Signed, Sealed, and Delivered

Mark Ribowsky

Description

The first definitive biography of music legend Stevie Wonder

Stevie Wonder's achievements as a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer are extraordinary. During a career that has spanned almost fifty years, he has earned more than thirty Top 10 hits, twenty-six Grammy Awards, and a place in both the Rock and Roll and Songwriter Halls of Fame—and he's not finished yet. On the verge of turning sixty, he is still composing, still touring, and still attracting dedicated fans around the world.

For the first time, Signed, Sealed, and Delivered takes an in-depth look at Stevie Wonder's life and his evolution from kid-soul pop star into a mature artist whose music helped lay the groundwork for the evolution of hip hop and rap.

• Explores the life, achievements, and influence of one of America's biggest musical icons, set against the history of Motown and the last fifty years of popular music
• Based on extensive interviews with Motown producers, music executives, songwriters, and musicians, including founding Temptation Otis Williams, Mickey Stevenson, surviving Funk Brother Eddie Willis, synthesizer genius Malcolm Cecil, guitar legend Michael Sembello, and many others
• Traces Stevie's personal and musical development through the decades, from the early 1960s R&B of "Fingertips" to the social and political themes of "Living for the City" and other 1970s classics, through periods of musical and personal confusion, uncertainty, and, later, renewal

Read Signed, Sealed, and Delivered to explore the life and work of one of pop music's most compelling masters of invention.
Acknowledgments.

Introduction.

1 A World of Hurt.

2 Motorin'.

3 "That Shit Is Just Fantasticness!"

4 Jazz, Soul, and Grab-Ass.

5 "Take a Bow, Stevie".

6 No Wonder.

7 The Motown Way.

8 Outta Sight.

9 You Met Your Match.

10 Pretty Heavy.

11 The Direction of Destiny.

12 Apocalypse Now.

13 Stevie in Wonderland.

14 "We're Almost Finished".

15 The Clock of Now.

16 Epilogue . . . Prologue.

Discography: Stevie Wonder's Chart Hits.

Index.

Photo Gallery.

Sujets

• Pop Vocal
• Styles
• Genres
• Sign (mathematics)
• Music
• Stevie Wonder
• Motown

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470588819
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
 
Chapter 1 - A World of Hurt
Chapter 2 - Motorin’
Chapter 3 - “That Shit Is Just Fantasticness!”
Chapter 4 - Jazz, Soul, and Grab-Ass
Chapter 5 - “Take a Bow, Stevie”
Chapter 6 - No Wonder
Chapter 7 - The Motown Way
Chapter 8 - Outta Sight
Chapter 9 - You Met Your Match
Chapter 10 - Pretty Heavy
Chapter 11 - The Direction of Destiny
Chapter 12 - Apocalypse Now
Chapter 13 - Stevie in Wonderland
Chapter 14 - “We’re Almost Finished”
Chapter 15 - The Clock of Now
Chapter 16 - Epilogue ... Prologue
 
Discography: Stevie Wonder’s Chart Hits
Photo Insert
Index

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Copyright © 2010 by Mark Ribowsky. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
 
Published simultaneously in Canada
 
The images on pages 148-158 are from the author’s collection unless otherwise noted.
 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
 
Ribowsky, Mark.
Signed, sealed, and delivered: the soulful journey of Stevie Wonder / Mark Ribowsky.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-470-58881-9
1. Wonder, Stevie. 2. Rhythm and blues musicians—United States—Biography. 3. Soul musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.
ML410.W836R53 2010
782.421644092—dc22
[B] 2009037587

