Wesley Morris & Robert Margouleff on Stevie Wonder

We have a two-part episode for you today in honor of the great Stevie Wonder. First we will hear the Pulitzer Prize winning writer Wesley Morris talk about the making of his new Audible original, The Wonder of Stevie.

Then, Justin Richmond talks to the pioneering electronic music producer Robert Margouleff, who in 1968 together with Malcolm Cecil, built the world's largest analog synthesizer known as TONTO.

Over a four year period, Stevie Wonder worked closely with Robert, Cecil, and TONTO to record a string of albums now known as Stevie’s “classic period:” Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness’ First Finale.

On today’s episode Robert Margouleff talks about recording those classic albums, and Stevie’s creative process. Robert also remembers how Stevie changed after surviving a near-fatal accident in 1973.

You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite Stevie Wonder songs HERE.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, y'all, we have a bit of a two
for for you today in honor of the great Stevie Wonder.
We'll be hearing from Robert margoliv later in the show.
He along with his partner Malcolm Cecil, were responsible for
engineering for Stevie's records from his classic seventies run and
introduced Stevie to the Tanto synthesizer. But more on that later.

(00:40):
First up, a quick chat with critic extraordinaire Wesley Morris.
Wesley is a two time Politzer winner, once for his
work with The Boston Globe, then just a couple of
years ago for his phenomenal writing with The New York Times.
His latest project is an Audible original about Stevie called
The Wonder of Stevie. It's a great look into Stevie's

(01:00):
vaunted seventies output that culminates with an insane conversation between Wesley,
Stevie himself, and President Obama. Let's hear my brief conversation
with Wesley about this project. Please be sure to check
it out, The Wonder of Stevie on Audible. Great job
to tell you.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
That you must know, well, we're all really proud of it.
We're all really proud of it, and you just never know.
You make a thing and it's not on it once it,
once it leaves, once it goes out into the world,
it's not yours anymore to everybody else's.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
So what was the genesis of the project? How did
the whole thing come together?

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Well, it was the idea of a woman named Anna
Holmes who wanted to think about the meaning of these albums.
And she came to me with this idea and I said, Anna,
you're really smart, you have a lot of passion.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
You should host this show.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
And she said, the reason I'm telling you about this
show is because I think you should host it. And
the the way I understood the show initially was that
I would be in some conversation with Stevie wonder about
the streak in these albums. And then the other thing
I thought would happen was that I would be in

(02:14):
conversation with like a Questlove about these albums and that
would be it, and it would take a month to do,
and we'd have a cute little thing out into the
world and everybody will listen to it in loven and
that would be it. But that is definitely not what happened.
What happened was I went to Stevie Wonder University and

(02:35):
took all my love of these albums, and it's turned
my feelings into knowledge, turned all of my enthusiasm and
passion and feelings into a form of scholarship. But there
are lots and lots of really smart Stevie scholars out there,
actual academics, professors, musicologists, music theorists. And then there's me.

(03:00):
I'm a critic, and I have my own set of
tools by which to I mean, think through articular late
what this album, what these albums, what this man his
his ingenuity, what it all means. And we spent a
few years realizing, you know what we all what I

(03:24):
the folks at Higher Ground and the folks at Pineapple,
the production team brought to the telling of this story
and the thinking through these albums as cultural monuments.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
How much did you know about these records going into
it versus how much? Like how much did you learn
through the process of making this? Uh?

Speaker 2 (03:44):
How much did I know?

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Well?

Speaker 2 (03:45):
I mean I had listened before we began production, and
when I was hemming in a hang about whether I
could do it, whether I was the right person to
do it. I had listened to all I've listened to
all the albums a lot, and I had, you know,
I think the thing that changed for me through the
making of the album was I didn't know a lot

(04:05):
about Stevie Wonder. I didn't know a lot about his life.
I didn't know a lot about the Motown years. I
mean I knew all of these things. I could answer
questions on Trivia Night, if you know what I mean
about what years, what titles, things like, you know, tidbits, factoids,
certain biographical moments, but being immersed in the making, I

(04:30):
didn't know anything about Bob Margoleff and Malcolm Cecil. I
didn't know anything about those guys. I didn't know about Tanto,
I didn't know.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
What did What did you make of Robert Margalov? I
mean he's caring around a lot.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
I mean, you know, I make a show, I used
to make a show. I still make a show with
another person, and just thinking a lot about yeah, still
processing with Jay Wortham, and just thinking a lot about
what it is to be in constant collaboration with another person.
It can become a little bit like a marriage. And

(05:04):
you I mean, it's not like a marriage. It's a marriage,
and you know, depending on how things go in the relationship,
when a person, when someone like Stevie makes a change, Uh,
and I don't I mean, I'm gonna use the framework

(05:24):
of marriage and divorce basically in some form or another
or another says I'd like a divorce. Although that is
not what Stevie did to Bob and Malcolm, which is
partially why Bob has the feelings he has. He didn't articulate,
I mean, I don't remember that conversation as being Bob

(05:45):
being salty. Bob just had a lot of clarifications to
make right and to like make sure it was clear.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
To us.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
The degree of the collaboration without you know, he's not
so presumptuous as to like claim ownership or anything. But
you know, I mean, anytime you make something with somebody,
the question around whose is what or what is who's
get really muddy. And everybody who's worked with Stevie has

(06:18):
a different relationship to what their role is in the
collaboration and the creative process. And you know, Bob understands
that his relationship with Malcolm and Stevie was critical for
the albums they worked on together. And you know, their

(06:40):
breakup is still with him in some way, and I think,
you know, he doesn't think songs Nikuel Life is a
very good album compared to the ones they made together. Yeah,
that just sounds like divorce talking.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, and to continue with that sort
of metaphor in terms of their partnership, it's like the
divorce wasn't so formal as to allow for the normal
sort of maybe grieving process. Feel like there's a lot
unresolved there because of the way in which their relationship dissolved,
you know, with there not being much paperwork accounting for

(07:14):
much of assist.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
But they say nobody's signed anything.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
It's crazy, you know, it's kind of wild. I learned
a lot talking to Robert and listening to the Wonder
of Stevie, because I mean, to your point, I knew
all the albums, I knew all the stuff before this,
I knew the dates, I knew some of the players
on the records. But you know, Stevie, it seems like
by design hasn't put a ton out about himself. You know,

(07:38):
there hasn't been the Keith Richard style biography that he
rightly deserves. There hasn't even been like a lot of them,
they haven't working on one, but oh he's working on them.
Is that true? I'm he had been. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
I know the person who was working on it with him,
I don't I need to get a status update from
that person, very prominent person.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Maybe better to say out of it was like, I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
I'm just saying I don't know, but I think that
he is somebody who, like a lot of our great
black musicians, you know, great black people. You know, look
at the Harlem Renaissance. How many of those people have
biographies written about them. And we're talking about a person,
you know, who's still alive and has sort of been

(08:27):
under under examined.

