The Wonder of Stevie - 3 - Innervisions | 1973

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

What more is there to say? For Stevie Wonder, a lot. He’s got more love songs, sure. But as Stevie takes a hard look at the world around him, he’s itching to address different concerns — drugs, politics, and religion in America. Stevie’s next album isn’t just about him. Innervisions, the third album in the streak, is about the Black American experience.Featuring Barack Obama, Brittany Luse, George Clinton, and more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey everybody, we're going to be talking about racial violence and police brutality in explicit terms in this episode. So please take care of yourselves while you're listening. On April 28th, 1973, a 10-year-old boy named Clifford Glover was walking with his stepfather at Armstead along New York Boulevard in Queens, New York. Ad worked as a mechanic at a wrecking yard nearby. Clifford loved going there. He'd bring his own wrench and pretend that he was working on the cars too. They were headed to the yard that morning. It was early Saturday, around 5 a.m.,

when a Buick Skylark pulled up next to them and two undercover cops, Thomas Shea and Walter Scott, got out of the car and addressed them with racial slurs. Clifford and his stepdad turned and ran, and Thomas Shea pulled his gun and started firing. Street violence is not uncommon in New York City. This past weekend, one of its victims was 10-year-old Clifford Glover, who was shot to death by a policeman. Today was his funeral, and Richard Roth reports. Clifford Glover is believed the youngest person ever killed by a New York City policeman. Ad survived. Clifford did not. Shea claimed Clifford was threatening him with a gun. Three days of searches have failed to turn up any gun that can be connected with the boy.

At Armstead told WCBS-TV newsman Bob Young that's because Clifford never had one. Did he ever have a gun at all? No, he never had a gun. He didn't even have a toy gun. Not even a toy gun. All he wanted was a full-width bicycle and a full-width car motor. Outside of that, he didn't fool with no toy gun. He don't buy with toy gun. Shea later claimed that the boy and his stepfather fit the description of thieves

who were in their mid-20s, around six feet tall. Ad was 51 at the time. Clifford was less than five feet and weighed 90 pounds. Eloise Armstead, the boy's mother. five feet and weighed 90 pounds. Eloise Armstead, the boy's mother. I feel like that it was murder because he was a

kid and like he was an older kid from a grown up and it seemed like to me that he would have had an understanding that was a kid and could have crippled him and not just shot him down. Two shots, sir. Not just shot him down.

Two shots, sir. Officer Shea was arrested and became the first cop in 50 years to be charged with murder while on the job. But a mostly white jury, 11 of 12 jurors were white, later acquitted him. There were riots in New York. There were riots across the country. The Rolling Stones song Do Do Do Do Do, Heartbreaker,

told the story in its first stanzas. The police in New York City They chased a boy right through the park In a place of mistaken identity They put a bullet through his heart In a place of mistaken identity But for that truest heart The poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote a poem about this incident too. This is the last one. The title of it is Power.

And I should tell you, since this is San Francisco, right? In DuPose. They're shooting black children down in the streets of New York. Here she is reading the poem she wrote after Clifford's murder. The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes and child's blood. And a voice said, die, you little motherfucker. And there are tapes to prove this. And at his trial,

this policeman said in his own defense, I didn't notice the size or nothing else, only the color. And there are tapes to prove this too. This is what law and order in Nixon's America looked like. This is what law and order in Nixon's America looked like. Clifford's funeral took place at the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Jamaica, Queens, just about four blocks from Clifford's home.

A large swell of people packed the block, and as the crowd filed out with Clifford's casket, Stevie Wonder sang for the procession. After, he'd say to Jet Magazine, I have followed the case. It brings America down another notch in my book. Another notch. About three months later, in August of 1973, Stevie released Inner Visions. Its centerpiece is a song called Living for the City. And in part, it was inspired by Clifford's murderer, but it was entirely informed by the political conditions that caused his death. The song is a kaleidoscopic seven-minute vision of this country's broken promise to black people. The album is just as vivid as that song. Nine explorations of the mind, the soul, and the heart.

It's a masterpiece that grows from Stevie's sense that America's problems are getting worse, but also from his faith that something better in this life is possible, and that art, his art, can help us reach it. I'm Wesley Morris, I'm a critic at The New York Times. And today on The Wonder of Stevie, Inner Visions. In your honor, Wesley, I re-listened to Inner Visions yesterday.

Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. This is Barack Obama, former president of the United States and friend of Stevie Wonder. And he came of age in the midst of all the chaos that was America in the 1970s. By that time, you had seen some disillusionment coming out of the 60s, right? You had had the hopeful moments of the early civil rights movement, the sense of the culture changing.

There's the sense of black power and black pride, the politicization of music in pretty much all genres, rock and roll, soul, rhythm and blues. You've had some remarkable albums like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On came out, Aretha's Respect, and James Brown, Sly Stone. But a lot of black music at that point still felt as if it was either catering to white audiences or a response, an answer to the dominant white culture. Basically, there was a wing of popular musicians out there during the civil rights movement eager to mess with the racial status quo, to make a white listener understand what was

happening for black people. This was underway a full decade before Intervisions came out. One of the artists who applied deep seriousness to using popular music for protest was a classically trained pianist from North Carolina named Nina Simone. The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddamn. And I mean every word of it. She wrote her song Mississippi God Damn in 1963

after Medgar Evers was shot dead in front of his house and after the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black girls at Sunday school. Alabama's got me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi, God damn Nina would just get out there in front of a black audience, actually any audience, honestly,

sometimes the whiter the better even, and from behind her piano just talk about revolution. Well, that's just the trouble Desegregation Mass participation Just talk about revolution. Well, that's just the trouble. Desegregation. Mass participation. Unification. Do things gradually.

Bring more tragedy. Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it? I don't know. I don't know. You don't have to live next to me Just give me my equality Everybody knows about Mississippi Everybody knows about Alabama

Everybody knows about Mississippi Cause I'm That's it! Speaking on the show Black Journal in 1969, Nina said her art had to engage with what her people were going through. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help but be involved. Young people, black and white, know this. That's why they're so involved in politics. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?

That, to me, is the definition of an artist. Meanwhile, the artists at Motown also feel passionately about using their music to make statements. They, too, want to speak directly to what's happening all around them politically, the way other black popular artists are, which Smokey Robinson told me didn't sit so well with Motown's founder, Barry Gordy. See, Barry thought that they were so powerful making love songs

and the music that they were making that was not political. And he didn't necessarily want them to lose that imagery, and especially Marvin. Marvin was our Motown sex symbol. And that's how big he was, our sex symbol, all the women and blah, blah, blah. And so he did not want them to lose that particular identity because he wasn't sure what the political identity would do to their careers. Mm-hmm. Brother, brother, there's far too many of you dying.

What's Going On becomes the anthem of black protest music in the early 1970s. To bring some loving here today. It wasn't just in music. A lot of black artists are figuring out their way of doing what gets called using your voice. What's happening here is what I think is fair to call a multimedia Black renaissance. Black filmmakers and Black authors, Black playwrights, Black painters, Black sculptors, they're out there demonstrating against this country's failure to make good on its promises. But they're also demonstrating how to live as gloriously, beautifully, powerfully Black as you can, embodying a resplendent blackness, blackness on its own terms, not white Americas, because we tried that and look what happened.

I talked about that with President Obama. I think one of the first 10 albums I had was Isaac Hayes' Shaft, right? Isaac Hayes' Shaft, right? And the music, along with the movie, was empowering for Black boys because we're not servants, we're not sidekicks, right? We're at the center of the narrative. But the truth of the matter is that it's still rare to see depictions of black life in popular commercial art during this time. No, no, you're right. The reason Shaft and Superfly make such a mark is precisely because they're rare on television. You know, good times had not come out yet. on television.

You know, Good Times had not come out yet. No. The Jeffersons, you know, even sort of comedies involving black folks. Maybe Flip Wilson was out there. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But you were not getting a regular menu of black life depicted in film and on television. So let's get back to Stevie.

This is, let's call it the artistic, political, or even commercial landscape that Stevie's surveying at the time. By the early 70s, Nixon's been elected. There's been a backlash to the civil rights movement. There's a sense of the country beginning to shift towards a less hopeful decade. And what was interesting for me, at least about Stevie, was the fact that he seemed to have woven his own aesthetic that was entirely rooted in Black music, but was not restricted by it.

And what he does with Intervisions is something else. Something that is speaking directly to the moment in which it was made and is also so much deeper that to call it protest music misses the rare genius of, well, what's going on? You think about each song, starting with Too High, A Cautionary Tale, right? The Perils of Drug Use. There are only nine songs here, and Stevie's using the album format to tell a story with them.

