50 reasons why 1973 music rocks, Part 6: Innervisions
#39: Stevie Wonder’s remarkable progress towards Innervisions, the era’s greatest funk and soul album.
39. Stevie Wonder — Innervisions
My journey to enlightenment
The Dark Side Of The Moon eclipsed all other rock albums in 1973.
And I’ve told the tale of how I deeply fell in love with it, way back in 1993.
Because of brilliance that hooked me immediately.
Like blinding white light refracting from a prism into a rainbow laser beam.
But the story of how I grasped the more slippery Innervisions unfolded differently and over a longer period.
First let’s rewind. To 1984. When I first became aware of Stevie Wonder.
Just as that long hot summer was ending, his syrupy (or heartfelt) hit I Just Called To Say I Love You hit UK #1.
And stayed there for 6 weeks, until the autumn leaves began falling. It felt much longer. But then I was only 10.
Now let’s fast forward to 1995. When I first realised that Stevie Wonder was a really big deal.
Check out the audience reaction when Wonder appears during Coolio & L.V.’s live performance of Gangsta’s Paradise during the Billboard Awards.
(No, I didn’t realise the hook came from Wonder’s own Pastime Paradise.)
That moment of realisation finally dawned in 2003.
When I chanced on it via a Q Magazine feature steering neophytes through his formidable body of work.
(With a warning to avoid Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants. Which actually isn’t all that bad, but that’s for another day.)
At the apex towered Innervisions, depicting Wonder as an oracle in intriguing album artwork of earthy ochres.
The next day I went out and bought their five highest recommendations.
An unbeatable sequence from Music Of My Mind to Songs In The Key Of Life.
And Innervisions was first into my CD player.
But it didn’t resonate immediately.
Now I put that down to my relatively unsophisticated palette.
Accustomed as it had been to various strains of indie rock, plus a smattering of electronica and hip-hop. And maybe a bit of soul.
Hardly surprising that some of these complex arrangements threw me off.
Like the delirious descent of those backing harmonies in Too High, or those jazzy chord progressions in Wonder’s pensive Visions.
Yes, a few songs connected right away, like Golden Lady’s rapturous melodies and the undulating groove of He’s Misstra Know-It-All.
But overall it felt too rich, almost dauntingly dazzling, to take in at once.
So my journey towards enlightenment spanned a decade or more, with each fresh play inching me towards an embrace of the album’s genius.
From Motown cash cow to composer extraordinaire
Yet as the 1970s dawned, Wonder was already outpacing his Motown masters at warp speed.
By 1971, his keenness to tackle more socially conscious themes began to emerge on his first self-produced record Where I’m Coming From.
The last album under his soon-to-expire Motown contract shared similar concerns to Marvin Gaye’s contemporaneous What’s Going On.
But while Wonder’s record ushered in new sounds via synth bass and clavinet, it suffered in the shadow of Gaye’s era-defining masterpiece.
Music Of My Mind marked a definitive change of direction in 1972.
His opening album in a new Motown contract, the first under his full creative control, vaunted fresh textures and cutting-edge technology.
Fusing synthesizers into his soul heightened the album’s otherworldly feel, thanks to the influence of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.
This pioneering duo, engineer Robert Margouleff and jazz bassist Malcolm Cecil, helped Wonder integrate these space-age soundscapes seamlessly.
The debut of what we’ll call the “Stevie Moog Bass” on radical-sounding 7-minute opener Love Having You Around made a bold statement.
Not to mention the TONTO synth, a concatenation of contraptions so colossal they could fill an entire room.
This behemoth enabled Wonder to orchestrate several instruments with the touch of hands or feet: behold, The Original New Timbral Orchestra!
And this proved to be no fad, also appearing several times on his second album of 1972, Talking Book, which pushed the envelope even further.
As on Music Of My Mind, several of the songs shone as ballads or love themes, like You Are The Sunshine of My Life or Tuesday Heartbreak.
But more darker themes emerged to show that Evil’s bleak ending to Music Of My Mind was no solitary aberration.
Politicians’ empty promises surfaced on Big Brother, while crisp funk clavinet amplified the power of Superstition as a distraction from reality.
The apex of Wonder’s art
And as Innervisions took shape, Wonder’s synth collaborators Margouleff and Cecil inspired him to push further still beyond familiar love songs.
The outcome?
A multi-faceted and nuanced album with serious messages to impart.
Right from the opening Too High, which deals with the spiralling fallout from drug abuse.
Wonder’s genius reflects this in his music, which soon descends in a chromatic stagger over inverted chords and a sinister bass pedal point.
That lends the piece an unsettled, destabilising air, even while the whole vibe’s swinging amid sublime harmonised scatting.
Quite simply it’s the biggest leap forward from his previous works.
And next Wonder tackles the vast theme of hope for love and unity, or whether they exist only in our dreams, in the face of such prevalent hate.
This desire for utopia amid an ugly reality, and an acceptance that time withers all things, imbue Visions with an introspective gloom and beauty.
One of the most harmonically complex songs in pop, its chord changes inhabit a spectral sort of jazz realm, just as fragile as Wonder’s visions.
And they’re scattered to winds as we awake with a jolt to poverty and systemic racism in remarkable album centrepiece Living For The City.
Its driving rhythm of strident, hardscrabble verses encircle a street dialogue scene telling how the cynical chew up and spit out the innocent.
After such a hard-hitting trio, a love song feels familiar and welcome, and Golden Lady’s chorus becomes more irresistible with every key change.
The album’s other love song, the majestic ballad All In Love Is Fair, unfurls as philosophical break-up lament.
Whether viewed widely via Barbra Streisand’s cover, or specifically about his ex-wife Syreeta Wright, who remained Wonder’s best friend throughout.
We return to wider, knottier themes on the album’s remaining tracks: those of organised religion, mysticism, materialism and corruption.
Adherence to faith comes under his critical gaze in Jesus Children Of America, while the subject of reincarnation gets funky on Higher Ground.
An infectious Latin vibe breaks out on Don’t You Worry ’Bout A Thing, as Wonder offers solace from the seductive illusion of consumerism.
And He’s Misstra Know-It-All’s insistent rhythm underscores the song’s trickster antagonist in the shadow of US President Nixon’s impeachment.
The accident that changed everything
This collection of brilliantly composed and adroitly sequenced songs represented Stevie Wonder at the pinnacle of his powers in August 1973.
But just three days after Innervisions was released, he suffered a life-changing accident while asleep in the passenger seat of his friend’s car.
The collision with a truck loaded with logs sent one through the windscreen, hitting Wonder in the forehead and putting him in a coma.
Nobody knew whether he’d regain consciousness until his friend and tour director Ira Tucker knelt down and sang Higher Ground into his ear.
When Wonder’s fingers started moving in time with the song, they knew he’d make it, and he finally awoke after 10 days.
But he was never the same again: returning with even greater spiritual intensity to record two more era-defining albums.
That makes an incredible sequence of five superlative solo albums on the bounce, from Music Of My Mind in 1972 to Songs In The Key Of Life in 1976.
Yet this remains his high-water mark to my ears, with a strong claim to be the greatest album of 1973, if not the entire decade.
For Wonder’s innate musicality, his insight, those inner visions — captured in themes of dreams and mysticism, materialism and systemic racism — combined with advances in studio technology to produce a work of genius.
Genius that doesn’t wither with the passage of time, outlasting those autumn leaves in Wonder’s Visions, sounding just as remarkable 50 years on.