Speaker 1 (08:33):
There are several books about.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Him, mostly written from the standpoint of musicology. But what
is it about this man and his relationship to music
that is just so innovative and pleasing and boundary combining
es Yeah, because a lot of what we did was
kind of cobbling together his life from different sources. And

(08:58):
you know, I also think that in a lot of ways,
when you become one of the rushmore objects, right, like
a person who will live on in the form of
statuary in one way or another, I think that those
people sort of don't know what is true about their
lives anymore. So I mean it really is up to

(09:23):
journalism and criticism to kind of make sense of it.
But I also think that Stevie telling his own story
in his own words is something that someone like it
needs to happen as well. You know, I think about like,
there are a couple of really great books about Sammy Davis Junior,
but the two autobiographies that he wrote those are also fantastic.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah. Yeah, you know, you say that you've made it
without Stevie, and it's obviously true. But even at talking
to you, I forgot that you didn't make it with him,
because he just somehow Stevie is ever present through the
whole thing, which I means, I don't know. It's like
what an accomplishment is over it makes it. I mean,
it's not a cold calculated analysis at all. The joy

(10:06):
of the albums, the joy of Steve, I mean, it's all.
I mean, it's just the way that you structured it,
wrote it, voiced it, produced it, and everyone else at
Pineapple and Higher Ground. I mean, it's just like phenomenal job,
so so good, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
It was a real It was an honor and a pleasure,
like deeply, deeply rewarding to spend that much time thinking
about this man and what he made, and to like
experience that with you know, the Pineapple folks and the
higher Ground folks and also the people who made the music, right,

(10:46):
like to look at to be able to look at
Greg filling Gains's face, remembering what it was like to
like outplay Stevie on something.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
When you got contusion bit where you have Greg filling
Gains in front of you and he's talking about how
Stevie couldn't play the line on Contusions and he just
is like, I can do it, you know, and Stevie
just puts him into captaincy and he just nails it.
And then it's just the.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Kids by the way, right, Like, you know, Stevie's in
his seventies now, but when this music was being made,
he was a kid.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
Yeah, Like, this is.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
A twenty one to twenty six year old, barely twenty
six year old making this music. Think about that, this
is a kid.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
It's unbelievable. Well, Wesley, thanks so much for making it.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
You.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
I mean, yeah, I can't, I can't, I can't say
enough good things about the project. It's incredible.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
Oh thank you, I really appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
Next up is a conversation with the pioneering electronic music
producer and engineer Robert Margolev. In sixty eight, together with
Malcolm Cecil, Robert built the largest analog synthesizer in the world,
a be myth called Tonto. Two years later, the duo
released Zero Time that made waves in the experimental music
world and caught the attention of one Stevie Wonder, who

(12:07):
at the time was in transition and maybe even leaving Motown.
Over the next four years, Stevie worked closely with Robert
Cecil and Tonto to record a string of albums known
as Stevie's classic period Music of my Mind, Talking Book Intervisions,
and Fulfillinginess's first Finale. On today's episode, I talked to
Robert Margolev about Stevie's creative process in the studio during

(12:29):
this time. Robert also recalls the way in which Stevie
changed after surviving a near fatal car accident in seventy three,
and how Robert Cecil, Stevie and Tonto brought new life
to Hendrix's famed electric Lady Studio in New York, just
a year after Jimmy died. This is broken record liner

(12:50):
notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's my
conversation with Robert Margolev. Where in New York were you
born and raised?

Speaker 3 (13:00):
I was born and raised in a place called Great Neck,
New York. I used to happily called it the Gilded Ghetto.
It was very, very Jewish at that time. Now it's
Aranian and Chinese.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
Is it Long Island? Great Long Island?

Speaker 3 (13:17):
Yeah? Or you have to say Long Island, Long Island.
You can have a glass of water. I grew up
on Long Island until I was in tenth grade, and
then I had the great fortune of going to his school,
and a private school in Massachusetts called the Stockbridge School.
Arlo Guthrie went there afterwards. But it was a very

(13:40):
small school. They have to understand now. I graduated nineteen
fifty seven. I think that was before you were born. Yes, okay,
it was a very interesting time. The school was run
by a guy named Hans Mater, who was really an
experimental educator. Born in Germany, had very hard time with

(14:02):
his father, who was a Nazi basically, and Hans had
to leave the country and he got interned in Hawaii
during the war. He was a progressive educator, and in
the hallway of the school building was a sign that says,
all human beings are born free and equal in dignity
and rights. And that otto is something that I've lived

(14:25):
with all my life. It's really sort of might change
my thinking about humanism, about equality, and about all those
kinds of things that were going on around the time
of nineteen fifty seven. Worse, my senior year. Nineteen fifty
seven was when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act,

(14:47):
and there were kids that were being escorted, little girls
being black, little girls being escorted to school in the
South by armed marshals. Right, and was very passioned and
very racial, and very heavy, heavily racial, and Stockbridge was international, interracial,
and also was really round upon and pup the private

(15:11):
schools at that time. The reason I talk about it
now is because I'm ten years older than Stevie Wonder. Okay,
So what Stevie came on the scene for us in
the seventy two, I'd already been down the road of
civil rights, Okay. I already was Abernathy and Martin Luther

(15:34):
King and was already in my head, and I already
had been trained in this kind of humanist tradition. And
when Stevie came on board, when we started working on
songs like Living for the City, I knew right then
that he and I really we might have traveled different
roads to the same place. You know. It was it

(15:57):
was that close, that kind of intensity about race relations.
And also it was a time when the music business
was also undergoing a kind of interesting change. You know,
you call it R and B. I call it the
Blues and the Jews. Okay, it was a very different

(16:18):
environment in the East Coast in New York, the brill Building,
a lot of Jewish songwriters working with motown artists, a
lot of independent black labels coming up. The major labels
really weren't in the late fifties and early sixties, really
weren't that interested in signing black artists. Black music was
called race music, right, and the big labels didn't want

(16:41):
to touch it. So the bunch of Jewish guys all over,
you know, really could relate to it. Strangely enough, although
it's not really leaned upon, but Jewish music during that time,
a lot of Eastern European guys right with Klesmer music right, Okay,
it was melismatic, just as melismatic as black singing when

(17:03):
they sing a thousand notes around one bar. It was improvised,
A lot of it was. And also a lot of
the Eastern Europeans were a lot of the major classical
players around that time, Heipitz and all these Eastern If
you wanted a great violin player, you had to find
a Russian, right. It was a sort of a different vibe,

(17:25):
and the majors in this country weren't interested in recording
race music. It wasn't until Jerry Wexler, who was a
producer early on at Atlantic, came up with a new
name for it, and it was called Rhythm and Blues.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
Did Jerry Wexler came up with that on rhythm and Blues? Yes,
I didn't know that.

Speaker 3 (17:43):
So they came up with a new name, right, And
now all of a sudden that became interesting. But by
the time Stevie showed up on the scene, the record
business was at a place where the black businessmen were
beginning to start to form black labels. So that's when
motown really started to flower in Detroit, and they became

(18:10):
very protective of their own music. It wasn't for a
while until the big majors started to absorb Motown and
all the other black labels began to be signed to
Atlantic or to CBS or now we only have three
record companies.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
Yeah, right, everything, even Atlantic pretty quickly gets merged in
with Warner.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, and all that stuff. So it's turned into another animal.
But during our time with Steve in New York, it
was just at the beginning of that kind of vibe.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Were you tracking music throughout the sixties?