These nine songs are arranged in what has always struck me as being a mathematical structure. Three suites of three songs, each suite about a different state of mind, an experience of being high on drugs, on God, and on relationships. And the perils of being too high, which is the title of the very first track. I'm too high, too high, but I ain't touched the sky. 1973 was a good year for the drug business, which meant it was a bad year for black America. This is what Stevie's writing about.

She was good in the past. I guess that all got to her at last. Stevie's kind of setting himself up as a square here, but he's also saying that what you're about to experience, this album, is not the work of someone who's high. It's the work of someone who knows that music can be its own narcotic. He said she's too high, too high Give him all of you. There's a funkiness to it.

This is Brittany Luce. She's the host of the NPR show It's Been a Minute, and she's isolating the importance of funk to Stevie's approach. There's the lyrics, which are heavy and have a lot of imagery. But also there's that, that have this dissonantly upbeat, 40s-ish, swingy kind of feeling to them. He has this fantastic way of pulling together all of these elements that I don't know that anybody would ever think to put together.

Starting off with that kind of funk, I think it also just speaks to the times. It speaks to where music was at that moment. And hearing Stevie's interpretation of that kind of funk. It's so special. It's refined. And then you have visions. Sort of this utopian musings of Stevie. Track two is visions. That's sober Stevie and somber Stevie. It's his version of John Lennon's Imagine,

but it's less hopeful than Imagine, more realistic. I always think this is a black American's way of doing Imagine. I can envision all this promise. It was promised to me, to Clifford Glover, to all of us. So where is it? This is a song that's aware, even in its dreaminess, that the dream might have an expiration date. Hey guys, this is Smokey Robinson, and I'm here today to talk about my brother, Stevie Wonder, who is my brother, brother, brother.

The first time that I remember going on the road with Stevie was when we took the Motor Tower Review out. The first stop was a theater in Chicago called the Regal Theater. There was a circuit of those theaters back in those days, and almost every city had one of those theaters. And it was the first tour that Stevie had ever gone out with us. Stevie came on.

He was doing his singing. He did his act. I forgot what song he had out then. We had several band leaders at Motown who used to go out with the Motown Reviews. And this particular time, a guy named Beans Bowles. And so Stevie had gone off and he was taking his bowels

and Beans Bowles had the band to start a jazz riff. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. And the band was playing that and Stevie took out his harmonica and started to just play what they were playing. Because that's who he is. He can just do that.

Damn it. But that's what he did. And so they went along with Stevie. And then it just became a party. Now, Stevie and I have been traveling on the road all over the place. And you might be a person who does that too, and your home may be just sitting empty. Why let it be empty when it could be full?

Turn it to an Airbnb and earn some money while you're traveling. So if you're curious about this, just go to airbnb.com slash host and find out more about it. The 1970s was one of those valley-to-mountaintop moments. Black people imagining what was possible for themselves, whether or not the rest of the country wanted to put its imagination to equally fertile use. And out of that, through that, arrived a new language. A new musical language that communicated the resolve of black people. To be irreverent.

To not stop feeling. A language that went way beyond a traditional rock and roll structure. For instruments and could welcome anything capable of making a sound. An orchestra made a rhythm. Funk! Funk is black people's folk music. Whether it's George Clinton or whatever you think is funky,

you may get the ugly face when you listen to it, but you're smiling. It's an ugly face with a smile. This is James Harris III, but the whole world calls him Jimmy Jam. He's also, along with his creative partner Terry Lewis, one of the most important and inventive producers in American music.

The SOS Band, Sheryl Lynn, the Human League, Boys to Men, Tony Braxton, and of course, Janet Jackson. So many, many other people too. This is the guy you turn to for a better definition of funk than I can give you. I always say that you can't have funk without fun. You gotta have the F-U-N before you add the K. I think Stevie knew his way around rhythms so well, and rhythms not only because he was a drummer, which I related to because I started off playing drums myself before switching to keyboard. So he had a great relationship with rhythm,

but then he was so funky on the bass lines. The bass synthesizer stuff he did was so influential to me. And he just, he had control over it, but there's a lot of people just having fun. And to me, that's when the funk happens, when it's just a group of people having fun. And Stevie, to me, mastered that better than anybody. Just take a song Stevie wrote and never even recorded. He just gave it away for Chaka Khan to immortalize with her band Rufus. Yes, Stevie wrote Tell Me Something Good. Tell Me Something Good was actually the one.

