Wesley Morris & Robert Margouleff on Stevie Wonder

32:27and he was standing in Studio A and the console had one big top plate on it that lifted up like this, like the hood of a car. Everyone was building their own consoles. There was no Neve this and SSL that or any of that kind of stuff. It was all, everybody in the studio business was busy jury rigging their own consoles. So Malcolm was standing in front of the thing and it looked like a rat's nest inside the console. and I walked in and I was wearing a sheer sheepskin sheer coat. It was in the wintertime. And I usually would come in at night if I wasn't doing a commercial or something, right? So Malcolm was in there fixing the console or doing something to it.

33:13And I said, do you really know how to fix this thing? And he says, I ought to because it's my job here. And he said, are you the guy with that funny synthesizer in the other room? I said, yeah, and I own it. And he says, I'll make a deal with you. And I said, what is it? He said, I'll teach you how to become a first-class recording engineer if you teach me how to play the synthesizer. And we shook hands on that deal, and the rest is history. We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more from my interview with Robert Margalev. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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37:23we're back with more from robert margaleff did you even want to learn how to become a recording engineer yeah i did and i didn't to me it's just the way through to the end because electronic music has no instrument it electronic exists in the air it's not like a saxophone or a trumpet that plays a certain sound that you have like you place one note well the synthesizer plays one note but you don't have to have an embouchure for it. You don't have to have a physical training to play it. But the synthesizer, as big as it is, at that point only played one event or note at a time. Right, right. And I was busy writing music based on the fact that I would do one or two lines simultaneously.

38:06And I was putting together some music. The first piece I worked on was called Aurora. It was very science fiction, had nothing to do with eight bar phrases, boom, boom, boom, none of that. It wasn't pop music at all. It was really kind of classical music. And Malcolm was enthralled by that because we were writing music for non-existent instruments that occurred only in space and in our heads. And you really couldn't play a chord at that time? You couldn't play a basic C major chord? No chords. You'd have to arpeggiate it. You could arpeggiate, but there are no chords because you could only play one event on one keyboard.

38:44Tonto, which we originally, we called, we finally called it Tonto, the original neo-timbral orchestra. And that kind of name kind of stuck to it. And we started to really sort of plan how we could get to have multiple voices. And we did that at a Chinese restaurant across the street from media. The food was terrible and filled with monosodium glutamate. So every time we went over there to eat dinner, like I would get flushed and my face would get really red and stuff. But we drew the plans for Tanto on the tablecloth. They had paper tablecloths. So Tanto was designed on a tablecloth at this Chinese Spanish restaurant.

39:25It was sort of an in-between. Fusion. Fusion and confusion. But we were slowly putting it together and it was a big pile of equipment on three or four tables and a big gurney. And we were really sailing along, making some of the strangest music you would ever believe. We were working about a year or two. We became very close friends. And it slowly came together. And then one night, we were working along, and Herbie Mann walked into the back of the control room and looked at Malcolm and said, what the hell are you doing here? because he remembered Malcolm from Ronnie Scott's. Wow. Okay? Because Malcolm would play when Herbie would come over to play.

40:12Herbie's the flautist. Yeah. So he said, well, we're doing something really rather different. And he pointed to Malcolm and said, you playing electronica? Because he viewed Malcolm playing upright acoustic bass, which was Malcolm's first instrument, right? And Malcolm said, Herbie, don't sweat it. and we pulled the synthesizer out into the studio and I put two big loudspeakers, one on each side and we sat him down in the front of the synthesizer and we played it at high level and blew his mind. Wow. And he said, do you guys want a deal? Malcolm said, yeah, we want a deal. He says, well, I have one slot left on Embryo.

