Episode 156: “I Was Made to Love Her” by Stevie Wonder

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs by Andrew A.

Episode 156

I Was Made to Love Her by Stevie Wonder

A quick note before I begin.

This episode deals with disability and racism, and also deals from the very beginning with sex work and domestic violence.

It also has some discussion of police violence and sexual assault.

As always, I will try to deal with those subjects as non-judgmentally and sensitively as possible, but if you worry that anything about those subjects might disturb you, please check the transcript.

Calvin Judkins was not a good man.

Lula May Hardaway thought at first he might be, when he took her in, with her infant son whose father had left before the boy was born.

He was someone who seemed, when he played the piano, to be deeply sensitive and emotional, and he even did the decent thing and married her when he got her pregnant.

She thought she could save him, even though he was a street hustler, and not even very good at it, and thirty years older than her.

She was only nineteen, he was nearly fifty, but she soon discovered that he wasn't interested in being saved, and instead he was interested in hurting her.

He became physically and financially abusive, and started pimping her out.

Lula would eventually realise that Calvin Judkins was no good, but not until she got pregnant again, shortly after the birth of her second son.

Her third son was born premature.

Different sources give different numbers for how premature, with some saying four months and others six weeks.

And while he apparently went by Steve Lin Judkins throughout his early childhood, the name on his birth certificate was apparently Steve Lynn Morris, Lula having decided not to give another child the surname of her abuser, though nobody has ever properly explained where she got the surname Morris from.

Little Steveland was put in an incubator with an oxygen mask, which saved the tiny child's life but destroyed his sight, giving him a condition called retinopathy of prematurity, a condition which nowadays can be prevented and cured, but in 1951 was just an unavoidable consequence for some portion of premature babies.

Shortly after the family moved from Saginaw to Detroit, Lula kicked Calvin out, and he would remain only a peripheral figure in his children's lives.

But one thing he did do was notice young Stevelin's interest in music, and on his increasingly infrequent visits to his wife and kids, visits that usually ended with violence, he would bring along toy instruments for the young child to play, like a harmonica and a set of bongos.

Stevie was a real prodigy, and by the time he was nine he had a collection of real musical instruments, because everyone could see that the kid was something special.

A neighbour who owned a piano gave it to Stevie when she moved out and couldn't take it with her.

A local lions club gave him a drum kit at a party they organised for local blind children, and a barber gave him a chromatic harmonica after seeing him play as toy one.

Stevie gave his first professional performance when he was eight.

His mother had taken him to a picnic in the park, and there was a band playing, and the little boy got as close to the stage as he could and started dancing wildly.

The MC of the show asked the kid who he was, and he said, My name is Stevie, and I can sing and play drums.

So, of course, they got the cute kid up on stage behind the drum kit, while the band played Johnny Ace's Pledging My Love.

you.

Just promise me, darling,

you'll love in return.

Make this fire in my soul, dear.

Forever.

He did well enough that they paid him 75 cents, an enormous amount for Small Child at that time.

Though he was disappointed afterwards that they hadn't played something faster that would really allow him to show off his drumming skills.

After that, he would perform semi-regularly at small events and always asked to be paid in quarters rather than paper money because he liked the sound of the coins.

One of his party tricks was to be able to tell one coin from another by the sound of them hitting a table.

Soon he formed a duo with a neighborhood friend, John Glover, who was a couple of years older and could play guitar while Stevie sang and played harmonica and bongos.

The two were friends and both accomplished musicians for their age.

But that wasn't the only reason Stevie latched on to Glover.

Even as young as he was, he knew that Motown was soon going to be the place to be in Detroit if you were a musician, and Glover had an inn.

His cousin was Ronnie White of the Miracles.

Stevie and John performed as a duo everywhere they could and honed their act, performing particularly at the talent shows which were such an incubator of black musical talent at the time, and they also at this point seemed to have got the attention of Clarence Paul, but it was White who brought the duo to Motown.

Stevie and John first played for White and Bobby Rogers, another of the Miracles.

Then when they were impressed, they took them through the several layers of Motown people who would have to sign off on signing a new act.

First they were taken to see Brian Holland, who was a rising star within Motown, as pleased Mr.

Postman was just entering the charts.

They impressed him with the performance of the Miracles song, Bad Girl.

Because

she made me see

how love could be,

but she's a bad

girl because

she wants to be free.

After that, that, Stevie and John went to see Mickey Stevenson, who was at first sceptical, thinking that a kid so young, Stevie was only 11 at the time, must be some kind of novelty act rather than a serious musician.

He said later, it was like, what's next?

The singing mouse.

But Stevenson was won over by the child's talent.

Normally, Stevenson had the power to sign whoever he liked to the label, but given the extra legal complications involved in signing someone under age, he had to get Barry Gordy's permission.

Gordy didn't even like signing teenagers because of all the extra paperwork that would be involved, and he certainly wasn't interested in signing preteens, but he came down to the studio to see what Stevie could do, and was amazed, not by his singing, Gordy didn't think much of that, but by his instrumental ability.

First, Stevie played harmonica and bungos as proficiently as an adult professional, and then he made his way around the studio playing on every other instrument in the place, often only a few notes, but competent on them all.

Gordy decided to sign the duo, and the initial contract was for an act named Steve and John, but it was soon decided to separate them.

Glover would be allowed to hang around Motown while he was finishing school, and there would be a place for him when he finished.

He later became a staff songwriter, working on tracks for The Four Tops and The Miracles, among others, and he would even later write a number one hit, You Don't Have to Be a Star to Be in My Show, for Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr.

But they were going to make Stevie a star right now.

The man put in charge of that was Clemence Paul.

Paul, under his birth name of Clemence Pauling, had started his career in the Five Royales, a vocal group he formed with his brother Loman Pauling that had been signed to Apollo Records by Ralph Bass,

and later to King Records.

Paul seems to have been on at least some of the earliest recordings by the group, so is likely on their first single, Give Me One More Chance.