Yes! And that happened because Stevie Wonder came in the studio. Actually came in the studio and came in with some offerings, you know? Shaka, Miss Khan to me, went on the Jennifer Hudson show and talked about the first time she met Aretha Franklin and the first time she met Prince. And she mentions how she didn't like some of the music Stevie wanted to give her. First couple of offerings that he played, I didn't like, and I told him.

You told him? Yeah. I said, you got anything else? How you tell Stevie Wonder you don't like the song? Well, he started playing it. I ain't doing that. I can't help it. Yes. I really can't help it.

He started playing it, and I said, what else you got? You know, and so he played the second one. I said, anything else? He said You know, and so he played the second one. I said, anything else? He said, well, what's your birth sign? Because I told him, you know, Aries, Pisces. He said, oh, I got the song for you. Oh. Hey.

No, no. Waka-oom, waka-oom, waka-oom, waka-oom. Hey! You ain't got no kind of feeling inside Part of what makes it sound so good is how much room there is in the groove. The funk here comes from how laid back it all feels. Every time I hear this song, all I see is Shaka in a bubble bath.

How do you hear this and not make a face like you're smelling weak old fish? As Jimmy Jam said, an ugly face with a smile. I love you. What I got will knock all your pride aside Tell me something good Tell me that you love me, yeah Tell me something good It's the face of utter disbelief, of awe, of where the hell did this come from?

And why does it feel so good? You don't bother to give it a name. It's just utterly beyond language. It's instinctive, something your face just does, like the way you nod when you see another black person on the street. A cultural secret handshake. This music, in all its guises, is not an escape from the world. It's an argument for how the world should be.

Funky. And nobody's made that argument more religiously than the leader of Parliament, Funkadelic, and the High Priest of Funk. My name is George Dr. Funkenstein Clinton. I'm an artist. Dr. Funkenstein senses that as music, funk arose from an almost political necessity. Rock and roll is black music that didn't eat America

until the TV and radio played white people doing it. George Clinton wasn't going to let that happen to funk. I mean, this is what P-Funk and Stevie have in common, right? Which is that Parliament has a song about who says a funk band can't play rock, right? Right. And that's the question, right? And you, I mean, the chorus is basically everybody can do everything, essentially. You know, you have all these people in the band who can do all these different things

and bring all these traditions in. And you turn it into something new. But part of that new sound, there is a kind of ideology that comes with it, like a vision for what the newness of the music is doing and can be. the music is doing and can be. And I'm just really wondering if you could hear that happening in Stevie in a way that was in communication

with what Parliament and Funkadelic were doing. What you're saying is that there was always some funk in there. Yes, yes. No matter which word went. The funk is the binding force. No matter what the sound and the funk is the binding force. No matter what the sound and the new era, whatever the instruments are, you use to get there with.

The funk is the thread. Stevie took all that funk and added all of his skill as a storyteller to paint a picture of what his people were going through in the South and in the North. The story of how you can't outrun racism. How simply being a black man on the street, or a black boy, could be a hazard. He combined all of this innocence, stress, disillusionment, to create the album's magnum opus,

Living for the City. It's a panoramic short story about a guy who leaves his family to come north to New York just to have some dude hand him some drugs and get him instantly arrested, jailed, and abused. Intervisions is absolutely a watershed moment His mother goes to scrub the floors for me. Inner Visions is absolutely a watershed moment as far as Stevie expressing his political voice. Here's Britney loose again. And Living for the City is such an imaginative interpretation of how he arrived at that point.

Telling the story of an everyman, telling a story of an everywoman, and just the daily hustle that can eventually grind you down. Stevie's longtime collaborators during this classic period, Bob Margalef and Malcolm Cecil, have been in the studio almost daily with Stevie. And Bob could already see on their previous album, Talking Book, Stevie's knowledge and sense of politics evolving. You couldn't avoid it. It was Malcolm who had Stevie sitting in the barber chair in the lounge of Electric Lady

and reading George Orwell to him. And then a week or two later, Stevie runs into the room, Malcolm, Malcolm, I just wrote a new song. I want you to hear it, Malcolm, and say, oh, not another love song, Steve. And he said, no, not a love song. And he went into the studio and he sat down at the piano

and played his big brother. So Steve always had a sensibility for justice and for equality. But even Bob believes Living for the City is greatness at a higher, more special order of magnitude. I've been making records for 60 years, and I have to say that that song, Living for the City, is probably the most important song I've ever put my hands on. And I've done a lot of miles in the studio. So when I say that, it really is important to me because I think he has brought social awareness that we all need to

embrace still to this day. The people that he talks about in that song, the story that he tells with that song. Britney Luce again. All of us have been there or felt that or know that person. When you listen to that entire song, that story, that portrait that he's painting. President Obama again. And he's talking about the sister's black, but she's sure enough pretty. Clothes are old, but never are they dirty. The way he, in a few lines, is evoking a dignity and an independence. And the brother's trying to get a job.