40:52I have my label on Atlantic, it's called Embryo and I'll sign you guys. I said, really? We're going to have a record deal? you know a real record deal and uh we signed with herbie did you have material at the time had you written stuff like like uh it was all recorded no music no written music everything head charts like jazz yeah and we put that record together called zero time and herbie put the record out and it made a big noise on uh on rolling stone it got huge reviews and that was the beginning of what really started to change my world forever how much editing did that album require a good bit we fooled around with it a lot my song aurora which was the first thing we did was 26 minutes long okay and i said malcolm i'm not even sure this is music and he said it's music all right it just needs a bit of an edit it turned out to be seven and a half minutes long so it was classic okay it needed a big edit we had we did so much laughing our faces hurt i'll tell you something we were laughing all the time we had a wonderful time working together and we were working with other artists as well richie havens came by uh uh a whole bunch other people you guys produced a richie havens record yeah how did that come to stormy forest this was richie's label right and i fell in love with richie when before i even got to media where i was working at broadway he came with his label and a whole bunch of hippie musicians and we just got along and i love richie and uh incredible voice i was i went to woodstock with him you did opened the he opened the show that's an iconic performance so you were there for that yeah i was there for that that's an incredible performance it's all running late and he goes out by himself yeah he goes out by himself and uh the strange thing is the guys that paid for woodstock also built media sound oh joel rosenman so i was when i got to media i was among friends immediately and they tolerate as long as we did malcolm did what had to do to keep the studios rolling and i was doing what i was doing to make music for the clients to make you know music for Crazy Daisy Toilet Paper and Trans-Caribbean Airways and all kinds of stuff.

43:21They would basically leave us alone because they knew where we came from. And you get free time. So basically free time. You guys were able to just... There was no time. We could do whatever we wanted just as long as when the paying session was in 25 string players that everything worked. Everything was good. And so what happened was the record came out it made a big noise and then on memorial day weekend 1970 i think it was 1971 it was a sunday 57th street was like a ghost town malcolm had a little apartment next to uh the front door of media sound i'm up one flight over a deli which was just next door and we hear Malcolm Malcolm and we look out the window the front window we're looking down at the front door of media and there is our friend fellow bass player Ronnie Blanco standing there with Stevie who we didn't know he was just a big tall black guy right and he had our album under his arm and we invited him in and we started recording and we didn't stop for five years wait a second So you invite him into Malcolm's home.

44:40Yeah, we then go downstairs. We go upstairs, and Malcolm plays bass for a little while upstairs. And Steve, he's honking around on Frank Filippetti's Mellotron, which Malcolm was fixing, putting new tapes in, right? We honked around for about 20 minutes. He said, you want to go downstairs and see Tonto? And he said, yeah. And that was the beginning of it. We unlocked the front door and walked in. and I don't know what the hell happened for the next five years. You know, you tell me, well, I was invisible, you know, and we maintained Malcolm and I sort of were invisible in a lot of ways. But I always viewed my job because I didn't ever want to be standing on the front of the stage.

45:23So I'm perfectly happy to do stuff, right? I'm so perfectly happy to be the man behind the curtain. Malcolm, on the other hand, wanted to play out. so we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get tanto to play live but remember this was all analog yeah there was no high technology involved at all yeah right there was no midi it was none of that stuff so everything we did was all voltage controlled and analog right right it was highly unstable power supply issues rf from a radio station could fuck with the pitch and stuff It was not what you would call the encomium of stability. It was pretty loose.

46:07Stevie had a hard time with it at first, correct? With the synthesizer? Not really too much. We ended up, everyone found the role. And to be very honest, I don't know what the hell happened. I mean, once we started working with Stevie, it was like a fever dream. There was no daytime or nighttime. time. There were no other clients in the end. By the time we got to Electric Lady, all our other clients were basically non-existent because we couldn't accommodate them. We were living inside Stevie's bubble, and we lived like that for five years. What was his bubble like? Well, for us, it was never, let's go out to dinner or go to a party or do any kind of social thing.

46:54our entire existence with Steve revolved around being in the studio and he was there a lot, right? yes he would call us if it was four in the morning and he wanted to do something we would be there for him wow and we ended up having to leave media first of all we were consuming so much time that they were getting a little nervous because they couldn't accommodate their commercial clients and I Malcolm and I set up the studio for Steve so that he could sort of memorize where everything was. And also, there were very particular things that we did, like when we recorded the drums. If you listen to any of those Stevie Wonder records or any of the records that I've done since those days, you'll see the hi-hat is on the left.

