he wants to play. And by the way, there's one That's the most important thing that we've left out of this entire conversation. What's that? Out of all of the instruments Stevie plays, and he plays the drums great, the piano, the synthesizers, the harmonica. He sings, he does everything. He just can't play the electric guitar. Jeff, let's talk about a little job security.

The three songs in End Talking Book are a trio of love songs, songs about heartache. Blame it on the Sun, Looking for another pure love, and I believe When I fall in love, it will be forever. Each one is a gem on its own, but for me, they're a hole within the hole. Man loses love, man searches for love, man thinks he's found love. Serita wrote Another Pure Love and Blame it on the Sun with Stevie. The most devastating thing on that song is the moment toward the end where Stevie sings that his heart is blaming him for what went wrong. Then this beautiful thing happens. This female voice comes up to basically say, This is new. Your heart claims for you. I love the ownership that comes at the end of this record. He owns his part of the demise of the relationship and uses the chorus of something like blame it on the sun to say so. Even if this is not literally her voice here, it feels like Serita's dare to fact-check him and resolve mutually that it's time to move on. Maybe she's the baby who'd unmade some other plans. If you've got great confessional songwriting like this, maybe you don't need divorce court.

Now, having said that, I could spend a month talking about every single track on this album, including those three songs. I didn't even mention Big Brother, and it's one of Stevie's strongest pieces of political songwriting. But time is short. I mean, I could spend another month on track four alone. So apparently could this guy, Tuesday Hot break.

You could just get into that groove and it would transport you. Tuesday Hot I mean, come on, listen to that.

You're listening to the Wonder of Stevie from Pineapple Street Studios, Higher Ground Audio and Audible. And do you want to hear more? There's a very special bonus episode only on Audible, featuring me, Wesley Morris, and former President Barack Obama in an enlightening conversation with Stevie Wonder himself. Listen to the bonus episode at Audible before you can hear it anywhere else. Getting bogged down by how much new music there is out there. There's a lot. Consider a daily dose of the All Songs Considered podcast. It's the easiest way to get tuned into the music world. We spend hours combing through the new music universe from emerging bands to time-tested icons, to bring you your next favorite artist. To get up on your music know-how, listen to All Songs Considered from NPR. There's another song, and another matter that has to be addressed. Because it's important. Everybody knows Superstition. It opens Side 2 of Talking Book. It's a song you all have been misinterpreting for decades. I want to set the record straight once and for all because you know what superstition isn't about? Halloween. Lyrically, superstition is just true poetic conciseness. The whole thing fits on a cocktail napkin.

I'll be fair, it does make use of superstition imagery. Thirteen month old baby broke the looking glass. Seven years of bad luck, the good things in your past. And according to Stevie, the devil is on his way. I got to admit that I, too, have bought into the Halloween of this song. But about 20 years ago, Superstition told me something else. The song told me it was a wish for Black people to avoid low expectations, not to fall for the idea that their Blackness is an American curse. That's the ladder you're not supposed to walk under. Why do we even think that? What happens if we let go of Blackness as a curse, as a problem? Conversely, what if white people stop their superstitious purse clutching and crossing the as a Black person approaches? Because when you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain't the way. The superstition is racism. It's a devastating way to open side, too, with a song that feels secretly about untapped Black power. But what does that genius sound like to the genius himself? As he's, I don't know, geniusing? We don't often get to hear that.

Sometimes with the Beatles and Aretha Franklin and Prince, some documentary or outtakes will surface showing them in process. I'd never heard anything like that with Stevie Wonder. But then a little miracle happened for me. I got to hear component parts for superstition. Stems is what people in the music business call them, like flower stems. Before these stems came into my life, if you had said, Wesley, what's the baseline of superstition? I would never in a million years have said this. Never. But that's what this actually is. It's the baseline to superstition. What I thought the baseline actually was, was… What I thought was the bass line was actually a clavenet. Individually, they could really be sketches for distinct songs, but really, they're the onions for the Soffrido Stevie's making. Then he takes that basic clavenet cord progression and add salt and pepper in the form of little notes and some swing and a half note that do indeed funk the basic progression up. And he starts to saute them all together so that everything's dancing in the pan. They all have their own parts, but they play together. They play off each other. Here come the green peppers.

What's great about hearing these individual elements is that you can hear Stevie bleeding through what I think are probably headphones when there's a rust between cords. It's very faint, but it's there. Okay, let's add another ingredient. Stevie, can we have the garlic, please? Then he throws in some chillies in the form of delays and slapback, this type of rapid echo that gives the sounds a depth of flavor, basically more salt and a little more garlic. Now, in the stems we got our hands on, the drums are miced three ways, from the left and the right, and then down at the bass drum, so that each element is its own distinct sound. And just to reiterate this, all of these pieces, or many of them, especially with the clavenet, could actually stand on their own as solo compositions. Now, I know this isn't typically done when you're making a soffrito, but I want to add some wine to the pan to the glaze it. Hit me. That's Trevor Lawrence on tenor sax and Steve Medio on trumpet. You can hear them waiting to add their sizzle to what I'm going to argue is the chorus. If you listen closely, you can hear their hands on the valves of their instruments, if I'm not mistaken.

