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Thread started 05/04/10 1:47pm

theAudience

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Stevie Wonder - Happy Birthday To Ya

One of the production duos I mentioned in a current thread was Robert Margouleff & Malcolm Cecil who most know from their association with Stevie Wonder during his creative breakout period.



Anticipating Stevie's upcoming birthday (May 13th), here's part of an April 2003 article in MOJO magazine I found while browsing around Robert Margouleff's current studio (Mi Casa Multimedia) website.

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Power In The Darkness by Joel Selvin

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

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

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

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

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

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

The album under Wonder's arm was Zero Time by Tonto's Expanding Head Band, a 1970 record made by Cecil and his partner Bob Margouleff on the a cobbled together set of primitive synthesizers and sequencers that made the pair pioneers in the rarified early days of analog synthesizers.

They called it TONTO The Original Neo Timbral Orchestra and had stormed into the unknown on an electro instrument still in its infancy with an album released on a label run by jazzman Herbie Mann. "As far as their concept, their level of complication, in terms of how it was executed, their album was way beyond anything in the analog synthesizer world at that point," said Bernie Krause, another early synthesizer pathfinder who recorded the landmark In A Wild Sanctuary with partner Paul Beaver in 1970.

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

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



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




The record labels arranged this summit meeting and, in exchange for his guitar playing, wonder was supposed to write a song for the rock guitarist. Beck and his band heard Maybe Your Baby at the studio, but were told there were already plans for that song when they asked about it.

Later, Beck was sitting at a drum kit, pounding out a simple, mundane tattoo, just goofing around, when out of nowhere came this monster riff from Wonder behind the clavinet. Wonder scratched out some quick lyrics and Beck left the studio with a dub copy of the track, called, at the time, Very Superstitious. Although he tried to cut the song with his musicians at Ladyland, Beck fired the entire band as soon as they returned to England (the bass player took a swing at Beck during the Wonder sessions). He didn't get around to recording the number for several months, by which time Wonder's version was already shooting up the charts. Beck made some snide comments to the music press.

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

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

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Full article can be found in the Press section here:
http://www.micasamm.com/newsite/


Music for adventurous listeners


tA

peace Tribal Records
"Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all."
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Reply #1 posted 05/04/10 1:56pm

Timmy84

Nevermind, I found it. lol
[Edited 5/4/10 13:57pm]
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Reply #2 posted 05/04/10 1:58pm

Marrk

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Thanks for posting, no need to buy the mag now! lol The Clapton and Beck part of the story is interesting stuff to say the least.
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Reply #3 posted 05/05/10 12:30am

SoulAlive

Thanks for posting that.
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Reply #4 posted 05/05/10 8:23am

Slave2daGroove

Neil, I've said it before and I'll say it again...

You are the Man!

Thanks for the post! Can't wait to meet up again and catch up.
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Reply #5 posted 05/05/10 5:44pm

sosgemini

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biggrin
Space for sale...
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Reply #6 posted 05/05/10 6:18pm

theAudience

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Timmy84 said:

Nevermind, I found it. lol

Forgot to mention that you had to mouse around the 5.1 graphic.
Glad you found it.


Music for adventurous listeners


tA

peace Tribal Records
"Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all."
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #7 posted 05/05/10 6:20pm

theAudience

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Marrk said:

Thanks for posting, no need to buy the mag now! lol The Clapton and Beck part of the story is interesting stuff to say the least.

I never knew the Clapton involvement (or lack of involvement as it turned out). smile


Music for adventurous listeners


tA

peace Tribal Records
"Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all."
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #8 posted 05/05/10 6:25pm

theAudience

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SoulAlive said:

Thanks for posting that.


Slave2daGroove said:

Thanks for the post!


You're both welcome. Interesting read.




Music for adventurous listeners


tA

peace Tribal Records
"Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all."
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #9 posted 05/05/10 6:26pm

theAudience

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sosgemini said:

biggrin

confuse Are you laughing at me? cool


Music for adventurous listeners


tA

peace Tribal Records
"Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all."
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #10 posted 05/05/10 6:45pm

sosgemini

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lol


No, just enjoying the read. wink
Space for sale...
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Reply #11 posted 05/05/10 7:04pm

Timmy84

theAudience said:

Timmy84 said:

Nevermind, I found it. lol

Forgot to mention that you had to mouse around the 5.1 graphic.
Glad you found it.


Music for adventurous listeners


tA

peace Tribal Records


Yeah I realized that when I came around that thing. nod
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Reply #12 posted 05/05/10 9:24pm

sosgemini

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To Johanan Vigoda, it is not so simple. He thinks everybody grows and changes, that you can only spend so much time with people like Coretta Scott King or Jesse Jackson before it begins to affect how you see yourself. He thinks a 24-year-old man, at the top of the world after surviving a brush with death, is very different to a 21-year-old young man freshly emancipated, looking to make his own mark.


All good things, they say, never last.
Space for sale...
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