Now she won't talk.

So, Mr.

Won't you ask me

to give me one more

But Paul was drafted to go and fight in the Korean War, and so wasn't part of the group's string of hit singles, mostly written by his brother Lohman, like Think, which later became better known in James Brown's cover version, or Dedicated to the One I Love, later covered by the Sherelles, but in its original version dominated by Lohman's stinging guitar playing.

Each night before you go, baby,

my baby.

After being discharged, Clements had shortened his name to Clements Paul and had started recording for the usual RB labels like Roulette and Federal, with little success.

until the day.

I wanna hear you say I do.

I'm gonna love you,

love you.

And oh,

what a feeling is for a mighty good feeling.

I guess every time I'd also co-written I Need Joe Loving,

which had been an RB hit for Roy Hamilton.

That's what I need.

You might

bleeding.

You know I need

your love so

bad

When I see your love lips

My heart goes a little slip

Well when you pass your love and smile

Paul had recently come to work for Motown.

One of the things Berry Gordy did to try to make his label more attractive was to hire the relatives of RB stars on other labels, in the hopes of getting them to switch to Motown.

And he was the new man on the team, not given any of the important work to do.

He was working with acts like Henry Lumpkin and The Valadeers, and had also been the producer of Mind Over Matter, the single Attemptations had released as The Pirates, in a desperate attempt to get a hit.

mind, my mind is made up

of yours

or cold.

I want, I want your love

to have

a new home.

I'll have

your love,

but you are

so fine.

My

matter,

gonna make you mine.

Paul was the person you turned to when no one else was interested and who would come up with bizarre ideas.

A year or so after the time period we're talking about, it was him who produced an album of country music for the Supremes before they'd had a hit and came up with the man with the rock and roll banjo band for them.

the rockin' old banjo band.

So, Paul was the perfect person to give a child, by this time 12 years old, who had the triple novelties of being a multi-instrumentalist, a child, and blind.

Stevie started spending all his time around the Motown studios, partly because he was eager to learn everything about making records, and partly because his home life wasn't particularly great, and he wanted to be somewhere else.

He earned the affection and irritation, in equal measure, of people at Motown, both for his habit of wandering into the middle of sessions because he couldn't see the light that showed the studio was in in use, and for his practical joking.

He was a great mimic, and would do things like phoning one of the engineers and imitating Berry Gordy's voice, telling the engineer that Stevie would be coming down, and to give him studio equipment to take home.

He'd also astonish women by complimenting them in detail on their dresses, having been told in advance what they looked like by an accomplice.

But other jokes were less welcome.

He would regularly sexually assault women working at Motown, grabbing their breasts or buttocks, and then claiming it was an accident because he couldn't see what he was doing.

Most of the women he molested still speak of him fondly and say everybody loved him, and this may even be the case.

And certainly I don't think any of us should be judged too harshly for what we did when we were twelve.

But this kind of thing led to a certain amount of pressure to make Stevie's career worth the extra effort he was causing everyone at Motown.

Because Barry Gordy was not impressed with Stevie's vocals, the decision was made to promote him as a jazz instrumentalist, and so Clemence Paul insisted that his first release be an album, rather than doing what everyone would normally do, and only put out an album after a hit single.

Paul reasoned that there was no way on earth they were going to be able to get a hit single with a jazz instrumental by a 12-year-old kid, and eventually persuaded Gordy of the wisdom of this idea.

So they started work on The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie, released under his new stage name of Little Stevie Wonder, supposedly a name given to him after Berry Gordy said, that kid's a wonder, though Mickey Stevenson always said that the name came from a brainstorming session between him and Clarence Paul.

The album featured Stevie on harmonica, piano and organ on different tracks, but on the opening track, Fingertips, he's playing the bongos that give the track its name.

The composition of that track is credited to Paul and the arranger Hank Cosby, but Beans Bowles, who played flute on the track, always claimed that he came up with the melody, and it seems quite likely to me that most of the tracks on the album were created more or less as jam sessions, though Wonder's contributions were all overdubbed later.

The album sat in the can for several months.

Barry Gordy was not at all sure of its commercial potential.

Instead, he told Paul to go in another direction.

Focusing on Wonder's blindness, he decided that what they needed to do was to create an association in listeners' minds with Ray Charles, who at this point was at the peak of his commercial power.

So back into the studio went Wunder and Paul to record an album made up almost entirely of Ray Charles covers, titled Tribute to Uncle Ray.

Some sources have the Ray Charles tribute album recorded first, and given Motown's lacks record-keeping at this time, it may be impossible to know for sure.

But this is the way round that Mark Rubowsky's biography of Wonder has it.

But at Motown's regular quality control meeting, It was decided that there wasn't a single on the album, and you didn't release an album like that without having a hit single first.

By this point, Clemence Paul was convinced that Barry Gordy was just looking for excuses not to do anything with Wonder, and there may have been a grain of truth to that.

There's some evidence that Gordy was worried that the kid wouldn't be able to sing once his voice broke, and was scared of having another Frankie Lyman on his hands.

But the decision was made that rather than put out either of those albums, they would put out a single.

The A-side was a song called I Call It Pretty Music, but the Old People call it the blues, part one, which very much played on Wonder's image as a lovable, naive kid.

I was sitting in my classroom the other day,

playing my mind in another

way.

My teeth just shipped a hair, gathered around,

trying to figure out what I was putting down.

I called it pretty music, but the old people called the blues.

The B-side, meanwhile, was part two,

a slowed-down, near-instrumental version of the song, reframed as an actual blues, and as a showcase for Wonder's harmonica playing rather than his vocals.

The single wasn't a hit, but it made number 101 on the Billboard charts, just missing the hot 100, which, for the debut single of a new artist, wasn't too bad, especially for Motown at this point in time, when most of its releases were flopping.

That was good enough that Gordy authorised a release of the two albums that they had in the can.

