Hey, everybody, we're going to be talking about racial violence and police brutality in explicit terms in this episode. So please take care of yourselves while you're listening. On April 28, 1973, a ten year old boy named Clifford Glover was walking with his stepfather at Armstead along New York Boulevard in Queens, New York. Ad worked as a mechanic at a wrecking yard nearby. Clifford loved going there. He'd bring his own wrench and pretend that he was working on the cars, too. They were headed to the yard that morning. It was early Saturday, around 05:00 a.m. when a Buick Skylark pulled up next to them and two undercover cops, Thomas Shea and Walter Scott, got out of the car and addressed them with racial slurs. Clifford and his stepdad turned and ran, and Thomas Shea pulled his gun and started firing.

Street violence is not uncommon in New York City this past weekend. One of its victims was ten year old Clifford Glover, who was shot to death by a policeman. Today was his funeral. And Richard Roth reports Clifford Glover is.

Believed the youngest person ever killed by a New York City policeman. Ad survived. Clifford did not. Shay claimed Clifford was threatening him with a gun of searches have failed to turn up any gun that can be connected with the boy, Ed Armstead told WCBS TV newsman Bob Young. That's because Clifford never had one.

Did he ever have a gun at all?

No, he never had a gun.

He don't even have a toy.

Not a play gun, not even a toy gun. All he wanted bicycles and four with car motors. Outside of that, he don't fool no toy gun. He don't bought with toy gun. Shay later claimed that the boy and his stepfather fit the description of thieves who were in their mid twenties, around 6ft tall. Armstrong was 51 at the time. Clifford was less than 5ft and weighed 90 pounds. Eloise Armstead, the boy's mother I feel.

Like that it was murder cause he was a kid and like he was an older kid from a grown up. And it seemed like to me that he would have an understanding that was a kid and could have crippled him and not just shot him down. Two shots.

Her. Officer Shay was arrested and became the first cop in 50 years to be charged with murder while on the job. But a mostly white jury, eleven of twelve jurors were white, later acquitted him. There were riots in New York. There were riots across the country. The Rolling Stone song doo doo doo doo doo, heartbreaker told the story in its first stances.

The bowl is in New York City, right through the park in a place of mystic and identity.

The poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote a poem about this incident, too.

Last one. The title of it is power. And I should tell you, since this is San Francisco, right? They're shooting black children down in the streets of New York.

Here she is reading the poem she wrote.

After Clifford's murder, the policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes and child's blood, and a voice said, die, you little motherfucker. And there are tapes to prove this. And at his trial, this policeman said in his own defense, I didn't notice the size on nothing else, only the color. And there are tapes to prove this, too.

This is what law and order in Nixon's America looked like. Clifford's funeral took place at the Mount Zion Baptist church in Jamaica, Queens, just about four blocks from Clifford's home. A large swell of people packed the block, and is the crowd filed out with Clifford's casket. Stevie Wonder sang for the procession. After he'd say to Jet magazine, I have followed the case. It brings America down another notch in my book, another notch. About three months later, in August of 1973, Stevie released inner Visions. Its centerpiece is the song called living for the city, and in part, it was inspired by Clifford's murder, but it was entirely informed by the political conditions that caused his death. The song's a kaleidoscopic, seven minute vision of this country's broken promise to black people. The album is just as vivid as that song, nine explorations of the mind, the soul, and the heart. It's a masterpiece that grows from Stevie's sense that America's problems are getting worse, but also from his faith that something better in this life is possible and that art, his art, can help us reach it. I'm Wesley Morris. I'm a critic at the New York Times.

And today on the wonder of inner visions.

In your honor, Wesley, I re listened to intervisions.

Mm hmm.

Yesterday.

Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. This is Barack Obama, former president of the United States and friend of Stevie Wonder. And he came of age in the midst of all the chaos that was America in the 1970s.

By that time, you had seen some disillusionment coming out of the sixties, right? You had had the hopeful moments of the early civil rights movement, the sense of the culture changing. There's the sense of black power and black pride, the politicization of music in pretty much all genres, rock and roll, soul, rhythm and blues. You've had some remarkable albums like Marvin Gaye's what's going on came out Aretha's respect and James brown slystone. But a lot of black music at that point still felt as if it was either catering to white audiences or a response, an answer to the dominant white culture.

