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The 500 with Josh Adam Meyers
Introducing...Shaping Sounds: Stevie Wonder, DEVO, the Synth Revolution and My Life Behind the Music by Robert Margouleff
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- [00:01]
Robert Margouleff
Next chapter podcasts.
- [00:08]
Podcast Host
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hey fleece army, we need your help to make the 500 even better by telling us a bit more about yourself. Go to www.surveymonkey.com R3TWX8YD for a quick listener survey. It only takes a few minutes and directly supports our team. To show our appreciation, we're giving away two 50 gift cards to lucky participants every single month. So head to www.surveymonkey.com Rs and RA/3 the number T as in Tony, W as in Woman, X as in Xerox and 8 as the number y as in yellow, D as in Dog. I'm saying this, we're gonna put the link on our website if you can't see that. That was a lot. But this is your chance to win. It helps our show. We really appreciate it. We want to know more about you because you know so much about me. So yeah dude, do it. Www.surveymonkey.com R3TWX8Y D that's a mouthful, but it's there. All right, Fleece army, you have an episode coming up later this year that I'm pretty pumped about. So I want to tease it here that in a few months I have Grammy Award winning music producer and engineer Robert Mar Guleff joining me for an episode. We've already recorded this. It's a Stevie Wonder talking book. This motherfucker produced it. And it just so happens that Robert has a new book out and that's why I came on the podcast to talk about. It's all about collaborating with Stevie and other legends like Devo, Jeff Beck, the Isley Brothers. The book is called Shaping Sounds, Stevie Wonder, Devo the Synth Revolution and My Life behind the Music. And it's really both a chronicle of music history and a personal memoir about Robert pushing the boundaries of musical innovation and technology. I got a little special excerpt. Excerpt so you say it. Excerpt Excerpt from the audiobook to share with you. Today, Robert shares a creative bond and mutual trust he and his longtime partner collaborator Malcolm Cecil and Stevie had during their early 70s when they were working on three of Stevie's landmark records. Yep, dude, this guy's important. Talks a lot too about synths, but I'm tell you right now, if you're into this, it's dope. I enjoyed the story about superstition, that's the Truth, which originated from a spontaneous session where Stevie sat down at the drums and started playing the entire track from memory, hearing the finished song completely in his head. I mean, come on, dude, Prince before Prince. If you want to hear more, get Shaping Sounds wherever audiobooks are sold. And if you want to save 25, use the code sounds25@Pushkin FM. Shapingsounds. Once again, 25 off by using code sounds25. That's s o u n d s number 25@Pushkin FM. ShapingsoundS. Thank you for listening.
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Robert Margouleff
Chapter 12 the magic we created Music of My Mind was the first and most self contained of the records Stevie, Malcolm and I made together. Aside from some splendid guitar work on Superwoman by Howard Buzzy Featon, formerly of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Rascals, Stevie played all the instruments. You never knew where a live instrument would end and an electronic instrument would begin. There were no rules or regulations. We would put in whatever we felt was right for the song. Man, Stephie kept saying, this is how my music sounds in my mind. That's how the album got its title. It just tumbled out. Music of My Mind was his first real adventure with synthesizers. And it kicked off what would become known as his classic period. He had already come a long way from the Motown sound of his teen years. He was exploring themes of love, loss and social justice. And his emerging maturity was obvious to us. When Stephie wanted something, he would explain what he heard in his head and we would attempt to create it as closely as possible. He would say something like, hey, man, give me that John Lennon slap echo thing. We knew exactly what he meant and we had the technical skill set to do it. Everything was happening so quickly that Stephie often couldn't remember all the words to the songs. Some of the lyrics were even written in the moment, so Malcolm would read them back to him through his headphones, prompting him line by line. I swear, if you listen carefully every now and then because of the headphone leakage. You can hear Malcolm's clipped British accent feeding Stephie the lyrics a bar or two before he sings them. Stephie was very receptive to our feedback. We had a live mic in the control room, so he could always hear us in his headphones. We never turned that mic off. It was like the glass between the control room and the studio disappeared. We were always connected. Malcolm's observations of our time with Stevie were loving, astute and insightful. In a 2019 interview for the website okplayer.com, he told writer Chris Williams, the thing about Stevie was that he had such an incredible range of emotion in his voice. He could go from a real whisper to a roaring shout and holler. He could take one syllable and play 300 notes to it and twist it around. He was also capable of doing really simple things and we explored a lot. Like in the lead vocal on Keep On Running, where he was doing half spoken, half sung. Almost like the church thing, where members from the congregation would sing or yell out a line while the pastor is preaching. It's a common thing in a black Baptist church. It's a gospel thing, and it's spontaneous, fun, and it's done with a lot of energy. When it came to putting the album together, we stepped back and took a look at what we already had in the can. I remember the three of us sitting on the green shag rug in Johann Vigoda's very grungy office on Broadway, keeping company with his dead potted palm plants. We went down the list and played every song, listening for the tracks that would become Music of My Mind. We had probably 50 to pick from. The record was never conceived as an album. From the start, it was just Stevie pouring out all these songs out of his head, and they were all in different states of completion. The beautiful difficulty we had with Stevie was pinning down which songs were going to be on the album. We'd play stuff back song after song, again and again, and