The next single, Little Waterboy, was a rather baffling duet with Clemence Paul, which did nothing at all on the charts.

will pay you a quarter

if you be my water boy.

Mister, you know it ain't no fun, working out in the hot sun.

Pay me a half an hour

if I'll be your water boy.

The boy sure is not funny.

You don't wanna make no money.

Well, I can go down to the corner and get me a dozen water boys.

Just what I do that's funny.

After this came another flop single written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Janie Bradford, before the record that finally broke Little Stevie Wonder out to the mainstream in a big way.

While Wonder hadn't had a hit yet, he was sent out on the first Motor Town review tour, along with almost every other act on the label.

Because he hadn't had a hit, he was supposed to play only one song per show, but nobody had told him how long that song should be.

He had quickly become a great live performer, and the audiences were excited to watch him.

So when he went into extended harmonica solos rather than quickly finishing the song, the audience would be with him.

Clemence Paul, who came along on the tour, would have to motion to the on-stage band leader to stop the music, but the bandleader would know that the audiences were with Stevie, and so would just keep the song going as long as Stevie was playing.

Often Paul would have to go onto the stage and shout in Wonder's ear to stop playing, and often Wonder would ignore him, and have to be physically dragged off stage by Paul, still playing, causing the audience to boo Paul for stopping him from playing.

Wunder would complain off stage that the audience had been enjoying it, and didn't seem to get it into his head that he wasn't the star of the show, that the audiences were enjoying him, but were there to see the miracles and Mary Wells and the Marvelettes and Marvin Gay.

This made all the acts who had to go on after him, and who were running late as a result, furious at him, especially since one aspect of Wonder's blindness was that his circadian rhythms weren't regulated by sunlight in the same way that the sighted members of the tours were.

He would often wake up the entire tour bus by playing his harmonica at two or three in the morning, while they were all trying to sleep.

Soon Berry Gordy insisted that Clarence Paul be on stage with Wonder throughout his performance, ready to drag him off stage, so that he wouldn't have to come out onto the stage to do it.

But one of the first times he had done this had been on one of the very first Motor Town review shows, before any of his records had come out.

There he'd done a performance of fingertips, playing the flute part on harmonica, rather than only playing bongos throughout as he had on the studio version, leaving the percussion to Marvin Gaye, who was playing drums for Wonders set.

But it extended the song with a little bit of call and response vocalizing.

After the long performance ended, Clarence Paul dragged Wonder off stage, and the MC asked the audience to give him a round of applause.

But then Stevie came running back on and carried on playing.

I'm on this head father.

By this point though, the musicians had started to change over.

Mary Wells, who was on Afterwonder, was using different musicians from his, and some of her players were already on stage.

You can hear Joe Swift, who was playing bass for Wells, asking what key he was meant to be playing in.

Eventually, after six and a half minutes, they got Wonder stage, but that performance became the two sides of Wonder's next single, with Fingertips Part 2, the part with the ad-lib singing and the false ending, rather than the instrumental part 1, being labelled as the side the DJ should play.

When it was released, the song started a slow climb up the charts, and by August 1963, three months after it came out, it was at number one, only the second ever Motown number one, and the first ever live single to get there.

Not only that, but Motown released a live album, recorded live the 12-year-old genius, though as many people point out, he was 13 when it was released.

He was 12 when it was recorded, though.

And that made number one on the album's chart, becoming the first Motown album ever to do so.

They followed up fingertips with a similar sounding track, Workout Stevie Workout, which made number 33.

After that, his albums, though not yet his singles, started to be released as by Stevie Wonder with no little.

He'd had a bit of a growth spurt and his voice was breaking, and so marketing him as a child prodigy was not going to work much longer, and they needed to transition him into a star with adult potential.

In the Motown of 1963, that meant cutting an album of standards, because the belief at the time in Motown was that the future for their entertainers was doing show tunes at the Copa Cabana.

But for some reason, the audience who had wanted an RB harmonica instrumental with call-and-response improvised gospel-influenced yelling was not in the mood for a 13-year-old singing Put On a Happy Face and When You Wish Upon a Star,

and especially not when the instrumental tracks were recorded in a key that suited him at age 12, but not 13.

So he was clearly straining.

Fingertips being a massive hit also meant Stevie was now near the top of the bill on the Motor Town Review when it went on its second tour.

But this actually put him in a precarious position.

When he had been down at the bottom of the bill and unknown, nobody expected anything from him, and he was following other minor acts.

So when he was surprisingly good, the audiences went wild.

Now, near the top of the bill, he had to go on after Marvin Gay, and he was not nearly so impressive in that context.

The audiences were polite enough, but not in the raptures he was used to, although Stevie could still be gay in some circumstances.

At Motown staff parties, Barry Gordy would always have a contest where he pit two artists against each other to see who could win the crowd over, something he thought instilled a fun and useful competitive spirit in his artists.

They'd alternate songs, two songs each, and Gordy would decide on the winner based on audience response.

For the 1963 Motown Christmas party, it was Stevie vs.

Marvin.

Wonder went first with Workout Stevie Workout and was apparently impressive, but then Gay topped him with a version of Hitchhike.

So Stevie had to top that, and apparently did, with a hugely extended version of I Call It Pretty Music, reworked in the Ray Charles style he'd used for fingertips.

So Marvin Gay had to top that with the final song of the contest.

And he did, performing stubborn kind of fellow.

of fellow.

Got my mind made up to love you.

Wow!

Everybody sing E-A-M,

hey-A-A.

Wow!

Everybody sing E-A-M,

and he was great.

So great it turned the crowd against him.

They started booing, and someone in the audience shouted, Marvin, you should be ashamed of yourself, taking advantage of a little blind kid.

The crowd got so hostile Barry Gordy had to stop the performance and end the party early.

He never had another contest like that again.

There were other problems as well.

Wonder had been assigned a tutor, a young man named Ted Hull, who began to take serious control over his life.

