Latest / Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond / Wesley Morris & Robert Margouleff on Stevie Wonder

Transcript

Wesley Morris & Robert Margouleff on Stevie Wonder · Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, y'all, we have a bit of a two
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: for for you today in honor of the great Stevie Wonder.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: We'll be hearing from Robert margoliv later in the show.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: He along with his partner Malcolm Cecil, were responsible for
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: engineering for Stevie's records from his classic seventies run and
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: introduced Stevie to the Tanto synthesizer. But more on that later.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: First up, a quick chat with critic extraordinaire Wesley Morris.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Wesley is a two time Politzer winner, once for his
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: work with The Boston Globe, then just a couple of
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: years ago for his phenomenal writing with The New York Times.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: His latest project is an Audible original about Stevie called
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: The Wonder of Stevie. It's a great look into Stevie's
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: vaunted seventies output that culminates with an insane conversation between Wesley,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Stevie himself, and President Obama. Let's hear my brief conversation
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: with Wesley about this project. Please be sure to check
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: it out, The Wonder of Stevie on Audible. Great job
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: to tell you.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: That you must know, well, we're all really proud of it.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: We're all really proud of it, and you just never know.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: You make a thing and it's not on it once it,
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: once it leaves, once it goes out into the world,
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: it's not yours anymore to everybody else's.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: So what was the genesis of the project? How did
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: the whole thing come together?
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Well, it was the idea of a woman named Anna
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Holmes who wanted to think about the meaning of these albums.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: And she came to me with this idea and I said, Anna,
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: you're really smart, you have a lot of passion.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: You should host this show.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: And she said, the reason I'm telling you about this
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: show is because I think you should host it. And
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: the the way I understood the show initially was that
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: I would be in some conversation with Stevie wonder about
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: the streak in these albums. And then the other thing
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: I thought would happen was that I would be in
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: conversation with like a Questlove about these albums and that
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: would be it, and it would take a month to do,
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: and we'd have a cute little thing out into the
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: world and everybody will listen to it in loven and
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: that would be it. But that is definitely not what happened.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: What happened was I went to Stevie Wonder University and
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: took all my love of these albums, and it's turned
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: my feelings into knowledge, turned all of my enthusiasm and
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: passion and feelings into a form of scholarship. But there
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: are lots and lots of really smart Stevie scholars out there,
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: actual academics, professors, musicologists, music theorists. And then there's me.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: I'm a critic, and I have my own set of
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: tools by which to I mean, think through articular late
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: what this album, what these albums, what this man his
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: his ingenuity, what it all means. And we spent a
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: few years realizing, you know what we all what I
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: the folks at Higher Ground and the folks at Pineapple,
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: the production team brought to the telling of this story
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: and the thinking through these albums as cultural monuments.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: How much did you know about these records going into
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: it versus how much? Like how much did you learn
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: through the process of making this? Uh?
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: How much did I know?
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Well?
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: I mean I had listened before we began production, and
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: when I was hemming in a hang about whether I
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: could do it, whether I was the right person to
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: do it. I had listened to all I've listened to
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: all the albums a lot, and I had, you know,
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: I think the thing that changed for me through the
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: making of the album was I didn't know a lot
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: about Stevie Wonder. I didn't know a lot about his life.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: I didn't know a lot about the Motown years. I
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: mean I knew all of these things. I could answer
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: questions on Trivia Night, if you know what I mean
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: about what years, what titles, things like, you know, tidbits, factoids,
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: certain biographical moments, but being immersed in the making, I
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: didn't know anything about Bob Margoleff and Malcolm Cecil. I
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: didn't know anything about those guys. I didn't know about Tanto,
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: I didn't know.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: What did What did you make of Robert Margalov? I
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: mean he's caring around a lot.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I make a show, I used
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: to make a show. I still make a show with
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: another person, and just thinking a lot about yeah, still
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: processing with Jay Wortham, and just thinking a lot about
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: what it is to be in constant collaboration with another person.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: It can become a little bit like a marriage. And
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: you I mean, it's not like a marriage. It's a marriage,
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: and you know, depending on how things go in the relationship,
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: when a person, when someone like Stevie makes a change, Uh,
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: and I don't I mean, I'm gonna use the framework
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: of marriage and divorce basically in some form or another
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: or another says I'd like a divorce. Although that is
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: not what Stevie did to Bob and Malcolm, which is
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: partially why Bob has the feelings he has. He didn't articulate,
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: I mean, I don't remember that conversation as being Bob
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: being salty. Bob just had a lot of clarifications to
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: make right and to like make sure it was clear.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: To us.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: The degree of the collaboration without you know, he's not
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: so presumptuous as to like claim ownership or anything. But
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: you know, I mean, anytime you make something with somebody,
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: the question around whose is what or what is who's
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: get really muddy. And everybody who's worked with Stevie has
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: a different relationship to what their role is in the
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: collaboration and the creative process. And you know, Bob understands
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: that his relationship with Malcolm and Stevie was critical for
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: the albums they worked on together. And you know, their
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: breakup is still with him in some way, and I think,
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: you know, he doesn't think songs Nikuel Life is a
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: very good album compared to the ones they made together. Yeah,
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: that just sounds like divorce talking.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, and to continue with that sort
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: of metaphor in terms of their partnership, it's like the
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: divorce wasn't so formal as to allow for the normal
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: sort of maybe grieving process. Feel like there's a lot
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: unresolved there because of the way in which their relationship dissolved,
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: you know, with there not being much paperwork accounting for
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: much of assist.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: But they say nobody's signed anything.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: It's crazy, you know, it's kind of wild. I learned
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: a lot talking to Robert and listening to the Wonder
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: of Stevie, because I mean, to your point, I knew
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: all the albums, I knew all the stuff before this,
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: I knew the dates, I knew some of the players
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: on the records. But you know, Stevie, it seems like
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: by design hasn't put a ton out about himself. You know,
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: there hasn't been the Keith Richard style biography that he
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: rightly deserves. There hasn't even been like a lot of them,
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: they haven't working on one, but oh he's working on them.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: Is that true? I'm he had been. I don't know.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: I know the person who was working on it with him,
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: I don't I need to get a status update from
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: that person, very prominent person.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Maybe better to say out of it was like, I
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: don't know.