Speaker 3 (18:50):
No. I got out of college. I left early because
I hated it. It was Vietnam War, and I realized
that if I wanted to stay alive, I had to
do something other than being an average student in the
theater department at lu Okay.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
So that wasn't going to be good enough excuse.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Yeah, it was not a good enough excuse. And also
I really wasn't that happy with it. I didn't see where.
I was studying sociology and stuff, and finally, by accident,
fell into the theater department and I tried the acting
part of it. I acted in a play called The
Violent Eruption of the Volcano Krakatoa, and I came on

(19:30):
the stage holding a model ship and an admiral's hat
from the eighteen hundreds, and I felt like an ice
cream cone, melting ice cream cone. And I came to
the conclusion after that it was the second lesson that
I'm fine to sing in the choir. Okay, I was
before that. I was a chorus professional chorister the New

(19:50):
York Philharmonic. I sang in the Scolacantorum, the orchestra of
the New York Philharmonic. I studied at Tanglewood a couple
of summers, then sang you know, with the Skull under
the baton of Leonard Bernstein. And I was really fine
in the choir. But when I started going to music
school after LU for about a year to Manhattan, I

(20:13):
realized that I was not going to be an opera singer.
I didn't have the voice for it. I could memoryate
somebody off the stage in shadow of Styrophoam cup at
ten paces, and I knew that I would never want
to stand as a solo, as a tenor in front
of an audience of a thousand people. Right, And then
I learned again at LU being the melting ice cream

(20:37):
cone on stage. I had to be the man behind
the curtain.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
So then what did you pivot to?

Speaker 3 (20:42):
I pivoted to studying music, and then I pivoted to
the US Army, and I became enamored with my other love,
which is photography. And you can see all my work
around the room, and I said, I'm going to study
photography because that's really where I want to go. So

(21:03):
I signed up and they sent me to Motion Picture
Combat Photographer school that I was stationed in Germany for
about two years. I ended up doing a lot of
still photography, you know, basically general shaking hands, and I
did a little stuff on the helicopter looking down at
tire prints. I was stationed in Stuttgart and stuff.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
Was any of it reconnaissance photography.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
Yeah, reconnaissance photography. It's just general photography. But I really
fell in love there in Stuttgart with the ballet company.
And it was before don't ask, don't tell, but I
was not asked and I didn't tell, but I eventually telled,
and I found my way back to the United States

(21:51):
a shortened tour.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
Oh they did they get you out?

Speaker 3 (21:54):
Yeah? I finally told them. I said, listen, I'm a
ballet photographer by night and a combat photographer by day,
and I was really starting to have some really issues
with that. And I suddenly found my self living in
the East Village and got into making filmmaking, and I

(22:15):
produced and put together a film called Chaal Manhattan with
Edie Sedgwick, with Edie Sedgwick and all the refugees from
the factory for May's Place in Maxis, Kansas City, and
Ellen Stewart and Obama and the Temple of Rock and
Roll in Phillmore East and Bill Graham and all those

(22:37):
people and the big cloud of pot smoke, and well, were.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
You shocked by that scene that was happening in the
at all?

Speaker 3 (22:43):
No, No, I felt right at home.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
Was it a surprise that it existed?

Speaker 3 (22:48):
It was an interesting existence because within the space around
my loft apartment, which I had on the fifth floor
of a tenement, around literally around the corner from the Fillmore,
the place became sort of a salon for all people
but hanging out from everyone from Tom O'Horgan, who went
on to direct Hair on Broadway with Hellen's Blessed, and

(23:10):
the Fillmore and Bill Graham and all his people and
people from the factory, and everyone ended up in my flat,
which was a five room railroad flat on the fifth
floor between Second and Third Avenue, and I felt totally
at home. I loved going to Max's at night. I
knew Mickey Ruskin, the guy who ran the place and

(23:33):
who originated it. And I had a table and Andy
had a table, and we used to back and forth
to each other, you know, and it was an interesting time.
It was very druggy. There was this guy we used
to call him doctor Robert in Chow Manhattan. I'm not
going to mention his real name, but he was poking

(23:53):
up everybody from Hare to President Kennedy to everyone with
his famous vitamin shots and every.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Shots that Kennedy was getting.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yeah, so it was kind of weird and strange, and
I kind of took it all to be kind of
a normal thing. Wow. But the reason I even speak
about this, Edie lived in my apartment for about six
or seven months with me, not romantically, but she set
her room on fire at the Chelsea and that no

(24:24):
one would take her phone calls after that. So, and
she looked like a cute tip. Both of her hands
were bandaged from the fire because she grabbed a doorknob,
which was scolding toasty. My father was in the fur business.
We were shooting chow, and my father gave her a
whole bunch of her coats to wear, and they were
all trashed in the fire.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
So she had no place to live. So I had
a friend to look after me and what was going
on and stuff. And he would fwawn over her and
feed her and go to Maxis for my milkshakes at
two in the morning and stuff like that. It was
really a scene.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
And she had a kind of, if I'm recalling, kind
of a tragic demise, right.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
Yeah. She got married and three months later she died
in bed with her husband of a drug overdose. She
couldn't shake the drugs, you know. I'll tell you she
was an incredible human being, incredibly gentle and sensitive and
I couldn't handle it when she was up or once

(25:34):
she was really down, but she was just edie and sober.
I fell in love with her, I really did. She
was a splendid human being. And it's just sad that,
you know, all she had left in the end was
chow Manhattan. That was the last thing that she did,
and she lived for it to tell the story of

(25:55):
what happens to someone in drugs. But what came out
of it for me in the end was that was
my first and last feature as a producer in the
motion picture business. Because during that time I had been
scouting around in the East Village and I heard electronic

(26:15):
music playing in a nightclub called Cerebrum, and I went
up to the booth and I looked on the floor
and there were a couple of modules from a Mogue
synthesizer beeping and blooping away under the DJ, and I said,
now here's something that's really interesting. I was totally captivated

(26:35):
by it, and it wasn't long before I came to
the conclusion this is the way to make the music
for Chow Manhattan. And I was soon on the phone
to Robert Mogue. And it wasn't a month or two
later that my friend Tom Fly, who was in the
band called loth Are in the Hand People, and Walter Seer,

(26:59):
who has had since also passed on, was Bob's New
York rep, and they brought a synthesizer over to my studio,
which by this time was on forty seventh Street and
a diamond merchant building that had all these like rebbies
with the long hair.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Right.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
It wasn't much different than the people that showed up
at my place, really, except they all wore black coats
and carried their diamonds and their briefcases, clutching them to
their chests and making deals at Keat's downstairs in the
coffee shop, you know. But so I lived in that building.
We had a studio in there, and we started I

(27:37):
started playing around with the synthesizer, and I, to make
a long story short, I preferred the synthesizer the filmmaking,
and I ran out of money and things went south.
There were a lot of there was a little bit
too much Doctor Robert and Doctor Robert and infight have
been shots going on that really in the end, blew

(27:59):
the whole thing out of the water. Everything went down
the tubes, with the exception of my synthesizer and a
few pieces of furniture, and it up at a place
called Broadway Recording Studios. And the guy who owned that place,
this guy named Pat Jakes. He was a wonderful man

(28:19):
and he really got me going. I mean I was
already doing. I already produced my first semi electronica album,
with a band called lowth Are in the Hand People.
I did the record for John Hammond the Capitol, and
if you listen to Like Machines on that record and
then listened to Whip It, you will see a direct relationship.

(28:41):
Because I produced Whip It right with Devo, you will
see the direct relationship between the idea of the fusion
of rock and roll instruments and electronica. Wow, it's very
evident in that thing. But that's where I got the synthesizer.
From there, I went to Media Sound because Media was

(29:03):
really happening. It was a big studio, and I ended
up there becoming their electronic genius and bad boy. I
looked like nobody else there. I looked like a freak,
of course, and a joint sticking out of my mouth,
and you know, doing crazy daisy toilet paper commercials and
stuff during the day. But at night I was writing

(29:26):
serious classical music. And that's where I met Malcolm Malcolm Cecil,
who he was not only the head of maintenance. He
was an ACE electronics guy, but he was also an
ACE musician and played bass and played at Ronnie Scott's.
Every major jazzer, including people like Charlie Watts and Jeff Beck.