Hull was legally blind, so could teach Wonder using Braille, but unlike Wonder had some sight, enough that he was even able to get a driver's license and a co-pilot license for planes.

Hull was put in loco parentis on most of Stevie's tours, and soon became basically inseparable from him, but this caused a lot of problems, not least because Hull was a conservative white man, while almost everyone else at Motam was black, and Stevie was socially liberal and on the side of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements.

Hull started to collaborate on songwriting with Wonder, which most people at Motown were okay with, but which now seems like a serious conflict of interest.

And he also started calling himself Stevie's manager, which did not impress the people at Motown, who had their own conflict of interest, because with Stevie, like with all their artists, they were his management company and agents, as well as his record label and publishers.

Motown grudgingly tolerated Hull though, mostly because he was someone they could pass Lula May Hardaway to to deal with her complaints.

Stevie's mother was not very impressed with the way that Motown were handling her son, and would make her opinion known to anyone who would listen.

Hull and Hardaway did not get on at all, but he could be relied on to save the Gordy family members from having to deal with her.

Wunder was sent over to Europe for Christmas 1963, to perform shows at the Paris Olympia and do some British media appearances, but both his mother and Hull had come along, and their clear dislike for each other was making him stressed.

He started to get pains in his throat whenever he sang, pains which everyone assumed were a stress reaction to the unhealthy atmosphere that happened whenever Hull and his mother were in the same room together, but which later turned out to be throat nodules that required surgery.

Because of this, his singing was generally not up to standard, which meant he was moved to a less prominent place on the bill, which in turn led to his mother accusing the Gordy family of being against him and trying to stop him becoming a star.

Wonder started to take her side and believed that Motown were conspiring against him, and at one point he even, accidentally, dropped a bottle of wine on Ted Hull's foot, breaking one of his toes, because he saw Hull as part of the enemy that was Motown.

Before leaving for those shows, he had recorded the album he later considered the worst of his career.

While he was now just plain Stevie on albums, he wasn't for his single releases, or in his first film appearance, where he was still little Stevie Wonder.

Berry Gordy was already trying to get a foot in the door in Hollywood.

By the end of the decade, Motam would be moving from Detroit to LA, and his first real connections there were with American International Pictures, the low-budget filmmakers who have come up a lot in connection with the LA scene.

AIP were the producers of the successful low-budget series of beach party films, which combined appearances by Teen Hartthrobs Frankie Avalon and Annette Fonacello in swimsuits, with cameo appearances by old film stars Fallen on Hard Times, and with musical performances by bands like the Bobby Fuller 4.

There would be a couple of Motown connections to these films.

Most notably, The Supremes would do the theme tune for Dr.

Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, but Muscle Beach Party was to be the first.

Most of the music for Muscle Beach Party was written by Brian Wilson, Roger Christian, and Gary Usher, as one might expect for a film about surfing, and was performed by Dick Dale and the Dell Tones, the film's major musical guests, with Annette, Frankie, and Donna Lauren adding vocals on songs like Muscle Bustle.

The film followed the formula in every way.

It also had a cameo appearance by Peter Lowry,

his last film appearance before his death, and it featured little Stevie Wonder playing one of the few songs not written by the surf and car writers, a piece of nothing called Happy Street.

Stevie also featured in the follow-up, Bikini Beach, which came out a little under four months later, again doing a single number, Happy Feelin'.

To cash in on his appearances in these films, and having tried releasing albums of Little Stevie as jazz multi-instrumentalist, Ray Charles Tribute Act, Live Soul Man, and Andy Williams Style Crooner, they now decided to see if they could sell him as a surf singer, or at least as Motown's idea of a surf singer, which meant a lot of songs about the beach and the sea, mostly old standards like Red Sails in the Sunset and Ebb Tide, backed by rather schlocky wrecking crew arrangements.

And this is as good a place as any to take on one of the bits of disinformation that goes around about Motown.

I've addressed this before, but it's worth repeating here in slightly more detail.

Carol Kaye, one of the go-to wrecking crew bass players, is a known credit thief, and claims to have played on hundreds of records she didn't, claims which too many people take seriously, because she is a genuine pioneer and was, for a long time, undercredited on many records she did play on.

In particular, she claims to have played on almost all the classic Motown hits that James Jamison of the Funk Brothers played on, like the title track for this episode.

And she claims this despite evidence including notarized statements from everyone involved in the records, the release of session recordings that showed producers talking to the Funk Brothers, and, most importantly, the evidence of the recordings themselves, which have all the characteristics of the Detroit studio and sound like the Funk Brothers playing, and have absolutely nothing in common, sonically, with the records the Wrecking Crew played on at Goldstar, Western, and other LA studios.

The Wrecking Crew did play on a lot of Motown records, but with a handful of exceptions, mostly by Brenda Holloway, the records they played on were quickie knock-off album tracks and pop-boiler albums made to tie in with film or TV work, soundtracks to TV specials the acts did, and that kind of thing.

And in this case, the wrecking crew played on the entire Stevie at the Beach album, including the last single to be released as by Little Stevie Wonder, Castles in the Sand, which was arranged by Jack Nitchy.

have washed away

Castles in the sand,

castles in the sand,

where did they go?

Castles in the sand,

tell me where did they go.

Apparently, the idea of surfing Stevie didn't catch on any more than that of swinging Stevie had earlier.

Indeed, throughout 1964 and 1965, Motown seemed to have had less than no idea what they were doing with Stevie Wonder, and he himself refers to all his recordings from this period as an embarrassment, saving particular scorn for the second single from Stevie at the Beach, Hey Harmonica Man, possibly because that, unlike most of his other singles around this point, was a minor hit, reaching number 29 on the charts.

Motown were still pushing Wonder hard.

He even got an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in May 1964, only the second Motown act to appear on it after the Marvelettes.

But Wonder was getting more and more unhappy with the decisions they were making.

He loathed the Stevie at the Beach album.

The records he'd made earlier, while patchy and not things he'd chosen, were at least in some way related to his musical interests.