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: I'm just saying I don't know, but I think that
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: he is somebody who, like a lot of our great
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: black musicians, you know, great black people. You know, look
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: at the Harlem Renaissance. How many of those people have
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: biographies written about them. And we're talking about a person,
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: you know, who's still alive and has sort of been
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: under under examined.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: There are several books about.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: Him, mostly written from the standpoint of musicology. But what
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: is it about this man and his relationship to music
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: that is just so innovative and pleasing and boundary combining
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: es Yeah, because a lot of what we did was
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: kind of cobbling together his life from different sources. And
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: you know, I also think that in a lot of ways,
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: when you become one of the rushmore objects, right, like
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: a person who will live on in the form of
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: statuary in one way or another, I think that those
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: people sort of don't know what is true about their
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: lives anymore. So I mean it really is up to
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: journalism and criticism to kind of make sense of it.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: But I also think that Stevie telling his own story
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: in his own words is something that someone like it
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: needs to happen as well. You know, I think about like,
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: there are a couple of really great books about Sammy Davis Junior,
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: but the two autobiographies that he wrote those are also fantastic.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, you know, you say that you've made it
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: without Stevie, and it's obviously true. But even at talking
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: to you, I forgot that you didn't make it with him,
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: because he just somehow Stevie is ever present through the
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: whole thing, which I means, I don't know. It's like
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: what an accomplishment is over it makes it. I mean,
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: it's not a cold calculated analysis at all. The joy
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: of the albums, the joy of Steve, I mean, it's all.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's just the way that you structured it,
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: wrote it, voiced it, produced it, and everyone else at
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: Pineapple and Higher Ground. I mean, it's just like phenomenal job,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: so so good, thank you, thank you.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: It was a real It was an honor and a pleasure,
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: like deeply, deeply rewarding to spend that much time thinking
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: about this man and what he made, and to like
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: experience that with you know, the Pineapple folks and the
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: higher Ground folks and also the people who made the music, right,
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: like to look at to be able to look at
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: Greg filling Gains's face, remembering what it was like to
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: like outplay Stevie on something.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: When you got contusion bit where you have Greg filling
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Gains in front of you and he's talking about how
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Stevie couldn't play the line on Contusions and he just
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: is like, I can do it, you know, and Stevie
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: just puts him into captaincy and he just nails it.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: And then it's just the.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: Kids by the way, right, Like, you know, Stevie's in
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: his seventies now, but when this music was being made,
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: he was a kid.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, this is.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: A twenty one to twenty six year old, barely twenty
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: six year old making this music. Think about that, this
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: is a kid.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: It's unbelievable. Well, Wesley, thanks so much for making it.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: You.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I can't, I can't, I can't say
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: enough good things about the project. It's incredible.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: Oh thank you, I really appreciate that.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: Next up is a conversation with the pioneering electronic music
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: producer and engineer Robert Margolev. In sixty eight, together with
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Malcolm Cecil, Robert built the largest analog synthesizer in the world,
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: a be myth called Tonto. Two years later, the duo
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: released Zero Time that made waves in the experimental music
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: world and caught the attention of one Stevie Wonder, who
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: at the time was in transition and maybe even leaving Motown.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Over the next four years, Stevie worked closely with Robert
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Cecil and Tonto to record a string of albums known
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: as Stevie's classic period Music of my Mind, Talking Book Intervisions,
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: and Fulfillinginess's first Finale. On today's episode, I talked to
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: Robert Margolev about Stevie's creative process in the studio during
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: this time. Robert also recalls the way in which Stevie
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: changed after surviving a near fatal car accident in seventy three,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: and how Robert Cecil, Stevie and Tonto brought new life
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: to Hendrix's famed electric Lady Studio in New York, just
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: a year after Jimmy died. This is broken record liner
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's my
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: conversation with Robert Margolev. Where in New York were you
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: born and raised?
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: I was born and raised in a place called Great Neck,
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: New York. I used to happily called it the Gilded Ghetto.
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: It was very, very Jewish at that time. Now it's
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: Aranian and Chinese.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Is it Long Island? Great Long Island?
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah? Or you have to say Long Island, Long Island.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: You can have a glass of water. I grew up
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: on Long Island until I was in tenth grade, and
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: then I had the great fortune of going to his school,
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: and a private school in Massachusetts called the Stockbridge School.
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: Arlo Guthrie went there afterwards. But it was a very
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: small school. They have to understand now. I graduated nineteen
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: fifty seven. I think that was before you were born. Yes, okay,
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: it was a very interesting time. The school was run
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: by a guy named Hans Mater, who was really an
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: experimental educator. Born in Germany, had very hard time with
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: his father, who was a Nazi basically, and Hans had
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: to leave the country and he got interned in Hawaii
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: during the war. He was a progressive educator, and in
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: the hallway of the school building was a sign that says,
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: and rights. And that otto is something that I've lived
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: with all my life. It's really sort of might change
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: my thinking about humanism, about equality, and about all those
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: kinds of things that were going on around the time
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: of nineteen fifty seven. Worse, my senior year. Nineteen fifty
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: seven was when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act,
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: and there were kids that were being escorted, little girls
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: being black, little girls being escorted to school in the
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: South by armed marshals. Right, and was very passioned and
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: very racial, and very heavy, heavily racial, and Stockbridge was international, interracial,
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: and also was really round upon and pup the private
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: schools at that time. The reason I talk about it
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: now is because I'm ten years older than Stevie Wonder. Okay,
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: So what Stevie came on the scene for us in
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: the seventy two, I'd already been down the road of
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: civil rights, Okay. I already was Abernathy and Martin Luther
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: King and was already in my head, and I already
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: had been trained in this kind of humanist tradition. And
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: when Stevie came on board, when we started working on
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: songs like Living for the City, I knew right then
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: that he and I really we might have traveled different
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: roads to the same place. You know. It was it
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: was that close, that kind of intensity about race relations.
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: And also it was a time when the music business
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: was also undergoing a kind of interesting change. You know,
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: you call it R and B. I call it the
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: Blues and the Jews. Okay, it was a very different
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: environment in the East Coast in New York, the brill Building,
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: a lot of Jewish songwriters working with motown artists, a
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: lot of independent black labels coming up. The major labels
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: really weren't in the late fifties and early sixties, really
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: weren't that interested in signing black artists. Black music was
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: called race music, right, and the big labels didn't want
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: to touch it. So the bunch of Jewish guys all over,
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: you know, really could relate to it. Strangely enough, although
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: it's not really leaned upon, but Jewish music during that time,
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: a lot of Eastern European guys right with Klesmer music right, Okay,
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: it was melismatic, just as melismatic as black singing when
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: they sing a thousand notes around one bar. It was improvised,
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: A lot of it was. And also a lot of
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: the Eastern Europeans were a lot of the major classical
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: players around that time, Heipitz and all these Eastern If
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: you wanted a great violin player, you had to find
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: a Russian, right. It was a sort of a different vibe,
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: and the majors in this country weren't interested in recording
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: race music. It wasn't until Jerry Wexler, who was a
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: producer early on at Atlantic, came up with a new
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: name for it, and it was called Rhythm and Blues.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: Did Jerry Wexler came up with that on rhythm and Blues? Yes,
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: I didn't know that.
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: So they came up with a new name, right, And
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: now all of a sudden that became interesting. But by
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: the time Stevie showed up on the scene, the record
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: business was at a place where the black businessmen were
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: beginning to start to form black labels. So that's when
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: motown really started to flower in Detroit, and they became
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: very protective of their own music. It wasn't for a
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: while until the big majors started to absorb Motown and
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: all the other black labels began to be signed to
• 18:25
  Speaker 3: Atlantic or to CBS or now we only have three
• 18:28
  Speaker 3: record companies.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, right, everything, even Atlantic pretty quickly gets merged in
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: with Warner.
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and all that stuff. So it's turned into another animal.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: But during our time with Steve in New York, it
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: was just at the beginning of that kind of vibe.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Were you tracking music throughout the sixties?
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: No. I got out of college. I left early because
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: I hated it. It was Vietnam War, and I realized
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: that if I wanted to stay alive, I had to
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: do something other than being an average student in the
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: theater department at lu Okay.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: So that wasn't going to be good enough excuse.
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it was not a good enough excuse. And also
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: I really wasn't that happy with it. I didn't see where.
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: I was studying sociology and stuff, and finally, by accident,
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: fell into the theater department and I tried the acting
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: part of it. I acted in a play called The
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: Violent Eruption of the Volcano Krakatoa, and I came on
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: the stage holding a model ship and an admiral's hat
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: from the eighteen hundreds, and I felt like an ice
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: cream cone, melting ice cream cone. And I came to
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: the conclusion after that it was the second lesson that
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: I'm fine to sing in the choir. Okay, I was
• 19:47
  Speaker 3: before that. I was a chorus professional chorister the New
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: York Philharmonic. I sang in the Scolacantorum, the orchestra of
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: the New York Philharmonic. I studied at Tanglewood a couple
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: of summers, then sang you know, with the Skull under
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: the baton of Leonard Bernstein. And I was really fine
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: in the choir. But when I started going to music
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: school after LU for about a year to Manhattan, I
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: realized that I was not going to be an opera singer.
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: I didn't have the voice for it. I could memoryate
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: somebody off the stage in shadow of Styrophoam cup at
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: ten paces, and I knew that I would never want
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: to stand as a solo, as a tenor in front
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: of an audience of a thousand people. Right, And then
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: I learned again at LU being the melting ice cream
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: cone on stage. I had to be the man behind
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: the curtain.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: So then what did you pivot to?
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: I pivoted to studying music, and then I pivoted to
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: the US Army, and I became enamored with my other love,
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: which is photography. And you can see all my work
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: around the room, and I said, I'm going to study
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: photography because that's really where I want to go. So
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: I signed up and they sent me to Motion Picture
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: Combat Photographer school that I was stationed in Germany for
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: about two years. I ended up doing a lot of
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: still photography, you know, basically general shaking hands, and I
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: did a little stuff on the helicopter looking down at
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: tire prints. I was stationed in Stuttgart and stuff.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Was any of it reconnaissance photography.