And it's just hard getting a job. That's all he was trying to do. Right? So you're getting a whole portrait compressed of how ordinary black folks are living at this time. And that is not depicted in popular culture at that time. Yeah. It's still rare. Yes.

It's still rare. There's something surprising about how innovative living for the city is. You could certainly imagine it as a straight-ahead protest song, something classically folksy, a man with his guitar, a woman at her piano. But Stevie turns it into something else. It's panoramic now. It's cinematic. It doesn't operate at a mournful pace either.

It's not a dirge. It's emphatic. It's insistent. It opens with a thump that doesn't let up and keeps building towards something tragic, gospel-y. The way this song incorporates the streets and the city into its rhythm, the way those keyboards never stop dancing, never stop crying, and that throb again, it never leaves. That's the catharsis of funk. An invitation to dance to keep from bawling.

Also, and this feels important, funk was frequently committed to leaving this place behind and starting somewhere new, better. Shaking our asses in outer space. The funk in this song is committed to life down here, about our black asses on Earth. Wow. New York, just like I pictured it.

God's grace on everything. Living for the City, also a very important song because we created sound pictures and illusions of, you know, New York, just like I pictured it. Here's Bob Margalef again. It was a sonic movie,

and it also gave Steve a real ability to illustrate the song, and it was like an opera or like a radio drama. Ten years. Come on, come on, get in that cell. It was all very local. Calvin is his younger brother. And Calvin is the one who says, New York, just like I pictured it, right? Ten years.

That was Johannan Vigoda, Stevie's lawyer, being the judge. You hear the bus, the sound of the bus. That's me standing out on 57th Street at 4 o'clock in the morning with my Nagra recording an oil truck making a delivery to Media Sound. And the guy drove it up and down the street from me a couple of times. Bob's dad was the mayor of Great Neck, New York, just outside the city. So I had access to the police department. I took the cop and his car down to the parking lot at the park and recorded the bust.

We created all these different kinds of sound effects, but back then we were creating these like movies for your mind. Listen, I'm not big on the term tour de force, but there aren't many better terms for what this song is. A song whose greatness is easy to take for granted, but only because you've maybe heard it a thousand times. Stevie's playing every instrument here. And I'll never forget, there was one time he was recording Living for the City.

I was there when he wrote the song and recorded the entire track. You might remember Ray Parker Jr. was 17 years old when Stevie called him up and asked him to come on tour with him and the Rolling Stones. That was just the beginning of his apprenticeship. He made me stay up in the studio with him for three, four days. He put all the instruments down. I learned a whole lot from that, watching the record go from him writing the song to finishing the song, and then the song coming out on the radio and the way the public accepted it. Wait, so can you just sit for me, with me for a second about this living for the city thing?

See, don't skip over that so fast, right? How the hell did that happen? I was just around. And the difference between me, I'm going to say, and most of the people in this band at the time that I was there, is most people, you know, Friday night, they want to go party and hang out and do stuff, go to club. And for me, if Stevie went to the studio, I wanted to follow him. It's like, well, why would I want to go party and hang out and do stuff, go to club. And for me, if Stevie went to the studio, I wanted to

follow him. It's like, well, why would I want to go party and hang out? I'm with the genius. I'm with Beethoven of the 20th century. Let me go hang out with Beethoven and maybe a little bit of rub off. Can you just talk about like how he built that song? Like what your impression of its building was? I mean, was there ever a moment where you're... I don't have to talk about the impression of it. I can tell you exactly what happened. Okay, sure. First, he wrote the song, and he had it in his head. And these are back in the days when you have click tracks

and all the rest of the stuff. So he put the Fender Rhodes down first. That's Stevie's piano. And, you know, there's that part... And I thought he lost his mind. Then he went back to... Which was just the strangest thing. And then he started building it instrument by instrument.