He did love jazz, and he did love Ray Charles, and he did did love old standards, and the records were made by his friend Clarence Paul, and with the studio musicians he'd grown to know in Detroit.

But Stevie at the Beach was something that was imposed on Clarence Paul from above.

It was cut with unfamiliar musicians.

Stevie thought the films he was appearing in were embarrassing, and he wasn't even having much commercial success, which was the whole point of these compromises.

He started to get more rebellious against Paul in the studio, though many of these decisions weren't made by Paul, and he would complain to anyone who would listen that if he was just allowed to do the music he wanted to sing, the way he wanted to sing it, he would have more hits.

But for nine months, he did basically no singing other than that Ed Sullivan show appearance.

He had to recover from the operation to remove the throat nodules.

When he did return to the studio, the first single he cut remained unreleased, and while some of the stuff from the archives was released between the start of 1964 and March 1965, the first single he recorded and released after the throat nodules, Kiss Me Baby, which came out in March, was a complete flop.

That single was released to coincide with the first Motown tour of Europe, which we looked at in the episode on Stop in the Name of Love, and which was mostly set up to promote the Supremes, but which also featured Martha and the Vandelas, the Miracles, and the Temptations.

Even though Stevie had not had a major hit in 18 months by this point, he was still brought along on the tour, the only solo artist to be included.

At this point, Gordy thought that solo artists looked outdated compared to vocal groups in a world dominated by bands, and so other solo artists like Marvin Gaye weren't invited.

This was a sign that Gordy was happier with Stevie than his recent lack of chart success might suggest.

One of the main reasons that Gordy had been in two minds about him was that he'd had no idea if Wonder would still be able to sing well after his voice broke.

But now, as he was about to turn fifteen, his adult voice had more or less stabilised, and Gordy knew that he was capable of having a long career, if they just gave him the proper material.

But for now, his job on the tour was to do his couple of hits, smile, and be on the lower rungs of the ladder.

But even that was still a prominent place to be, given the scaled-down nature of this bill compared to the Motor Town reviews.

While the tour was in England, for example, Dusty Springfield presented a TV special focusing on all the acts on the tour, and while the Supremes were the main stars, Stevie got to do two songs, and also took part in the finale, a version of Mickey's Monkey, led by Smokey Robinson, but with all the performers joining in, with Wonder getting a harmonica solo.

tonight.

Love me, love the night, all right.

Love me, love the night, let me hear you now.

Sadly, there was one aspect of the trip to the UK that was extremely upsetting for Wonder.

Almost all the media attention he got, which was relatively little as he wasn't a supreme, was about his blindness, and one reporter in particular convinced him that there was an operation he could have to restore his sight, but that Motan were preventing him from finding out about it in order to keep his gimmick going.

He was devastated about this, and then further devastated when Ted Hull finally convinced him that it wasn't true, and that he'd been lied to.

Meanwhile other newspapers were reporting that he could see, and that he was just feigning blindness to boost his record sales.

After the tour, a live recording of Wonder singing the blues standard high-heeled sneakers was released as a single, and barely made the RB top 30, and didn't hit the top 40 on the pop charts.

Stevie's initial contract with Motown was going to expire in the middle of 1966, so there was a year to get him back to a point where he was having the kind of hits that other Motown acts were regularly getting at this point.

Otherwise, it looked like his career might end by the time he was 16.

The B side to High Heeled Sneakers was another duet with Clarence Paul, who dominates the vocal sound for much of it, a version of Willie Nelson's country classic, Funny How Time Slips Away.

Seems like only yesterday

a dear ended party

of

christ gets

away

from

your new love.

There are a few of these duet records scattered through Wonder's early career.

We'll hear another one a little later.

And they're mostly dismissed as Paul trying to muscle his way into a revival of his own recording career as an artist.

And there may be some truth in that.

But they're also a natural extension of the way the two of them worked in the studio.

Motown didn't have the facilities to give Wonder Braille lyric sheets.

And Paul didn't trust him to be able to remember the lyrics.

So often when they made a record, Paul would be just off Mike, reciting the lyrics to Wonder, fractionally ahead of him singing them.

So it was more or less natural that this dynamic would leak out onto records.

But not everyone saw it that way.

But at the same time, there has been some suggestion that Paul was among those manoeuvring to get rid of Wonder from Motown as soon as his contract was finished, despite the fact that Wonder was the only act Paul had worked on any big hits for.

Either way, Paul and Wonder were starting to chafe at working with each other in the studio, and while Paul remained his on-stage musical director, the opportunity to work on Wonder's singles for what would surely be his last few months at Motown was given to Hank Cosby and Sylvia Moy.

Cosby was a saxophone player and staff songwriter who had been working with Wonder and Paul for years.

He'd co-written fingertips and several other tracks.

while Moy was a staff songwriter who was working as an apprentice to Cosby.

Basically at this point, nobody else wanted the job of writing for Wonder, and as Moy was having no luck getting songs cut by any other artists, and her career was looking about as dead as Wonder's, they started working together.

Wonder was, at this point, full of musical ideas, but with absolutely no discipline.

He said in interviews that at this point he was writing a hundred and fifty songs a month, but these were often not full songs.

They were fragments, hooks of a single verse or a few lines, which he would pass on to Moy,

who would turn his ideas into structured songs that fit the Motown hit template, usually with the assistance of Cosby.

Then Cosby would come up with an arrangement and would co-produce with Mickey Stevenson.

The first song they came up with in this manner was a sign of how Wonder was looking outside the world of Motown to the rock music that was starting to dominate the US charts, but which was itself inspired by Motown music.

We heard in the last episode on the Rolling Stones how Nowhere to Run by the Vandelas.

Had inspired the Stones' as satisfaction.

I can't get more.

Satisfaction.

I can't get more.

Satisfaction.

Cause I try to walk

And Wonder, in turn, was inspired by Satisfaction to come up with his own song, though again, much of the work making it into an actual finished song was done by Sylvia Moy.