47:48Okay? And the reason for that is that that is the position by which Only the drummer really hears the drums in stereo, and that always puts the hi-hat on the left, because Stevie was facing the drums. Right. So what I wanted to make sure of was that Steve heard the same sonic image in his headphones that he heard live. In the room. In the room, right. So because that helped him know where the drums were. So we had a lot of sensitivity toward how Stevie was listening to things. It's so interesting that such a banal, non-artistic consideration, you know, leads to such a strong artistic choice. Little things make a lot of difference.

48:32We set up every instrument that he was going to possibly be used. There's always an open mic in the control, not one of these things where you go, Steve, Steve, is Mike playing the drums again? It was not one of those sort of earphone monitor things. We had an open full frequency microphone just like this one here. So Steve could always hear what we were talking about. It basically made the control room window disappear. It became one room. Now that's commonplace today, 40 some odd years later. But nobody was doing that at that time. Everyone was, the musicians are on this side of the glass and the engineers are over here and they never meet.

49:13You know, the engineers all wore little pocket protectors with pens and pencils and short sleeve white shirts. And then the musicians had their own world in the other space. Right. It was only the three of us. Like Music of My Mind, the first album, was just Malcolm, me and Stevie. Yeah. Did the whole thing. Right. I think one guitar part, Buzzy played, Featon played it on one song. Sanborn played on that record. There were a whole bunch of different people who were in Butterfield. Oh, Paul Butterfield's band. Yeah. Butter's horn section sort of ended up being Stevie's horn section. Really? I didn't know that.

49:49Yeah. There's lots of stuff you don't know. Yeah. There are. It's because you're young. So anyways, it was always inside. You know, just the three of us for the most part. How aware were you? I mean, to your point of there's no record company people around. How aware were you of the tension between Stevie and Motown at that point? Well, that only developed later. And I think that partially had to do with the fact where we started to go our separate ways. And that was after we moved to L.A. Got it. But he was renegotiating his contract with Motown. Not in the beginning. Not in the beginning. First part of music in my mind, Steve really didn't want to have too much to do with them.

50:36I think he knew sooner or later he would end up back there one way or another. but I think he was really very open-minded and wanted to do something really totally different. I don't think that Motown in general would have approved of me and Malcolm at all, okay? And they likely didn't even know about you. Two white Jewish boys, one from London and one from New York. You know, it was not what they were thinking about at Motown and having a true black label. Yeah, and very different from the way they had operated in the past with their in-house producers, Yes, yes. In-house songwriters. Everyone dressed the same, and they would dance the dancing sticks back and forth.

51:16Yeah. All these groups and quartets, the Jackson Five and the Supremes. And Steve really wasn't hearing the music that way. They would have him just come in. Somebody would do an arrangement. The in-house band would do a rhythm track. They'd have Steve come in and sing the rhythm track. And then Gene would go away and write the charts and stuff. and then after the mix they'd play it back for Steve. And he wasn't hearing, what he heard coming back wasn't even close to what he had in his head. So he had music of my mind. So we helped him cook up that first album cover with him with the glasses, with the little figures and stuff inside.

51:59With the figures of himself inside. Yeah, yeah. We cooked that up with Danny Blumenau who did these kind of artworks that were in the bathroom and the studio at Electric Lady when we went down there. Oh, yeah. So the artist who did the murals and things and the tile. Yeah. Yeah. We had him do it. But me, Malcolm, and Steve cooked all that stuff up between the three of us. And it was Malcolm who said, you know, we were doing music that's only been in your mind. And we said, ah, great title for the album. Talking Book, on the other hand, is my photography. The one where he's playing in the sand.