Basically, there was a wing of popular musicians out there during the civil rights movement, eager to mess with the racial status quo, to make a white listener understand what was happening for black people. This was underway a full decade before intervisions came out. One of the artists who applied deep seriousness to using popular music for protest was a classically trained pianist from North Carolina named Nina Simone.

The name of this tune is Mississippi goddamn, and I mean every word of it.

She wrote her song Mississippi Goddamn in 1963, after Medgar Everest was shot dead in front of his house, and after the 19th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black girls at Sunday school.

Alabama's got me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest. And everybody knows about Mississippi got.

Nina would just get out there in front of a black audience. Actually, any audience, honestly. Sometimes the whiter the better, even. And from behind her piano, just talk about revolution.

We're back to justin trouble. We segregation. That's participation, unification. Do things gradually bring more tragedy? Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it? I don't know. I don't know. You don't have to live next to me. Just give me my e 40. Everybody knows about Mississippi. Everybody knows about Alabama. God, it knows about Mississippi. That's it.

Speaking on the show black journal in 1969, Nina said her art had to engage with what her people were going through.

And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help but be involved. Young people, black and white, know this. That's why they're so involved in politics. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times? That, to me, is the definition of an artist.

Meanwhile, the artists at Motown also feel passionately about using their music to make statements. They, too, want to speak directly to what's happening all around them politically, the way other black popular artists are, which Smokey Robinson told me didn't sit so well with Motown's founder, Barry Gordy.

See, Barry thought that they were so powerful making love songs and the music that they were making that was not political. And he didn't necessarily want them to lose that imagery. And especially Marvin. Marvin was our Motown sex symbol, and that's how Barry fell. He's our sex symbol. All the women and blah, blah, blah. 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.

Mother, Mother there's too many of you.

To cry.

Brother, brother, brother there's far.

Too many of you dying what's going on becomes the anthem of black protest music in the early 1970s to bring.

Some lovin here today.

It wasn't just in music. A lot of black artists are figuring out their way of doing what gets called using your voice. What's happening here is what I think is fair to call a multimedia black renaissance. Black filmmakers and black authors, black playwrights, black painters, black sculptors. They're out there demonstrating against this country's failure to make good on its promises. But they're also demonstrating how to live as gloriously, beautifully, powerfully black as you can, embodying a resplendent blackness, blackness on its own terms, not white americas, because we tried that. And look what happened. I talked about that with President Obama.

I think one of the first ten albums I had was Isaac Hayes Shaft, right? And, you know, the music along with the movie was empowering for black boys. Because we're not servants, we're not sidekicks, right? We're at the center of the narrative. But the truth of the matter is that it's still rare to see depictions of black life in popular commercial art during this time.

No, no, you're right.

The reason shaft and superfly make such a mark is precisely because they're rare on television. You know, good times had not come out yet. No, the Jeffersons, you know, even, even sort of comedies involving black folks, maybe flip Wilson was out there, but you were not getting a regular menu of black life depicted in film and on television.

So lets get back to Stevie. This is, lets call it the artistic, political, or even commercial landscape that Stevie is surveying at the time.

By the early seventies, Nixon has been elected. Theres been a backlash to the civil rights movement. Theres a sense of the country beginning to shift towards a less hopeful decade. And what was interesting for me, at least, about Stevie was the fact that he seemed to have woven his own esthetic that was entirely rooted in black music, but was not restricted by it.

And what he does with inner visions is something else, something that is speaking directly to the moment in which it was made and is also so much deeper that to call it protest music misses the rare genius of, well, what's going on?

You think about each song starting with too high a cautionary tale, right? The perils of drug use.

There are only nine songs here, and Stevie's using the album format to tell a story with them. These nine songs are arranged in what has always struck me as being a mathematical structure. Three suites of three songs, each suite about a different state of mind, an experience of being high on drugs, on God, and on relationships, and the perils of being too high, which is the title of the very first track.

I'm too high, do I put into the sky?

1973 was a good year for the drug business, which meant I. It was a bad year for black America. This is what Stevie's writing about.

The girl today.