They took the four and the floor beat and basic melody of satisfaction, and brought it back to Motown where those things had originated, though they hadn't originated with Stevie, and this was his first record to sound like a Motown record in the way we think of those things.

As a sign of how, despite the way these stories are usually told, the histories of rock and soul were completely and complexly intertwined, that four on the floor beat itself was a conscious attempt by Holland, Doja and Holland to appeal to white listeners, on the grounds that while black people generally clapped on the backbeat, white people didn't, and so having a four on the floor beat wouldn't throw them off.

So Cosby, Moy and Wonder, in trying to come up with a satisfaction sound alike, were black Motown writers trying to copy a white rock band trying to copy black Motown writers trying to appeal to a white rock audience.

Wunda came up with the basic chorus hook, which was based around a lot of current slang terms he was fond of.

Then Moy, with some assistance from Cosby, filled it out into a full song.

Lyrically, it was as close to social comment as Motown had come at this point.

Wunder was, like many of his peers in soul music, interested in the the power of popular music to make political statements, and he would become a much more political artist in the next few years.

But at this point, it still couched in the acceptable boy meets girl romantic love song that Motown specialized in.

But in 1965, a story about a boy from the wrong side of the tracks dating a rich girl inevitably raised the idea that the boy and girl might be of different races, a subject that was very, very controversial in the mid-sixties.

My money is low, and my suits are stopped.

But it's alright, and my clothes aren't new.

I'm sorry, because my heart is true, since then, baby,

everything is alright.

Uptight made number three on the pop charts and number one on the RB charts, and saved Stevie Wonder's career.

And this is where, for all that I've criticised Motown in this episode, their strategy paid off.

Mickey Stevenson talked a lot about how in the early 60s Motown didn't give up on artists.

If someone had potential but was not yet having hits or finding the right approach, they would keep putting out singles in a holding pattern, trying different things and seeing what would work, rather than toss them aside.

It had already worked for the temptations of the supremes, and now it had worked for Stevie Wonder.

He would be the last beneficiary of this policy.

Soon things would change, and Motan would become increasingly focused on trying to get the maximum returns out of a small number of stars, rather than building careers for a range of artists.

But it paid off brilliantly for Wonder.

Uptight was such a reinvention of Wonder's career, sound, and image, that many of his fans consider it the real start of his career, everything before it only counting as prologue.

The follow-up, Nothing's Too Good For My Baby, was an uptight sound-alike, and as with Motown's sound-alike follow-ups in general, it didn't do quite as well, but it still made the top 20 on the pop chart, and got to number 4 on the RB chart.

Stevie Wonder was now safe at Motown.

and so he was going to do something no other Motown act had ever done before.

He was going to record a protest song and release it as a single.

For about a year, he'd been ending his shows with a version of Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind, sung as a duet with Clarence Paul, who was still his on-stage bandleader, even though the two weren't working together in the studio as much.

Wonder brought that into the studio and recorded it with Paul back as the producer and as his duet partner.

Barry Gordy wasn't happy with the choice of single, but Wunder pushed, and Gordy knew that Wonder was on a winning streak and gave in.

And so Blowin' in the Wind became Stevie Wonder's next single.

Well, how many years?

Blowin' in the Wind made the top ten and number one on the RB charts and convinced Gordy that there was some commercial potential in going after the socially aware market.

And over the next few years, Motown would start putting out more and more political records.

Because Motown Convention was to have the producer of a hit record produce the next hit for that artist, and keep doing so until they had a flop, Paul was given the opportunity to produce the next single.

A Place in the Sun was another ambiguously socially aware song, co-written by the only white writer on Motown staff, Ron Miller, who happened to live in the same building as Stevie's Tutor Cum manager, Ted Hull.

A Place in the Sun was a pleasant enough song, inspired by A Change Is Gonna Come, but with a more watered-down, generic message of hope.

But the record was lifted by Stevie's voice, and again made the top ten.

This meant that Paul and Miller and Miller's writing partner Brian Mills got to work on his next two singles, his 1966 Christmas song Someday at Christmas, which made number 24, and the ballad Travellin' Man, which made 32.

The downward trajectory with Paul meant that Wonder was soon working with other producers again.

Harvey Fouqua and Johnny Bristol cut another Miller and Mills song with him, Yester Me, Yes to You, Yesterday.

The world we knew

when we were dreaming, scheming, wild

the time away.

Yesterday,

yesterday,

yesterday.

But that was left in the can as not good enough to release, and Stevie was soon back working with Cosby.

The two of them had come up with an instrumental together in late 1966, but had not been able to come up with any words for it.

So they played it for Smokey Robinson, who said their instrumental sounded like circus music, and wrote lyrics about a clown.

I try to keep myself busy.

Smiling in the market,

but in my lonely room, I cry to hear a clown

when there's no one around.

The Miracles cut that as album filler, but it was released three years later as a single, and became the Miracles' only number one hit with Smokey Robinson as lead singer.

So Wonder and Cosby definitely still had their commercial touch, even if their renewed collaboration with Moy, who they started working with again, took a while to find a hit.

To start with, Wonder returned to the idea of taking inspiration from a hit by a white British British group, as he had with Uptight.

This time it was The Beatles and the track Michelle from the Rubber Soul album.

Michelle,

my bell,

these are words that go together well.

My Michelle

Michelle,

my belle, son de motivon, l'É bien en son,

l'é bien en son.

Wunda took the idea of a song with some French lyrics and a melody with some similarities to the Beatles song, and came up with My Shere Mo, which Cosby and Moy finished off.

O'Malley, lovely as a summer day

My Sherry Omar,

distant as the Milky Way

My Sharioma,

pretty little one that I

Gordy wouldn't allow that to be released, saying it was too close to Michelle and people would think it was a rip-off, and it stayed in the vaults for several years.

Cosby also produced a version of a song Ron Miller had written with Orlando Murden, For Once in My Life, which pretty much every other Motown act was recording versions of.