(29:48):
Jeff Beck, right, all these guys would come and play.
Herbie band would come. When the jazzers came from out
of town. Ronnie Scott's had a back line, you know,
a rhythm section because most jazzers couldn't afford to play right,
bring a band. So Malcolm was in that band.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
Was Ronnie Scott's house band bass player Yeah London, Yeah wow.

Speaker 3 (30:10):
He's an extremely accomplished musician, beyond any level of musicianship
that I had. The difference was he liked to play
out in front of people, right, he was all for that.
He was as thin Asarail, had a big puffy hair
to do, looked like a big Q tip. What night
I walked into media to work on my with my synthesizer,

(30:32):
and they just tired him. And he was standing in
studio A and the console had one big top plate
on it that lifted up like this, like the hood
of a car. Everyone was building their own consoles. There
was no need this in SSL, that or any of
that kind of stuff. It was all everybody in the
studio business was busy jury rigging their own consoles. So

(30:57):
Malcolm was standing in front of thing and it looked
like like a rat's nest inside the console. And I
walked in and I was wearing a sheer sheepskin sheer coat.
It was in the winter time, and I usually would
come in at night if I wasn't doing your commercial
or something. Right, So Malcolm was in there fixing the
console or doing something to it, and I said, do

(31:19):
you really know how to fix this thing? And he says,
I ought to because it's my job here. And he said,
are you the guy with that funny synthesizer in the
other room. I said yeah, and I own it. And
he says, don't make a deal with you, and I said,
what is it. He said, I'll teach you how to
become a first class recording engineer if you teach me

(31:41):
how to play the synthesizer.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
And we shook hands on that deal and the rest
is history.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
We're going to take a quick break and then we'll
be back with more from my interview with Robert Margolev.
We're back with more from Robert Margolev. Did you even
want to learn how to become a recording engineer? First?

Speaker 3 (32:04):
Yeah? I did, and I didn't. To me, it's just
the way through to the end, because electronic music has
no instrument. Electronic exists in the air. It's not like
a saxophone or a trumpet that plays a certain sound
that you have like place one note. Well, the synthesizer
plays one note, but you don't have to have an
ambisher for it. You don't have to have a physical

(32:25):
training to play. But the synthesizer, as big as it
is at that point, only played one event or note
at a time, right, And I was busy writing music
based on the fact that I would do one or
two lines simultaneously, and I was putting together some music.
The first piece I worked on was called Aurora, was
very science fiction, had nothing to do with eight bar

(32:48):
phrases boom boom, boom, none of that. It wasn't pop
music at all. It was really kind of classical music.
And Malcolm was enthrawled by that because we were writing
music with for non existent instruments that occurred only in
space and in our heads.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
You really couldn't play a chord at that time. You
couldn't play a basic C major coord have no court peggiated.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
You could arpeggiate, but there's no quartz because you can
only play one event on one keyboard Tonto, which we
originally we called it finally called a Tonto, the original
Neo Timbrel Orchestra, and that kind of name kind of
stuck to it. And we started to really sort of
plan how we could get to have multiple voices, and

(33:33):
we did that at a Chinese restaurant across the street
from Media. Food was terrible and filled with mono sodium
in glutamate. So every time we went over there to
eat dinner, like I would get flushed and I my
face would get really red and stuff. But we drew
the plans for Tonto on the tablecloth. They had paper tablecloth,

(33:53):
so Tanto was designed on a tablecloth at this Chinese
Spanish restaurant. It was sort of an in beach fusion,
fusion and confusion, but we were slowly putting it together,
and it was a big pile of equipment on three
or four tables and a big gurney, and we were

(34:14):
really sailing along making some of the strangest music you
would ever believe. Were working about a year or till
we became very close friends and it slowly came together.
And then one night we were working along and Herbie
Man walked into the back of the control room and
looked at Malcolm and said, what the hell are you

(34:36):
doing here? And because he remembered Malcolm from Ronnie Scott's
Wow Okay, because Malcolm would play when Herbie would come
over to play.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
Herbie's floutest Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
So he said, well, we're doing something really rather different.
And Malo, he pointed out and said, you playing electronica
because he viewed Malcolm playing up Pride acoustic bass, which
was Malcolm's first instrument, right, And Malcolm said, Herbie, don't
sweat it. And we pulled the synthesizer out into the

(35:08):
studio and I put two big loud speakers, one on
each side, and we sat them down in the front
of the synthesizer and we played it at high level
and blew his mind and he said, you guys want
a deal. Malcolm said, yeah, we want a deal. He says, well,
I have one slop left on Embryo. I have my
label on Atlantics called Embryo, and I'll sign you guys.

(35:32):
I said, really, we're going to have a record deal,
you know, a real record deal, and we signed with Herbie.

Speaker 1 (35:41):
Did you have material at the time, had you written stuff.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
Like it was all recorded, no music, no written music,
everything head charts like jazz. And we put that record
together called Zero Time, and Herbie put the record out
and it made a big noise Rolling Stone. It got
huge reviews, and that was the beginning of what really

(36:07):
started to change my world forever.

Speaker 1 (36:10):
How much editing did that album require?

Speaker 3 (36:13):
A good bit? We fooled around with it a lot.
My song Aurora, which was the first thing we did,
was twenty six minutes long, okay, And I said, Malcolm,
I'm not even sure this is music, and he said,
it's music all right, it just needs a bit of
an edit. It turned out to be seven and a
half minutes long, so it was classic, Okay.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
Need to do it.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
We had a big da we had. We did so
much laughing. Our faces hurt. I'll tell you something. We
were laughing all the time. We had a wonderful time
working together, and we were working with other artists as well.
Richie Havens came by a whole bunch of other few you.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Guys producer Richie Havens record. Yeah, how did that.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
Come to Stormy Forrest? This was Richie's label, right, And
I fell in love with Richie when it before I
even got to Media where I was working at Broadway.
He came with his label and a whole bunch of
hippie musicians and we just got along. And I love
Richie and I went to Woodstock with him. They opened,
He opened the.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
Show an iconic performance, So you were there for that.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
I was there for that.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
That's an incredible performance. So it's all running late and
he goes out by himself.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
Yeah, he goes out by himself. And the strange thing
is the guys that paid for Woodstock also built Media
Sound Joel Rosenman. So I was when I got to Media,
I was among friends immediately, and they tolerate as long
as we did. Malcolm did what had to do to

(37:41):
keep the studios rolling, and I was doing what I
was doing to make music for the clients, to make
you know, music for crazy Daisy toilet paper and Trans
Caribbean airways and all kinds of stuff. They would basically
leave us alone because they knew where we came from.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
And you get free time, so basically free time you got.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
There was no time we had. We could do whatever
we wanted, just as long as when there was paying
session was and in you know, twenty five string players
that everything worked, everything was good, and so what happened
was the record came out and made a big noise.
And then on Memorial Day weekend nineteen seventy I think

(38:23):
it was nineteen seventy one. It was a Sunday, fifty
seventh Street was like a ghost town. Malcolm had a
little apartment next to the front door of Media Sound.
I'm up one flight over at Deli, which was just
next door, and we hear malcobe Malcolm and we look

(38:45):
out the window, the front window. We're looking down at
the front door of Media and there is our friend,
fellow bass player, Ronnie Blanco was standing there with Stevie,
who we didn't know. Was just a big, tall black guy, right,
and he had our album under his arm, and we
invited him in and we started recording and we didn't

(39:07):
stop for five years.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
Wait a seme, So you invite him into Malcolm's home.

Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah. We then go down, we go upstairs and he
Malcolm plays bass for a little while upstairs and Stevee's
honking around on Frank Philip Petty's melotron, which Malcolm was
fixing putting new tapes in. Right, We honked around for
about twenty minutes, you said you want to go downstairs
and see Tonto, and he said yeah, and that was

(39:35):
the beginning of it. We unlocked the front door and
walked in, and I don't know what the hell happened
for the next five years, you know, you tell me. Well,
I was invisible, you know, And we maintained Malcolm and
I sort of were invisible in a lot of ways.
But I always viewed my job because I didn't ever

(39:55):
want to be standing in the front of the stage.
So I'm perfectly happy to do stuff right. I'm so
perfectly happy to be the man behind the curtain. Malcolm,
on the other hand, wanted to play out, so we
spent a lot of time trying to figure out how
to get Tonto to play live. But remember this was
all analog. There was no high technology involved at all.

(40:18):
There was no MIDI, it was none of that stuff.
So everything we did was all voltage controlled and analog.
It was highly unstable. Power supply issues RF from a
radio station could fuck with the pitch and stuff. It
was not what you would call the encomium of stability.

(40:38):
It was pretty loose.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
Stevie had a hard time with it at first. Correct
with the synthesize with really too much.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
We ended up everyone found a role, and to be
very honest, I don't know what the hell happened. I mean,
once we started working with Stevie, it was like a
fever dream. There was no daytime or nighttime. There were
no other clients in the end, by the time we
got to Electric Lady, all our other clients were based

(41:09):
non existent because we couldn't accommodate them. We were living
inside Stevie's bubble. And we lived like that for five years.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
What was his bubble like?

Speaker 3 (41:20):
Well, for us, it was never let's go out to
dinner and or go to a party or do any
kind of social thing. Our entire existence with Steve revolved
around being in the.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Studio and he was there a lot, right.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
Yes, he would call us if it was four in
the morning and he wanted to do something, we would
be there for him. Wow, And we ended up having
to leave Media. First of all, we were consuming so
much time that they were getting a little nervous because
they couldn't accommodate their commercial clients. And I, Malcolm and

(41:57):
I set up the studio for Steve so that he
could sort of memorize where everything was. And also there
were very particular things that we did when we recorded
the drums. If you listen to any of those Stevie
Wonder records or any of the records that I've done

(42:18):
since those days, you'll see the high hat is on
the left, okay, And the reason for that is that
that is the position by which only the drummer really
hears the drums in stereo, and that always puts the
high hat on the left because Stevie was facing the drums.
So what I wanted to make sure of was that

(42:40):
Steve heard the same sonic image in his headphones that
he heard live in the room, right, so because that
helped him know where the drums were. So we had
a lot of sensitivity toward how Stevie was listening to.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
It's so interesting that it's such a banal, non artistic consideration,
you know, leads to such a strong artistic Children make.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
A lot of difference. We set up every instrument that
he was going to possibly being used. When we there's
always an open mic in the control, not one of
these things where you go Steve, Steve playing the drums again.
It was not one of those sort of earphone monitor things.
We had an open, full frequency microphone just like this
one here, so Steve could always hear what we were

(43:28):
talking about. It basically made the control room window disappear.
It became one room. Now that's commonplace today forty some
odd years later, right, But nobody was doing that at
that time. Everyone was the musicians are on this side
of the glass and the engineers were over here, and
they never meet, you know, the engineers all or little

(43:49):
pocket protectors with pens and pencils and short sleeve white shirts.
And then the musicians had their own world in the
other space, right, It was only the three of us.
Like Music of My Mind, the first album was just Malcolm,
me and Stevie did the whole thing. I think one
guitar part. Buzzy played feet and played on and Sanborn

(44:10):
played on that record. There are a whole bunch of
different people who were in the Butterfield. Yeah, Butter's horn
section sort of ended up being Stevie's horn section.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
Really, I didn't know that.

Speaker 3 (44:23):
Yeah, there's lots of stuff you don't know. Ye're young.
So anyways, it was always inside, you know, just the
three of us for the most part.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
How away were you, I mean to your point that
there's no a record people around. How aware were you
of the tension between Stevie and Motown at that point?

Speaker 3 (44:44):
Well, that only developed later, and I think that partially
had to do with the fact where we started to
go our separate ways, and that was after we moved
to La got it.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
But he was negotiating his contract with Motown, not.

Speaker 3 (45:01):
In the beginning, not in the beginning the first part
of music. In my mind, Steve really didn't want to
have too much to do with them. He I think
he knew sooner or later he would end up back
there one way or another. But I think he was
really very open minded and wanted to do something really
totally different. I don't think that Motown in general would

(45:24):
have approved of me and Malcolm at all.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
Okay, and they likely didn't even know two.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
White Jewish boys, one from London and one from New York.
You know, it was not what they were thinking about
at Motown and having a true black label.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
Yeah, and very different from the way they had operated
in the past with their in house producers.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
And everyone trusts the same and they would dance the
dancing sticks back and forth all these groups and Quartets,
the Jackson Five and the Supremes, and Steve really wasn't
hearing the music that way. They would have him just
come in. Somebody would do an arrangement, the in house
band that would do a rhythm track. They'd have Steve

(46:07):
come in and sing the rhythm track, and then Jean
would go away and write the charts and stuff, and
then after the mix they play it back for Steve
and he wasn't hearing what he heard coming back wasn't
even close to what he had in his head. So
he had music of my mind. So we helped him
cook up that first album cover with him with the glasses, yeah,

(46:30):
with the little figures and stuff outside inside.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:34):
Yeah, we cooked that up with Danny Blumeno, who did
these kind of artworks that were in the bathroom and
the studio Electric Lady when we went down there.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
Oh yeah, oh, so the point the artists who did
the murals and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
We had him do it, but me, Malcolm and Steve
cooked all that stuff up between the three of us,
and it was Malcolm said, you know, you were doing
music that's only been in your mind, and we said, ah,
a great title for the album. Talking book on the
other hands by photography.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
The one where he's plane in the sand.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
Yes, I did that.

Speaker 1 (47:12):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
I mean we did everything together. It was photographed high
in the hills of Hollywood, six in the morning, just
under the Hollywood sign No way Wow. Yeah, I had
that beautiful robe. Ola Hudson did that robe and Ola
Hudson is the mother of us Slash Incredible. Yeah. So

(47:36):
really everything colliding in different ways. But we had to
leave media sound behind because we couldn't stay set up
and it would take to do the setup that we
had with Steve, it would take hours.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
Yeah, and you couldn't break that down because they had
to be the same.

Speaker 3 (47:51):
Yeah. So it was just around the time that Jimmy
decided to leave the planet basically, and Electric Lady was
a brand new studio and ended up it was designed
by my very dear friend to the stay, John Stork,
who designed the Electric Lady and also designed the cases

(48:13):
for Tonto, those big involved round cases, the Arcs and lived.
It started its life at Electric Ladies Studios and we
moved in just I guess a few months after Jimmy passed.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
That must have been kind of a heavy time to
be there in a way.