He puts the drums on closer to the end than the beginning. So that's even stricter. You don't hear any rhythm, right? Yeah. It's all in his head, doing the rhythm. And I'll never forget, on that particular song, we were sitting in the control room for maybe two hours and he likes to play this stuff loud and and it was loud he kept saying

something's ringing and you know nobody could tell what he's talking about we soloed all the instruments nothing was ringing anyway and it turned out to be somebody had car keys laying on the couch in the front he heard the car keys ringing over the loudspeakers. Holy shit. It was going on. I'll never forget that. We wasted like two hours trying to find out what the heck was making this noise. And it turned out to be car keys, you know.

Part of those three days, I think, that we stayed there, I was really sleepy and wanted to go home. But he was like, no, no, Ray, you stay here with me. Stay here with me. So I didn't get to go anywhere. I barely got a nap while the speakers were going on. You got trapped while one of the greatest songs ever written in the history of American music was being done. Yes, yes. Yeah, history was being made. I had no clue history was being made. I thought something good was being made. I knew that, but I had no idea that another

stage of history was at my feet. I've always thought the song was about living your life to get to the big city. I thought it was a great story of the Great Migration, which describes the 60 years of Black Americans fled the South to escape the death and degradation of the Jim Crow regime. It's the tale of a guy who worked hard to get from Mississippi to New York. who worked hard to get from Mississippi to New York. But it's also about what happens after you've migrated. It's no picnic up north either. In fact, by the end of the song,

Stevie's argument is that it's worse. This is cruel No work could be much colder If real change The world would soon be over This is actually a song about living just enough for a city to use you up, to devour you, and then spit you out. Welcome to Stevie Wonder's Apocalypse, y'all. Oh, no, no, no, no. There's a very special bonus episode only on Audible featuring me, Wesley Morris, and former President Barack Obama in an enlightening conversation with Stevie Wonder himself. Visit audible.ca slash wonder to listen now. Getting bogged down by how much new music there is out there? There's a lot.

Consider a daily dose of the All Songs Considered podcast. It's the easiest way to get tuned into the music world. We spend hours combing through the new music universe from emerging bands to time-tested icons to bring you your next favorite artist. To get up on your music know-how, listen to All Songs Considered from NPR. I mean, I reliably fall back on Stevie to be able to cope in the times that we're currently living through. Britney loose again. And I love this album specifically because it has the stinging and the sweet. Living for the City is a song that stings. It burns. It's beautifully told, but it's a painful story. Even more heartbreaking than that, it's a familiar story.

But then it's followed by Golden Lady, which is a lamentation on love. You know, when you see somebody that you're in love with, you see your partner, you see somebody even that you just question on really hard and maybe you're dating somebody and it feels really good. And one of those days where you all, like the sun is shining just right, it's hitting their eyes and everything like that. And the wind is blowing and the breeze is balmy. Golden Lady captures that feeling of desire and appreciation that you have in those moments. The fact that that song follows Living for the City, I think speaks to something that I think all Black people know.

I think speaks to something that I think all black people know, but Stevie always manages to put forth in his music, which is that alongside great pain and great struggle is also great beauty and great joy. Closing both my eyes Waiting for surprise Golden Lady is the first song in the second suite on the album. We're moved away from the scourge of drugs, from the ravages of the city, and now we're in the realm of spiritual transcendence. Show it And Golden Lady of spiritual transcendence.

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

Hands can understand. Remember earlier when Jimmy Jam was talking about the fun of funk coming in part from a group of people jamming together? It's important to remember that when it comes to Stevie, the fun in the funk was often Stevie having fun by himself, the way he is on the album's first single, Higher Ground, using his weapon of choice, the trusty, funky clavinet. Okay, all right, so here, let's do this then, shall we?

Let's do this. Yeah. Let's do this now. Okay, I'm going to stop talking about the meaning of these songs for a second and just get into how it sounds, how it feels in the ear, how it feels to the ear. I got to sit down with Greg Fillengaines. This man has played for everybody from Aretha Franklin to Eric Clapton to Michael Jackson.