She passed away. What did a friend say?

Stevie's kinda setting himself up as a square here. But he's also saying that what you're about to experience this album is not the work of someone who's high. It's the work of someone who knows that music can be its own narcotic.

They said she's too high, too late.

There's a funkiness to it.

This is Brittany Luce. She's the host of the NPR show. It's been a minute. And she's isolating the importance of funk to Stevie's approach.

There's the lyrics, which are heavy and have a lot of imagery, and. But also there's that. That have this dissonantly upbeat, forties ish, swingy kind of feeling to them. He has this fantastic way of pulling together all of these elements that I don't know that anybody would ever think to put together. Starting off with that kind of funk, I think it also just speaks to the times. It speaks to where music was at that moment. And hearing Stevie's interpretation of that kind of funk, it's so special. It's refined.

I.

And then you have visions, sort of this utopian musings of Stevie.

Track two is visions that's sober Stevie and somber Stevie. It's his version of John Lennon's imagine, but it's less hopeful than imagine, more realistic.

I will not want to make the leaves. I know the leaves are greenhouse.

I always think this is a black american's way of doing imagine. I can envision all this promise. It was promised to me, to Clifford Glover, to all of us. So where is it? This is a song that's aware, even in its dreaminess, that the dream might have an expiration date.

Hey, guys, this is Smokey 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 Motor town 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. And it was the first tour that Stevie had ever gone out with us. Stevie came on. He was doing his singing. He did his act. I forgot what song he had out. Then we had several bandleaders at Motown who used to go out with the Motown reviews. And this particular time, a guy named Beans Bowles. And so Stevie had gone off, and he was taking his bows, and beans Bowles had the band to start a jazz rip bomb. Bom bom bom bom. And the band was playing that. And Stevie took out his harmonica and started to just play what they were, 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. And your home may be 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. So if you're curious about this, just go to airbnb.com and find out more about it.

The 1970s was one of those valley to mountaintop moments, black people imagining what was possible for themselves, whether or not the rest of the country wanted to put its imagination to equally fertile use. And out of that, through that arrived a new language, a new musical language that communicated the resolve of black people to be irreverent, to not stop feeling. A language that went way beyond a traditional rock and roll structure, four instruments, and could welcome anything capable of making a sound. An orchestra made a rhythm. Funk. Funk is black people's folk music, whether.

It'S George Clinton or whatever you think is funky. You know, you may get the ugly face when you listen to it, but you're smiling. It's an ugly face with a smile.

This is James Harris III, but the whole world calls him Jimmy Jam. He's also, along with his creative partner, Terry Lewis, one of the most important and inventive producers in american music. The so's band, Cheryl Lynn, the Human League, boys to men, Tony Braxton, and, of course, Janet Jackson, so many, many other people, too. This is the guy you turn to for a better definition of funk than I could give you.

I always say that you can't have funk without funk fun. You got to have the f you in before you add the k. I think Stevie knew his way around rhythms so well, and rhythms not only because he was a drummer, which I related to because I started off playing drums myself before switching to keyboard. So he had a great relationship with rhythm, but then he was so funky on the bass lines. The bass synthesizer stuff he did was so influential to me. And, you know, he just. He had control over it. But there's a lot of people just having fun. And to me, that's when the funk happens, when it's just a group of people having fun. And Stevie, to me, mastered that better than anybody.

Just take a song Stevie wrote and never even recorded. He just gave it away for Shaka Khan to immortalize with her band. Rufus. Yes. Stevie wrote tell me something good.

Tell me something good was actually the one.

Yes.

And that happened. Cause Stevie Wonder came into the studio, actually came in the studio and came in with some offerings.

You know, Shaka, Miss Kahn, to me, went on the Jennifer Hudson show and talked about the first time she met Aretha Franklin and the first time she met Prince. And she mentions how she didn't like some of the music. Stevie wanted to give her first couple.

Offerings that he played, I didn't like. And I told him.

You told him?

Yeah. I said, you got anything else? How you tell Stevie wonder you don't like the song? Well, he stopped playing it. I ain't doing that. What you saw, I can't help it. Yes, I really can't help it. He started playing it, and I said, what else you got? You know, and so he played the second one. I said, anything else? He said, what's your birth sign? Cause I told him, you know, airy, spicy. She said, oh, I got the song.