Speaker 3 (48:31):
Well, the thing is that Jimmy designed that studio, had
a studio built like that because he wanted his own
personal studio. There was no such thing as a personal
studio in those days. This was one of the would
be one of the first home studios. Well, here's a
home studio that's lasted more than sixty years. They're still
in business. Yeah, yeah, but the place is wonderful. We

(48:52):
went down there, Jimmy had passed away, there wasn't a
lot of business. They didn't know what to do exactly.
And we put our feet in those shoes. Yeah, and
they fit perfectly, and we started working an electric lady
and we worked there for about a year and a
half and it was a wonderful, full time, very creative time.

Speaker 1 (49:11):
What did you make of the music you were hearing
from Stevie?

Speaker 3 (49:14):
I'll tell you this. I didn't think there was any
other kind of music. Nothing else existed for me. I
would sleep and then I'd turn around and go back
to the studio. We worked in Jewish holidays and Christmas,
and any time that Steve was in town, we would work.
And when we were not working with Steve because he

(49:34):
was on the road or something like that then we
would work on Tonto and make more music. So we're
living totally oblivious to anything, including any kind of business
relationship we had with Stevie. Nothing mattered.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
What was it that stuff discussed? The business stuff, it was.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
Discussed only once at the beginning of our relationship. He said, hey, guys,
I want you to be directors of my company and
we said yes, and then we shook hands on that
and that was it.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
His production company or his publishing this production company, I think, okay,
And we were discussed again until it really became finally
an issue because we weren't.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
We didn't finally feel we were being felt unloved sort of.
And at the end of the deal, Motown also didn't
put us in the ads or give us credits for
things and the trades and stuff, and we knew that
really they didn't really see us as being a part
of Steve and Steve never had any issues with us,

(50:37):
you know, for us and Steve, it was always the music.
We never really got into business or anything else until
it became an issue towards the end of our relationship,
and that was the reason for our party of the ways.
But we had a really good run of nearly five years,
and you know, Steve finally gave us a huge thank

(50:59):
you at one of his concerts, you know. And Steve
and I have very cordial relationship now, friendly and together
and from him ever, yeah, I do. I just send
him a text message a few nights ago talking about
him maybe writing something for my book for openers, you know.
But we have a lasting friendship of more than fifty years.

(51:23):
But it's not let's go out to dinner kind of friendship.
You know. There's a certain arm's length to it, and
I totally understand that. And he has people that are
working for him, that have worked for him for twenty
five years. I did something with him, I think a
year and a half or two years ago. I did
one mode track for his new record, and I was
honored and happy to do it. I have a very

(51:45):
decent relationship with him, and I know that everything in
our relationship wasn't perfect, especially when it came to the
business part of things, but that is thesiness of the business. Yes, okay,
I can't change it. It's water under the bridge. But
I know that what we did is way more important
than a few shekels. Okay, we did something really and

(52:11):
for that I have to thank by higher power. We
did something that was really beautiful and really incredible in
its way.

Speaker 1 (52:22):
We have to take another quick break and then we'll
be back with more from Robert Margolef. Here was the
rest of my conversation with Robert Margolev. Do you remember
some of the early feedback you were getting from other
people who weren't in the room with you guys making
the music.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
Oh, there were always people, you know, going around the edges,
coming and going. But we finally we moved out from LA.
Motown had just recently moved from Detroit to LA and
they really wanted to have Stevie back. And Stevie we
finished that first album, Music of My Mind, and he

(53:04):
wasn't assigned to Motown for that record. That was totally
and they really started agitating.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
You know.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
We came out, we said, with a place called Crystal Studios, which,
strangely enough, the husk of that building is just on
the other side of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine. It's
just a few blocks from where I first landed in
La right there, right and.

Speaker 1 (53:34):
Then wound record plant right.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
Then then came the record plant and we couldn't stay
at Crystal because there was only one room and his
the main clients at Crystal an incredible recording console there
that Andrew Berltter built, which is to this day I
think sounds sounds still sounds better than anything that was
ever built to this day.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (53:57):
Crystal sort of was home to the acoustic rock set.
I called him the Denizens of Laurel canyonk Okay. They
were all of those kind of folky James Taylor kind
of records. I loved it. I knew Jony you did. Yeah.
She used to come and listen to Stevie at Studio
B at the Record Plant on a couple of occasions. Wow.

(54:19):
And we went down to Fat Burger and had fat
burgers together and decided to stop smoking. And I went
to this place called the Shick Center. I don't know
whether she ever won or not, but I haven't picked
up a cigarette since so.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
But at any rate, I think she's picked up since then.
I've seen.

Speaker 3 (54:36):
What happened was we had a move because the place
that people were raising hell about us being in there
all the time, Stevie sucked up all the oxygen we
had tanto in there from these coaches. We brought it
out in a truck. It was there, you know, and
people were saying, Hey, how am I going to get
in and do my record? Steve is totally doing everything.

(54:57):
And when Malcolm first came to New York, he worked
at the Record Plant in New York for about six
weeks before we went to media, so he knew Chris
and Gary Gary Kelgrin.

Speaker 1 (55:10):
Right.

Speaker 3 (55:10):
So we got a call from Gary says, I hear
you guys are looking for a studio and we said yeah.
He says, come up and meet me at my house.
Sydney and Malcolm go up to his house which was
on Camino palm Ayrow. It's been torn down since then,
but it was the old Canadian Embassy and it looked
like something from a Charles Adams cartoon, like a big

(55:31):
haunted house, right, And he said, listen, you bring Stevie
for a year to the Record Plant. We'll build a
studio for you exactly the way you want it. We'll
do it completely and totally for Tonto and to have
Stevie there. And we couldn't say no to that, right.
So Gary brings out a bottle of cognac and he

(55:54):
pours everybody to drink, and we stand up and we
clink our glasses. And the minute the glasses clink together,
there was an earthquake. And the whole place is going
like this. And I looked into the kitchen through the
door from the dining room, and out the door of
the kitchen there was a swimming pool and there was
like a little tsunami in the swimming pool coming towards

(56:15):
the back door right, and the chandelier was going back
and forth like this. And I said, God has his
hand on our shoulder, man. And that's how he ended
up at the record plan.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
Wow. How would Stevie usually bring songs in? Would he
come in and play them for you? Would he have
a demo tape?

Speaker 3 (56:38):
No, not really. Sometimes he would improvise in the studio
and come up with the song directly. Sometimes he would
come in. He had like a little recording rig that
he kept in his hotel room or at his house.
Like I've never been to Stevie Wonder's house ever, not
in fifty years. Okay, I only know him as denizen

(56:59):
of the studio. He appears there. I have empathy, incredible
empathy with him, and we work in the studio and
the studio is over. We go our separate ways. We've
never had like a friendship friendship, do you know what
I'm saying. It's always been based around around the work.

Speaker 1 (57:17):
So improvising in the studio would sometimes a certain sound
that you've programmed on Tanto sport.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
It was like jazz. He would come up with a song,
we would come up with a sound, okay, and then
he'd say more of this, less that, and so on
and so forth, and generally we would create two or
three separate voices on separate keyboards. But they were all mono.
If you really listen to those records, and all the
records that I do, they're very simple. Okay, there's only

(57:46):
a few voices. There's no waterfalls, there's no stylistic big
key things. If there are keyboards, they're very simple, like
a Fender Rhodes or a clavinet, like a boogie on
reggae woman for example. Yes, okay, So if you listen
to the records, you'll see there are only a few voices.