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, reconnaissance photography. It's just general photography. But I really
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: fell in love there in Stuttgart with the ballet company.
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: And it was before don't ask, don't tell, but I
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: was not asked and I didn't tell, but I eventually telled,
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: and I found my way back to the United States
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: a shortened tour.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: Oh they did they get you out?
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah? I finally told them. I said, listen, I'm a
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: ballet photographer by night and a combat photographer by day,
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: and I was really starting to have some really issues
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: with that. And I suddenly found my self living in
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: the East Village and got into making filmmaking, and I
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: produced and put together a film called Chaal Manhattan with
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: Edie Sedgwick, with Edie Sedgwick and all the refugees from
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: the factory for May's Place in Maxis, Kansas City, and
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: Ellen Stewart and Obama and the Temple of Rock and
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: Roll in Phillmore East and Bill Graham and all those
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: people and the big cloud of pot smoke, and well, were.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: You shocked by that scene that was happening in the
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: at all?
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: No, No, I felt right at home.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: Was it a surprise that it existed?
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: It was an interesting existence because within the space around
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: my loft apartment, which I had on the fifth floor
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: of a tenement, around literally around the corner from the Fillmore,
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: the place became sort of a salon for all people
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: but hanging out from everyone from Tom O'Horgan, who went
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: on to direct Hair on Broadway with Hellen's Blessed, and
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: the Fillmore and Bill Graham and all his people and
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: people from the factory, and everyone ended up in my flat,
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: which was a five room railroad flat on the fifth
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: floor between Second and Third Avenue, and I felt totally
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: at home. I loved going to Max's at night. I
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: knew Mickey Ruskin, the guy who ran the place and
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: who originated it. And I had a table and Andy
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: had a table, and we used to back and forth
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: to each other, you know, and it was an interesting time.
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: It was very druggy. There was this guy we used
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: to call him doctor Robert in Chow Manhattan. I'm not
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: going to mention his real name, but he was poking
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: up everybody from Hare to President Kennedy to everyone with
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: his famous vitamin shots and every.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: Shots that Kennedy was getting.
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so it was kind of weird and strange, and
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: I kind of took it all to be kind of
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: a normal thing. Wow. But the reason I even speak
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: about this, Edie lived in my apartment for about six
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: or seven months with me, not romantically, but she set
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: her room on fire at the Chelsea and that no
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: one would take her phone calls after that. So, and
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: she looked like a cute tip. Both of her hands
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: were bandaged from the fire because she grabbed a doorknob,
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: which was scolding toasty. My father was in the fur business.
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: We were shooting chow, and my father gave her a
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: whole bunch of her coats to wear, and they were
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: all trashed in the fire.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: So she had no place to live. So I had
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: a friend to look after me and what was going
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: on and stuff. And he would fwawn over her and
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: feed her and go to Maxis for my milkshakes at
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: two in the morning and stuff like that. It was
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: really a scene.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: And she had a kind of, if I'm recalling, kind
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: of a tragic demise, right.
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah. She got married and three months later she died
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: in bed with her husband of a drug overdose. She
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: couldn't shake the drugs, you know. I'll tell you she
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: was an incredible human being, incredibly gentle and sensitive and
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: I couldn't handle it when she was up or once
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: she was really down, but she was just edie and sober.
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: I fell in love with her, I really did. She
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: was a splendid human being. And it's just sad that,
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: you know, all she had left in the end was
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: chow Manhattan. That was the last thing that she did,
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: and she lived for it to tell the story of
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: what happens to someone in drugs. But what came out
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: of it for me in the end was that was
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: my first and last feature as a producer in the
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: motion picture business. Because during that time I had been
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: scouting around in the East Village and I heard electronic
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: music playing in a nightclub called Cerebrum, and I went
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: up to the booth and I looked on the floor
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: and there were a couple of modules from a Mogue
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: synthesizer beeping and blooping away under the DJ, and I said,
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: now here's something that's really interesting. I was totally captivated
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: by it, and it wasn't long before I came to
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: the conclusion this is the way to make the music
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: for Chow Manhattan. And I was soon on the phone
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: to Robert Mogue. And it wasn't a month or two
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: later that my friend Tom Fly, who was in the
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: band called loth Are in the Hand People, and Walter Seer,
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: who has had since also passed on, was Bob's New
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: York rep, and they brought a synthesizer over to my studio,
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: which by this time was on forty seventh Street and
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: a diamond merchant building that had all these like rebbies
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: with the long hair.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: It wasn't much different than the people that showed up
• 27:18
  Speaker 3: at my place, really, except they all wore black coats
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: and carried their diamonds and their briefcases, clutching them to
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: their chests and making deals at Keat's downstairs in the
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: coffee shop, you know. But so I lived in that building.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: We had a studio in there, and we started I
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: started playing around with the synthesizer, and I, to make
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: a long story short, I preferred the synthesizer the filmmaking,
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: and I ran out of money and things went south.
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: There were a lot of there was a little bit
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: too much Doctor Robert and Doctor Robert and infight have
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: been shots going on that really in the end, blew
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: the whole thing out of the water. Everything went down
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: the tubes, with the exception of my synthesizer and a
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: few pieces of furniture, and it up at a place
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: called Broadway Recording Studios. And the guy who owned that place,
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: this guy named Pat Jakes. He was a wonderful man
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: and he really got me going. I mean I was
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: already doing. I already produced my first semi electronica album,
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: with a band called lowth Are in the Hand People.
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: I did the record for John Hammond the Capitol, and
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: if you listen to Like Machines on that record and
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: then listened to Whip It, you will see a direct relationship.
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: Because I produced Whip It right with Devo, you will
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: see the direct relationship between the idea of the fusion
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: of rock and roll instruments and electronica. Wow, it's very
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: evident in that thing. But that's where I got the synthesizer.
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: From there, I went to Media Sound because Media was
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: really happening. It was a big studio, and I ended
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: up there becoming their electronic genius and bad boy. I
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: looked like nobody else there. I looked like a freak,
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: of course, and a joint sticking out of my mouth,
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: and you know, doing crazy daisy toilet paper commercials and
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: stuff during the day. But at night I was writing
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: serious classical music. And that's where I met Malcolm Malcolm Cecil,
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: who he was not only the head of maintenance. He
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: was an ACE electronics guy, but he was also an
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: ACE musician and played bass and played at Ronnie Scott's.
• 29:43
  Speaker 3: Every major jazzer, including people like Charlie Watts and Jeff Beck.
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: Jeff Beck, right, all these guys would come and play.
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: Herbie band would come. When the jazzers came from out
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: of town. Ronnie Scott's had a back line, you know,
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: a rhythm section because most jazzers couldn't afford to play right,
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: bring a band. So Malcolm was in that band.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: Was Ronnie Scott's house band bass player Yeah London, Yeah wow.
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: He's an extremely accomplished musician, beyond any level of musicianship
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: that I had. The difference was he liked to play
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: out in front of people, right, he was all for that.
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: He was as thin Asarail, had a big puffy hair
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: to do, looked like a big Q tip. What night
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: I walked into media to work on my with my synthesizer,
• 30:32
  Speaker 3: and they just tired him. And he was standing in
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: studio A and the console had one big top plate
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: on it that lifted up like this, like the hood
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: of a car. Everyone was building their own consoles. There
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: was no need this in SSL, that or any of
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: that kind of stuff. It was all everybody in the
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: studio business was busy jury rigging their own consoles. So
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: Malcolm was standing in front of thing and it looked
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: like like a rat's nest inside the console. And I
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: walked in and I was wearing a sheer sheepskin sheer coat.