52:36Yes. I did that. Wow. I mean, we did everything together. Where was that photographed? High in the hills of Hollywood, six in the morning, just under the Hollywood sign. Wow. No way. Wow. Yeah. And that beautiful robe. Ola Hudson did that robe. And Ola Hudson is the mother of Slash. Incredible. Yeah. So really, everything colliding in different ways. but we had to leave Media Sound behind because we couldn't stay set up and to do the setup that we had with Steve it would take hours. Yeah, you couldn't break that down because it had to be the same. Yeah. So it was just around the time that Jimmy decided to leave the planet basically and Electric Lady was a brand new studio and ended up it was designed by my very dear friend to this day, John Storick who designed Electric Lady and also designed the cases for Tonto, those big involved round cases, the arcs, and lived, it started its life at Electric Lady Studios.

53:48Wow. And we moved in just, I guess, a few months after Jimmy passed. That must have been kind of a heavy time to be there in a way, right? Well, the thing is that Jimmy designed that studio, had a studio built like that because he wanted his own personal studio. There was no such thing as a personal studio in those days. This would be one of the first home studios. Well, here's a home studio that's lasted more than 60 years. They're still in business. But the place was wonderful. We went down there. Jimmy had passed away. There wasn't a lot of business. They didn't know what to do exactly. And we put our feet in those shoes.

54:27And they fit perfectly. And we started working at Electric Lady, and we worked there for about a year and a half. And it was a wonderful time, very creative time. What did you make of the music you were hearing from Stevie? I'll tell you this. I didn't think there was any other kind of music. Nothing else existed for me. I would sleep, and then I'd turn around and go back to the studio. We worked in Jewish holidays and Christmas, and any time that Steve was in town, we would work. And when we were not working with Steve because he was on the road or something like that, then we would work on Tonto and make more music.

55:06So we were living totally oblivious to anything, including any kind of business relationship we had with Stevie. Nothing mattered. Was that stuff discussed, the business stuff? It was discussed only once. At the beginning of our relationship, he said, hey guys, I want you to be directors of my company. And we said yes. And then we shook hands on that, and that was it. His production company or his publishing? It was a production company, I think. Okay. And it was never discussed again until it really became finally an issue because we didn't finally feel we were being felt unloved, sort of. And at the end of the deal, Motown also didn't put us in the ads or give us credits for things and the trades and stuff.

55:53And we knew that really they didn't really see us as being a part of Steve. Steve never had any issues with us. For us and Steve, it was always the music. We never really got into business or anything else until it became an issue toward the end of our relationship. And that was the reason for our parting of the ways. But we had a really good run of nearly five years. And Steve finally gave us a huge thank you at one of his concerts. And Steve and I have a very cordial relationship now, friendly and together. Do you hear from him ever? Yeah, I do. I just sent him a text message a few nights ago.

56:39Yeah. Talking about him maybe writing something for my book for openers, you know? Yeah, yeah. But we have a lasting friendship of more than 50 years, but it's not let's go out to dinner kind of friendship. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's a certain arm's length to it, and I totally understand that. And he has people that are working for him that have worked for him for 25 years. I did something with him, I think, a year and a half or two years ago. I did one mode track for his new record, and I was honored and happy to do it. I have a very decent relationship with him, and I know that everything in our relationship wasn't perfect, especially when it came to the business part of things.

57:19But that is the isness of the business. Yes. Okay. I can't change it. It's water under the bridge. But I know that what we did is way more important than a few shekels. Okay. We did something really major. Yeah. And for that, I have to thank by higher power. We did something that was really beautiful. Yeah. And really incredible in its way. We have to take another quick break, and then we'll be back with more from Robert Margalev.

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1:01:29Here's the rest of my conversation with Robert Margalev. Do you remember some of the early feedback you were getting from other people who weren't in the room with you guys making the music? Oh, there were always people going around the edges, coming and going. But finally, we moved out from L.A. Motown had just recently moved from Detroit to L.A. Right. And they really wanted to have Stevie back. and Stevie, we finished that first album, Music of My Mind, and he was assigned to Motown for that record. It was totally on Steve. And they really started agitating. We came out, we settled in a place called Crystal Studios, which strangely enough, the husk of that building is just on the other side of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine.