Stephie kept saying that almost every song had to go on the album. We ended up with more than enough for a double album. We had our little book of songs, some finished, some ready to mix, others not. We made list after list, putting songs together in different order, and finally nailed down which ones would make the cut. When the time came to put the album out, we needed to find someone to create the COVID artwork. Danny Blumeno, the night manager at Jimi Hendrix New Electric Ladies Studios, was also an artist. He used the quiet time at night to create some of his designs on the studio's bathroom walls using a technique called decoupage, where paper cutouts were glued onto surfaces in combination with special paint effects like gold leaf and other decorative elements. I think Stevie loved Danny's art because he could feel the outlines of the cutouts on the walls. To create the album cover, Danny combined a portrait of Stevie with other graphics reflecting a whole different world in the sunglasses Stevie wore. Music of My Mind was released on March 3, 1972 and peaked at number 21 on Billboard's pop chart and number six on the R and B chart. Though it wasn't a huge commercial success, it began a new stage in Stevie's artistic development, proving that he had staying power and that he was capable of much, much more than what he had achieved during his prodigious youth. Our use of the synthesizer, long before it became a staple instrument in popular music, opened Stevie's mind to all kinds of exciting sonic possibilities that added a new dimension to his music while preserving its inherent warmth and emotion. With Music of My Mind, we had created a new fully integrated signature sound, style and personal expression that would forever change the face of R and B and popular music. Unfortunately, it didn't stay that way. Once Music of My Mind had opened the door and shown that Stephie's creativity knew no bounds, we slowly became surrounded by the self important big shots and hangers on that go hand in hand with fame and fortune in the music business. I often wonder what would have happened if we had been left alone in our creative bubble a few more years. However, the journey was far from over and there was much more incredible music to make and places to go together. In June, with Music of My Mind climbing up the charts, Stevie was invited to open for the Rolling Stones on the very debauched American leg of their Exile and Main street tour, a tour still remembered for hard drugs, bombings and arrests. Opening for the Stones, as rough as it was, provided Stevie with very important access to rock audiences which were new to him. Jeff Beck was in New York that summer, having just wrapped up his east coast tour. Malcolm already knew him, as they had played together at Ronnie Scott's in London. Jeff's management reached out to us and we arranged to produce and record with Jeff and his band at Electric Lady a few days before Stevie got back from the Stones tour at the end of July. Jeff's band on that tour included Cozy Powell on drums, Max Middleton on keyboards, Clive Shaman on bass. On the day Stevie returned to Electric lady, we were working with Beck in the studio. We introduced them to one another. Stephie asked Jeff to play guitar on his song Looking for Another Pure Love. In return, Jeff asked Stephie if he could have Maybe or Baby for his new album. No, you can't have it. Stephie kept on saying, no, I'm going to put it out. No, you can't have it. Jeff kept on and on. Finally, Stephie relented. Okay, I'll give you a new song I'm working on. That song was Superstition. When we finished tracking Superstition, Stephie realized what he had created. And after intense lobbying from Motown's executives, he wisely decided to release Superstition himself. He gave back another track called Because We've Ended as Lovers, which he had written with his ex wife Sarita Wright. That song ended up on Beck's 1974 album Blow by Blow. It was an emotional song and a highlight of the record and it helped solidify Beck's reputation as an elite guitarist. After Superstition was a hit for Stevie, Beck released his own version of superstition in March 1973 with his power trio Beck, Bogart and the piece Superstition re established Stevie as a chart topping artist and proved that he had found his voice and was truly capable of captaining his creative ship. He told Malcolm and me that he first imagined the song in a flash while he was on tour with the Stones. I just started singing the melody, he said. Probably the first thing and the only thing I can remember keeping was the line, wash your face and hands. I think that was from when I was really a little boy. I remember hearing this song saying, get out of that bed. Wash your face and hands. From the song Shake, Rattle and Roll. I remember Stevie being at the mic writing and singing at the same time, working out the song. Malcolm and I were running around the studio with a pencil and paper asking everybody about things that they considered superst, like walking under a ladder or looking in a mirror with a crack in the glass, which supposedly brought seven years of bad luck. He was saying that things appear in a certain way only because we don't understand them and that you should try to understand yourself rather than just blindly believing in them. In his words, as he put it to rolling stone in 1988, the lyrics came from the sense that people believe in things that they don't understand and they suffer. If you're feeling low and you come to a conclusion based on whatever someone else says, it gets hairy. Basically I was just saying Superstition ain't the way usually stephie would play keyboards and sing a God track simultaneously and then build the rest of the song around that. For superstition. He walked into the studio, sat down at the drums, put on his headphones, and just started playing without relying on a click track or anything else to play against. He played the entire drum track for over five minutes, not singing at all and with nothing else to guide him.
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Podcast Host
Writings on the wall,
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Robert Margouleff
Various superstitions. He heard the entire finished song in his head. It was astounding. His performances were played freely and had very subtle tempo changes. He knew exactly where it was going. It was one of the things that made it all so magical. Next Chapter Podcasts.