 
In memory of my mother, Frances Ribowsky, who never cared much for rock or soul music but noted one day, apropos of nothing, “You know, Smokey Robinson isn’t too bad. ” Amen, Mom. Amen.
Acknowledgments
Deciphering and demystifying the life of Stevie Wonder—the mystery of which even extends to his real name—can be a tempestuous pursuit, and one that would have left the journey to actualize this book stranded on a lonely road had not a cadre of noble and generous souls agreed to keep moving it forward. Some of these fellow travelers helped to cover many miles at a time, some just a few critical paces, but as a whole they were all indispensable fellow travelers, without whom this work would have been left gasping for the nuance, balance, and previously untold, sometimes harsh truths essential to any major biography worth its salt.
Since the setting for much of these pages was Motown in its glorious prime, the ground filled in by those who were there sharing its glory is nothing less than historically profound. To my giddy delectation, their revelations replaced long-standing myths and fables with something rarely found in existing Motown literature—a sense of what really happened. For these blessed excavations, I am indebted to a wonderful cross-section of living, breathing Motown notables, who, for a Motown buff, are quite nearly Olympian in stature.
My eternal thanks to Kim Weston, who can still make one’s knees weak breaking into “Take Me in Your Arms”; Bobby Rogers, the Miracles’ venerable sideman, who helped provide Stevie’s access route to Motown; Claudette Robinson, Smokey Robinson’s early partner in the Miracles and his wife for twenty-seven years; Janie Bradford, who as a teenage assistant to Berry Gordy cowrote the immortal “Money (That’s What I Want)”; the infectiously enthusiastic Mickey Stevenson, Gordy’s right-hand man, who was pivotal in establishing the Stevie Wonder brand; Jimmy Ruffin, David Ruffin’s brother, who scored one of Motown’s biggest and best hits in “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted”; and last but hardly least, the wondrous Otis Williams, the only surviving member of the original Temptations, who is still out there ripping it up year after year and only getting younger.
Spending some time with Eddie “Chank” Willis was almost like a trip to Nirvana. A prideful man, with cause, Willis is one of the few surviving members of the Funk Brothers, the legendary Motown house band, which never got their due in their day. The Brothers’ perfectly blended mix of soul and pop carried Stevie from boy to man and created the soundtrack of his—and our own—formative years, which will remain in the marrow of our souls forever. We cannot possibly pay them back for cruelly overlooking their contribution, but we sure can try.
For filling ground that stretches from pre-Motown to the present day, I am particularly grateful to John Glover, who performed with Stevie on the stoops and porches of poverty-scarred Detroit when they were both kids. A successful Motown songwriter himself in the 1960s, Glover was the perfect source to attest to where and how Stevie’s genius germinated and reveal what drives Stevie Wonder even now, so many years later. He was also able to make profound sense out of the tangled and tainted family strains Stevie had to overcome.
For unlocking the doors and secrets to Stevie’s life and art during the apogee of his creative genius in the 1970s—and parallel declination into a pawn for those who ran his affairs—I simply could not have found two better or kinder sources than Malcolm Cecil and Michael Sembello. An unsung musical genius himself, who is also regarded as the finest bass player ever to come out of England, Cecil, along with his partner Robert Margouleff—for little public attention or financial gain—channeled Stevie’s genius as masters of the universe of synthesizers that gave life and bite to milestone masterworks like Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. Like that of the Funk Brothers, the contribution of Cecil and Margouleff to the evolution of modern music cannot be overstated, nor overlooked. Mike Sembello—who served as lead guitarist at many of those epochal sessions, as well as onstage in Stevie’s backup band before going off to make his own chart history—not only played the music, he “got” it, and thus could think along with Stevie as he created it. To our joy, and his, he can also describe the music’s raw power and seraphic nuances in the most vivid, trenchant, and sometimes metaphysical terms, as it deserves to be.
Not to be overlooked, either, is the incomparable Harry Weinger, producer of the sublime series of recent-day Motown time capsules for the ear, those essential and exhaustive box-set anthologies; the magnificent 1999 entry Stevie Wonder: At the Close of a Century is perhaps the best of the lot. Compiling these ultimate historical legacies requires culling meticulous and accurate details about a boatload of songs, both famous and not, so Weinger’s expertise on the minutiae of Stevie Wonder’s body of work may be without peer, which is all the more impressive given Motown’s notorious neglect for archiving such data. Century, for legions of serious musical history scholars, restored the history that had been lost in the mist.
I would like to thank, too, a pair of fellow music and pop culture freaks who recognized the need for this book: my agent Michael Dorr of LitPub Ink, and Hana Lane, senior editor at John Wiley & Sons. Hana ushered the book into print with a sharp, uncompromising eye for a story told well, fully, entertainingly, and accurately, making it seem like a great victory when she was satisfied enough to wave the manuscript into print. That rigorous phase was only to my benefit, and in the end, to yours. And to history’s.
Introduction
On May 13, 2010, a day when baby boomers officially get to feel like grumpy old men, Stevie Wonder begins drawing breath in his seventh decade. It’s unlikely he will feel old, crotchety, or crusty, mind you. Or that he will be allowed to. He is, after all, the eternal man-child some of us fossils still remember as “Little Stevie,” hardly little around the waist and maybe just a tad jowly but in many ways inherently the twelve-year-old who shot the frothing R&B revelation known as “Fingertips—Part 2” all the way up the pop chart. Little Stevie was never supposed to go the way of Bob Dylan, the Stones, and Bruce Springsteen across the divide of antiquity. Can a sixty-year-old man even be called “Stevie”?
But there he will be, surrounded by people ma