Part of what makes it sound so good is how much room there is in the groove. The funk here comes from how laid back it all feels. Every time I hear this song, all I see is shotgun in a bubble bath. How do you hear this and not make a face like you're smelling weak gold fish? As Jimmy Jam said, an ugly face with a smile.

What I got will knock on your pride. Tell me something good tell me that you love me again tell me something good.

It's the face of utter disbelief, of awe, of where the hell did this come from? And why does it feel so good? You don't bother to give it a name. It's just utterly beyond language. It's instinctive, something your face just does. Like the way you nod when you see another black person on the street. A cultural secret handshake. This music, in all its guises, is not an escape from the world. It's an argument for how the world should be funky. And nobody's made that argument more religiously than the leader of parliament Funkadelic, and the high priest of funk.

My name is George Doctor Funkenstein Clinton.

I'm an artist. Doctor Funkenstein senses that as music, funk arose from an almost political necessity. Rock and roll is black music that didn't eat America until the tv and radio played white people doing it. George Clinton wasn't gonna let that happen to funk. I mean, this is what P Funk and Stevie have in common, right? Which is that parliament has a song about who says a funk is it? Or who says a funk band can't play rock.

Right?

Right.

And that's the question. Right. And you, I mean, the chorus is basically, everybody can do everything. Essentially. You know, you have all these people in the band who can do all these different things and have all these. Bring all these traditions in, and you turn it into something new. But part of that new sound, there is a kind of ideology that comes with it, like a vision for what the newness of the music is doing and can be. And I'm just really wondering if you could hear that happening in Stevie in a way that was in communication with what parliament and Funkadelic were doing.

Yes.

I mean, what you're saying is that there was always some funk in there.

Yes, yes.

No matter which word went, the funk is the binding force, no matter what the sound and the new era, whatever the instruments are you use to get there with the funk is the thread.

Stevie took all that funk and added all of his skill as a storyteller to paint a picture of what his people were going through in the southe and in the north. The story of how you can't outrun racism, how simply being a black man on the street or a black boy could be a hazard. He combined all of this innocence, stress, disillusionment, to create the album's magnum opus, living for the city. It's a panoramic short story about a guy who leaves his family to come north to New York just to have some dude hand him some drugs and get him instantly arrested, jailed, and abused.

His father works some days for 14 hours, and you can bet he barely makes a dollar his month ago.

Scrub the floors for many inner visions is absolutely a watershed moment. As. As far as Stevie expressing his political voice.

Here's Brittany Luce again.

And living for the city is such an imaginative interpretation of how he arrived at that point, telling the story of an everyman, telling a story of an every woman and just the daily hustle that can eventually grind you down.

Stevie's longtime collaborators during this classic period, Bob Margoleff and Malcolm Cecil, had been in the studio almost daily with Stevie. And Bob could already see on their previous album talking book, Stevie's knowledge and sense of politics evolving.

He couldn't avoid it. It was Malcolm who had Stevie sitting in the barber chair in the lounge, an electric lady, and reading George Orwell to him. And then a week or two later, Stevie runs into the room. Malcolm. Malcolm, I just wrote a new song. I want you to hear it, Malcolm. And say, oh, not another love song, Steve. And he said, no, not a love song. And he went into the studio and he sat down at the piano and played his big brother. So Steve always had a sensibility for justice and for equality.

But even Bob believes living for the city is greatness at a higher, more special order of magnitude.

I've been making records for 60 years, and I have to say that that song, living for the city, is probably the most important song I've ever put my hands on. And I've done have a lot of miles in the studio. So when I say that, it really is important to me because I think he has brought social awareness that we all need to embrace. Still to this day.

The people that he talks about in that song, the story that he tells with that song.

Brittany Luce, again, all of us have.

Been there or felt that or know that person.

When you listen to that entire song, that story, that portrait that he's painting, President Obama again, and he's talking about the sister's black, but she's sure enough, pretty clothes are old, but never are they dirty. The way he, in a few lines, is evoking a dignity and an independence. And the brother's trying to get a job, and it's just hard getting a job.

That's all he was trying to do.