And what happens is they basically have to play two parts, one from the left and one from the right. And now, check out this steak before it goes in the pan. Very superstitious.

Writings on the wall. Very superstitious. Let us not to fall.

But the point here is that with a lot of songs, great ones included, they're found in collaboration. When you're a one-person band, the jam is you. I mean, he's just goofing around like he's still making music in my mind. Stevie tended to be right about a lot of things, but not everything. I mean, take me. There's one thing I believe in that I don't understand, and I have yet to suffer for it, and that's his genius. Motown put the song out in October of 1972, and by January of '73, it had taken over the Hot 100's number one spot, something Stevie hadn't achieved since he told everybody to clap their hands on Fingertips Part Two in 1963. After Talking Book came out, The New York Times read about how Stevie was beloved not just by his longtime Black listeners, but by, young and not so young white, song quote. The New Yorker referred to his, quote, huge interracial audience, and a cover story in Newsweek announced, quote, Stevie is the favorite of young, old, Black, White, the hip and the Where. And when you've got the number one song in America, there are just places you're suddenly allowed to go.

Everyone else might have to ask for directions on how to get there, but you're allowed to set up your band and jam out. Find my way to I'm talking about the time that Stevie went on down to the Children's Television Workshop to teach the kids. I got some just for you, bro. Oh, yeah? Oh, go ahead. It goes like this.

Oh, boy. You got that?

You got it? Okay, here, we do it now. I'm going to do it. Okay, here we go.

And then got down.

You're going to save me. I My favorite live Stevie Wonder performance is Sesame Street. Bray Parker Jr. Again.

When we When I did it, I had no clue that it was going to be that big of a deal. When I was a kid, I used to watch Sesame Street and playing on Sesame Street with Stevie Wonder, I thought, Wow, this is really cool, man. I'm on Sesame Street, and I'm playing with Stevie Wonder, and it's all being recorded.

Just think about this for a moment. It's now the spring of 1973, and this is the place Stevie Wonder now occupies in American popular culture. A guy who can spend the summer touring with one of the dirtiest acts in popular music. And then, nine months or so after the end of that tour, finds his way to Sesame Street. He's about to turn 23 years old. 23. And if there are any doubts remaining out there as to just what a hot streak he's on, well, Stevie's about to put those doubts to rest. Six months after leaving a crater outside Mr. Hooper's store, he'll release Innervisions, the third album in the streak. If we're talking about transcendence, that's the album that makes him artistically untouchable and untoppable. See, Barry thought that they were so powerful making love songs and the music that they were making that was not political. And so he did not want them to lose that particular identity because he wasn't sure what the political identity would do to their careers. That's next time on The Wonder of Stevie. When you believe in things you don't understand, then you stop it. It's the most disunest way.

This has been a Higher Ground and Audible original. The Wonder of Stevie is produced by Pineapple Street Studios. Higher Ground, Audio, and Audible. Our senior producer is Josh Gwyn. Producer is Janel Anderson. Associate producer is Mary Alexa Cavenagh. Senior managing producer is Asha Saluja. Executive editor is Joel Lovall. Archival producer is Justine Domb. Fact checker is Jane Drinkert. Senior managing producer is Asha Saluja. Executive editor is Joel Lovall. Archival producer is Justine Domb. Fact checker is Jane Drinkert. Senior managing producer is Sound and Engineering is Raj Makija. Senior Audio Engineers are Davie Sumner, Pedro Elvira, and Marina Pais. Assistant Audio Engineers are Jade Brooks and Sharon Vardalas. Mixed and mastered by Davie Sumner and Raj Makija. Additional by Jason Richards, Scott Gillman, Javier Martinez, and Leon Doe. Score and Sound Design by Josh Gwen and Raj Makija. Original Score performed by Carles Music and Raj Makija. Additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. Hosted in an executive produced by Wesley Morris, higher ground executive producers are Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Corinne Gileard-Fisher, Dan Feerman, and Mukta Mohan. Creative executive for higher ground is Janée Marible. Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Jenna Weis-Burman and Max Winsky.

Audible executive producers are Kate Navin and nick DiAngelo. The Wonder of Stevie is also executive produced by Amir Questlove Thompson, Anna Holmes, and Stevie Wonder. Questlove is the producer of this show, courtesy of iHeart, and can also be heard on Questlove Supreme from iHeart podcasts. Recorded at Different Fur, Patches, The Hobby Shop, and Pineapple Street Studios. Head of Creative Development at Audible is Kate Navin. Chief Content Officer is Rachel Ghiatza. Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording, copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.