1:02:26And it's just a few blocks from where I first landed in L.A. Wow. Right there, right. Then wound up a record plant, right? Then came the record plant. And we couldn't stay at Crystal because it was only one room. And the main clients at Crystal had an incredible recording console there that Andrew Berlitter built, which to this day, I think, still sounds better than anything that was ever built to this day. Wow. Crystal Sorter was home to the acoustic rock set. I call them the denizens of Laurel Canyon. Okay. Okay. They were all of those kind of folky James Taylor kind of records. Were you into that?

1:03:08I loved it. I knew Joni. You did? Yeah. She used to come and listen to Stevie at Studio B at the record plant on a couple of occasions. Wow. And we went down to Fatburger and had Fatburgers together and decided to stop smoking. and I went to this place called the Schick Center. I don't know whether she ever went or not, but I haven't picked up a cigarette since. So, but at any rate - I think she's picked some up since then. I've seen some. What happened was we had to move because the place, the people were raising hell about us being in there all the time. Stevie sucked up all the oxygen. We had Tonto in there from the East Coast.

1:03:46We brought it out in a truck. It was there, you know, and people were saying, hey how am I going to get in and do my record Steve is totally doing everything and uh when Malcolm first came to to New York he worked at the record plant in New York for about six weeks before he went to media so he knew Chris and Gary Gary Kellgren right right so we got a call from Gary he says I hear you guys are looking for a studio and we said yeah he says come up and meet me at my house. Samir Malcolm would go up to his house, which was on Camino Palmeiro. It's been torn down since then. But it was the old Canadian embassy, and it looked like something from a Charles Adams cartoon, like a big haunted house.

1:04:30Right. And he said, listen, you bring Stevie for a year to the record plant. We'll build a studio for you exactly the way you want it. We'll do it completely and totally for Tonto and to have Stevie there. And we couldn't say no to that, right? So Gary brings out a bottle of cognac, and he pours everybody a drink, and we stand up, and we clink our glasses. And the minute the glasses clinked together, there was an earthquake. And the whole place was going like this. And I looked through into the kitchen, through the door from the dining room, and out the door of the kitchen, there was a swimming pool, and there was like a little tsunami in the swimming pool coming toward the back door, right?

1:05:15And the chandelier was going back and forth like this and uh i said god has his hand on our shoulder man and that's how we ended up at the record playing wow yeah how would stevie usually bring songs in would he come in and play them for you would he have a demo tape no not really he would uh sometimes he would improvise in the studio and come up with a song directly. Sometimes he would come in. He had like a little recording rig that he kept in his hotel room or at his house. Like I've never been to Stevie Wonder's house ever. Not in 50 years. Okay. I only know him as a denizen of the studio.

1:05:58He appears there. I have empathy, incredible empathy with him. And we work in the studio. When the studio is over, we go our separate ways we've never had like a friendship friendship do you know what i'm saying it's always been based around yeah around the work so improvising in the studio would sometimes a certain sound that you've programmed on tanto spark it was like jazz we would he would come up with a song we would come up with a sound okay and then he'd say more this less that and so on and so forth and generally we would create two or three separate voices on separate keyboards but they were all mono.

1:06:38If you really listen to those records and all the records that I do, they're very simple, okay? There's only a few voices. There's no waterfalls. There's no stylistic big key things. If there are keyboards, they're very simple like a Fender Rhodes or a Clavinet, like on Boogie on Reggae Woman, for example, okay? So if you listen to the records, you'll see there are only a few voices. And the simpler you make the records, the closer you can make the record sound. So, I mean, Steve was singing into an RE20, and the reason I like to use the RE20 is you could touch the microphone without making any mic noise because it was dynamic.