Speaker 1 (58:04):
And the simpler you.

Speaker 3 (58:05):
Make the records, the closer you can make the record sound.
So I mean Steve was singing into an RI twenty
and the reason I like to use the R twenty
is you could touch the microphone without making any mic
noise because it was dynamic and you you wouldn't hear
the thumb. This is because being uncited, he had to
feel where the microphone was to singh. But it also

(58:28):
gave me this kind of really dry close sound that
Malcolm and I really loved. You know, I just wanted
to back up one please minute, Okay, I want to
talk about race relations and where we are now, which
is horrific. Okay, But like we mentioned earlier, Steve had

(58:50):
a real understanding of around the fifties, late fifties, early sixties,
Martin Luther King. As a matter of fact, Stevie was
one who was behind getting Martin Luther King Day as
an official American holiday.

Speaker 1 (59:05):
Right.

Speaker 3 (59:05):
I think the song that really did it for me
with Steve and really sort of sign sealed and delivered
me to his front door and really helped me make
a deep emotional commitment to his work was a song
called Living for the City. Yeah, okay, I was already

(59:26):
deep inside of what was going down South and the
integration and the bus boycotts and the little girls being
escorted to school by armed marshals and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (59:39):
Right.

Speaker 3 (59:40):
So, by the time we got with Stevie and he
started writing songs about the black social condition, right, I
really deeply identified with that. There were a lot of
songs that Steve wrote that had these very very important
and very key racial cues and understandings and his feelings

(01:00:00):
about racism. And to this day I celebrate those same
feelings of humanism and equality.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
It wasn't just the kind of was getting the music
is making. It was the message as well, yes, all
of it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:14):
The message of his songs. This I think was really
sort of twang my heart, you know, it's sort of
I really sort of understood it. And I knew as
both being Jewish and gay, Okay, I understood the fact that,
you know, he suffered also inequality by being black and blind.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
And I always like to say, between the two of us,
we had we had it all black, blind, Jewish and gay.
We had everything going for us. Okay. You know, I'm
not why, I don't have anything to hide on eighty
three years old, who cares? But I understood the energy
that Steve had toward the racial relationships and about humanity,

(01:01:00):
and I think that many of his songs really relate
to that, and I think that's what pushed my buttons
more than anything else in his music. I mean, we
could be inventive and crazy and do wonderful things and
create sounds that never existed before. And it was sort
of like electronica jazz, where we would make a sound.
We didn't know what an instrument was. We couldn't call

(01:01:22):
it a visor or that it was I don't know,
something that existed only as vibrating electrons in space, and
it would only be a sound after it fell out
of the loudspeakers.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:34):
It was a different kind of a head.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
It's incredible, how I mean, given that you were working
with these inorganic sounds. You know, like as you're saying,
you can't place what the instrument is exactly, that doesn't exist.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
Well, they were organic, but we have to reach them
a different way.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
You guys were speaking to the human experience while channeling
sounds from I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Well, we lived inside the sounds where we structured and
built them. Sometimes we would start we wouldn't know where
we were going to end up, but somehow it all
fell together. It was a perfect union. Me, Malcolm and Steve.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
Be four and a half years together. How much music
was recorded in those four and a half.

Speaker 3 (01:02:17):
I would say maybe about one hundred and fifty songs,
maybe more. We had everything set up in the studio right,
so when he sat down to play, he could just
play and we recorded immediately.

Speaker 1 (01:02:28):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
It's time when we were working with Jeff Beck at
the same time, and Jeff wanted a song for his album.

Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
He wanted maybe your Baby.

Speaker 3 (01:02:38):
Yes, yeah, he wanted maybe your Baby. But somehow it
turned to Superstition, and Steve had already had a demo,
and he said, we can't have maybe your Baby because
I wanted for my record. So he said, but I'll
write you something and that was Superstition, which we had
already begun tracking, but he Jeff played a demo of it.

(01:03:01):
But Steve finished Superstition. But the interesting thing about it
was we tracked Superstition. Steve wanted, he said, just put
up the drums. We put up the drums. Steve walked
into the studio, no guide vocal, no click track, nothing.
Steve never played for the click track either. His head
is a click track. And he sat down at the

(01:03:22):
drums and he played for three and a half minutes
and he came in and said, Okay, that's it. Let's
put a bass part on this. And it turned into
it turned into Superstition. The whole song was already in
his head.

Speaker 1 (01:03:34):
The drum takes one take, one take. Wow. Was Stevie's
final take of Superstition at all influenced by Beck's version?

Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
I honestly don't think so.

Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
You don't think so.

Speaker 3 (01:03:48):
I think they were very separate. When Barry Gordy heard
the rough of Superstition is I recollect? He said, if
you give that away, I'm going to raise hell. And
that song turned out to be Stevie's first major hit record. Yeah,
and we were very glad. Nobody wanted to give it
to Jeff because of that.

Speaker 1 (01:04:06):
How did you feel when it became the hit that
it became hearing it everywhere?

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
And you know, I'll tell you something, I didn't really
care if it wasn't in the studio coming out of
the loud speakers. I had no opinion. Okay. I was
not there to manage Stevie's career. I was not there
to give Stevie any kind of advice when it comes
to politics or dealing with the record label. I worked

(01:04:30):
with and for Stevie Wonder, as did Malcolm, and we
did what had to happen when it was eight bars
long and it fell out of the loud speakers. That
is where I lived, Okay, it was like architecture.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
Did you have any dealings with Barry Gordy or the
label that did come.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
He was very interesting and tense guy had very specific ideas.
He had come up with a very successful formula. He
had a major record company. Everybody called him the chairman,
not mister Gordy. Okay. He had a guy who was
the president of the label called Ewart Abner and Abner.
This little guy sort of looked like Sammy Davis Junior.

(01:05:12):
And he always sat in this big office with this
big high chair behind him with his sports jacket on
the top of it. And I came in and showed
them the pictures of a talking book that I took
and he said, yeah, we like those. I'll give you
three hundred bucks.

Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
So anyway, I had an agent with you.

Speaker 3 (01:05:31):
Yeah, but that record cover really worked.

Speaker 1 (01:05:33):
Did anyone try to pick you up after this? After
you come out of the whirlwind of working with Stevie
and you come out of that sort of well, we.

Speaker 3 (01:05:40):
Worked with guys like the Isley Brothers. We did three
plus three, Fight the Power, all of that stuff with
the Isley's. I went on to produce two albums with
Billy Preston.

Speaker 1 (01:05:50):
So you were able to take some time and do
those sorts of things.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
Yeah, we worked with the Isleys, but it was a
different five. The Isleys already knew exactly what they wanted
to record with the exception and maybe how a solo
is gonna sound like Fight the Power? Who's that Lady?
With a wonderful guitar solos, great Arnie stuff. Yeah, those solos.
We did some very funny stuff to the guitar sounds

(01:06:15):
with that we used. I think I used a Dolby encoder, right,
but I only encoded it. I didn't decode it. I
left it encoded because it made a really kind of
raw sound with the fact so those lead lines were
recorded through a Dolby but not decoded, and then mixed

(01:06:35):
and limited afterwards, and that's how we got that kind
of ripping solo sounds. Wow, we were doing stuff, yeah, wow.
And of course you know Ernest Ernie Isley was a
great guitar player who was this mentor and who lived
at his house. Hendricks, Hendricks, h you knew that incredible,
You know, your stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:06:53):
Was the experience of working with the Isley's as fulfilling
as the work with TeV. I get the sense that,
as you described, with Stevie being so all consuming, that
maybe that was more.