Right? So you're getting a whole portrait compressed of how ordinary black folks are living at this time, and that is not depicted in popular culture at that time.

Yeah, it's still rare.

Yes, it's still rare.

There's something surprising about how innovative living for the city is. You could certainly imagine it as a straight ahead protest song, something classically folksy, a man with his guitar, a woman at her piano. But Stevie turns it into something else. It's panoramic now. It's cinematic. It doesn't operate at a mournful pace, either. It's not a dirge. It's emphatic. It's insistent. It opens with a thump that doesn't let up and keeps building towards something tragic, gospel y. The way this song incorporates the streets and the city into its rhythm. The way those keyboards never stop dancing, never stop crying. And that throb again, it never leaves. That's the catharsis of funk. An invitation to dance, to keep from bawling. Also, and this feels important, funk was frequently committed to leaving this place behind and starting somewhere new. Better shaking our asses in outer space. The funk in this song is committed to life down here. About our black asses on earth.

Wow.

New York.

Just like I pictured it.

Skyscrapers and everything.

Hey, hey, brother.

Living for the city. Also very important song because we created sound, pictures, and illusions of, you know, New York. Just like I pictured it.

Here's Bob Margoliffe again.

It was a sonic movie, and it also gave Steve a real ability to illustrate the song. And it was like an opera or like a radio drama.

Ten years. Come on, come on.

Get in that cell.

It was all very local. Calvin is his younger brother. And Calvin is the one who says New York. Just like I pictured it, right? Ten years. That was Johannan Vagoda, Stevie's lawyer, being the judge. You hear the bus? The sound of the bus. That's me standing out on 57th street at 04:00 in the morning with my Nagra, recording an oil truck making a delivery to media sound. And the guy drove it up and down the street from me a couple of times.

Bob's dad was the mayor of great neck, New York, just outside the city.

So I had access to the police department. I took the cop and his car down to the parking lot at the park and recorded the bust. We created all these different kinds of sound effects. But back then, we were creating these, like, movies for your mind.

Listen, I'm not big on the term tour de force. But there aren't many better terms for what this song is. A song whose greatness is easy to take for granted. But only because you've maybe heard it a thousand times. Stevie's playing every instrument here.

And I'll never forget. There was one time he was recording living for the city. I was there when he wrote the song and recorded the entire track.

You might remember Ray Parker Junior was 17 years old when Stevie called him up. And asked him to come on tour with him in the Rolling Stones. That was just the beginning of his apprenticeship.

He made me stay up in the studio with him for three, four days he put all the instruments down. I learned a whole lot from that. Watching the record go, from him writing the song to finishing the song and then the song coming out on the radio and the way the public accepted it.

Wait, so can you just sit for me, with me for a second, about this living for the city thing?

See, don't skip over that so fast. Right?

How the hell did that happen?

I was just around. And the difference between me, I'm gonna say, and most of the people in this bandaid at the time that I was there is most people, you know, Friday night, they want to go party and hang out and do stuff, go to club. And for me, if Stevie went to the studio, I wanted to follow him.

It's like, well, why would I want.

To go party and hang out? I'm with the genius. I'm with Beethoven of the 20th century. Let me go hang out with Beethoven and maybe a little bit of rub off.

Can you just talk about, like, how he built that song? Like, what your impression of its building was? I mean, was there ever a moment where.

I don't have to talk about the impression of it, I can tell you exactly.

Okay, sure.

First, he wrote the song, and he had in his head, and these are back in the days when you have click tracks and all the rest of the stuff. So he put defender Rhodes down first.

That's Stevie's piano.

And, you know, there's that part, da da da da da da da. And I thought he lost his mind. Then he went back to, which was just the strangest thing, and then he started building it instrument by instrument. You know, he puts the drums on closer to the end than the beginning. So that's even stressful. You don't hear any rhythm, right?

Yes. Yeah.