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: It was in the winter time, and I usually would
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: come in at night if I wasn't doing your commercial
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: or something. Right, So Malcolm was in there fixing the
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: console or doing something to it, and I said, do
• 31:19
  Speaker 3: you really know how to fix this thing? And he says,
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: I ought to because it's my job here. And he said,
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: are you the guy with that funny synthesizer in the
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: other room. I said yeah, and I own it. And
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: he says, don't make a deal with you, and I said,
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: what is it. He said, I'll teach you how to
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: become a first class recording engineer if you teach me
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: how to play the synthesizer.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: And we shook hands on that deal and the rest
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: is history.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break and then we'll
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: be back with more from my interview with Robert Margolev.
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: We're back with more from Robert Margolev. Did you even
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: want to learn how to become a recording engineer? First?
• 32:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah? I did, and I didn't. To me, it's just
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: the way through to the end, because electronic music has
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: no instrument. Electronic exists in the air. It's not like
• 32:14
  Speaker 3: a saxophone or a trumpet that plays a certain sound
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: that you have like place one note. Well, the synthesizer
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: plays one note, but you don't have to have an
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: ambisher for it. You don't have to have a physical
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: training to play. But the synthesizer, as big as it
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: is at that point, only played one event or note
• 32:31
  Speaker 3: at a time, right, And I was busy writing music
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: based on the fact that I would do one or
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: two lines simultaneously, and I was putting together some music.
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: The first piece I worked on was called Aurora, was
• 32:45
  Speaker 3: very science fiction, had nothing to do with eight bar
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: phrases boom boom, boom, none of that. It wasn't pop
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: music at all. It was really kind of classical music.
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: And Malcolm was enthrawled by that because we were writing
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: music with for non existent instruments that occurred only in
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: space and in our heads.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: You really couldn't play a chord at that time. You
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: couldn't play a basic C major coord have no court peggiated.
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: You could arpeggiate, but there's no quartz because you can
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: only play one event on one keyboard Tonto, which we
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: originally we called it finally called a Tonto, the original
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: Neo Timbrel Orchestra, and that kind of name kind of
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: stuck to it. And we started to really sort of
• 33:30
  Speaker 3: plan how we could get to have multiple voices, and
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: we did that at a Chinese restaurant across the street
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: from Media. Food was terrible and filled with mono sodium
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: in glutamate. So every time we went over there to
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: eat dinner, like I would get flushed and I my
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: face would get really red and stuff. But we drew
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: the plans for Tonto on the tablecloth. They had paper tablecloth,
• 33:53
  Speaker 3: so Tanto was designed on a tablecloth at this Chinese
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: Spanish restaurant. It was sort of an in beach fusion,
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: fusion and confusion, but we were slowly putting it together,
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: and it was a big pile of equipment on three
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: or four tables and a big gurney, and we were
• 34:14
  Speaker 3: really sailing along making some of the strangest music you
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: would ever believe. Were working about a year or till
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: we became very close friends and it slowly came together.
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: And then one night we were working along and Herbie
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: Man walked into the back of the control room and
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: looked at Malcolm and said, what the hell are you
• 34:36
  Speaker 3: doing here? And because he remembered Malcolm from Ronnie Scott's
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: Wow Okay, because Malcolm would play when Herbie would come
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: over to play.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: Herbie's floutest Yeah.
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: So he said, well, we're doing something really rather different.
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: And Malo, he pointed out and said, you playing electronica
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: because he viewed Malcolm playing up Pride acoustic bass, which
• 35:00
  Speaker 3: was Malcolm's first instrument, right, And Malcolm said, Herbie, don't
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: sweat it. And we pulled the synthesizer out into the
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: studio and I put two big loud speakers, one on
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: each side, and we sat them down in the front
• 35:14
  Speaker 3: of the synthesizer and we played it at high level
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: and blew his mind and he said, you guys want
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: a deal. Malcolm said, yeah, we want a deal. He says, well,
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: I have one slop left on Embryo. I have my
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: label on Atlantics called Embryo, and I'll sign you guys.
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: I said, really, we're going to have a record deal,
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: you know, a real record deal, and we signed with Herbie.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: Did you have material at the time, had you written stuff.
• 35:43
  Speaker 3: Like it was all recorded, no music, no written music,
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: everything head charts like jazz. And we put that record
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: together called Zero Time, and Herbie put the record out
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: and it made a big noise Rolling Stone. It got
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: huge reviews, and that was the beginning of what really
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: started to change my world forever.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: How much editing did that album require?
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: A good bit? We fooled around with it a lot.
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: My song Aurora, which was the first thing we did,
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: was twenty six minutes long, okay, And I said, Malcolm,
• 36:23
  Speaker 3: I'm not even sure this is music, and he said,
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: it's music all right, it just needs a bit of
• 36:27
  Speaker 3: an edit. It turned out to be seven and a
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: half minutes long, so it was classic, Okay.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: Need to do it.
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: We had a big da we had. We did so
• 36:37
  Speaker 3: much laughing. Our faces hurt. I'll tell you something. We
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: were laughing all the time. We had a wonderful time
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: working together, and we were working with other artists as well.
• 36:45
  Speaker 3: Richie Havens came by a whole bunch of other few you.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: Guys producer Richie Havens record. Yeah, how did that.
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: Come to Stormy Forrest? This was Richie's label, right, And
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: I fell in love with Richie when it before I
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: even got to Media where I was working at Broadway.
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: He came with his label and a whole bunch of
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: hippie musicians and we just got along. And I love
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: Richie and I went to Woodstock with him. They opened,
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: He opened the.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: Show an iconic performance, So you were there for that.
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: I was there for that.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: That's an incredible performance. So it's all running late and
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: he goes out by himself.
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, he goes out by himself. And the strange thing
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: is the guys that paid for Woodstock also built Media
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: Sound Joel Rosenman. So I was when I got to Media,
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: I was among friends immediately, and they tolerate as long
• 37:39
  Speaker 3: as we did. Malcolm did what had to do to
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: keep the studios rolling, and I was doing what I
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: was doing to make music for the clients, to make
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: you know, music for crazy Daisy toilet paper and Trans
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: Caribbean airways and all kinds of stuff. They would basically
• 37:56
  Speaker 3: leave us alone because they knew where we came from.
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: And you get free time, so basically free time you got.
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: There was no time we had. We could do whatever
• 38:04
  Speaker 3: we wanted, just as long as when there was paying
• 38:08
  Speaker 3: session was and in you know, twenty five string players
• 38:11
  Speaker 3: that everything worked, everything was good, and so what happened
• 38:17
  Speaker 3: was the record came out and made a big noise.
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: And then on Memorial Day weekend nineteen seventy I think
• 38:23
  Speaker 3: it was nineteen seventy one. It was a Sunday, fifty
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: seventh Street was like a ghost town. Malcolm had a
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: little apartment next to the front door of Media Sound.
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: I'm up one flight over at Deli, which was just
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: next door, and we hear malcobe Malcolm and we look
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: out the window, the front window. We're looking down at
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: the front door of Media and there is our friend,
• 38:50
  Speaker 3: fellow bass player, Ronnie Blanco was standing there with Stevie,
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: who we didn't know. Was just a big, tall black guy, right,
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: and he had our album under his arm, and we
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: invited him in and we started recording and we didn't
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: stop for five years.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: Wait a seme, So you invite him into Malcolm's home.
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah. We then go down, we go upstairs and he
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: Malcolm plays bass for a little while upstairs and Stevee's
• 39:20
  Speaker 3: honking around on Frank Philip Petty's melotron, which Malcolm was
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: fixing putting new tapes in. Right, We honked around for
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: about twenty minutes, you said you want to go downstairs
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: and see Tonto, and he said yeah, and that was
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: the beginning of it. We unlocked the front door and
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: walked in, and I don't know what the hell happened
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: for the next five years, you know, you tell me. Well,
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: I was invisible, you know, And we maintained Malcolm and
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: I sort of were invisible in a lot of ways.
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: But I always viewed my job because I didn't ever
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: want to be standing in the front of the stage.
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: So I'm perfectly happy to do stuff right. I'm so
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: perfectly happy to be the man behind the curtain. Malcolm,
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: on the other hand, wanted to play out, so we
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: spent a lot of time trying to figure out how
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: to get Tonto to play live. But remember this was
• 40:11
  Speaker 3: all analog. There was no high technology involved at all.