1:07:17And you wouldn't hear the thumbs. Because being unsighted, he had to feel where the microphone was to sing. Yeah. But it also gave me this kind of really dry, close sound that Malcolm and I really loved. You know, I just wanted to back up one minute. I want to talk about race relations and where we are now, which is horrific. But like we mentioned earlier, Steve had a real understanding of around the late 50s, early 60s. Martin Luther King, as a matter of fact, Stevie was the one who was behind getting Martin Luther King Day as an official American holiday. I think the song that really did it for me with Steve and really sort of a sign sealed and delivered me to his front door and really helped me make a deep emotional commitment to his work was a song called Living for the City.

1:08:21yeah okay i was already deep inside of uh you know what was going down south and the integration and the bus the bus boycotts and uh the little girls being escorted to school by armed marshals and stuff like that right so by the time we got with stevie and he started writing songs about the black social condition right i really deeply identified with that yeah there were a lot of songs that steve wrote that had these very very important and very key racial cues and understandings and his feelings about racism and to this day i celebrate those same feelings of humanism and equality it wasn't just the kind of the sound he was getting the music he was making it was the message as well yes all of the message of his songs yeah this i think was really sort of twanged my heart.

1:09:19I really sort of understood it, and I knew as both being Jewish and gay. I understood the fact that he suffered also inequality by being black and blind. And I always like to say between the two of us, we had it all, black, blind, Jewish, and gay. We had everything going for us. Okay? There we go. You know, I don't have anything to hide. I'm 83 years old. Who cares? But I understood the energy that Steve had toward the racial relationships and about humanity. And I think that many of his songs really relate to that. And I think that's what pushed my buttons more than anything else in his music.

1:10:07I mean, we could be inventive and crazy and do wonderful things and create sounds that never existed before. And it was sort of like electronica jazz where we would make a sound. We didn't know what an instrument was. We couldn't call it a this or a that. It was, I don't know, something that existed only as vibrating electrons in space. Yeah. And it would only be a sound after it fell out of the loudspeakers. Yeah. Right? It was a different kind of a head. It's incredible how, I mean, given that you were working with these inorganic sounds, you know, as you're saying, you can't place what the instrument is exactly.

1:10:43That doesn't exist. Well, they're organic, but we have to reach them a different way. You guys were speaking to the human experience while channeling sounds from, I don't know. Well, we lived inside the sounds. Yeah. When we structured and built them, sometimes we would start, we wouldn't know where we were going to end up. but somehow it all fell together it was a perfect union me malcolm and steve but four and a half years together how much music was recorded in those four and a half i would say maybe about 150 songs maybe more we had everything set up in the studio right so when he sat down to play he could just play and we recorded immediately right it's time when we were working with jeff beck at the same time and Jeff wanted a uh a song for his album he wanted maybe your baby yes yeah he wanted maybe your baby but somehow it turned to superstition and uh and Stephen already had a demo he said well you can't have maybe your baby because I want it for my record so he said but I'll write you something and that was superstition which we had already begun tracking but he Jeff played a demo of it, but Steve finished Superstition.

1:12:01But the interesting thing about it was we tracked Superstition. Steve went and he said, just put up the drums. We put up the drums. Steve walked into the studio, no guide vocal, no click track, nothing. Steve never played with a click track either. His head is a click track. And he sat down at the drums and he played for three and a half minutes. Then he came in and said, okay, that's it. Let's put a bass part on this and it turned into uh it turned into superstition the whole song was already in his head the drum takes one take one take wow was stevie's final take of superstition at all influenced by beck's version i honestly don't think so you don't think so i think they were very separate when uh barry gordy heard the rough of superstition as i recollect he said if you give that away, I'm going to raise hell.

1:12:56And that song turned out to be Stevie's first major hit record. And we were very glad. Nobody wanted to give it to Jeff because of that. How did you feel when it became the hit that it became, hearing it everywhere? You know, I'll tell you something. I didn't really care. If it wasn't in the studio coming out on the loud speakers, I had no opinion. Okay? I was not there to manage Stevie's career. I was not there to give Stevie any kind of advice when it comes to politics or dealing with a record label. I worked with and for Stevie Wonder, as did Malcolm. And we did what had to happen when it was eight bars long and it fell out of the loudspeakers.