It's all in his head doing a rhythm. And I'll never forget on that particular song, we were sitting in the control room for maybe 2 hours, and he likes to play this stuff loud. And it was loud. He kept saying, something's ringing, and, you know, nobody could tell what was talking about. We soloed all the instruments. Nothing was ringing anyway. And it turned out to be somebody had car keys laying on the couch in the front, and he heard the car keys ringing over the loud speakers. Holy shit, it was going on. I'll never forget that. We wasted, like, 2 hours trying to find out what the heck was making this noise. And it turned out to be car keys. You know, part of those three days, I think, that we stayed there. I was really sleepy and wanted to go home, but he was like, no, no, ray, you stay here with me. Stay here with me. So I didn't get to go anyway. I barely got a nap. While the speakers are going on, you.

Got trapped while one of the greatest songs ever written in the history of american music was being done.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. History was being made. I had no clue history was being made. I thought something good was being made. I knew that. But I had no idea that another stage of history was at my feet.

I've always thought the song was about living your life to get to the big city. I thought it was a great story of the great migration, which describes the 60 years that black Americans fled the south to escape the death and degradation of the Jim Crow regime. It's the tale of a guy who worked hard to get from Mississippi to New York, but it's also about what happens after you've migrated. It's no picnic up north either. In fact, by the end of the song, Stevie's argument is that it's worse. This is actually a song about living just enough for a city to use you up to devour you and then spit you out. Welcome to Stevie Wonder's apocalypse, y'all.

Da Namdeh.

Youre listening to the wonder of Stevie from Pineapple Street Studios, higher ground audio and audible. And do you want to hear more? Theres 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? Theres a lot. Consider a daily dose of the all songs considered podcast. Its 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.

I mean, I reliably fall back on Stevie to be able to cope in the times that we're currently living through.

Brittany loose again.

And I love this album specifically because it has the stinging and the sweet. Living for the city is a song that stings, it burns. It's beautifully told, but it's a painful story, even more heartbreaking than that. It's a familiar story. But then it's followed by golden lady, which is a lamentation on love. You know, when you see somebody that you're really, that you're in love with, you see your partner, you see somebody even that you just crushed on really hard, and you may be dating somebody, and it feels really good. And, you know, one of those days where you all, like, the sun is shining just right, it's hitting their eyes and everything like that. And the wind is blowing and the breeze is balmy. Golden lady captures that feeling of desire and appreciation that you have in those moments. The fact that that song follows living for the city, I think, speaks to something that I think all black people know. But Stevie always manages to put forth in his music, which is that alongside great pain and great struggle, is also.

Great beauty and great joyous. Closing both my eyes waiting for surprise.

Golden ladies, the first song and the second tweet on the album, were moved away from the scourge of drugs, from the ravages of the city. And now we're in the realm of spiritual transcendence.

Golden lady. I'd like to go there.

And what comes next? Well, it's a vow to strive to remain transcended in spite of or because of all the human cruelty and temptation that's conspiring to pull you down. And within all this exaltation on Golden lady is a quiet kind of funk. The prayer formation two hands make once.

Theyve clapped hands can understand.

Remember earlier when Jimmy Jam was talking about the fun of funk coming in part from a group of people jamming together? Its important to remember that when it comes to Stevie, the fun in the funk was often Stevie having fun by himself, the way he is on the album's first single, higher ground, using his weapon of choice, the trusty, funky clavinette. Okay.

All right, so here, let's do this, then, shall we? Let's do this. Yeah, let's do this now.

Okay. I'm gonna stop talking about the meaning of these songs for a second and just get into how it sounds, how it feels in the ear. How it feels to the ear. I got to sit down. With Greg Fillingame. This man has played for everybody from Aretha Franklin to Eric Clapton to Michael Jackson. And, I mean, that is the tip of a massive iceberg. He's a former member of Wonderlove, too, and he broke down the secret sauce of higher ground for me. It's also the album's first single. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. This is Greg fishing for the clavinette, please.

So what would happen, you know, in higher ground, for instance? Because, you know, he obviously multi tracked the clap and that parts, right?

Mm hmm.

But to do us, you know, a more of a simplified version for the live thing, he split up the parts. And he showed me how to do it, and he showed me which part I should play. So in other words, he had me do one clavin it part this way so it'd be two, three, four.

Right.

So the accent is right.

Yep.

So while I'm doing that, he's doing this to the fog.

Oh, my God.

Right.