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: There was no MIDI, it was none of that stuff.
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: So everything we did was all voltage controlled and analog.
• 40:24
  Speaker 3: It was highly unstable. Power supply issues RF from a
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: radio station could fuck with the pitch and stuff. It
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: was not what you would call the encomium of stability.
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: It was pretty loose.
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: Stevie had a hard time with it at first. Correct
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: with the synthesize with really too much.
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: We ended up everyone found a role, and to be
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: very honest, I don't know what the hell happened. I mean,
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: once we started working with Stevie, it was like a
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: fever dream. There was no daytime or nighttime. There were
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: no other clients in the end, by the time we
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: got to Electric Lady, all our other clients were based
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: non existent because we couldn't accommodate them. We were living
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: inside Stevie's bubble. And we lived like that for five years.
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: What was his bubble like?
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: Well, for us, it was never let's go out to
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: dinner and or go to a party or do any
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: kind of social thing. Our entire existence with Steve revolved
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: around being in the.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: Studio and he was there a lot, right.
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: Yes, he would call us if it was four in
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: the morning and he wanted to do something, we would
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: be there for him. Wow, And we ended up having
• 41:44
  Speaker 3: to leave Media. First of all, we were consuming so
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: much time that they were getting a little nervous because
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: they couldn't accommodate their commercial clients. And I, Malcolm and
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: I set up the studio for Steve so that he
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: could sort of memorize where everything was. And also there
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: were very particular things that we did when we recorded
• 42:10
  Speaker 3: the drums. If you listen to any of those Stevie
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: Wonder records or any of the records that I've done
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: since those days, you'll see the high hat is on
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: the left, okay, And the reason for that is that
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: that is the position by which only the drummer really
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: hears the drums in stereo, and that always puts the
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: high hat on the left because Stevie was facing the drums.
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: So what I wanted to make sure of was that
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: Steve heard the same sonic image in his headphones that
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: he heard live in the room, right, so because that
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: helped him know where the drums were. So we had
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: a lot of sensitivity toward how Stevie was listening to.
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: It's so interesting that it's such a banal, non artistic consideration,
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: you know, leads to such a strong artistic Children make.
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: A lot of difference. We set up every instrument that
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: he was going to possibly being used. When we there's
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: always an open mic in the control, not one of
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: these things where you go Steve, Steve playing the drums again.
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: It was not one of those sort of earphone monitor things.
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: We had an open, full frequency microphone just like this
• 43:25
  Speaker 3: one here, so Steve could always hear what we were
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: talking about. It basically made the control room window disappear.
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: It became one room. Now that's commonplace today forty some
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: odd years later, right, But nobody was doing that at
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: that time. Everyone was the musicians are on this side
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: of the glass and the engineers were over here, and
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: they never meet, you know, the engineers all or little
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: pocket protectors with pens and pencils and short sleeve white shirts.
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: And then the musicians had their own world in the
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: other space, right, It was only the three of us.
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: Like Music of My Mind, the first album was just Malcolm,
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: me and Stevie did the whole thing. I think one
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: guitar part. Buzzy played feet and played on and Sanborn
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: played on that record. There are a whole bunch of
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: different people who were in the Butterfield. Yeah, Butter's horn
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: section sort of ended up being Stevie's horn section.
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: Really, I didn't know that.
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, there's lots of stuff you don't know. Ye're young.
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: So anyways, it was always inside, you know, just the
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: three of us for the most part.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: How away were you, I mean to your point that
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: there's no a record people around. How aware were you
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: of the tension between Stevie and Motown at that point?
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: Well, that only developed later, and I think that partially
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: had to do with the fact where we started to
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: go our separate ways, and that was after we moved
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: to La got it.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: But he was negotiating his contract with Motown, not.
• 45:01
  Speaker 3: In the beginning, not in the beginning the first part
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: of music. In my mind, Steve really didn't want to
• 45:08
  Speaker 3: have too much to do with them. He I think
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: he knew sooner or later he would end up back
• 45:13
  Speaker 3: there one way or another. But I think he was
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: really very open minded and wanted to do something really
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: totally different. I don't think that Motown in general would
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: have approved of me and Malcolm at all.
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: Okay, and they likely didn't even know two.
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: White Jewish boys, one from London and one from New York.
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: You know, it was not what they were thinking about
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: at Motown and having a true black label.
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and very different from the way they had operated
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: in the past with their in house producers.
• 45:44
  Speaker 3: And everyone trusts the same and they would dance the
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: dancing sticks back and forth all these groups and Quartets,
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: the Jackson Five and the Supremes, and Steve really wasn't
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: hearing the music that way. They would have him just
• 45:59
  Speaker 3: come in. Somebody would do an arrangement, the in house
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: band that would do a rhythm track. They'd have Steve
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: come in and sing the rhythm track, and then Jean
• 46:10
  Speaker 3: would go away and write the charts and stuff, and
• 46:13
  Speaker 3: then after the mix they play it back for Steve
• 46:15
  Speaker 3: and he wasn't hearing what he heard coming back wasn't
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: even close to what he had in his head. So
• 46:22
  Speaker 3: he had music of my mind. So we helped him
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: cook up that first album cover with him with the glasses, yeah,
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: with the little figures and stuff outside inside.
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we cooked that up with Danny Blumeno, who did
• 46:38
  Speaker 3: these kind of artworks that were in the bathroom and
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: the studio Electric Lady when we went down there.
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh, so the point the artists who did
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: the murals and yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 46:50
  Speaker 3: We had him do it, but me, Malcolm and Steve
• 46:53
  Speaker 3: cooked all that stuff up between the three of us,
• 46:56
  Speaker 3: and it was Malcolm said, you know, you were doing
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: music that's only been in your mind, and we said, ah,
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: a great title for the album. Talking book on the
• 47:05
  Speaker 3: other hands by photography.
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: The one where he's plane in the sand.
• 47:10
  Speaker 3: Yes, I did that.
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: I mean we did everything together. It was photographed high
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: in the hills of Hollywood, six in the morning, just
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: under the Hollywood sign No way Wow. Yeah, I had
• 47:25
  Speaker 3: that beautiful robe. Ola Hudson did that robe and Ola
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: Hudson is the mother of us Slash Incredible. Yeah. So
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: really everything colliding in different ways. But we had to
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: leave media sound behind because we couldn't stay set up
• 47:45
  Speaker 3: and it would take to do the setup that we
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: had with Steve, it would take hours.
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you couldn't break that down because they had
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: to be the same.
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So it was just around the time that Jimmy
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: decided to leave the planet basically, and Electric Lady was
• 48:02
  Speaker 3: a brand new studio and ended up it was designed
• 48:06
  Speaker 3: by my very dear friend to the stay, John Stork,
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: who designed the Electric Lady and also designed the cases
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: for Tonto, those big involved round cases, the Arcs and lived.
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: It started its life at Electric Ladies Studios and we
• 48:24
  Speaker 3: moved in just I guess a few months after Jimmy passed.
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: That must have been kind of a heavy time to
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: be there in a way.
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: Well, the thing is that Jimmy designed that studio, had
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: a studio built like that because he wanted his own
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: personal studio. There was no such thing as a personal
• 48:40
  Speaker 3: studio in those days. This was one of the would
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: be one of the first home studios. Well, here's a
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: home studio that's lasted more than sixty years. They're still
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: in business. Yeah, yeah, but the place is wonderful. We
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: went down there, Jimmy had passed away, there wasn't a
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: lot of business. They didn't know what to do exactly.
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: And we put our feet in those shoes. Yeah, and
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: they fit perfectly, and we started working an electric lady
• 49:05
  Speaker 3: and we worked there for about a year and a
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: half and it was a wonderful, full time, very creative time.
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: What did you make of the music you were hearing
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: from Stevie?
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: I'll tell you this. I didn't think there was any
• 49:16
  Speaker 3: other kind of music. Nothing else existed for me. I
• 49:21
  Speaker 3: would sleep and then I'd turn around and go back
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: to the studio. We worked in Jewish holidays and Christmas,
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: and any time that Steve was in town, we would work.