1:13:37That is where I lived, okay? It was like architecture. Did you have any dealings with Barry Gordier, the label? Oh, yeah. What was that like? He was a very interesting, intense guy, had very specific ideas. he had come up with a very successful formula he had a major record company everybody called him the chairman not mr gordy okay he had a guy who was the president of the label called eward abner and abner was this little guy sort of looked like sammy davis jr and he always sat in this big office with this big high chair behind him with his sports jacket on the top of it and uh i came him and showed him the pictures of a talking book that i took and he said yeah we like those i'll give you 300 bucks so anyway should have had an agent with you yeah but that record cover really worked did anyone try to pick you up after this after like after you you come out of the whirlwind of working with stevie and you come out of that sort of well we work with guys like the eisley brothers we did three plus three right fight the power all of that stuff with the eisleys I went on to produce two albums with Billy Preston.

1:14:48So you were able to take some time and do those sorts of things. Yeah, we worked with the Isleys, but it was a different vibe. The Isleys already knew exactly what they wanted to record, with the exception of maybe how a solo was going to sound, like Fight the Power or Who's That Lady with the wonderful guitar solos. That great Ernie solo. Those solos, we did some very funny stuff to the guitar sounds with that. I think I used a Dolby encoder, right? But I only encoded it. I didn't decode it. I left it encoded because it made a really kind of raw sound with that effect. So those lead lines were recorded through a Dolby but not decoded and then mixed and limited afterwards.

1:15:35And that's how we got that kind of ripping solo sound. Wow. We were doing stuff, yeah. Wow. And of course, Ernest, Ernie Isley, he was a great guitar player. Who was his mentor and who lived at his house? Hendrix. Hendrix, right. You knew that. Incredible. You know your stuff. Was the experience of working with the Isleys as fulfilling as the work with Stevie? I get the sense that, as you described with Stevie, it being so all-consuming that maybe that was a more... Yeah, the Isleys was more a professional, quote-unquote, professional gig. They weren't interested in any production ideas from us.

1:16:12They had the songs prepared. They knew pretty much what they wanted to do. One of the senior Isleys was sort of like a traffic cop. He made sure everyone came to the studio on time. It was all very coordinated and basically more of a classical engineering gig than anything that was really creative on our part. We brought a lot of stuff we had worked on with Stevie to the table, which is what they wanted they came to the studio when we were working with Steve to meet us so I mean it was all kind of friendly and everything I can remember Michael Jackson coming to the studio to sing on Stevie's who's that lady do do wop it was Jackson 5 I have a picture of it somewhere really?

1:17:00yeah because I don't think there's a that I know of a Stevie song that might be sang on it. Yeah, on Stevie's song that he came to sing. Were other Motown acts coming through? Oh, you haven't done nothing. It was the song that Jackson sang on. Really? Yeah. You got to make a note on that one. I am, yeah. Are you having fun? I'm having a ball. Okay, that's what's important. Do you remember when Stevie almost died? Yes, I do. He just finished the second album, and I got a call, said Steve was in a car accident and he's in a coma. I almost fell off the console. I mean, I was in shock. And he was unconscious for two weeks.

1:17:42And he was in North Carolina. Malcolm and I got a call from the boss man, Mr. Gordy, the chairman. And he said, do you have access to Stevie's tapes? And we said yes. And he said, well, could you finish when something happened? to Steve? And I said, no. And he said, why? He said, because Steve specifically forbade us to give the tapes to nobody if they're not complete at Masters. Because we worked for Steve. We didn't work for Motown. We were not their employees. And we had to tell him no. And I remember that. And then Steve was gone for about a month. And we were working, doing other projects and stuff.