The Four Tops, The Temptations, Billy Eckstein, Martha and the Vandellas, and Barbara McNair all cut versions of it in 1967, and Gordy wouldn't let Wunder's version be put out either.

So they had to return to the drawing board.

But in truth, Stevie Wonder was not the biggest thing worrying Berry Gordy at this point.

He was dealing with problems in the Supremes, which we'll look at in a future episode.

They were about to get rid of Florence Ballard, and thus possibly destroy one of the biggest acts in the world.

But Gordy thought that if they didn't get rid of her, they would be destroying themselves even more certainly.

Not only that, but Gordy was in the midst of a secret affair with Diana Ross.

Holland Doja and Holland were getting restless about their contracts, and his producers kept bringing him unlistenable garbage that would never be a hit, like Norman Whitfield insisting that this track he'd cut with Marvin Gaye, I heard it through the grapevine, should be a single.

Gordy had put his foot down about that one too, just like he had about My Sharia Moore, and wouldn't allow it to be released.

Meanwhile, many of the smaller acts on the label were starting to feel like they were being ignored by Gordy, and had formed what amounted to a union, having regular meetings at Clarence Paul's house to discuss how they could pressure the label to put the same effort into their careers as into those of the big stars.

And the Funk brothers, the musicians who played on all of Motown's hits, were also getting restless.

They contributed to the arrangements, and they did more for the sound of the records than half the credited producers.

Why weren't they getting production credits and royalties?

Harvey Fouquet had divorced Gordy's sister Gwen, and so became persona non-vrata at the label, and was in the process of leaving Motown, and so was Mickey Stevenson, Gordy's second second-in-command, because Gordy wouldn't give him any stock in the company.

And Detroit itself was on edge.

The crime rate in the city had started to go up, but even worse, the perception of crime was going up.

The Detroit News had been running a campaign to whip up fear, which it called its secret witness campaign, and running constant headlines about rapes, murders, and muggings.

These in turn had led to increased calls for more funds for the police, calls which inevitably contained a strong racial element, and at least implicitly linked the perceived rise in crime to the ongoing civil rights movement.

At this point, the police in Detroit were 93% white, even though Detroit's population was over 30% black.

The mayor and police commissioner were trying to bring in some modest reforms, but they weren't going anywhere near fast enough for the black population, who felt harassed and attacked by the police, but were still going too fast for the white people who were being whipped up into a state of terror about supposedly soft on crime policies, and for the police who felt under siege and betrayed by the politicians.

And this wasn't the only problem affecting the city, and especially affecting black people.

Redlining and underfunded housing projects meant that the large black population was being crammed into smaller and smaller spaces with fewer local amenities.

A few black people who were lucky enough to become rich, many of them associated with Motown, were able to move into majority white areas, but that was just leading to white flight and to an increase in racial tensions.

The police were on edge after the murder of George Overman Jr., the son of a policeman, and though they arrested the killers, that was just another sign that they weren't being shown enough respect.

They started organising blue flues.

The police weren't allowed to strike, so they claim en masse that they were off sick, as a protest against the supposed soft-on-crime administration.

Meanwhile, John Sinclair was organising Love-Ins, gatherings of hippies at which new bands like the MC5 played, which were being invaded by gangs of bikers who were there to beat up the hippies.

And the Detroit auto industry was on its knees.

Working conditions had got bad enough that the mostly black workforce organised a series of wildcat strikes.

All in all, Detroit was looking less and less like somewhere that Barry Gordy wanted to stay.

and the small LA subsidiary of Motown was rapidly becoming, in his head if nowhere else, the more important part of the company and its future.

He was starting to think that maybe he should leave all these ungrateful people behind in their dangerous city and move the parts of the operation that actually mattered out to Hollywood.

Stevie Wonder was, of course, one of the parts that mattered, but the pressure was on in 1967 to come up with a hit as big as his records from 1965 and early 66, before he'd been sidetracked down the ballad route.

The song that was eventually released was one on which Stevie's mother, Lula Mae Hardaway, had a co-writing credit.

I Was Made to Love Her was inspired by Wonder's first love.

a girl from the same housing projects as him.

And he talked about the song being special to him because it was true, saying, kind of speaks of my first love to a girl named Angie, who was a very beautiful woman.

Actually, she was my third girlfriend, but my first love.

I used to call Angie up and like we would talk and say, I love you, I love you, and we'd talk and we'd both go to sleep on the phone.

And this was like from Detroit to California, right?

You know, mother said, Boy, whatcha doing?

Get off the phone.

Boy, I tell you, it was ridiculous.

But while it was inspired by her, like with many of the songs from this period, much of the lyric came from Moi.

Her mother grew up in Arkansas, and that's why the lyric started I Was Born in a Little Rock, as her inspiration came from stories told by her parents.

But truth be told, the lyrics weren't particularly detailed or impressive, just a standard story of young love.

Rather, what mattered in the record was the music.

The song was structured differently from many Motown records, including most of Wonder's earlier ones.

Most Motown records had a huge amount amount of dynamic variation, and a clear demarcation between verse and chorus.

Even a record like Dancing in the Street, which took most of its power from the tension and release caused by spending most of the track on one chord, had the release that came with the line All We Need Is Music, and could be clearly subdivided into different sections.

I Was Made to Love Her wasn't like that.

There was a tiny section which functioned as a middle eight, and which cover versions like the one by the Beach Boys later that year tend to cut out, because it disrupts the song's flow.

But other than that, the song has no verse or chorus, no distinct sections.

It's just a series of lyrical couplets over the same four chords, repeating over and over, an incessant groove that could really go on indefinitely.

Far outside, I'd still be standing there.

Cause I was made to love,

I was made to live for.

This is as close as Motown had come at this point to the new genre of funk,

of records that would just staying with one groove throughout.

It wasn't a funk record, not yet.