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: And when we were not working with Steve because he
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: was on the road or something like that then we
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: would work on Tonto and make more music. So we're
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: living totally oblivious to anything, including any kind of business
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: relationship we had with Stevie. Nothing mattered.
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: What was it that stuff discussed? The business stuff, it was.
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: Discussed only once at the beginning of our relationship. He said, hey, guys,
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: I want you to be directors of my company and
• 50:00
  Speaker 3: we said yes, and then we shook hands on that
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: and that was it.
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: His production company or his publishing this production company, I think, okay,
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: And we were discussed again until it really became finally
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: an issue because we weren't.
• 50:14
  Speaker 3: We didn't finally feel we were being felt unloved sort of.
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: And at the end of the deal, Motown also didn't
• 50:23
  Speaker 3: put us in the ads or give us credits for
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: things and the trades and stuff, and we knew that
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: really they didn't really see us as being a part
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: of Steve and Steve never had any issues with us,
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: you know, for us and Steve, it was always the music.
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: We never really got into business or anything else until
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: it became an issue towards the end of our relationship,
• 50:48
  Speaker 3: and that was the reason for our party of the ways.
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: But we had a really good run of nearly five years,
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: and you know, Steve finally gave us a huge thank
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: you at one of his concerts, you know. And Steve
• 51:02
  Speaker 3: and I have very cordial relationship now, friendly and together
• 51:07
  Speaker 3: and from him ever, yeah, I do. I just send
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: him a text message a few nights ago talking about
• 51:14
  Speaker 3: him maybe writing something for my book for openers, you know.
• 51:18
  Speaker 3: But we have a lasting friendship of more than fifty years.
• 51:23
  Speaker 3: But it's not let's go out to dinner kind of friendship.
• 51:26
  Speaker 3: You know. There's a certain arm's length to it, and
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: I totally understand that. And he has people that are
• 51:32
  Speaker 3: working for him, that have worked for him for twenty
• 51:34
  Speaker 3: five years. I did something with him, I think a
• 51:37
  Speaker 3: year and a half or two years ago. I did
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: one mode track for his new record, and I was
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: honored and happy to do it. I have a very
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: decent relationship with him, and I know that everything in
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: our relationship wasn't perfect, especially when it came to the
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: business part of things, but that is thesiness of the business. Yes, okay,
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: I can't change it. It's water under the bridge. But
• 52:02
  Speaker 3: I know that what we did is way more important
• 52:05
  Speaker 3: than a few shekels. Okay, we did something really and
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: for that I have to thank by higher power. We
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: did something that was really beautiful and really incredible in
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: its way.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: We have to take another quick break and then we'll
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: be back with more from Robert Margolef. Here was the
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: rest of my conversation with Robert Margolev. Do you remember
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: some of the early feedback you were getting from other
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: people who weren't in the room with you guys making
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: the music.
• 52:42
  Speaker 3: Oh, there were always people, you know, going around the edges,
• 52:46
  Speaker 3: coming and going. But we finally we moved out from LA.
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: Motown had just recently moved from Detroit to LA and
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: they really wanted to have Stevie back. And Stevie we
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: finished that first album, Music of My Mind, and he
• 53:04
  Speaker 3: wasn't assigned to Motown for that record. That was totally
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: and they really started agitating.
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 53:16
  Speaker 3: We came out, we said, with a place called Crystal Studios, which,
• 53:21
  Speaker 3: strangely enough, the husk of that building is just on
• 53:25
  Speaker 3: the other side of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine. It's
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: just a few blocks from where I first landed in
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: La right there, right and.
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: Then wound record plant right.
• 53:36
  Speaker 3: Then then came the record plant and we couldn't stay
• 53:39
  Speaker 3: at Crystal because there was only one room and his
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: the main clients at Crystal an incredible recording console there
• 53:47
  Speaker 3: that Andrew Berltter built, which is to this day I
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: think sounds sounds still sounds better than anything that was
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: ever built to this day.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: Crystal sort of was home to the acoustic rock set.
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: I called him the Denizens of Laurel canyonk Okay. They
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: were all of those kind of folky James Taylor kind
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: of records. I loved it. I knew Jony you did. Yeah.
• 54:13
  Speaker 3: She used to come and listen to Stevie at Studio
• 54:16
  Speaker 3: B at the Record Plant on a couple of occasions. Wow.
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: And we went down to Fat Burger and had fat
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: burgers together and decided to stop smoking. And I went
• 54:25
  Speaker 3: to this place called the Shick Center. I don't know
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: whether she ever won or not, but I haven't picked
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: up a cigarette since so.
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: But at any rate, I think she's picked up since then.
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: I've seen.
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: What happened was we had a move because the place
• 54:40
  Speaker 3: that people were raising hell about us being in there
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: all the time, Stevie sucked up all the oxygen we
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: had tanto in there from these coaches. We brought it
• 54:48
  Speaker 3: out in a truck. It was there, you know, and
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: people were saying, Hey, how am I going to get
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: in and do my record? Steve is totally doing everything.
• 54:57
  Speaker 3: And when Malcolm first came to New York, he worked
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: at the Record Plant in New York for about six
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: weeks before we went to media, so he knew Chris
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: and Gary Gary Kelgrin.
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: So we got a call from Gary says, I hear
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: you guys are looking for a studio and we said yeah.
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: He says, come up and meet me at my house.
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: Sydney and Malcolm go up to his house which was
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: on Camino palm Ayrow. It's been torn down since then,
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: but it was the old Canadian Embassy and it looked
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: like something from a Charles Adams cartoon, like a big
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: haunted house, right, And he said, listen, you bring Stevie
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: for a year to the Record Plant. We'll build a
• 55:39
  Speaker 3: studio for you exactly the way you want it. We'll
• 55:42
  Speaker 3: do it completely and totally for Tonto and to have
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: Stevie there. And we couldn't say no to that, right.
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: So Gary brings out a bottle of cognac and he
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: pours everybody to drink, and we stand up and we
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: clink our glasses. And the minute the glasses clink together,
• 56:01
  Speaker 3: there was an earthquake. And the whole place is going
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: like this. And I looked into the kitchen through the
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: door from the dining room, and out the door of
• 56:10
  Speaker 3: the kitchen there was a swimming pool and there was
• 56:12
  Speaker 3: like a little tsunami in the swimming pool coming towards
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: the back door right, and the chandelier was going back
• 56:18
  Speaker 3: and forth like this. And I said, God has his
• 56:24
  Speaker 3: hand on our shoulder, man. And that's how he ended
• 56:28
  Speaker 3: up at the record plan.
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: Wow. How would Stevie usually bring songs in? Would he
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: come in and play them for you? Would he have
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: a demo tape?
• 56:38
  Speaker 3: No, not really. Sometimes he would improvise in the studio
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: and come up with the song directly. Sometimes he would
• 56:46
  Speaker 3: come in. He had like a little recording rig that
• 56:48
  Speaker 3: he kept in his hotel room or at his house.
• 56:51
  Speaker 3: Like I've never been to Stevie Wonder's house ever, not
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: in fifty years. Okay, I only know him as denizen
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: of the studio. He appears there. I have empathy, incredible
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: empathy with him, and we work in the studio and
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: the studio is over. We go our separate ways. We've
• 57:11
  Speaker 3: never had like a friendship friendship, do you know what
• 57:14
  Speaker 3: I'm saying. It's always been based around around the work.
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: So improvising in the studio would sometimes a certain sound
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: that you've programmed on Tanto sport.
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: It was like jazz. He would come up with a song,
• 57:28
  Speaker 3: we would come up with a sound, okay, and then
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: he'd say more of this, less that, and so on
• 57:32
  Speaker 3: and so forth, and generally we would create two or
• 57:36
  Speaker 3: three separate voices on separate keyboards. But they were all mono.
