By the Grace of God
DANGEROUS DAYS AND NIGHTS ON MUSIC’S HIGHWAYS
A Mercury Cruiser, a Buick LeSabre and a Bellanca Viking – near-death vehicles for three of Motown’s finest.
The saga of the first of these is the most familiar: this was the car carrying Stevie Wonder across the Carolinas, driven by his cousin John Harris, when it smashed into a flatbed farm truck on Interstate 85. The musician was seriously injured and sent into a coma, requiring hospital treatment for a bruise of the brain, among other wounds.
Stevie Wonder’s car: driving close to a ‘spiritual place’
Wonder was travelling to Durham, North Carolina, to play a benefit concert for America’s first black, non-commercial community radio station, WAFR-FM. It was Monday, August 6, 1973. The night before, he had performed at the Memorial Auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina. The previous week, Motown Records had released his latest album, Innervisions, and its lead single, “Higher Ground.”
The white Mercury Cruiser was behind the Dodge truck when the collision occurred. Wonder was asleep in the front passenger seat, wearing headphones. The metallic rear of the truck was compressed into the front right of the car, shattering the windscreen and impacting Stevie’s head. The vehicle skidded towards the median and came to a halt.
Musicians in Wonder’s band, travelling behind, stopped and carried the unconscious 23-year-old into another car, and thence to hospital in nearby Salisbury. “What happened was my brother picked me up,” the star later said, “put me in the car and drove the back roads to the highway to get to the hospital. At the hospital, the doctors said that if they hadn’t moved me, I would have died, because help was taking too long to get there.”
Subsequently, Wonder was transferred to Winston-Salem’s North Carolina Baptist Hospital, where he stayed under neurological supervision for two weeks. On August 18, Wonder had recovered sufficiently to give a press conference there. “The only thing I know,” he said, “is that I was unconscious, and that for a few days, I was definitely in a much better spiritual place that made me aware of a lot of things that concern my life and my future, and what I have to do to reach another higher ground.”
On that same date, “Higher Ground” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100.
Coincidentally, the second serious auto accident in Motown history occurred after the first “Motor Town Special” played Greenville on November 20, 1962, with a line-up which included Marv Johnson, Mary Wells, the Miracles, the Marvelettes and Marvin Gaye (but not Wonder).
‘Beans’ Bowles comes out of hospital, pictured with sons Dennis and Harold
The package tour’s manager was Thomas “Beans” Bowles – but he was, of course, more than that. Heard playing flute and saxophone on early Motown recordings such as Marv Johnson’s “Come To Me,” the 6’ 5” beanpole became Esther Edwards’ right-hand in artist development during the early 1960s, and a strong advocate (if not its originator) of the idea of the multi-artist Motown roadshow. “I was everything on that tour,” Bowles said in Dr. Beans Bowles – Fingertips: The Untold Story, the biography written by his son, Dennis. “I was road manager, chaperone and diplomat. This was our first major tour. We played 55 one-niters. It was too long, too hard and too big.”
Knowing the demands and demons of the road, Bowles had persuaded Edwards that he needed a solid set of wheels in which to travel up and down the United States – not least because, usually, he did the payroll every night in the back seat. “We went to the General Motors Company and asked them what the strongest car they made was, because we were going to go on all kinds of road,” Bowles recalled. The choice was the high-horsepower, automatic-transmission Buick LeSabre, GM’s best-selling full-size car. Yet its calibre made Bowles unpopular with the stars riding (and sleeping) on the tour bus. “Smokey told me, ‘Ain’t nobody in that big car but you. You got it all to yourself.’ Marvin Gaye went off. ‘You ain’t up on that damn stage every night. I’m going to call Berry and see why we can’t ride with you.’ ”
Had Gaye been riding with Bowles in the early hours of November 21, he might have been killed. The Buick’s driver, Eddie McFarland, certainly was, having fallen asleep at the wheel en route to Tampa – where the Motown revue was due to play that night – and crashed into a truck on the highway. Bowles sustained major injuries, and was hospitalised for six months. The morning after the crash, a muted Gaye visited him. “Marvin couldn’t say a word,” Bowles remembered. “I was fucked up.”
On the Billboard Hot 100 that week, Motown’s hottest climber was Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind Of Fellow.”
For Milan (“Machine Gun”) Williams of the Commodores, his means of transport on Thursday, October 23, 1980, came equipped with two wheels – and two wings. The Bellanca Viking was a single-engine, four-seat prop-plane, one of which he had leased out of enthusiasm and convenience. By the end of the ’70s, the Commodores were one of Motown’s – and the music industry’s – most popular acts, on record and on tour. With five Top 10 albums and seven Top 10 singles under their belt as the new decade dawned, the group’s individual members were wealthy and increasingly independent.
The aftermath of Milan Williams’ crash
Having become interested in flying, Williams possessed a pilot’s license and an inclination to take to the air between the Commodores’ concert dates. On that October day, he flew from Provo, Utah for the relatively short journey to Phoenix; the band was due to play the following night in nearby Tempe. With him was their publicist, Lester Mornay, and Lionel Richie was due to come along, too, but just before take-off, he changed his mind.
Shortly before the scheduled touchdown at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, the Viking’s engine cut out completely, and Williams was forced to try to touch down by gliding. “Milan was very calm and cool,” Mornay told Associated Press afterwards. “We didn’t talk much. We just looked for somewhere to land. Luckily, there was a freeway here.”
There was, indeed. About three miles from the airport, the plane (with landing gear retracted) hit the Maricopa Freeway belly up, with its propellors slicing into the back of a pick-up truck carrying Coca-Cola. Williams and Mornay scrambled out of the cockpit, and almost immediately, the Viking’s ruptured fuel tanks burst into flames. “It became apparent after we got out of the plane and looked at it that we probably should have died,” remarked Mornay. “We were very fortunate.”
Had others accompanied them, they might have been less lucky. “When the Federal Aviation Authority investigated,” the publicist subsequently said, “they determined any passengers in the back seat – where Lionel would have been sitting – would not have made it out.”
The Commodores’ hit on the Billboard Hot 100 that week? “Heroes.”
West Grand Blog is taking a short break. See you on the other side, with luck.
Postscript: the late Mary Wilson related a travel tragedy of her own in Supreme Faith. En route to her daughter Turkessa’s home in Las Vegas on January 29, 1994, she lost control of the Jeep Cherokee she was driving, and the 14-year-old passenger, her son Rafael, was killed in the crash. “They say that it is a mother’s greatest fear to lose one of her children,” she later wrote in the memoir, “and I have to agree.”