So when you split it up like that, then it becomes a stereo bounce kind of thing. So it's like. So you hear that and when that's in the mix, it gives it a stereo effect and it's really, really cool. And that's how I learned how to play the live part to the high ground.

Keep on.

And then. Then he showed us a special ending that he wanted us to do. And I remember to this day, because it took us hours to work it out, but we finally did. And so here's the ending for your listening pleasure. Here we go. That's the ending.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Hold on, Greg. 1 second. And he.

And he does the same. He does it that same way.

To this day. The song's about betterment and gratitude. It also occurs to me that higher ground is where you'd like to get to in anticipation of a flood. It's disaster prepost. Being ready for something that's coming for you. They'll show enough. Try. He sings in a throwaway line. Cause it won't be too long now. He doesn't mention God until the song's final seconds. As it's fading out and as he's singing about how the rest of the world will try and bring you down, in comes the next song. Jesus, children of America. I know a good ballad when I hear one. However, not every ballad is a jam, and some of that's just necessitated by what a ballad is. It's a slow song, but usually with the talented songwriter's touch, a ballad can turn into a jam. Maybe it's a bridge that does the trick. Maybe it's a key change that drives the drama of the song up a notch. Either way, the question is, does the ballad tip a toe into church? Does it sit in the pew and start sweating? Is there call and response? Does it make me want to sing along but also bounce my shoulders and nod my head?

Or even better, does it make me want to get up and start fanning myself? If this ballad does any of those things, and especially if it does all of them, then you have graduated and gone to jam heaven. This song has a bite that Stevie doesn't get enough credit for using. He's 23, and he is spying some hypocrisy in the house of God, the organized house of God that man built.

And if you like it, it will come to fade.

Of the many songs this man has written about the country falling apart, this is the one that embodies collapse. Just the way he sings the words peace of mind while those inner voices keep erupting from him. Failing to sound at peace, that always checks. Kills me. Now we're headed into the last suite of the album. By the time you get to, don't you worry about a thing. The pace has changed, the mood's lifted, your body's moving again. The jamming you were doing five minutes ago in church is now happening outside on the sidewalk. There's this mode Stevie gets into. He does it a couple times on music of my mind, where he's showing off this aggressive side of himself that on that album sounds like a pimp reincarnated as Pepe Le Pew. And here on don't you worry about a thing is like Pepe Le Pew reincarnated as some stranger on the street. You know, he's coming on to somebody, kicking game, pitching. Woo. That's what your grandparents, grandparents used to call it. Riz is what the kids call it today. And he's coming on to a woman for us, for an audience, he tells us.

Watch this, y'all. As he brags about all the places he's been in his speciously fluent Spanish.

You understand that well, like, you can just like I've been, you know, Paris, Beirut, you know, I mean, Iraq, Iran, you know, I speak very, very, um, fluent Spanish. Toro da vin chevre.

Toro staben chevre. And she tells him how to pronounce Chebre, which means everything's really great. Then jive Stevie turns back into just Stevie. So does that piano. But the song holds on to that latin groove. And again, the non musical subject here is moving on. Stevie wants his ex to know that it's okay to get back out there and find somebody he is. But there are some terrific wrinkles in these lyrics. It's not all emotional charity.

Cause I'll be standing in the side.

When you check it.

There are a few ways to interpret that last line. Could be a literal trip. If we're talking about his wife of a year and a half, Sarita Wright, maybe she went on a cruise. Then theres the sort of trip where a person gets fixated on an idea that other people think is outlandish. The black sort of trip. So maybe the person standing on the side here thinks this woman is trippin. Maybe Stevie thinks the reasons they broke up are absurd. Is she bitter?

Is she simply Sadeendez.

In its own way? Don't you worry about a thing as an expression of post breakup friendship, one that builds and builds until you get to that ecstatic climax where Stevie's singing the title as big and as brightly as he can while at the same time something, something utterly delightful happens. That Spanish that at the beginning of the song seemed like a throwaway comedy bit. It's back as a glorious melodic cross current. The last three song, flight on intervisions, is about relationships. The first two songs, all in love is fair and don't you worry about a thing. They're about moving past a broken relationship onto something new. But what kind of relationship is at the center of the album's 9th and last track that Stevie called he's Mister know it all.

