Never Too High

VISIONS OF UNRELEASED WONDER WORKS

And then there’s the other classic Motown album which just turned 50.

Plenty of media attention has been bestowed in recent weeks upon Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On because of its digital re-release by Motown/Universal Music Enterprises in an updated “deluxe edition.” This came out on August 25; the original album was issued by Motown on August 28, 1973.

Three weeks earlier, a half-century ago, the company launched Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions.

Of course, both long-playing masterpieces have earned their place in music history, just as their creators have towered over the cultural landscape of the past five decades. The contrast lies in Wonder’s evident reluctance to empower Motown and Universal Music to augment and embellish his finest work of the 1970s.

In other words, the chances appear slim that a deluxe, 50th anniversary edition of Innervisions will appear anytime soon. (The original Tamla album was released on August 3, 1973.) Unless I’m mistaken, its last reissue was in 2000, when Motown/Universal produced limited – but not expanded – editions of Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Songs In The The Key of Life, all in Digipak CD cases. Those faithfully contained the albums’ original content as first released.

Today, Wonder’s reluctance to focus on his past may make sense in light of the expectation – realistic or not – that he will release new music in the future. Yet there were only a couple of fresh tracks unveiled in 2020, and little sign of anything more. Those came out digitally via Republic Records (another part of the Universal Music empire) and signalled the superstar’s contractual exit from Motown. Is Republic expecting an album? It’s only been 18 years since his last.

On the subject of contracts, it’s common knowledge that Wonder achieved singular control over Motown’s release of his music when he re-signed with the firm on July 1, 1971 (he had turned 21 two months earlier). Subsequent albums came out in the form and sequence of his desire; no outtakes or alternative versions made available, no excess tracks.

‘THE MASTERS STAYED WITH STEVIE’

The choice of singles may have been the subject of intense or even fractious discussions between Wonder and Motown, but the albums were signed, sequenced and delivered in the form that their maker had approved. “We supplied Motown with the only tape they ever got, which was an EQ’ed master made in the cutting room,” the late Malcolm Cecil once told me. “They never got the real masters. They stayed with Stevie.”

Cecil and Robert Margouleff were associate producers of all five of Wonder’s classic albums, beginning with Music Of My Mind, and they also programmed the ARP and Moog synthesizers for him throughout that period. “Stevie had the final say,” Cecil continued, “in the sense that it is his album and he is the artist and so on, although we would argue and push and say, ‘You’ve got to have this one,’ etcetera.” But this back-and-forth – and the final decisions reached – was entirely within Wonder’s creative circle, and the outcome was not to be challenged or changed by his record company.

It was when I interviewed Cecil, more than 30 years ago, that he outlined the procedure by which finished masters were delivered to Motown – and showed me the master logs revealing what music was made and stored, and when. Wonder’s prodigious output is the stuff of legend, of course. The logs merely affirmed as much, while also hinting at songs complete and incomplete, filed away and finished – or not.

Wonder recorded much of Innervisions with Cecil and Margouleff during 1973 at The Record Plant in Los Angeles. “Possible master” declared one of the logs, dated April 3. Five tracks were identified: “Hello Jesus,” “Boogie On Reggae Woman,” “All In Love Is Fair,” “Jazz Tune” and “Mr. [sic] Know It All.”

Another master log, dated April 11, listed “Love Is A Thing Of The Past” with and without vocals, and “Living Just Enough,” also with and without vocals. The latter was likely “Living For The City,” but was the former a song which didn’t make it onto Innervisions? Or perhaps an early version of “Too High,” with its lyric line, “She’s a girl of the past”?

SEEING THE SUN IN LATE DECEMBER

One more log, dated April 17, identified three titles: “Too High, Touch The Sky,” “Go To Church” and “Broken Heart.” The next day? “I Can See The Sun In Dec.” is listed – a song he performed in concert, but was never released on disc. (The best-known cover was by Roberta Flack.)

On June 14, the log is brief and to the point: “Police Sound EFX.” Ah, those dramatic moments in “Living For The City” where the police show up and arrest the song’s central character.

*With Alice Cooper and Helen Reddy, Stevie enjoys the Grammy he garnered for* Innervisions

Malcolm Cecil noted that during those pathbreaking years, he and Margouleff worked with Wonder in the studio all hours of the day and night. “It was just the three of us in a room,” Bob Margouleff recalled in a recent Grammy Museum article about Innervisions’ 50th anniversary, “and the sounds we were creating gave him a whole new palate and put him in control of what he was doing. He’d start talking to us and we’d start cooking the soup. He’d show us a song he wrote with chords and a vocal demo; once we’d heard it, we’d say, ‘What about this sound? Or that sound?’ ”

That the trio did this at whatever time suited Wonder is typified by an American Federation of Musicians contract for November 10, 1972, when he cut a number logged as “All That’s In Love” (presumably, “All In Love Is Fair”) during a session running from 1am to 5am. Among the session players in those early hours at The Record Plant were Ollie Brown (drums), Ray Parker, Jr. (guitar), Keith Stevens (congas) and Ralph Hammer (acoustic guitar).

Days later, the AFM paperwork reveals a session at the more civilised time of 10pm to 1am, tracking two songs, “Love’s Knock On Your Door” and “Grasshopper,” with those same musicians.

In a world of our – or perhaps Universal Music’s – imagination, these enticing, unheard recordings and their backstories will one day find their way onto a deluxe edition of Innervisions, featuring “bonus material” and “previously unreleased” tracks of the type included in the new manifestation of Let’s Get It On.

And it wouldn’t matter whatever anniversary it was.

Promenade notes: London’s Royal Albert Hall has played host to various Motown acts over the decades, including Stevie Wonder – and he made a return visit just a few days ago. Well, OK, not in person, but his spirit suffused one of the historic venue’s so-called “Proms” concerts, when singer/instrumentalist Cory Henry and Jules Buckley’s orchestra recreated the entire Innervisions album. “This performance did the music full justice,” wrote Clive Davis in The Times. For those with online BBC access, the Henry/Buckley recreation is broadcast in full this Sunday (3) on Radio 2, offering 21st century visions, you might say, of a 20th century monument.

Award notes: there can be no mention of Innervisions without referencing its Grammy acclaim – namely, as 1973’s Album of the Year. It was the first time that a black artist had triumphed in the category, and Wonder was also the second-youngest performer (at age 23) to take the honour up to then. In addition, Malcolm Cecil and Bob Margouleff gained a Grammy for best engineered recording.

West Grand Blog