For me, Innervisions marked the peak of our efforts with Stevie Wonder. We all pushed each other to be better. It was a healthy competition. We believed that we were building something special together. Stevie’s songs went from the tough realities of ghetto streets to the transcendent joy of spiritual acceptance, each rendered with an original, unique musical palette. The feel of the album is a little more jazz than funk, perhaps because of Malcolm [Cecil]’s subtle jazz influences. The result was simply an incredible uplifting sound and message.
Stevie’s writing pushed the songs in a more consciously political direction, tackling systemic racism and incarceration in “Living For The City” and, in “He’s Misstra Know-It-All,” in which he rails on the incumbent president, Richard Nixon, who was making headlines and destroying our faith in the American presidency. We did everything we could to encourage Stevie and his sense of social justice and racial equality. Stevie’s songs were about the social condition and the moral fabric of our society, justice, politics, and the Black experience. These songs became a big part of my own social consciousness. The thing about Steve’s music is that it’s not just about heartbreak and love or our loves lost. Many of the songs were about our social condition and the fabric of our society. The profound social relevance of the lyrics to “Living For The City” is a shining example.
I was a child in the 50s, and I had also suffered my share of discrimination, both as a Jew and for being gay, but it was my exposure to civil rights and humanism at Stockbridge that helped me empathize with what Stevie was standing up for. I had found my liberal, humanistic identity years before as a teenager—a worldview that Malcolm also shared. Between Stevie and me, I thought, we had all the bases covered: Black, blind, Jewish, and gay. I felt like we belonged together.
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Innervisions epitomized the maxim that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Malcolm was also a progressive, growing up in London and living in a world of jazz, whose roots came directly from African American culture. Malcolm, too, was color-blind and empathetic. Although “Living For The City” was released on Innervisions, we had recorded it in our early days at Mediasound. It was one of the first R&B hits to include both a political message and the sounds of the streets—voices, buses, and traffic—mixed with the tracks we were recording in the studio. It was like a radio drama, and its effect on us was vivid and emotional. In a strange way, it was a precursor of rap and the social commentaries embedded in that genre. For me, it was and still is one of the most relevant and important recordings of my career, and it is still as important today as we still struggle with racism, white nationalism, voter suppression, LGBTQ backlash, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, affirmative action, and more.
The song’s story begins far from New York. It is about a young Black man born into a poor family in the Deep South who experiences poverty and discrimination in “hard time Mississippi.” He seeks to escape the oppression in the South and heads to New York City, hoping to find a new life.
Just past the four-minute mark, the song’s sparse instrumental bed gave us the room to create a rich soundscape. The story: a young man travels to New York by bus. We hear the bus engine rev, a driver announcing that it is bound for New York, and, upon his arrival in the big city, the innocent and hopeful young man is promptly framed for a crime, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison.
It was like an old-time radio soap opera. As a kid, I had listened to Captain Midnight, The Lone Ranger, Gangbusters, and other early radio dramas that created these very real, gritty sound pictures that always set the scene. “Living For The City” was a simple, homemade version of the same thing.
“New York City. Just like I pictured it, skyscrapers and everything” was voiced by Calvin Hardaway, Stevie’s older brother, while Johanan Vigoda delivered the judge’s sentence, “Ten Years!” The bus was actually the diesel engine of a heating oil truck making a delivery on 57th Street in front of the studio at 4am, captured by me on my Nagra portable recorder.
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With Stevie being blind, this sonic picture helped us focus on his point of view, the story, and the social consciousness he brought to his music. “Living For The City” is key to understanding the many intersecting beliefs upon which the greatness of our relationship with Stevie rested. It was the push and pull between the three of us, the empathy, the technical innovations, the conceptual drama, and the bond between man and machine.
According to Stevie, it was late on a rainy night when we started tracking the song. We usually started with the keys and a guide vocal. This time, we used a Fender Rhodes keyboard with a highly processed output that panned the sound very hard from side to side in time with the song’s tempo. The drums come in with the vocal at the beginning of the first verse. The synth bass line was all TONTO. [Margouleff and Cecil’s massive, pioneering multitimbral polyphonic analog synthesizer—Ed. Note].
As usual, we used an Electro-Voice RE20 for the vocal recording. It is a dynamic mic, and Stevie sang two inches in front of it. This produced a proximity effect, which we loved, giving the vocals a close, dry, intimate sound. It felt like you were standing next to him, his voice unfolding in your head.
Another thing we liked about the RE20 was that Stevie could put his hand on it to check his position without creating any hand noise from touching it. It became our go-to microphone for most of Stevie’s vocals throughout our time with him.
Once the keyboards, drums, and vocals were recorded, it was TONTO time. The bass sound was first. We spent a lot of time with Stevie getting it just right, and then Malcolm and I massaged the synthesizer while we were recording. The sound was constantly evolving. With us, it was never a matter of “set it and forget it.” For the TONTO tracks, we usually recorded two voices at a time, one on each keyboard, each with its own sound—woodwind or horn-like—with its own space and character. Each sound was monophonic. The only actual polyphonic instrument on the track was the Rhodes piano.
We thought Stevie’s vocal performance should feel gruff and angry, so we deliberately provoked Stevie when we tracked it. This is where my education as a singer brought me insight into getting a great vocal performance out of Stevie. When it was time to record the vocal for the last verse, we did it again and again and kept on doing stuff that would get him angry. One of the things he hated was stopping in the middle of a take, so we kept stopping in the middle of takes, saying, “C’mon Stevie, you can do better than that!” His voice got hoarse. He was getting upset with us, and it showed, but we got a great track out of him.
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Innervisions was released on August 3, 1973, and today is considered to be one of the finest works by Stevie Wonder and one of the greatest albums ever made. In 2003, it was ranked number 23 on Rolling Stone magazine’s “500 Greatest Albums Of All Time.”
Excerpted from Shaping Sounds: Stevie Wonder, DEVO, The Synth Revolution, And My Life Behind The Music by Robert Margouleff with Jim Reilly, and reprinted by permission of Jawbone Press. Shaping Sounds is available in audio at pushkin.fm/shapingsounds or wherever you purchase audiobooks.