And, I mean, that is the tip of a massive iceberg. He's a former member of Wonderlove, too, and he broke down the secret sauce of Higher Ground for me. It's also the album's first single. Oh my god. This is Greg fishing for the clavinet. Please. so what what would happen uh you know for in higher ground for instance because you know he

obviously multi-tracked the clavinet parts right but to do a uh you know, a more of a simplified version for the live thing, he, he, he split up the parts and he showed me how to do it. And he showed me which part I should play. So in other words, he had me do one clavinate part this way. So it'd be two, three, four. right so the accent is right yep so while i'm doing that he's doing this two three four oh my god right so when you split up like that, then it becomes a stereo bounce kind of thing. So it's like... So you hear that, and when that's in the mix, it gives it a stereo effect, and it's really, really cool. And that's how I learned how to play the live part to High Ground. People, people learning Soldiers, people learning

People, people learning And then, then he showed us a special ending that he wanted us to do. And I remember it to this day because it took us hours to work it out, but we finally did. And so here's the ending for your listening pleasure here we go that's the ending oh my god hold on Greg one second

and he he does it that same way to this day The song's about betterment and gratitude. It also occurs to me that higher ground is where you like to get to in anticipation of a flood. It's disaster prep, being ready for something that's coming for you. They'll show enough try, he sings in a throwaway line,

because it won't be too long. Now, he doesn't mention God until the song's final seconds as it's fading out. And as he's singing about how the rest of the world will try and bring you down, in comes the next song, Jesus, Children of America. I know a good ballad when I hear one. However, not every ballad is a jam, and some of that's

just necessitated by what a ballad is. It's a slow song. But usually, with the talented songwriter's touch, a ballad can turn into a jam. Maybe it's a bridge that does the trick. Maybe it's a key change that drives the drama of the song up a notch. Either way, the question is,

does the ballad tip a toe into church? Does it sit in the pew and start sweating? Is there call and response? Does it make me want to sing along but also bounce my shoulders and nod my head? Or even better, does it make me want to get up and start fanning myself? If this ballot does any of those things, and especially if it does all of them, then you have graduated and going to jam heaven. This song has a bite that Stevie doesn't get enough credit for using.

He's 23, and he is spying some hypocrisy in the house of God, the organized house of God that man built. You'd better tell Your story back And if you like it, it will come to pass. Tell me, holy, holy roller, are you standing like a soldier? Of the many songs this man has written about the country falling apart, this is the one that embodies collapse.

Just the way he sings the words peace of mind while those inner voices keep erupting from him, failing to sound at peace. That always chills me. Preservation Transcendental meditation Gives you peace of mind You better tell your story, babe

Now, we're headed into the last suite of the album. By the time you get to Don't You Worry About A Thing, the pace has changed, the mood's lifted, your body's moving again. The jamming you were doing five minutes ago in church is now happening outside on the sidewalk. There's this mode Stevie gets into, he does it a couple times on Music Of My Mind, where he's showing off this

aggressive side of himself that on that album sounds like a pimp reincarnated as Pepe Le Pew, and here on Don't You Worry About A Thing, it's like Pepe Le Pew reincarnated as some stranger on the street. You know, he's coming on to somebody, kicking game, pitching woo, that's what your grandparents' grandparents used to call it. Riz is what the kids call it today. And he's coming on to a woman for us, for an audience. He tells us, watch this, y'all, as he brags about all the places he's been and his speciously fluent Spanish. You understand that? No. Well, I don't understand how you can't, because I've been to Paris, Peru, Iraq, Iran, Eurasia.

I speak very, very fluent Spanish. Todo está bien chévere. You understand that? Bien chévere. Chévere. Bien chévere. Todo está bien chévere, and she tells him how to pronounce chévere,

which means everything's really great. Then Jive Stevie turns back into just Stevie. So does that piano. But the song holds on to that Latin groove. And again, the non-musical subject here is moving on. Stevie wants his ex to know that it's okay to get back out there and find somebody. He is. But there are some terrific wrinkles in these lyrics.

It's not all emotional charity. There are a few ways to interpret that last line. Could be a literal trip. If we're talking about his wife of a year and a half, Sarita Wright, maybe she went on a cruise. Then there's the sort of trip where a person gets fixated on an idea that other people think is outlandish. The black sort of trip. So maybe the person standing on the side here

thinks this woman is tripping. Maybe Stevie thinks the reasons they broke up are absurd. Is she bitter? Is she simply sad? Oh, no! Don't you worry about a thing. Don't you worry about a thing. Don't you worry about a thing. Don't you worry about a thing.

