Happy 50th Anniversary to Stevie Wonder’s fourteenth studio album Music of My Mind, originally released March 3, 1972.
Ronnie Blanco may not be a name many people are familiar with, but he is responsible for one of the most important moments in the development of popular music. A bass player who played in Stevie Wonder’s band in 1971, he had spent a lot of time at the Media Sounds recording studio housed in an old Baptist church on 57th Street in New York City. Here, he befriended Malcolm Cecil, a British jazz musician who was (amongst other things) the night maintenance worker.
So far, so unspectacular, right? Beyond his work at the studio though, Cecil worked alongside a former film maker named Robert Margouleff to create a device that would change the course of music creation. Margouleff had been an early adopter of the Moog (the rudimentary, monophonic, electronic instrument) and his interest had been piqued into exploring the possibilities of this new breed of instrument. Cecil and Margouleff began to work on an interface that could allow different electronic instruments to work together, be they made by Moog, Oberheimer, Roland or any other.
They succeeded in the most staggering way, creating what David Hepworth called in his book 1971 – Never A Dull Moment: Rock’s Best Year something that “looked more like the control room of a power station than a musical instrument and had to be operated by experts.” TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra) was the world’s largest multi-timbral polyphonic analogue synthesizer and it would change musical history and development. Using this monstrous machine, Cecil and Margouleff recorded an album entitled Zero Time under the suitably apt name Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.
And this is where Ronnie Blanco steps into the story to change the course of modern music. Having seen a spread about the album in Rolling Stone, Blanco told Stevie Wonder about it, recognizing Wonder’s desire to expand his working methods and then set about uniting him with these groundbreaking musical technicians. You may imagine a swanky hotel bar or high-falutin’ office for a meeting of this magnitude, but the reality is far more prosaic and worth recounting from Cecil’s point of view as detailed to Okayplayer.
Memorial Day 1971 was very hot in New York and Cecil (who lived above the studio to facilitate impromptu recording sessions) had found a novel way to stay cool. Relaxing, naked, at home, his peace was shattered by a knock at the door. Leaning out of the 3rd floor window, he saw Blanco with someone wearing a pistachio-colored jump suit holding an album that looked eerily like Zero Time. With no idea who the gentleman in green was, he dressed, ran down the stairs and opened up the studio to show his unexpected visitors the colossal TONTO.
Wonder laid his hands on TONTO, felt for the knobs, patch chords and keyboards and began to explore the dazzling possibilities at his fingertips. It didn’t take long before he felt proficient enough to start creating and he asked Cecil, almost immediately, if they could record. Recording, though, meant resources needed to be used and resources meant payment. Payment shouldn’t have been an issue, as upon turning 21 (that very year), Wonder was allegedly owed just over $3 million by Motown. But things were not straightforward between Motown and Wonder despite their longstanding relationship.
Clearly Wonder’s years at Motown as a young boy and teenager allowed him to pick up more than musical influences and experience. Here was an artist at the age of 21 who demanded independence and the rights to his music—hardly surprising from someone who had spent so much time around the label that was at least partially founded on business acumen and nous. Those desires would see him come to bash heads with Berry Gordy who discovered Wonder’s chosen path via a most unfriendly method. No sooner had the celebrations for Wonder’s 21st birthday ended on May 13, 1971, than Gordy was informed by Wonder’s lawyer of the artist’s intent to leave the label in search of greater control, remuneration and creative freedom.
Whether talking to other record labels (Atlantic and CBS for example) was a bluff or not, mattered not—it worked a treat. A new contract was signed with Motown that gave Wonder most, if not all, of what he wished for. But Music of My Mind and his relationship with Cecil, Margouleff and TONTO all began before the contractual issue was dealt with. So not only was the title of the album tribute to the world of possibilities that TONTO offered in releasing Wonder’s musical thoughts to the world, but also to the explosion of songs that Wonder had created while out of contract that lived (to that point) entirely in his mind. While under contract with Motown, he couldn’t set any idea to tape or they would own the rights under the previous (ever so slightly exploitative) conditions of the deal signed when he was 11.
This explosion of ideas that had only been available to Wonder’s memory was one reason that the work was so intense. Another though was the technology that so entranced him. As TONTO was still analogue, the sounds it created would change subtly over time, leading to an urgency to get the ideas on tape as Wonder heard them before the natural process of change occurred. Everything was new, exciting and urgent, and it created a maelstrom of intense creativity that would last for years and garnered a staggering 17 songs by the end of Memorial Day weekend.
