Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / [HIGHLIGHT] Stevie Wonder’s God-Given Genius — “God Put His Thumb On His Forehead” - From EP 379

Transcript

[HIGHLIGHT] Stevie Wonder’s God-Given Genius — “God Put His Thumb On His Forehead” - From EP 379 · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Here's a clip from our latest episode of Booked on Rock.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Robert Margo f his memoir Shaping Sounds. Stevie wonderdvo the
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: synth Revolution in my life behind the music, So walk
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: us through how songs like Living for the City come
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: together from a production standpoint.
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: Living for the City. I called Steve on the phone.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: I love him to death. By the way, Steve is
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: a remarkable person. But uh, I called him on the
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: phone and I asked him, I said, Steve, what do
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: you remember about when we were recutting Living for the City.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: It was one of the first things we recorded, And
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: he said it was raining. I mean, who remembers that
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: from fifty years ago?
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: Right. But it was at a time when the kids
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: from the South, the black kids from the South, were
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: beginning to try to figure out to find a way
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: to make a living. And some of them were coming
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: to New York and others were going to Detroit to
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: work in the car factories. And it was the time
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: of civil rights. It was the time of Norman Pettis
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: Bridge and the Civil Rights Act.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: In the sixty and fifty eight or fifty nine, Linda
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and there was a quality,
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: and there were US Marshalls, you know, bringing little girls
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: to school, Black girls to school in the South with guns,
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: and there was a lot of roiling around. And a
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: few years later with Devo, for example, it was Kent
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: State where the National Guard killed a whole bunch of
• 1:40
  Speaker 3: students in the campus and Jerry and Gerald and Mark
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: were there as art students when that happened. They too
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: were very politically oriented. The other one artist from Otown
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: who really sort of was doing it was a guy
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: named Marvin Gay. It was also during that time.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Was sort of instrumental in making music that was political,
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: more political, and Steve really wanted to be a political person.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: And he was twenty one years old. He was filled
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: with idealism and talent at the head. Top of his
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: head was exploding, basically, and he finally got out from
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: underneath his contract which expired out his twenty first birthday.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: And he didn't want to do the Motown formula where
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: the band would come in through the kitchen and the
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: clients and the audience would come in through the front door,
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: you know, and play this formulaic kind of Motown sort
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: of music hall kind of stuff, you know, with the
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: same core band and the same discipline and sort of
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: told how to behave in front of a wide audience.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: And it was kind of very you know, it was
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: kind of very uptight in a certain way, but it
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: got the music in front of, you know, a white audience,
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: which is critical for selling records. I mean, what really
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: changed for Steve, for example, was going out with the Stones.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: That was really brought his music in front of a
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: huge white audience. But it was a time when we,
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: you know, we wanted to be He wants to be
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: his own person, his own individual person, and Malcolm and
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: I aided and betted him. He always calls us his
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: associate producers, which you're fine, he can call me whatever
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: he wants. But I think that those four records really
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: speak for themselves and whatever we were, whatever we did together,
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: the formulae thing behind it was magical. I can't explain it.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: I don't know, I can't understand. Even for me to
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: listen to the sound of my own wheels is I'm
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: still sort of puzzled by it all in a lot
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: of way. The thing is this, we never went in
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: there with the idea, oh, we're going to do music
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: of my mind. We got to get twelve songs for
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: this album or that album or whatever. Steve and me
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: and Malcolm, we just started recording. We just started the
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: tape rolling right, and we do it. I don't know,
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: five or six songs. We've put them in a library
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: and an archive basically. Then we do a whole bunch
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: more songs and maybe the twenty songs. And we go
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: back and we pick ones up and say, let's put
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: background vocals on this one, or what do you want
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: to do with this one, Steve, you want to add
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: a new bassline? What do you have in mind? He
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: would walk into the time of Superstition. He walked into
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: the studio. You know, Superstition. This or that wasn't Jeff
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: becktime or anything that was before. He'd just come in
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: off the road from the Stone Store and he said,
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: walked into the studio, said let's record the drums. Oh
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: what's the song, Stevie, Well you'll hear it. He walked
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: in the studio and twenty minutes later he walked out
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: of the city. He played the drum track for Superstition
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: with no other music. Okay, it was all upstairs, it's
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: all up here, right, And he played the drum track,
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: and then we went back and then suddenly superstition emerged
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: because we started putting Clavenet tracks on it. But if
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: you listen to those Clavinet tracks, we used a lot
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: of tape delay to get them to repeat. You'll hear
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: where they collide, where they're not perfect because the thing
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: is moving, okay, but that movement is what created the funk.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: You see, and you ten eight bars of that, you
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: do do it and you'll see those tracks are in motion,
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: but it's that motion that creates the funk. Wow.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: So yeah, I think that story was he just sat
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: behind the kit, the drum kit. No, nobody knew he
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: was going to do that.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: All up here. Yeah, he has a remarkable mind. I mean,
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: maybe it's because he's unsided, but he has a memory,
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: like there's a steel trap up there. Like I said,
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: when we were doing the city, first thing out of
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  Speaker 2: his mouth is it was raining, says it, says it
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  Speaker 2: all to me.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: And essentially he's writing songs in his head.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah. He is a remarkable He is a remarkable, magical person.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: And God came down and put his thumb on his forehead.
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  Speaker 2: That's all I can tell you. There's no answer. There's
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: no logical reason or anything else. It's just that's the
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: way he was born. And he is an incredible human being.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: He's not perfect. None of us are perfect in every way,
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: you know. He has his own issues, just like everybody else.
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  Speaker 2: But the thing is, he did change the culture, and
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: we helped him do that. But we were in many ways.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: We were creative and everything, but we were his handmades. Basically,
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: he was the one who came up with the songs.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: We didn't come up with the song. We came up
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: with the orchestrations and the sounds, and engineering and storing
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: the information and encouraging him and whatever we did to
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: blow on the coals and everything else. But at the
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: bottom line is Stevie and his God.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.