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
Yeah, the Isleys was more professional, quote unquote professional gig.
They aren't interested in any production ideas from us. They
had the songs prepared, they knew pretty much what they
wanted to do. The scene one of the senior Isley's
was sort of like a traffic coffee made sure everyone
came to the studio on time. It was all very

(01:07:25):
coordinated and you know, basically more of a classical engineering
gig than anything that was really creative.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
On our part.

Speaker 3 (01:07:34):
We brought a lot of stuff we had worked on
with Stevie to the table, which is what they wanted,
all right. They liked this, say, they came to the
studio when we were working with Steve to meet us, so,
I mean it was all kind of friendly and everything.
I can remember Michael Jackson coming to the studio to
sing on the Stevie's Who's that Lady do? What?

Speaker 1 (01:07:58):
It was?

Speaker 3 (01:07:59):
Jackson five. I have a picture of it somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:08:02):
Really yeah, because I don't think there's a that I
know of a Stevie song, that mighty.

Speaker 3 (01:08:06):
Stevie song they came to sing.

Speaker 1 (01:08:09):
Or other Motown acts coming through.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
Oh you haven't done nothing. It was the song that
Jackson sang on. Really yeah, you got to make a
note on that one.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
I am, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:19):
Are you having fun?

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
I'm having I'm having a ball.

Speaker 3 (01:08:22):
Okay, that's what's important.

Speaker 1 (01:08:23):
Do you remember when Stevie almost died? Yes?

Speaker 3 (01:08:26):
I do. He We just finished the second album and
I got a call said Steve was in a car
accident and he's in a coma. I almost fell off
the console. I mean, I was in shock. And he
was unconscious for two weeks and he was in North Carolina.

(01:08:48):
Malcolm and I got a call from the boss man,
mister Gordie, the chairman, and he said, do you have
access to Stevie's tapes? And we said yes, and he said,
well could you finish when something happened to Steve? And
I said no? And he said why? He said, because

(01:09:09):
Steve specifically forbade us to give the tapes to nobody
if they're not complete ad masters, because we worked for Steve.
We didn't work from Motown. We were not their employees,
and we had to tell him no. And I remember that.
And then Steve was God for about a month and

(01:09:31):
we were working and doing other projects and stuff. And
he came back and he was a little different after that.
I think he learned about his own mortality. He received
a very serious blow to the head, and I think
it changed his perspective on his life. I really do.

(01:09:51):
He wasn't the same kind of super embulent, kind of
having a sense of humor about a lot of things.
He was a lot more serious, you know. He was
just more somber. Yeah. Well, here's it's the picture of
Stevie's wreck car right here if you want to see.

Speaker 1 (01:10:12):
Oh wow, did you know that it was his cousin
driving it? Did you know that?

Speaker 3 (01:10:19):
Let me look here, I'll read you something. We were
just taking the completed album of inter Visions into Mastery
when disaster struck on August sixth, nineteen seventy three, while
he was on the road on an overnight drive to Durham,
North Carolina. Stevie was sitting in the right front seat
listening to a mix of the inner Vision's album when

(01:10:40):
a stray log dislodged from a lumber truck driving in
front of them, striking Stevie in the head. He was
in a coma for five days and spent two weeks
in the Winston Salem hospital. It was several months before
Stevie made a full recovery. The accident changed him. He
came out with a higher consciousness that comes with a
near death experience. Stevie said when he returned to the studio,

(01:11:04):
I was definitely in a much better spiritual place that
made me aware of many things that concern my life
and future. He seemed more somber, more introspective, which I
think showed in fulfilling this first finale. And as it
turned out, it was to be our final finale with Stevie.

Speaker 1 (01:11:23):
But it's supposed to be a two part record, correct.

Speaker 3 (01:11:26):
Yes, correct, I don't know. Lowtown was very against doing
two album records because of shipping issues, and you go on,
they could put half as many records in the case
because there was two records in the thingy.

Speaker 1 (01:11:42):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:11:43):
They were all crazy. Because I wanted to in talking book,
I came up with the idea of putting a braille
on the cover. It made the records fatter and they
had to put one less record in the case of records,
so they gave a static on that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:58):
Yeah, did you have to re sequence fa failings his
first finale?

Speaker 3 (01:12:02):
No, the thing is about sequencing with Steve. If you
notice the records sort of blend one into another, right,
that was long before the DJs came up with that concept.
Malcolm and I Steve would do. We'd all sit at
the console together, rehearse everything and do one side completely.
But in order to do something like that, you had
to really relate the keys from one song to the

(01:12:23):
next song that the keys would work, and also the
tempos would work as well, because the temples had to
be exactly right on and beat. So we had to
rehearsal of that. We used three machines to mix those
records down and they were all done live like that,
and we would rehearse everything. Steve bea, Malcolm would all
sit at the console together and we'd each have our

(01:12:45):
stereo faders and everybody knew we put for me a Malcolm,
we put China markers on the faders so we knew
where everything was completely rehearsed. You should get it three
or four times, but all those albums were mixed like that,
down like that, with the segues, the correct segues. Although
I can recollect a lot of little details, I honestly

(01:13:08):
don't know what the heck happened. Okay. It was so
self realizing and so internalized that we lived, aid and
breathed Stevie. Okay, we were totally a part of some
kind of organic entity and had a force field around it.
Nobody fucked with us. People left us alone. Toward the

(01:13:31):
end of it, when we were out here, when we
were recording here and Steve had already signed this deal,
that's when people from Motown really started meddling and getting
in the way of our relationship. And we were slowly
at that point being deemphasized by the label. That's why
there was no credits on the Grammy wins thanking us

(01:13:51):
for giving us any credit on the thank yous that
appeared in the trade papers, and that's when we realized that.
I think it was Motown, not Steve in any way,
But I think there were people at Motown who didn't
want us around. They wanted black folks, basically, and I
think that that was and I'm not casting dispersions of

(01:14:11):
them because I really understand the need for an identity
in what was going on. But a lot of people
didn't realize and nor did we, including me and Stevie
and Malcolm, really knew about that kind of energy. I
think it was more outside, but it started to really
great on us at the end, and I think that's

(01:14:32):
part of the reason we went our separate ways. Otherwise
we would still be there twenty five years later, and
we changed the world a little bit, and for that,
I have great gratitude for that.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
So thank you so much for making those records.

Speaker 3 (01:14:47):
You're very welcome. I'm glad I was able to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:53):
Thanks so much for Wesley Morris for talking about his
latest projects, The Wonder If Stevie be sure to check
that out on Audible. And thanks so much to Robert
Margolev for sharing his creative history with Stevie Wonder. It's
so insane to build the toxinbody who worked that closely
and intimately with Steve. He just blew my mind. You
can hear all of our favorite songs from that classics
GDU period, along with some other works of Robert Margolves

(01:15:15):
on a playlist at broken Record podcast dot com. Subscribe
to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken
Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes.
Also be sure to follow us on Instagram at the
Broken Record Pod. Broken Record is produced by Leah Rose,
with marketing and help from Marek Sandler and Jordan McMillan.
Ben Holliday is our engineer. Broken Record is a production

(01:15:38):
of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others
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(01:15:59):
music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.