He's a man with a plan got a counterfeit dollar in his hand he mister know it all.

Loosely, I'd say it's about power's relationship to us. He's singing to you and me about the quote man with a plan, a plan that Stevie doesn't elaborate on, probably because the man with the plan never actually has a plan. No man with a plan ever does. Ive read interpretations of this song that know its about Richard Nixon, and when I talked about Margolis, he confirmed as much. Which is why considering Nixons relationship with America in specific. Frankly, black America is so crucial in some ways to thinking about this album. In the wake of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedys assassinations and in the ensuing unrest in black neighborhoods, and amid this general sense of national chaos, this pledge that Richard Nixon ran on in 1968 to restore law and order, it basically got him elected.

Government can do a lot of things for men. It can provide a man shelter, and it can provide him food and it can provide him a house, it can provide him clothing, but it can't provide him dignity. It can't provide him pride. It can't provide him self respect.

Nixon's so called war on drugs was a war on black people who, aside from a few notorious exceptions, did not vote for him.

And until those who are on welfare or who might be eventual recipients of welfare, develop within themselves a sense of self respect and pride and dignity, you're not going to get at the problem.

Why mister a know it all, though? Well, I think it's a speech Nixon gave during his campaign telling black people they can no longer expect any help from his government.

You do no favor to a man, or you do no favor to a woman when you provide assistance, when they do not need it, when they could help themselves. Let's never forget that the reason we're a great country, and we are a great country is not because of what government did for people, but because of what people did for themselves. And we've got to give people a chance to do something for themselves.

He thinks he knows all about how to cure what's ail black people since they brought to this country 350 odd years ago. Oh, he's a man with a plan, and we just heard it. We got to give people a chance to do something for themselves. Of course, Nixon didn't stay in his job long enough to explain how he intended to give people that chance. Whenever I reach the end of this album, I always sit there for a minute and think about the journey of these nine songs and the 44 minutes they last. Nobodys strung together nine better, more illustrative songs that are also as different and impossible to produce as the ones on intervisions, except maybe Stevie Wonder himself. It was really commercially successful, too. The following year it won the Grammy for album of the year and stayed in the Billboard top 20 for four months. It peaked at number four. Living for the city and higher ground were in the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100. Stevie capitalized, if thats even the word for it, off of all that mania he kicked up the previous year on tour with the Stones, winning a white audience without alienating his black listeners.

He was 23 and already a big star by then. This album made him even bigger. But I have to tell you something. He almost didnt get to savor its success because not three days after intervisions came out, while he was riding in the passenger seat up interstate 85, Stevie Wonder almost died.

Just for me. When it gets like that, all I know to do is to go into prayer. I go have a talk with God, you know? Cause that's my strongest power. I will pray at a drop of the hat. And because I wasn't there and there was nothing else I could do, I just prayed.

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 audio and audible. Our senior producer is Josh Gwinn. Producer is Janelle Anderson. Associate producer is Mary Alexa Cavanaugh. Senior managing producer is Asha Saluja. Executive editor is Joel Lovell. Archival producer is Justine Dom. Fact Checker is Jane Drinkard. Head of sounds and engineering is Raj Makija. Senior audio engineers are Davey Sumner, Pedro Alvira, and Marina Paez. Assistant audio engineers are Jade Brooks and Sharon Bardalas. Mixed and mastered by Davey Sumner and Raj Makija. Additional engineering by Jason Richards, Scott Gilman, Javier Martinez, and Leann Doe. Score and sound design by Josh Gwynne and Raj Makija. Original score performed by Carless 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 Gilliard Fisher, Dan Fierman, and Mukta Mohon. Creative executive for higher ground is Janae Marable. Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Genoise Bermandhenne and Max Linsky. Audible executive producers are Kate Navin and Nick Dangelo. The wonder of Stevie is also executive produced by Amir Questlove Thompson, Anna Holmes, and Stevie Wonder.

Questlove is a producer of this show courtesy of I Heart and can also be heard on Questlove supreme from I Heart podcasts recorded at different fir patches, the Hobby Shop, and Pineapple Street Studios. Head of creative development at Audible is Kate Navin. Chief content officer is Rachel Guaizza. Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound Recording Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.