1:18:32And he came back and he was a little different after that. I think he learned about his own mortality. He received a very serious blow to the head. And I think it changed his perspective on his life. I really do. He wasn't the same kind of super emulence kind of having a sense of humor about a lot of things he was a lot more serious you know he was just more somber yeah well uh here's the picture of stevie's wrecked car right here you can if you want to see oh wow did you know the uh it was his cousin driving it did you know him uh let me look here i'll read you something we were just taking the completed album of Intervisions into mastery when disaster struck.

1:19:25On August 6, 1973, while he was on the road on an overnight drive to Durham, North Carolina, Stevie was sitting in the right front seat listening to a mix of the Intervisions album when a stray log dislodged from a lumber truck driving in front of them, striking Stevie in the head. He was in a coma for five days and spent two weeks in the Winston-Salem hospital. It was several months before Stevie made a full recovery. The accident changed him. He came out with a higher consciousness that comes with a near-death experience. Stevie said when he returned to the studio, I was definitely in a much better spiritual place that made me aware of many things that concern my life and future.

1:20:09He seemed more somber, more introspective, which I think showed in fulfilling this first finale, and as it turned out it was to be our final finale with Stevie. But it's supposed to be a two-part record, correct? Yes. What happened? I don't know. Motown was very against doing two album records because of the shipping issues, and you only could put half as many records in a case because there was two records in the thingy. They were all crazy because I wanted to, in Talking Book, I came up with the idea of putting braille on the cover. It made the records fatter, and they had to put one less record in the case of records, so they gave us static on that.

1:20:57Did you have to re-sequence for Felliness' first finale? No. The thing is about sequencing with Steve, if you notice, the records sort of blend one into another. Yeah, great. That was long before the DJs came up with that concept. Malcolm and I, Steve, we'd all sit at the console together, rehearse everything and do one side completely but in order to do something like that you had to really relate the keys from one song to the next song that the keys would work and also the tempos would work as well because the tempos had to be exactly right on on beat so we had a rehearsal that we used three machines to mix those records down and they were all done live like that and we would rehearse everything Steve me and Malcolm would all sit at the console together and we'd each have our stereo faders and everybody knew we put for me and malcolm we put uh china markers on the faders so we knew where everything was completely rehearsed you should get it three or four times but all those albums were mixed like that down like that with the segues the correct segues although i can recollect a lot of little details i honestly don't know what the hell happened okay yeah it was so self-realizing and so internalized that we lived ate and breathed stevie yeah okay we were totally a part of some kind of organic entity and it had a force field around it nobody fucked with us people left us alone toward the end of it when we were out here uh when we were recording here and steve had already signed this deal that's when people from motown really started meddling and getting in the way of our relationship.

1:22:41And sort of we were slowly at that point being de-emphasized by the label. That's why there was no credits on the Grammy wins thanking us or giving us any credit on the thank yous that appeared in the trade papers. And that's when we realized that I think it was Motown, not Steve in any way. But I think there were people at Motown who didn't want us around. They wanted black folks, basically. And I think that that was, and I'm not casting dispersions on them because I really understand the need for an identity and what was going on, but a lot of people didn't realize, and nor did we, including me and Stevie and Malcolm, really knew about that kind of energy.

1:23:23I think it was more outside, but it started to really grate on us at the end. And I think that's part of the reason we went our separate ways otherwise we would still be there 25 years later and we changed the world a little bit and for that i have great gratitude for that so thank you so much for making those records you're very welcome i'm glad i was able to do it

1:23:51thanks so much to wesley morris for talking about his latest project the wonder of stevie be sure to check that out on audible and thanks so much to robert margalev for sharing his creative history with Stevie Wonder. It's so insane to go to talk to somebody who worked that closely and intimately with Stevie. It just blew my mind. You can hear all of our favorite songs from that classic Stevie period along with some other works of Robert Margaleves on a playlist at brokenrecordpodcast.com Subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash brokenrecordpodcast where you can find all of our new episodes.

1:24:23Also, be sure to follow us on Instagram at thebrokenrecordpod. Broken Record is produced by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Ben Tolliday is our engineer. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for$4.99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus and add the podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, review us on your podcast app and share us with friends.

1:24:56Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.

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