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: If you really listen to those records, and all the
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: records that I do, they're very simple. Okay, there's only
• 57:46
  Speaker 3: a few voices. There's no waterfalls, there's no stylistic big
• 57:51
  Speaker 3: key things. If there are keyboards, they're very simple, like
• 57:54
  Speaker 3: a Fender Rhodes or a clavinet, like a boogie on
• 57:57
  Speaker 3: reggae woman for example. Yes, okay, So if you listen
• 58:01
  Speaker 3: to the records, you'll see there are only a few voices.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: And the simpler you.
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: Make the records, the closer you can make the record sound.
• 58:09
  Speaker 3: So I mean Steve was singing into an RI twenty
• 58:12
  Speaker 3: and the reason I like to use the R twenty
• 58:14
  Speaker 3: is you could touch the microphone without making any mic
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: noise because it was dynamic and you you wouldn't hear
• 58:20
  Speaker 3: the thumb. This is because being uncited, he had to
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: feel where the microphone was to singh. But it also
• 58:28
  Speaker 3: gave me this kind of really dry close sound that
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: Malcolm and I really loved. You know, I just wanted
• 58:34
  Speaker 3: to back up one please minute, Okay, I want to
• 58:38
  Speaker 3: talk about race relations and where we are now, which
• 58:42
  Speaker 3: is horrific. Okay, But like we mentioned earlier, Steve had
• 58:50
  Speaker 3: a real understanding of around the fifties, late fifties, early sixties,
• 58:57
  Speaker 3: Martin Luther King. As a matter of fact, Stevie was
• 58:59
  Speaker 3: one who was behind getting Martin Luther King Day as
• 59:03
  Speaker 3: an official American holiday.
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 59:05
  Speaker 3: I think the song that really did it for me
• 59:09
  Speaker 3: with Steve and really sort of sign sealed and delivered
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: me to his front door and really helped me make
• 59:17
  Speaker 3: a deep emotional commitment to his work was a song
• 59:22
  Speaker 3: called Living for the City. Yeah, okay, I was already
• 59:26
  Speaker 3: deep inside of what was going down South and the
• 59:30
  Speaker 3: integration and the bus boycotts and the little girls being
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: escorted to school by armed marshals and stuff like that.
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 59:40
  Speaker 3: So, by the time we got with Stevie and he
• 59:42
  Speaker 3: started writing songs about the black social condition, right, I
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: really deeply identified with that. There were a lot of
• 59:51
  Speaker 3: songs that Steve wrote that had these very very important
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: and very key racial cues and understandings and his feelings
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: about racism. And to this day I celebrate those same
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 3: feelings of humanism and equality.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: It wasn't just the kind of was getting the music
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: is making. It was the message as well, yes, all
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: of it.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 3: The message of his songs. This I think was really
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 3: sort of twang my heart, you know, it's sort of
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 3: I really sort of understood it. And I knew as
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 3: both being Jewish and gay, Okay, I understood the fact that,
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 3: you know, he suffered also inequality by being black and blind.
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 3: And I always like to say, between the two of us,
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: we had we had it all black, blind, Jewish and gay.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: We had everything going for us. Okay. You know, I'm
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 3: not why, I don't have anything to hide on eighty
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 3: three years old, who cares? But I understood the energy
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: that Steve had toward the racial relationships and about humanity,
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 3: and I think that many of his songs really relate
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: to that, and I think that's what pushed my buttons
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 3: more than anything else in his music. I mean, we
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 3: could be inventive and crazy and do wonderful things and
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 3: create sounds that never existed before. And it was sort
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 3: of like electronica jazz, where we would make a sound.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 3: We didn't know what an instrument was. We couldn't call
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: it a visor or that it was I don't know,
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: something that existed only as vibrating electrons in space, and
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 3: it would only be a sound after it fell out
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 3: of the loudspeakers.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 3: It was a different kind of a head.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: It's incredible, how I mean, given that you were working
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: with these inorganic sounds. You know, like as you're saying,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: you can't place what the instrument is exactly, that doesn't exist.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 3: Well, they were organic, but we have to reach them
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 3: a different way.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: You guys were speaking to the human experience while channeling
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: sounds from I don't know.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 3: Well, we lived inside the sounds where we structured and
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: built them. Sometimes we would start we wouldn't know where
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 3: we were going to end up, but somehow it all
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 3: fell together. It was a perfect union. Me, Malcolm and Steve.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: Be four and a half years together. How much music
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: was recorded in those four and a half.
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: I would say maybe about one hundred and fifty songs,
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 3: maybe more. We had everything set up in the studio right,
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 3: so when he sat down to play, he could just
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 3: play and we recorded immediately.
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 3: It's time when we were working with Jeff Beck at
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 3: the same time, and Jeff wanted a song for his album.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: He wanted maybe your Baby.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, he wanted maybe your Baby. But somehow it
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: turned to Superstition, and Steve had already had a demo,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 3: and he said, we can't have maybe your Baby because
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: I wanted for my record. So he said, but I'll
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: write you something and that was Superstition, which we had
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 3: already begun tracking, but he Jeff played a demo of it.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 3: But Steve finished Superstition. But the interesting thing about it
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 3: was we tracked Superstition. Steve wanted, he said, just put
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 3: up the drums. We put up the drums. Steve walked
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 3: into the studio, no guide vocal, no click track, nothing.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: Steve never played for the click track either. His head
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: is a click track. And he sat down at the
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: drums and he played for three and a half minutes
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: and he came in and said, Okay, that's it. Let's
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: put a bass part on this. And it turned into
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 3: it turned into Superstition. The whole song was already in
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: his head.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: The drum takes one take, one take. Wow. Was Stevie's
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: final take of Superstition at all influenced by Beck's version?
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 3: I honestly don't think so.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: You don't think so.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 3: I think they were very separate. When Barry Gordy heard
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: the rough of Superstition is I recollect? He said, if
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 3: you give that away, I'm going to raise hell. And
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 3: that song turned out to be Stevie's first major hit record. Yeah,
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 3: and we were very glad. Nobody wanted to give it
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 3: to Jeff because of that.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: How did you feel when it became the hit that
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: it became hearing it everywhere?
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 3: And you know, I'll tell you something, I didn't really
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 3: care if it wasn't in the studio coming out of
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 3: the loud speakers. I had no opinion. Okay. I was
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 3: not there to manage Stevie's career. I was not there
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 3: to give Stevie any kind of advice when it comes
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 3: to politics or dealing with the record label. I worked
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 3: with and for Stevie Wonder, as did Malcolm, and we
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: did what had to happen when it was eight bars
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 3: long and it fell out of the loud speakers. That
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: is where I lived, Okay, it was like architecture.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: Did you have any dealings with Barry Gordy or the
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: label that did come.
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: He was very interesting and tense guy had very specific ideas.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 3: He had come up with a very successful formula. He
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 3: had a major record company. Everybody called him the chairman,
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 3: not mister Gordy. Okay. He had a guy who was
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 3: the president of the label called Ewart Abner and Abner.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 3: This little guy sort of looked like Sammy Davis Junior.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 3: And he always sat in this big office with this
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 3: big high chair behind him with his sports jacket on
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 3: the top of it. And I came in and showed
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: them the pictures of a talking book that I took
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 3: and he said, yeah, we like those. I'll give you
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 3: three hundred bucks.
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: So anyway, I had an agent with you.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but that record cover really worked.
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: Did anyone try to pick you up after this? After
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: you come out of the whirlwind of working with Stevie
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: and you come out of that sort of well, we.
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 3: Worked with guys like the Isley Brothers. We did three
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 3: plus three, Fight the Power, all of that stuff with
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 3: the Isley's. I went on to produce two albums with
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 3: Billy Preston.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: So you were able to take some time and do
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: those sorts of things.
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we worked with the Isleys, but it was a
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: different five. The Isleys already knew exactly what they wanted
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 3: to record with the exception and maybe how a solo
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 3: is gonna sound like Fight the Power? Who's that Lady?
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 3: With a wonderful guitar solos, great Arnie stuff. Yeah, those solos.
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 3: We did some very funny stuff to the guitar sounds
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 3: with that we used. I think I used a Dolby encoder, right,
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: but I only encoded it. I didn't decode it. I
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 3: left it encoded because it made a really kind of
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: raw sound with the fact so those lead lines were
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: recorded through a Dolby but not decoded, and then mixed
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 3: and limited afterwards, and that's how we got that kind
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: of ripping solo sounds. Wow, we were doing stuff, yeah, wow.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: And of course you know Ernest Ernie Isley was a
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 3: great guitar player who was this mentor and who lived
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: at his house. Hendricks, Hendricks, h you knew that incredible,
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 3: You know, your stuff.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: Was the experience of working with the Isley's as fulfilling
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: as the work with TeV. I get the sense that,
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: as you described, with Stevie being so all consuming, that
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: maybe that was more.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the Isleys was more professional, quote unquote professional gig.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 3: They aren't interested in any production ideas from us. They
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: had the songs prepared, they knew pretty much what they
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: wanted to do. The scene one of the senior Isley's
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 3: was sort of like a traffic coffee made sure everyone
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 3: came to the studio on time. It was all very
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 3: coordinated and you know, basically more of a classical engineering
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 3: gig than anything that was really creative.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: On our part.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 3: We brought a lot of stuff we had worked on
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 3: with Stevie to the table, which is what they wanted,
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 3: all right. They liked this, say, they came to the
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 3: studio when we were working with Steve to meet us, so,
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 3: I mean it was all kind of friendly and everything.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 3: I can remember Michael Jackson coming to the studio to
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: sing on the Stevie's Who's that Lady do? What?
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: It was?
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 3: Jackson five. I have a picture of it somewhere.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: Really yeah, because I don't think there's a that I
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: know of a Stevie song, that mighty.
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 3: Stevie song they came to sing.
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: Or other Motown acts coming through.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 3: Oh you haven't done nothing. It was the song that
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 3: Jackson sang on. Really yeah, you got to make a
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 3: note on that one.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: I am, yeah.
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 3: Are you having fun?
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: I'm having I'm having a ball.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 3: Okay, that's what's important.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: Do you remember when Stevie almost died? Yes?
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 3: I do. He We just finished the second album and
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 3: I got a call said Steve was in a car
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 3: accident and he's in a coma. I almost fell off
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 3: the console. I mean, I was in shock. And he
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 3: was unconscious for two weeks and he was in North Carolina.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: Malcolm and I got a call from the boss man,
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 3: mister Gordie, the chairman, and he said, do you have
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 3: access to Stevie's tapes? And we said yes, and he said,
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 3: well could you finish when something happened to Steve? And
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 3: I said no? And he said why? He said, because
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 3: Steve specifically forbade us to give the tapes to nobody
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 3: if they're not complete ad masters, because we worked for Steve.
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 3: We didn't work from Motown. We were not their employees,
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 3: and we had to tell him no. And I remember that.
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 3: And then Steve was God for about a month and
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 3: we were working and doing other projects and stuff. And
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 3: he came back and he was a little different after that.
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 3: I think he learned about his own mortality. He received
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 3: a very serious blow to the head, and I think
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 3: it changed his perspective on his life. I really do.
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 3: He wasn't the same kind of super embulent, kind of
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 3: having a sense of humor about a lot of things.
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 3: He was a lot more serious, you know. He was
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: just more somber. Yeah. Well, here's it's the picture of
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 3: Stevie's wreck car right here if you want to see.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, did you know that it was his cousin
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: driving it? Did you know that?
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 3: Let me look here, I'll read you something. We were
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 3: just taking the completed album of inter Visions into Mastery
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 3: when disaster struck on August sixth, nineteen seventy three, while
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 3: he was on the road on an overnight drive to Durham,
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 3: North Carolina. Stevie was sitting in the right front seat
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 3: listening to a mix of the inner Vision's album when
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 3: a stray log dislodged from a lumber truck driving in
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 3: front of them, striking Stevie in the head. He was
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 3: in a coma for five days and spent two weeks
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 3: in the Winston Salem hospital. It was several months before
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 3: Stevie made a full recovery. The accident changed him. He
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 3: came out with a higher consciousness that comes with a
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 3: near death experience. Stevie said when he returned to the studio,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 3: I was definitely in a much better spiritual place that
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 3: made me aware of many things that concern my life
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 3: and future. He seemed more somber, more introspective, which I
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 3: think showed in fulfilling this first finale. And as it
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 3: turned out, it was to be our final finale with Stevie.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: But it's supposed to be a two part record, correct.
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 3: Yes, correct, I don't know. Lowtown was very against doing
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 3: two album records because of shipping issues, and you go on,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: they could put half as many records in the case
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 3: because there was two records in the thingy.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 3: They were all crazy. Because I wanted to in talking book,
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 3: I came up with the idea of putting a braille
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 3: on the cover. It made the records fatter and they
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: had to put one less record in the case of records,
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 3: so they gave a static on that.
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, did you have to re sequence fa failings his
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: first finale?
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 3: No, the thing is about sequencing with Steve. If you
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: notice the records sort of blend one into another, right,
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 3: that was long before the DJs came up with that concept.
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 3: Malcolm and I Steve would do. We'd all sit at
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 3: the console together, rehearse everything and do one side completely.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 3: But in order to do something like that, you had
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 3: to really relate the keys from one song to the
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 3: next song that the keys would work, and also the
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: tempos would work as well, because the temples had to
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: be exactly right on and beat. So we had to
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 3: rehearsal of that. We used three machines to mix those
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 3: records down and they were all done live like that,
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 3: and we would rehearse everything. Steve bea, Malcolm would all
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 3: sit at the console together and we'd each have our
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 3: stereo faders and everybody knew we put for me a Malcolm,
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 3: we put China markers on the faders so we knew
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 3: where everything was completely rehearsed. You should get it three
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 3: or four times, but all those albums were mixed like that,
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 3: down like that, with the segues, the correct segues. Although
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 3: I can recollect a lot of little details, I honestly
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 3: don't know what the heck happened. Okay. It was so
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 3: self realizing and so internalized that we lived, aid and
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 3: breathed Stevie. Okay, we were totally a part of some
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 3: kind of organic entity and had a force field around it.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 3: Nobody fucked with us. People left us alone. Toward the
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 3: end of it, when we were out here, when we
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 3: were recording here and Steve had already signed this deal,
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 3: that's when people from Motown really started meddling and getting
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 3: in the way of our relationship. And we were slowly
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 3: at that point being deemphasized by the label. That's why
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 3: there was no credits on the Grammy wins thanking us
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 3: for giving us any credit on the thank yous that
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 3: appeared in the trade papers, and that's when we realized that.
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 3: I think it was Motown, not Steve in any way,
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 3: But I think there were people at Motown who didn't
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 3: want us around. They wanted black folks, basically, and I
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 3: think that that was and I'm not casting dispersions of
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 3: them because I really understand the need for an identity
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 3: in what was going on. But a lot of people
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 3: didn't realize and nor did we, including me and Stevie
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 3: and Malcolm, really knew about that kind of energy. I
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 3: think it was more outside, but it started to really
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 3: great on us at the end, and I think that's
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 3: part of the reason we went our separate ways. Otherwise
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 3: we would still be there twenty five years later, and
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 3: we changed the world a little bit, and for that,
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 3: I have great gratitude for that.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: So thank you so much for making those records.
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 3: You're very welcome. I'm glad I was able to do it.
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for Wesley Morris for talking about his
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: latest projects, The Wonder If Stevie be sure to check
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: that out on Audible. And thanks so much to Robert
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: Margolev for sharing his creative history with Stevie Wonder. It's
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: so insane to build the toxinbody who worked that closely
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: and intimately with Steve. He just blew my mind. You
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: can hear all of our favorite songs from that classics
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: GDU period, along with some other works of Robert Margolves
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: on a playlist at broken Record podcast dot com. Subscribe
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes.
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: Also be sure to follow us on Instagram at the
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: Broken Record Pod. Broken Record is produced by Leah Rose,
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: with marketing and help from Marek Sandler and Jordan McMillan.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: Ben Holliday is our engineer. Broken Record is a production
• 1:15:38
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  Speaker 1: music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.