Amidst this tumult, Wonder was clear about what he wanted to achieve. Marvin Gaye’s game changing What’s Going On (1971) had been released 8 days after Wonder’s 21st birthday and the artist formerly known as “Little Stevie Wonder” was ready, willing and able to grow up as he had so ably demonstrated on his previous album Where I’m Coming From. In John Swenson’s 1986 book Stevie Wonder, Wonder himself said, “I decided to go for something besides a winning formula. I wanted to see what would happen if I changed. It challenged me to give the public something other than what it was used to hearing.”
That was a promise he made good on, including the choice of first single. For all that “Superwoman” is an incredible song (of which I’ll say more later), it makes for a strange, even willfully obtuse choice for lead single from the album—especially in its edited form. “I Love Every Little Thing About You” is much more radio-friendly, bright, uncomplicated and a more obvious choice as a single, but it is the song most readily identified as being a Stevie Wonder song. And therein lies the rub—by releasing songs less obviously “him,” it stamped his newfound independence and freedom on proceedings.
Listening years later at the point where synthesizers are part of the fabric of musical creation, it is hard to fully appreciate the weirdness of the sounds that Wonder, Cecil and Margouleff wrung from the machine and their impact on the audience. The fact it succeeds is down to the mainly traditional structure of verse/chorus of the songs—perhaps if that had been less “acceptable” it may have been a stretch too far for the listeners. The album peaked at #23 on the pop chart and #6 on the R&B chart, so it didn’t represent a massive commercial success. But in retrospect, it has been more and more recognized for its genius, being included in Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums of All Time every time it is revised and updated.
“Love Having You Around” actually limits the TONTO influence but uses a talk-box to great effect on the funky opener before Art Baron’s ribald, brazen trombone adds an unusual (in the context of this album) texture to the driving groove. TONTO comes into its own on “Superwoman,” as the bridge between the two definite halves of the song offers such a rich tone—it shows the amazing ability of Wonder to wring such human emotions from electronic devices. When the song changes character at 3 minutes and 6 seconds in, the meditation on the ambitions of a modern woman ends, to be replaced by a lament for lost love and a decidedly more somber musical accompaniment.
This second half is a furtherance of “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” from his previous album Where I’m Coming From both lyrically—where both use the passing of the seasons to highlight the cold, emptiness of lovelorn longing—and musically. The second half of the song is one of the highlights of Wonder’s golden run—a fact which makes the edited-version-as-lead-single-decision all the more puzzling. TONTO combines with Buzz Feiten’s impeccable guitar and Wonder’s impassioned, wildly free vocals to create incandescent beauty.
The next two songs sit as testament to Wonder’s indefatigable positivity—firstly the aforementioned “I Love Every Little Thing About You” that is as bright and breezy as the title would suggest and then the honky-tonk sounding “Sweet Little Girl” comes replete with his immediately identifiable harmonica playing. Lyrically, it gets a bit sketchy as he adopts the leering persona of the uncle who always acts inappropriately at family get togethers, but it succeeds due to the sheer unbridled joy of the performance.
“Happier Than the Morning Sun” can be seen as a tribute to The Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun,” but it is more than its match with its delicate synthesizer lines, Wonder’s fresh-faced vocal innocence and its ridiculously catchy tumbling vocal ad-libs. Other choices ably demonstrate Wonder’s genius—on “Girl Blue” it is the use of a descending bassline on the verse and an ascending one on the chorus to give perfect symmetry. “Keep On Running” is a tireless funk groove that is titled perfectly and offers a glimpse into the almost inhuman perfection of Wonder’s work with TONTO. It feels almost impossible that one man could put the groove together—it genuinely feels like a band in the pocket.
Steve Lodder in his book Stevie Wonder. A Musical Guide To The Classic Albums makes the following observation: “I wonder how long it would take the average player to record those three inter-weaving clavinet tracks, at least without the aid of modern computer quantization which pulls stray notes back into time. There’s not a moment when you feel like saying: ‘stop the tape and go back, the timings not quite there!’
Conversely though, his drumming could be described as idiosyncratic. Lodder describes his process as follows: start with a pattern, keep it going until boredom threatens, then add a bit extra, before returning to something like you were doing before. This approach is borne out by Cecil in the Okayplayer interview where he recounts that drumming legend Bernard Purdie was asked to come and overdub some of the drum parts, but his metronomic tendencies failed to cope with the technique Lodder describes above, so he couldn’t fulfill Wonder’s requirements, resulting in Stevie doing it instead.
What makes this album so fascinating beyond the stellar music is the way it sits in the sequence of his albums. Where I’m Coming From began the maturation process that was continued on this album, before he hit critical and commercial paydirt on Talking Book later in ’72. Lyrically, this album is still immature and clunky on occasion, but musically he had found release from the constrictions Motown had previously imposed and had spread his wings with the aid of TONTO, Cecil and Margouleff.
TONTO afforded Wonder new horizons and he never looked back.
LISTEN: