Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life

Zeth Lundy

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781441170125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Like all double albums, Songs in the Key of Life is imperfect but audacious. If its titular concern - life - doesn't exactly allow for rigid focus, it's still a fiercely inspired collection of songs and one of the definitive soul records of the 1970s. Stevie Wonder was unable to control the springs of his creativity during that decade. Upon turning 21 in 1971, he freed himself from the Motown contract he'd been saddled with as a child performer, renegotiated the terms, and unleashed hundreds of songs to tape. Over the next five years, Wonder would amass countless recordings and release his five greatest albums - as prolific a golden period as there has ever been in contemporary music. But Songs in the Key of Life is different from the four albums that preceded it; it's an overstuffed, overjoyed, maddeningly ambitious encapsulation of all the progress Stevie Wonder had made in that short space of time. Zeth Lundy's book, in keeping with the album's themes, is structured as a life cycle. It's divided into the following sections: Birth; Innocence/Adolescence; Experience/Adulthood; Death; Rebirth. Within this framework, Zeth Lundy covers Stevie Wonder's excessive work habits and recording methodology, his reliance on synthesizers, the album's place in the gospel-inspired progression of 1970s R'n'B, and many other subjects.

III. Experience

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven’t they

carried you everywhere, up to now?

—Galway Kinnell, “Wait”

Adults are shifty creatures. They’re duty-bound by habit and frequently exhausted by routine, and this makes them cagey. They cry foul at the games that children play, if only because they’re jealous that their hard-won independence was realized at the sacrifice of frivolity. What a raw deal.

The emotional upkeep associated with adulthood is grueling, which is why we must sometimes accept the unpredictable behavior of grownups. To grow up and become experienced is easy enough—one simply needs to have his innocence corrupted, and there are countless ways to have that taken care of: pitch-dark truisms can be exposed or insinuated in the cold, brilliant daylight. Thereafter comes the hard stuff: patience, wisdom, forethought, reason and tolerance.

Experience is to live and live and live and then live some more, until the living has been torn and frayed by traumas and epiphanies, shaped by hoards of knowledge, until the living breeds out the disagreeable chaff of prejudices and conceit. The aforementioned hard stuff, those graceful attributes a life dons to aid it in the path to higher ground, is the big payoff, the reimbursement for autonomous risks.

In May of 1971, after leaving the decision-dictated, assembly-line system of Motown, Wonder was orchestrating a pair of autonomous risks. His recording sessions in New York with Cecil and Margouleff had begun in earnest, and the creative buildup that was beginning to be discharged from his head would define his postadolescent years. Meanwhile, Wonder’s new lawyer Johanan Vigoda was hammering out the new contract—the “adult” contract—with Motown in California. Vigoda found himself ambushed by a disorienting series of Motown company lawyers, a flurry of fountain pens and clauses and clip-on ties and addendums. It was Gordy’s attempt to strongarm one of his most promising acts back into the sort of limitation he had been raised on.

But Vigoda wasn’t hired to be ceremonially coaxed. He had to stand on symbolic ground, get Gordy and Motown to see Wonder, who had talked with virtually every other major label, as an artist who had matured beyond the pigeonholes of his “Fingertips”-playing childhood persona. Vigoda lived up to his reputation. Motown, the company known for the decisive power it wielded over its artists, effectively buckled to Wonder’s demands. He was granted complete creative control over his releases for the next five years, including the content of each album and its packaging. Though Motown would continue to have final say over the singles, Wonder would keep control of his publishing and receive generous publishing royalties—including back royalties for previous releases—that instantly made him one of the most successful artists in contemporary pop music. Vigoda had been so successful that Wonder’s immediate advance bested what he had earned in the previous decade.

The deal was extraordinary. Wonder had barely made it into adulthood and already he was exercising unusual command over one of the shrewdest companies in the music business. Wonder had already won complete creative control from Motown once before, with 1971’s Where I’m Coming From, the first time Gordy had allowed him to produce his own album. For Vigoda, the deal was proof that Motown was altering its perception of its artists and its investments in an industry that was putting more emphasis on albums than singles: “He broke tradition with the deal, legally, professionally—in terms of how he could cut his records and where he could cut—and in breaking tradition he opened up the future for Motown. They never had an artist in thirteen years. They had single records, they managed to create a name in certain areas, but they never came through with a major, major artist.” Motown gave Wonder his deal and, in return, he gave them their major artist.

Upon the departure of Cecil and Margouleff, engineering duties for Songs were taken over by John Fischbach, whose most high-profile session had been Carole King’s pre-Tapestry album Writer (1970), and Gary Olazabal, who had worked previously on Innervisions as a tape operator and Fulfillingness’ as a recordist. Fischbach and Olazabal didn’t hold Wonder back from courting the bigger picture, instead indulging his every production whim like fellow explorers high on the promises that lay waiting in the imminent wilderness. Their tasks were compounded by Songs’ increasing scope: arrangements were becoming precipitously complex, the material was especially sprawling and contributing musicians had ballooned to a number difficult to manage. The two would work on alternating days, those famously long days that Wonder ate up without knowing where they began or ended, to thwart fatigue, though often they’d end up in the studio together on the same day. With the changing of the engineering guard came a complete overhaul in how the makings of Wonder’s records would be approached. Unlike its predecessors, Songs definitely strives to be an album, something with a collective sum far more intimidating than its myriad parts. It was apparent to even the most untrained set of ears that Songs was the consequence of an entirely retooled production team.

This confused time of transition also coincided with Wonder’s privileged acceleration to the cutting edge of synthesizer technology. He was one of the lucky few (along with ELP’s Keith Emerson, Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones and ABBA’s Benny Andersson, among others) to obtain a Yamaha GX1, a test model synthesizer that had recently been issued in an extremely limited run. The GX1, which Wonder nicknamed “The Dream Machine,” was massive in both size and price, weighing in at around half a ton and costing $60,000. (Yamaha spent in the neighborhood of $3.5 million developing the GX1 alone.) In an age when monophonic synths such as the Moog were the widely available alternative to clavinets, organs or Mellotrons, the GX1 was a spine-tingling promise of a brave new world: it was polyphonic and multitimbral (meaning one could play multiple unique sounds, be they brass, piano or strings, all at once), and was equipped with three tiers of keyboards. In other words, the sound of pop music’s electronic future (which included, unfortunately, the 1980s’ assassination of good taste) would be divined on the Dream Machine’s black-and-white-keyed frontier.

The GX1 would deeply inform the involved production style of Songs. Its polyphonic and multitimbral capacities exponentially increased the number of layers that could be applied to each song; in other words, Wonder could record multiple sounds onto a smaller number of tracks at once, instead of recording each sound individually onto its own track. Not only would this open up tracking space for myriad contrapuntal and harmonic sounds, it would afford Wonder the economic ease to draft symphonic arrangements in songs like “Village Ghetto Land” and “Pastime Paradise,” with control of all elements of the arrangements at his fingertips.

Wonder had a penchant for pioneering keyboard firsts. The clavinet, without which both “Superstition” and “Higher Ground” would be stripped of their spiked-up sass, defined Wonder’s adult sound. Like his quick reflex response to the existence of the GX1, Wonder wasted no time associating himself with the clavinet. He’s generally thought to be the first artist to use the instrument (essentially an amplified clavichord often run through a wah-wah pedal or an envelope-following filter, manufactured by the Hohner company for roughly fifteen years) in a recording: “Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day” and “You Met Your Match,” both on 1968’s For Once in My Life, are the trail-blazing evidence, followed hotly by the Band’s wah-wah “clavinette” on 1969’s “Up on Cripple Creek.” That the clavinet’s prominence in Wonder’s instrumental lineup had dwindled to benchwarmer is indicative of the larger sonic shifts initiated by the prospect of innovative equipment; the clavinet had once been a novel signifier of his identity, but the desire to stay ahead of the technological curve rendered it stylistically archaic.

A machine as elite and technologically advanced as the GX1 not only made the utilitarian obsolete, but it also allowed for a swifter, less creatively taxing retrieval of sound. Where it had been necessary in the past to go to great lengths to coax organic sounds from a snarl of machines, Wonder could now beckon replication with greater ease. As a result, a synthesizer like the GX1, with its dispassionate imitations of actual instruments, could easily call attention to its own fakeness.

That fakeness is exceptionally transparent on “Village Ghetto Land,” which uses the synthesizer (save Wonder’s voice, the only instrument in the song) to simulate a baroque classical string arrangement. Even to indiscriminate ears, the strings obviously aren’t real; their tone is sheathed in mild fuzz, and the lowest octave doesn’t sound like a stringed instrument at all. It’s purposely ironic, this guided tour down the inner city’s “dead end street” of poverty and desolation, complete with the darkly satirical soundtrack of upper-class refinement. Perhaps the more pointed observation is that this synthetic string arrangement was the first instance of a string section (real or fake) on any of Wonder’s recorded output from the 70s. Strings were ubiquitous in 70s soul music, and not just in tacky instances—everything from Gaye’s Pet Sounds–esque tapestries to Curits Mayfield’s slippery rhythmic lubrications were touched with symphonic grace. The absence of strings in Wonder’s music made sense from a production point of view (he did, after all, strive to have a hand in every sound that made it to the final master), but it’s also another example of his determination to swim against the popular currents of the time, to define himself as an idiosyncratic force within a greater movement.

The fake string arrangement, juxtaposed with the fake promise of urban utopia, negates all subtext—Wonder’s thematic intentions, while always obvious, are delivered here with the delicacy of a hammer blow. (Real strings, incidentally, could have provided a similar result, even unintentionally, if used on any of his regal ballads of the era.) His narration, which begins with the false pretense that a rabbit hole to a fantastical wonderland awaits, leads to blunt images of children with sores, families living off dog food, and babies that “die before they’re born”; even dubbing this American antidream a “Village Ghetto Land” is a blatantly top-heavy lace of acidic sarcasm. The narrative’s sarcasm, as disgusted as it sounds with itself, conveys the deflowering of idealism that is such an integral part of maturation—a reveal of the ugly truth hiding behind deceptive preconceptions.

“Village Ghetto Land” was cowritten with lyricist Gary Byrd, who would later find success as a talk-radio host on New York City’s WLIB-AM. Byrd, who also contributed lyrics to “Black Man,” wasn’t immune to the kind of on-call demands Wonder, engrossed in his self-contained studio universe, expected of his collaborators. After sending the finished lyrics, Byrd received a phone call from Wonder, who said he had added an extra verse and needed more words. Wonder was calling from the studio, of course, and was in the middle of recording the song. Byrd was given ten minutes to draft up the new and final verse.

The imagery that Wonder and Byrd put into “Village Ghetto Land” wasn’t a new confrontation for the R&B community, but its nakedness, its cold, unmoved eye reflected a still-bitter reality. The Temptations’ fourteen-minute “Masterpiece” (1973), cast in a private-eye arrangement of skepticism and paranoia, had detailed the “thousands of lives wasting away” in the inner-city ghetto. Their producer, Norman Whitfield, wrote lyrics just as vividly terrifying as “Village Ghetto Land’s,” but the song’s funky and multilayered construction made it easy to lose the meaning in a dance. James Brown’s minor-key ballad “King Heroin” (1972) mixed drug abuse with apocalypse (“the white horse of heroin will ride you to hell…until you are dead—dead, brother”) but delivered the message like an out of touch afterschool special written by Dr. Seuss. Even Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” (1971) was blessed with groove and beauty that somewhat tamed its subject matter; “Village Ghetto Land,” on the other hand, is a grooveless specimen, a listening experience devoid of fun, its classical elegance an intentional hoax. It may have even been a sarcastic answer song to high-charting patronizations of urban black life like the dead-horse-flogged “In the Ghetto,” performed by everyone from Elvis Presley to Dolly Parton to Sammy Davis Jr. “Village Ghetto Land” called “In the Ghetto’s” rubbernecking bluff; as the unofficial anthem for bleeding heart (and, when coopted by Presley, white man’s) guilt, “In the Ghetto” masqueraded as an alibi of empathy. “Village Ghetto Land” stripped away the maudlin artifice to expose a world more horrible than “In the Ghetto” could ever hope to portray.

Though it can’t pretend to speak for the black experience (especially that of the American ghetto), the Kinks’ fatalistic single “Dead End Street” (1966) is nonetheless a precursor to the bleak picture painted by “Village Ghetto Land.” The existential apathy in one of Ray Davies’ lines alone—”what are we living for?”—economically says what Wonder’s picture extensively paints. Both songs share the same kind of incredulous defeatism and unglamorous presentation, but where Davies’ is a lament of personal crisis, Wonder’s is more mass epidemic.

The trickle-down effects of Wonder’s synthesizer pioneering were felt almost immediately, and by the early 80s, pop music was either replacing traditional instrumentation with machines or altering it to sound less human. R&B was arguably hit hardest by the cold transition; its reliance on a warm, communicable human touch was compromised by programmable templates that felt like warmed-over clichés from the moment they came anemically sashaying from the speakers. Unspeakable travesties like Gaye’s 808-ravished “Sexual Healing” had all the sex appeal of a calculator, but the public majority nevertheless made the plasticization of soul music acceptable. You can’t fault Wonder for the absurdities born in his progressive wake, just as you can’t fault the Beatles for the longform conceptualizations embraced by 70s rock, but his high-profile experimentations did make things possible.²⁹

The synth strings on “Pastime Paradise” are an example of just how realistic Wonder could make an imitation sound. Unlike the intentional forgery of strings in “Village Ghetto Land,” “Pastime Paradise” casts a different approximation, one that remains true to its aped source. The song draws a very conspicuous line in the sand, distinguishing those who have transcended prejudice from those who remain stubbornly adolescent. Across this line of sand it drags incongruent people and sounds, and piles them all up into one mound of togetherness. There they make a knotty collective sound that exhales forgiveness in eerie, tortured heaves. If that sounds corny—c’mon people now, smile on yer brother, everybody get together and try to love one another right now —that’s because, to a certain degree, it probably is. “Pastime Paradise” is a message song, make no mistake; it’s as forthright as “All You Need Is Love” and empowered by the knowledge that it has discovered a path to enlightenment.

The concept of spiritual transcendence or personal enlightenment is at the core of the Hare Krishna mantra (or Maha Mantra, meaning “Great Mantra”), an invocation of the Hindu god Vishnu through internal or external vocalization:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna

Krishna Krishna Hare Hare

Hare Rama Hare Rama

Rama Rama Hare Hare

According to the late Srila Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, “chanting the [Hare Krishna mantra] is the sublime method for reviving our transcendental consciousness.” Like the pop song refrains perpetrated by Wonder (a further analysis of which can be found in the forthcoming discussion of “As”), the Hare Krishna mantra seeks to break through the unknowable and trespass into the all-knowing. The all-knowing, of course, is what experience covets the most, what it sees in the recesses of its dreams—practice and repetition, vital to the realization of true adulthood, can take it there.

In a stroke of conceptual genius, Wonder incorporates a Hare Krishna choir into the final minute of “Pastime Paradise”: twelve voices perform the chant, its absence of melody seamlessly bonding with the song’s chord structure, which is faded into the mix upon the start of the final repetitions of the refrain. Shortly thereafter, the West Angeles Church of God Choir is faded into the mix as well, performing a spirited rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” The two choirs, mixed in motley harmony with the song’s Latin rhythm and percussion (Hare Krishna bells, cowbells, congas, handclaps) and synthesizer strings reminiscent of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” (as was Wonder’s stated intent), serve to provide a tangible demonstration of the song’s thematic intent: unity.³⁰

“Pastime Paradise” decries those who have “been wasting most their time glorifying days lone gone behind” and seeks to start “living for the future paradise.” In other words, a true utopia of shared bliss can only be reached through a rejection of the archaic baggage of ignorance (whether it be bigotry, exclusion or baseless hatred) and an embrace of constructive accord. Wonder’s crisscrossing synthesizer strings are wracked with anxious counterpoint—he’s sustaining the logic of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” (“we got to live together…”), but with the harried reason of a man who has seen worse and knows better. The two choirs that figure into the song’s vision of unity come from two worlds on opposite ends of the social spectrum, but Wonder’s intent is to merge them into a whole. Through this tangling of disparate universes, “Pastime Paradise” practices what it preaches, even though its sermon is harassed with the daunting reality of not-enough-time-to-reverse-centuries-of-injustice.

The Hare Krishna mantra had found its way into rock and roll’s progressive lexicon by way of the Beatles, whose public courtship of transcendental meditation in the 60s was fodder for the headlines. It’s sarcastically referenced briefly in Lennon’s vocal for “I Am the Walrus” (1967), makes an appearance in “Give Peace a Chance,” the 1969 single by Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, and plays an even greater role in George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” (1971).³¹ Apple Records went so far to release the mantra as a single by the Radha Krsna Temple (with Harrison on harmonium and guitar) in 1970. These instances are, arguably, self-conscious soapboxing, announcements (and, in one of Lennon’s cases, criticisms) of in-vogue spiritual predilections sought out to fill the empty chasms carved by fame. The use of the mantra in “Pastime Paradise,” then, is a timely ...