In its own way, Don't You Worry About a Thing is an expression of post-breakup friendship. One that builds and builds until you get to that ecstatic climax where Stevie's singing the title as big and as brightly as he can, while at the same time something utterly delightful happens. That Spanish that at the beginning of the song seemed like a throwaway comedy bit, it's back as a glorious melodic cross current. it. The last three song flight on Intervisions is about relationships. The first two songs, All in Love is Fair and Don't You Worry About a Thing, they're about moving past a broken relationship onto something new. But what kind of relationship is at the center of the album's ninth and last track

that Stevie called He's Mr. Know-It-All? He's a man with a plan Got a pound of fifth dollar in his hand He's Mr. Know-It-All Loosely, I'd say it's about Power's relationship to us. He's singing to you and me about the, quote, man with a plan. A plan that Stevie doesn't elaborate on, probably because the man with the plan never actually has a plan. No man with a plan ever does. I've read interpretations of this song that know it's about Richard Nixon.

And when I talked about Marguliffe, he confirmed as much, which is why considering Nixon's relationship with America, and specifically Black America, is so crucial in some ways to thinking about this album. In the wake of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy's assassinations, and in the ensuing unrest in Black neighborhoods neighborhoods and amid this general sense of national chaos, this pledge that Richard Nixon ran on in 1968 to restore law and order, it basically got him elected. Government can do a lot of things for men. It can provide a man shelter, and it can provide him food, and it can provide him a house.

It can provide him clothing. But it can't provide him dignity. It can't provide him pride. It can't provide him soft respect. Nixon's so-called war on drugs was a war on black people, who, aside from a few notorious exceptions, did not vote for him. And until those who are on welfare or who might be eventual recipients of welfare develop within themselves a sense of self-respect and pride and dignity,

you're not going to get at the problem. Why does Misstra know it all, though? Well, I think it's a speech Nixon gave during his campaign, telling black people they can no longer expect any help from his government. You do no favor to a man or you do no favor to a woman when you provide assistance when they do not need it, when they could help themselves. Let's never forget that the reason we're a great country,

and we are a great country, is not because of what government did for people, but because of what people did for themselves. And we've got to give people a chance to do something for themselves. He thinks he knows all about how to cure what's held black people since they were brought to this country 350-odd years ago. Oh, he's a man with a plan, and we just heard it. We got to give people a chance to do something for themselves. Of course, Nixon didn't stay in his job long enough to explain how he intended to give people that chance.

Whenever I reach the end of this album, I always sit there for a minute and think about the journey of these nine songs and the 44 minutes they last. Nobody's strung together nine better, more illustrative songs that are also as different and impossible to reduce as the ones on Inner Visions, except maybe Stevie Wonder himself. It was really commercially successful, too. The following year, it won the Grammy for Album of the Year and stayed in the Billboard Top 20 for four months.

It peaked at number four. Livin' for the City and Higher Ground were in the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100. Stevie capitalized, if that's even the word for it, off of all that mania he kicked up the previous year on tour with the Stones, winning a white audience without alienating his black listeners.

He was 23 and already a big star by then. This album made him even bigger. But I have to tell you something. He almost didn't get to savor its success because not three

days after Inner Visions came out, while he was riding in the passenger seat up Interstate 85, Stevie Wonder almost died. Just for me, when it gets like that, all I know to do is to go into prayer. I go have a talk with God, you know, because that's my strongest power. I will pray at a drop of the hat. And because I wasn't there and there was nothing else I could do, I just prayed. That's next time

on The Wonder of Stevie. This has been a Higher Ground and Audible original. The Wonder of Stevie is produced by Pineapple Street Studios, Higher Ground Audio, and Audible. Our senior producer is Josh Gwynn. Producer is Janelle Anderson. Associate producer is Mary Alexa Cavanaugh. Senior managing producer is Asha Saluja. Executive editor is Joel Lovell. Archival producer is Justine Daum. Fact checker is Jane Drinkard. Head of sound and engineering is Raj Makija.

Senior audio engineers are Davy Sumner, Pedro Alvira, and Marina Pais. Assistant audio engineers are Jade Brooks and Sharon Bardalas. Mixed and mastered by Davy Sumner and Raj Makija. Additional engineering by Jason Richards, Scott Gilman, Javier Martinez, and Lian Do. Score and sound design by Josh Gwynn and Raj Makija. Original score performed by Carles Music and Raj Makija. Additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. Hosted and executive produced by Wesley Morris.

Higher ground executive producers are Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Corinne Gileard-Fisher, Dan Fehrman, and Mukta Mohan. Creative executive for Higher Ground is Janae Marable. Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky. Audible executive producers are Kate Navin and Nick D'Angelo. The Wonder of Stevie is also executive produced by Amir Questlove Thompson, Anna Holmes, and Stevie Wonder. Thank you. is Kate Navin. Chief Content Officer is Rachel Giatza. Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Thank you.