It was still a pop-soul record, but what made it extraordinary was the baseline, and this is why I had to emphasise earlier that this was a record by the funk brothers, not the wrecking crew, no matter how much some crew members may claim otherwise.

As on most of Cosby's sessions, James Jameson was given free reign to come up with his own part with little guidance, and what he came up with is extraordinary.

This was at a time when rock and pop bass lines were becoming a little more mobile, thanks to the influence of Jameson in Detroit, Brian Wilson in LA, and Paul McCartney in London.

But for the most part, even those bass parts have been fairly straightforward technically, often inventive, but usually just crotchets and quavers, still keeping rhythm along with the drums, rather than in dialogue with them roaming free rhythmically.

Jameson had started to change his approach, inspired by the change in studio equipment.

Motown had upgraded to eight-track recording in 1965, and once he'd become aware of the possibilities, and of the greater prominence that his bass parts could have if they were recorded on their own track, Jameson had become a much busier player.

Jameson was a jazz musician by inclination, and so would have been very aware of John Coltrane's legendary Sheets of Sound, in which Coltrane would play fast arpeggios and scales in clusters of five and seven notes, usually in semi-quaver runs, though sometimes in even smaller fractions.

His solo in Miles Davis's straight note chaser is mostly semi-quavers, but has a short passage in hemi-demi-semi-quavers.

Jameson started to adapt the sheets of sound style to bass playing, treating the bass almost as a jazz solo instrument.

Though, unlike Coltrane, he was also very, very concerned with creating something that people could tap their feet to.

Much like James Brown, Jameson was taking jazz techniques and repurposing them for dance music.

The most notable example of that up to this point had been in the Fortop's Bernadette,

where there were a few scuffling semi-quaver runs thrown in, and which is a much more fluid part than most of his playing previously.

And never find the love I found in you.

And when I speak of you, I see envy in other men's eyes.

And I'm well aware of what's on their minds.

But on Bernadette, Jameson had been limited by Holland, Doziv and Holland, who liked them to improvise, but around a framework they created.

Cosby, on the other hand, because he had been a funk brother himself, was much more aware of the musicians' improvisational abilities, and would largely give them a free hand.

This led to a truly remarkable bass part on I Was Made to Love Her, which is somewhat buried in the single mix, but Marcus Miller did an isolated recreation of the part for the accompanying CD to a book on Jameson, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, and listening to that you can hear just how inventive it is.

This was exciting stuff, though much less so for the touring musicians who went on the road with the Motown reviews while Jameson largely stayed in Detroit recording.

Jameson's family would later talk about him coming home grumbling because complaints from the touring musicians had been brought to him and he'd been asked to play less difficult parts so they'd find it easier to replicate them on stage.

I Was Made to Love Her wouldn't exist without Stevie Wonder, Hank Cosby, Sylvia Moy or Lula May Hardaway, but it's James Jameson's record through and through.

outside, I'll still be standing there.

Cause I was made to love her,

I was made to live for her.

Yeah, hey, hey, hey.

I was made to love her.

You're the one

around her.

Hey, hey, hey.

Who made me?

I was made to believe that.

You know, Steve ain't gonna believe her.

No,

hey, hey.

He went to number two on the chart, sat between Light My Fire at number one and All You Need Is Love at number three,

with the Beatles song soon to overtake it and make number one itself.

But within a few weeks of Ira's made to love her reaching its chart peak, things in Detroit would change irrevocably.

On the 23rd of July, the police busted an illegal drinking den.

They thought they were only going to get about 25 people there, but there turned out to be a big party on.

They tried to arrest 74 people, but their wagon wouldn't fit them all in, so they had to call reinforcements and make the arrestees wait around till more wagons arrived.

A crowd of hundreds gathered while they were waiting.

Someone threw a brick at a squad car window.

A rumour went round that the police had bayoneted someone, and soon the city was in flames.

Riots lasted for days, with people burning down and looting businesses, but what really made the situation bad was the police's overreaction.

They basically started shooting at young black men, using them as target practice, and later claiming they were snipers, arsonists and looters.

But there were cases like the Algiers Motel incident, where the police raided a motel where several black men, including the members of the sole group The Dramatics, were hiding out along with a few white women.

The police sexually assaulted the women.

and then killed three of the men for associating with white women in what was described as a lynching with bullets.

The policemen in question were later acquitted of all charges.

The National Guard were called in, as were federal troops, the 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville, the division in which Jimi Hendrix recently served.

After four days of rioting, one of the bloodiest riots in U.S.

history was at an end, with 43 people dead, of whom 33 were black, and only one was a policeman.

Official counts had 1,189 people injured, and over 7,200 arrests, almost all of them of black people.

A lot of the histories written later say that black-owned businesses were spared during the riot, but that wasn't really the case.

For example, Joe's record shop, owned by Joe von Battle, who had put out the first records by C.L.

Franklin and his daughter Aretha, was burned down.

destroying not only the stock of records for sale, but the master tapes of hundreds of recordings of black artists, many of them unreleased and so now lost forever.

John Lee Hooker, one of the artists whose music Von Battle had released, soon put out a song, The Motor City is Burning, about the event.

can't stay around to find it out.

Taking my wife and my family.

And those gotta leave curtain out.

But one business that did remain unburned was Motown, with the Hittsville studio going untouched by flames and unlooted.

Motown legend has this being down to the rioters showing respect for the studio that had done so much for Detroit, but it seems likely to have just been luck.

Although Motown wasn't completely unscathed, a National Guard tank fired a shell through the building, leaving a gigantic hole, which Berry Gordy saw as soon as he got back from a business trip he'd been on during the rioting.

That was what made Berry Gordy decide once and for all that things needed to change.

Motown owned a whole row of houses near the studio, which they used as additional office space and for everything other than the core business of making records.

Gordy immediately started to sell them and moved the admin work into temporary rented space.

He hadn't announced it yet, and it would be a few years before the move was complete, but from that moment on the die was cast.

Motown was going to leave Detroit and move to Hollywood.

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