My parents had a cassette version of this Wonder LP which was very well worn from repeated plays in the ice-blue Volvo 164TE Sedan. The vinyl here is from a small books & records shop 'Halfback' (sell the book or record back and get half what you paid), I think situated in a Northern Beaches of Sydney suburb - Dee Why, not far from where I grew up. A$3.99 from about 1987.
The record is in poor condition - constant static, and the occasional jump when played. But what great cover art! Very earthy, water colours with an American desert feel, suggesting that the inner visions Stevie sings of were those produced by injesting something in the desert? Song titles like Too High, Higher Ground, Visions suggest . . . Peyote?
Nevermind.
Why Stevie is a Wonder: Stevie plays all the instruments (including dubbed vox), on tracks marked * Have a listen to Living for the City and compare Stevie's multitracked solo efforts to say Enya's watery - skidmarked layerings.
Side One
Too High
Drugs are bad mmm-kay?! Stevie goes and asks Alice: did you hear the news about the girl today/ She passed away/ what did her friend say/ They said she's too high/ Too high/ Can't hang around anyway
The sound of the bubbling synth-bass, Stevie's phased vocals, and locomotive mid-tempo pace, still can't submerge the bright feel of the jazz-inflected scat do-doing, and the hi-hat swing that accompanies it. Harmonica solo(s), electric piano comping (Fender Rhodes), and Stevie works the drums well.
He can do syrupy-maudlin (Lately from Hotter than July for example) but in this middle-period his natural effusiveness bubbles up even in a 'don't do it' song like this one. Listen out for the pre-chorus psych-out breakdowns: 'And she's a tangerine'~~~~~~~~~~ brought back into the funk with a sharp James-Brown 'Yowww!'
Visions
Wistful Stevie on this ornate ballad: decorated by arpeggioed electric and acoustic guitar arpeggios, and bass that mostly pulses then dances up a short flight of stairs. As in most of Stevie's ballads the harmonic construction here is sophisticated, with runs of extended (flat 9ths and sharp 13ths) chords laid out on the Rhodes.
Stevie the idealist argues that he's also a realist: be realistic ask for the impossible; or at least imagine that love (which for Stevie is a concept that is almost pantheistic, as well as romantic) and freedom will conquer all. As a lead-in to what is perhaps Stevie's great Social-realist protest song, Visions prefigures the waste of life that is the 'Boy . . . born in hard-time Mississippi' by asking 'Do we have to find our wings and fly away/ To the visions in our mind?'In case you think Stevie is a romantic idealist only, check out . . .
Living for the City*
All Wonder here! A lyric that preceeds and would have certainly influenced both Grandmaster Flash's The Message and even Prince's Sign O' the Times: angry, funked tales of urban, racist realism.
There are amazing elements here. The massed choir of Stevie at the song's end, when the melody is re-harmonized; the multi-voiced street-scene dialogue of the drug-deal set-up, when the wide-eyed Mississippi boy gets set-up and sent down almost on arrival; the opening bass pulse over which arrives a panning Rhodes; the 'no' 'nos' of the ending.
While Prince begins Sign O' the Times (1987) with 'In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name/By chance his girlfrind came across a needle and soon she did the same/ At home there are seventeen-year-old-boys and their idea of fun/ Is being in a gang called th Disciples, high on crack and totin' a machin gun/ Times/ Times' and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message with 'Broken glass everywhere/ people pissing on the streets you know they just don't care'
Stevie's story is third-person narrative, from birth to gaol where the aspirational theme-mantra - 'Living(just) enough for the city' changes tone as the hopelessness that the central character's limited life-chances necessitate, grows. While Prince presents an angry apocalyptic commentary, and Melle Mel a mixture of second-person dirty-realist description with first-person despair/survivalist-affirmation, Stevie's more conventional story of a life wasted is musically leavened by the form of a Mass: if there is hope it is in redemption, for us all. And yet, the anger here teeters over into the desire to heal, and back to anger.
Golden Lady
Not a strong song, but again a solid melody and song construction. Lyrically a weak song, though, and considering the theme of romantic desire, a melancholic and grey tone in the overall affect here.
Cubist figures from the inside coverSide Two
Higher Ground*
Great intertwined keyboard work here which multitracks about four lines. Worth listening to on headphones just to hear how skilled Stevie is in laying done not only something polyphonic (mulitple melodies) but polyrhythmic: like a small percussion ensemble. Probably overdubbed clavinets not on as sharp and bright a setting here as on Superstition. Shows off the uses Stevie puts synthesized Bass to: bending, and mirroring the vocal melody on the pre-chorus.
Jesus Children of America*
Another accusation song in the tradition of You haven't done Nothing from First Fulfillingness's Finale. There's something frantic about the voice here, reflected in the lyric: 'You better tell your story fast/ And if you lie it will come to pass.'
But the instrumentation here is amazing. Listening to the song on the head phones (again) there must be about four distinct keyboards in the mid to upper register, and of course the bending, funky synth bass. When the tambourine kicks in at the opening, the rhythm gets a roll-on that seems hard to stop.
What stands out here is how Stevie is a man of many voices. Apparently he could impersonate nearly anybody's speaking voice and at Motown would impersonate supremo Berry Gordy on the phone. Back in the 70s when my sister and I would hover around my parents' dinner parties (for the exotic food mainly - well pimenot rolls were exotic then weren't they?), a friend of theirs with a good musical ear but a weakness for evangelical christianity on hearing a string of Stevie songs asked who had put together the mixed reel? (8 Track reels were big in the early 1970s as you could put up to 2 hours of continuous music on the tape). No Uncle Tez - it was all Stevie, shape-shifting his voice, and here on Jesus Children of America Wonder comes across initially as full of air and smoothness,before ratcheting his timbre into something tighter and heavier as the lyrical tone shifts into, once again, anger.
All in Love is fair
Don't you Worry 'Bout a Thing
He's Misstra Know-It-All
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