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| What happened to Stevie Wonder? The second-coolest blind piano-playing soul singer in rock history, he was also one of the smartest, most talented and engaging songwriters this side of John Lennon, and he wasn't, and still isn't, self-absorbed and egotistical. (And unlike the first-coolest blind piano-playing vocalist, Ray Charles, Stevie never shilled for the state lottery.) After being a Motown prodigy and, among other things, co-writing "Tears of a Clown" with Smokey Robinson, Little Stevie Wonder came into his own. In a brilliant stretch from 1971 to 1976, he made six albums: Where I'm Coming From, Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness' First Finale, and Songs In The Key Of Life. Those six remarkable albums--the latter a double disc of tremendous proportions, filled with funk anthems and sweet ballads that is in many ways a culmination--really are of a single piece, a grandly radical, artistic, political statement of pain and anger and joy uttered during a difficult time for the world and for American blacks especially. For those five years, he was the preeminent creative force in American music, unrivaled in every way. And then the former Steveland Morris started sucking. The 1980s were not kind to Stevie Wonder. He adopted the sated and bloated sound of his contemporaries, generating over-produced pablum. I suppose it was inevitable. Who among the giants of Sixties and Seventies rock and pop retained their edge through the '80s? Maybe Neil Young. Perhaps Lou Reed, though both of those men had to retreat into an angry shell to weather the decade. So Stevie's not alone, but there was absolutely no excuse for 1984's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" on the Woman in Red soundtrack. Maybe that was what Orwell was warning us of. So the thing to do, of course, is just hope idly for a return to form, ignore everything he did after 1976, and be grateful we still have those five records. And we should be eternally grateful for 1972'sTalking Book. Even though Stevie plays almost all the instruments on the album, the opening track,"You Are the Sunshine of My Life," the hit (covered by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Ella Fitzgerald), begins with two verses sung by studio singers going solo for the moment. It's significant for its humility, and then Stevie comes in and takes over. It is such a goofy song, with its neo-bossa-nova beat, its bar mitzvah organ, its pah-pah-pah-pah background vocals, but it is also irresistible. There's so much joy and love in it, as in "Isn't She Lovely," on Songs In The Key Of Life. When Stevie sings a ballad, he absolutely means it, and we feel that. Then we immediately get a kick-ass funk bass line on "Maybe Your Baby," an ominous, paranoid, driving song whose massive groove sets the stage for "Superstition." That song, by now a classic-rock cliche is, in the context of the album, one of the best songs in the set, ust in sheer terms of production alone. It's masterful, from the slap-bass groove to the rising horn refrain to the splitting-hair lyrics about the crucial difference between religion and superstition for this pious man: "When you believe in things you don't understand, and you suffer." If you've never heard a full Stevie Wonder album from this period, it's hard to imagine the mood he creates by the juxtaposition of ballad and funk, of the tension between subject matter and musical mood. Take "You and I (We Can Conquer the World)," a piano torch song (complete with weeping electronic violins) that is followed by "Tuesday Heartbreak," a hand-clapping dance number. Strangely enough, he writes this upbeat song about a breakup. He employed this approach throughout this era, and the results were nothing but exhilarating. Just listen to "Joy Inside My Tears" on Songs In The Key Of Life and you'll understand. We also, inevitably, get a little social commentary here, in the form of the ingenious "Big Brother," a thankfully subtle song about Stevie's frustration with all the suits running the country. It's a sort of proto-"Living in the City," which later appeared on Innervisions. Stevie part of a rare goup of artists able to pull off the social commentary thing in the Sixties and Seventies without it compromising the art. Things would change, as evidenced by 1985's unfortunate (but well meaning), "We Are the World." The climax of Talking Book comes appropriately at the end of the album, with "I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever," perhaps my favorite Stevie song. It builds like the Beatles "Hey Jude," starting out unassumingly, simple, but with great tension. This slow setup initially makes you wonder where the song is going, if anywhere. Then after a minute and change, you suddenly get a quick snippet of that hugely satisfying chorus. He pulls you back to the unresolved minor chords for another whole minute, then just unleashes the rest of the song into the endlessly repeated chorus. Stevie does his own background vocals, and from there the song is engineered to be simple aural ecstasy. I get chills every single time I listen to it. But wait! He doesn't stop there. No, he closes out the song with a quick burst of spirit-lifting funk. There were never cliches for this man in those days, never. After gladly being manipulated for four minutes, hearing him pull back and sour a little makes me so grateful that I generally have to press play on the CD player and go through it all again. Especially now, when Stevie Wonder seems to be the flavor of the month among such neo-soul (isn't that just soul?) celebs such as Alicia Keys, India.Arie, Macy Gray, and Jill Scott (although she's good), it's much better to go back directly to the Stevie Wonder fountainhead, putting on an album that, if released today, would be hailed as revolutionary. Talking Book, I think, is the best of those five essential Stevie albums, and, without resorting to hyperbole, all of them are worth owning and listening to weekly, at least. --Scott Holden Smith (email) March 15, 2002
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