Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  "Yeah, well," says Mick, "they're just greedy and stu-pid, cutting their own necks to spite their noses. We'll just put out a live album of something else, maybe some old tour stuff, maybe some new things, maybe a mish-mash"-and probably in the fall, since the Stones are now finishing up the new studio album for release in March or April.

  What's this about your being part of the high society "Cat Pack" in New York?

  That's just a magazine thing.

  And the Best-Dressed List?

  That, too. I really do my best not to be well dressed.

  How has Bianca changed you, if she has at all?

  I don't like talking about women.

  What about being a father?

  I don't want to talk about family either.

  [Room service interrupts with coffee: I ask again about his baby daughter, jade.]

  I don't see the baby; I'm always fuckin' on the road. It's my own choice, but I'm fucking negligent, I just am. But when I was a kid, my father was away a lot. It's important to be there in the formative years of childhood, but I'm not there. And short of carrying the kid about in the next room, which I also don't particularly dig, you just see your kid when you can, same as anyone else. [Changing voice:] IT'S THE AMERICAN WAY.

  Then why did you choose to become a father?

  I didn't; that's why I don't want to talk about it. "Why do I have a child?" I have lots of other children that I also like.

  Charlie will talk about parenthood. Charlie will stay in South of France all the time. I just don't. Even two weeks in one place gets to be a maximum. The only time we stay anywhere longer is to finish off an album. I could go back to South of France but I never liked it there; soon as we cut the first album we left; I left im-me-diately. I visit Ireland a lot; I had a house there for six months, and I prefer London, but I can't go there. So I'm very happy moving every two weeks. I've got it down.

  Onstage, on that shiny white floor, I see you as kind of a child, a kid playing in the kitchen, your older brothers standing around ignoring you.

  [Mick, laughing] I was going to make popcorn on the side of the stage. This is the last year of the rose petal, actually.

  See, we had a lot of different shows for Japan: we were just building up for that. We were going to do seven shows in one place-we've never done that before-and by the time you've done three or four, there's all kinds of things you can do, fuck around. I was going to cook popcorn, hundreds of things, we were really mad, had it all going.. .But it needed two weeks, rehearsal, and they never gave it, the State Department, God bless `em.

  Anyway, we didn't do a fuckin' show in Japan, so it didn't matter. I was actually more brought down because I would've really gotten it off and would've got all the popcorn up in crates and hundreds of other gimmicks and crap.

  People always seem amazed to see you playing harmonica on "Sweet Virginia." It's lipsynced, isn't it?

  [Mick, laughing] Yes. I'm tolerable, but I've forgotten it all. You have to play every day for that-however, your mouth bleeds. That's the problem. You go home to see your old lady and you're bleeding. [Into a Manchester growl] .....'Ello, Dahlin," and your mouth is all covered with blood....

  I can just see Ralph Steadman doing your next album cover.

  [Mick portrays Steadman submitting his work:] "I'm not sure if this is really gonna sell the album!"...

  So what's the cover going to be like?

  Aw, fuck, you know, some bullshit or other. [Brightly to the tape machine, to the public.] It's what's inside that counts. 'Sgonna be quite a good album, folks. [Shrinking, into a wisp.] It's gonna be a bit different from the last one. Ahh...it's gonna be evocative, and romantic and tender and loving.

  What about the song, "Starfucker"?

  That's the only song with any slice of cynicism. All the others are into.. .beauty. [The violins swell as Mick continues.] It's very difficult to write about those sort of primitive emotions-without being cynical about it; that's when you sound old. I mean, if you can't go into a coffee shop and sort of fall in love with every glass of coffee, and listen to the jukebox-that's difficult to portray in a song.

  [Mick continues to dismiss himself as a songwriter and performer; he said the Forum benefit for the Nicaragua earthquake victims had good bits but was just a warm-up; so, in fact, were the Honolulu shows. Then after it gets good and revved up, slicing through the winds, the band coasts. And then there were the old days.]

  You know what we used to do in the South? We would go on-and if the audience wasn't very good, we'd do fifteen minutes and go off.

  Honolulu remembers that. I heard that in the 1966 show here you did twenty-two minutes and were drunk.

  [Laughing again] Yeah, twenty minutes-but I wasn't drunk. I'm usually pretty straight when I go on. You just do it automatically. You're completely off your head. Completely around the twist. I mean, you can try and get fucked up if you want, but then, basically you're fucked up anyway.

  Mick, after the Japanese refusal of your visa-are you sorry that you ever took drugs?

  [Laughing again, louder than ever, what kind of interview IS this?] NO! I'M GONNA GO AHEAD RIGHT ON TAKIN' 'EM! [Then, seriously, maybe] I don't take drugs. I don't approve of drugs, and I don't approve of people taking drugs unless they're very careful. Most people can't control themselves, they're not happy enough just to get a bit high; they've got to get fucked up all the time.

  What about that report about all of you being arrested for using heroin in France?

  That's propaganda. That's what propaganda is, isn't it-a distortion of the real facts. That's what fucked us up; everyone thought we'd been arrested on heroin charges. That's bullshit. They'd love to have us on heroin charges, I'll admit, that's their dream. But so far they haven't managed to. They're jumpin' the gun.

  What about Keith?

  Same. Completely jumped the gun. They'd like to arrest him and put him in prison, I suppose. Like to do it to all of us. [Pouting] But they can't, in my mind ...[long pause].. .because they're full of shit. [Laughing, again, then spitting, huffing out the words] Disgusting people... fascist pigs. They really are!

  THE LAST TIME I SAW KEITH RICHARDS, he was heading out of the Rainbow Tower, heading, with Taylor, Jagger, and Watts into a station wagon towards the Honolulu airport. Again, he turned to me, told me what hotel he'd be at next, how he really would like to cooperate. I said thanks and turned away to my own friends, still not sure what the story would be.

  -March 1, 1973

  Rolling Stone

  THE FORMERLY

  little 5tu!e ffloiidr

  t was at the Stones' benefit for Nicaragua's quake victims that I met a young man-a boy, really-who wanted to be a rock journalist. It turned out that Rolling Stone was just a stepping-stone-a big one, but a stepping-stone, nonetheless, to a wildly successful career as a screenwriter and film producer.

  At least that's how Cameron Crowe remembers our first meeting. I thought we met at the Sunset Boulevard offices of Gibson & Stromberg,the-I mean, the-most powerful rock publicity firm of its time. I remember him shyly handing over a few writing samples, and my promising to read them on my PSA flight back to San Francisco.

  Where we met doesn't matter. What happened next did. I liked what I read-he was informed and energetic, and his writing was straightforward and readable. And I liked Cameron. He had a disarming grin; an aw-shucks way about him that put people at ease. Good qualities for a reporter, I thought. I gave him an assignment, then learned that he was all of 16 years old. No matter. That is, if he delivered.

  As fate would have it, Crowe's first piece-a visit with the country-rock band, Poco-ran in the issue in which I had a feature on another prodigy: Stevie Wonder.

  Wonder had signed with Motown when he was young enough to be labeled, on his first album, as "the 12-year-old genius." Nine years later, he was 21 and standing up for himself.

  I went into the assignment thinking it could become a full-length Rolling Stone interview. It didn't turn out that way.
Wonder's time was limited, and, having just renegotiated a tough new deal with Motown, he referred a number of questions to his management. Still, he spoke forcefully about his newfound power, about his recent tour with the Rolling Stones, about blindness, and about his future-in musicand far beyond. "I want to get into as much weird shit as possible," he said.

  We billed the resulting question-and-answer session as a "conversation."

  " I REMEMBER ONE TIME we were in Puerto Rico, and it was a sunshiny day, " said Ira Tucker. 'And Stevie was saying it was gonna rain. He said he could smell the moisture in the air, and we were all laughing at him. Three hours later, sure enough, it came. A hailstorm!"

  What Tucker-an assistant to Stevie Wonder for five years now-was saying was that Wonder wasn't handicapped. Born blind, yes. Hampered, no.

  "He can hear," Ira continued, here in his Holiday Inn room across a concrete bridge from Chinatown, San Francisco, "like when I get stoned and listen to the radio, and then I can pick up things. He's there all the time." Tucker sat back in a yellow Tshirt named after Wonder's latest single, "You Are the Sunshine of My Life." "He even turns the lights on and off when he goes to the bathroom," said Ira. "What for, I don't know. He said it's 'cause he hears everybody else do it. Click, you go in, click, you're out. So he does it, too. But he goes to the movies, runs from place to place, going out to airports by himself. And on planes people think he's a junkie 'cause he sits there with these glasses on, and his head goes back and forth, side to side, when he feels good..."

  STEVIE WONDER ENTERED THE SYNAGOGUE for a post-concert party Motown was throwing for him. Half a year after the tour with the Stones, he was completing his show of new strength. He had conquered New York a month ago; here, he was headlining two shows, at Winterland and at the Berkeley Community Theater. He sold out both shows and won over both audiences. For the wider, whiter crowds he now draws, Wonder mixes together an Afro consciousness, a jazz/soul/rock/synthesized-up music, medleys of old hits and bits of other people's hits and, in one quick exercise in excess, a shot of one-man-band razzmatazz, as he moves from drums to electric piano to ARPwired clavinet to guitar to harmonica. What he cannot achieve through eye contact is reached by his output of energy, by a music that is by turns loving and lusty, that tells how Stevie Wonder cherishes freedom and how he uses it.

  And the music, sure enough, reflects the man.

  For the party, Wonder put aside his Afro gown and shark's-tooth necklace and dressed up in a champagne gold suit, matched by a plaid bow tie and metallic copper platforms stacked four inches high. He plopped down onto the floor to talk with people; he played the harmonica; with Coco, his most constant companion since his divorce last year from Syreeta Wright, he explored the building. Upstairs, Stevie sat in a pew, feeling the airiness of the room. Suddenly, the synagogue was filled with "Superstition." The disc jockey at KSAN, Buzzy Donahue, had been alerted, and she was putting together a string of Wonder hits. Stevie's head snapped up, started to go from side to side.. .You would've thought he was a junkie...

  Stevie was born Steveland Morris on May 13th, 1950, in Saginaw, Michigan; he was the third oldest in a not particularly musical family of six children. They moved to Detroit in the early fifties, where they lived a lower-middle-class life. Despite his blindness, Stevie was never treated special by his family; in fact, he claims, he hung out more than his four brothers did. He listened to a radio show in Detroit called Sundown and got filled with blues and jazz, He began playing the piano, and by age 11, he was also playing drums, "harmonica, bongos and hooky." He would play with a cousin, a friend of the brother of Ronnie White of the Miracles. White auditioned Stevie and took him to Motown, where staff producer Brian Holland listened. Motown signed him and advertised him as a 12-year-old genius.

  Now in his eleventh year in show business, formerly Little Stevie Wonder is finally in absolute control.

  "He feels he's back to making music again, " said Ira Tucker. "There was a lull for a time, from the time he was 17 to Music of My Mind (which followed Where I'm Coming From in Wonder's post-Signed Sealed and Delivered progression in music). After two fiveyear contracts with Motown, Stevie was looking around, stalled six months, finally negotiated six weeks over a 120-page contract, and made a deal. He got his own publishing-an unprecedented achievement for any Motown artist-and a substantially higher royalty rate (guessed at 50 percent by one close associate; Stevie would say only that he felt "secure").

  "It was a very important contract for Motown," said Wonder's attorney, Johannan Vigoda, "and a very important contract for Stevie, representing the artists of Motown. He broke tradition with the deal, legally, professionally-in terms of how he could cut his records and where he could cut-and in breaking tradition he opened up the future for Motown. That's what they understood. They had never had an artist in thirteen years; they had singles records, they managed to create a name in certain areas, but they never came through with a major, major artist. It turned out they did a beautiful job."

  Stevie Wonder now writes and produces for himself; he books his own concerts; he manages himself, and he can freelance at will. He is producing a second LP for Syreeta and one for the Supremes. He has worked in sessions with Eric Clapton, Graham Nash, and Jeff Beck: on tour, he jammed with the Stones.

  On the road and off the stage, Stevie spends his time in his hotel room, composing on a clavinet wired up to an ARP synthesizer, writing two or three tunes a day. He also explores, walking through Chinatown in gold lame, head swaying from side to side as he passes the stores and smells the fish, the ducks, the pickled greens. And he loves to talk. He establishes rapport on the basis of astrological signs and otherwise talks in black hippie fashion, zigzagging, sometimes from Pollyannish to apocalyptic.

  I T'S A M A Z I N G , I been in the business ten years, going on eleven now, and I look back and see so many things, changes; it's almost like I'm an old person sometimes.... The musical changes, how different eras have come and gone, a lot of people that I thought would be major people have died. Otis, Jimi Hendrix...

  It's been really amazing.. .like when certain things I felt were gonna happen, I'd have dreams. I had a dream about Benny Benjamin [Motown's first studio drummer, who died of a stroke in 1969]. I talked to him a few days before he died; he was in the hospital. But in my dream I talked to him; he said, "Look, man, I'm...I'm not gonna make it." "What, you kiddin'!" The image...he was sitting on my knee, which means like he was very weak. And he said, "So, like I'm leavin' it up to you." That was like a Wednesday, and that following Sunday I went to church and then to the studio to do a session: we were gonna record "You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover," and they said, "Hey, man, we're not gonna do it today, Benny just died."

  He died without notice. I mean, nobody really knew who he was.

  Man, he was one of the major forces in the Motown sound. Benny could've very well been the baddest-like [Bernard] Purdie. He was the Purdie of the sixties. But unknown.

  Why unknown?

  Well, because for the most part these cats'd be in the studios all day, and as musicians they weren't getting that recognition then, you know. People weren't really that interested in the musicians.

  Couldn't they also have had jobs with performing groups?

  They'd do clubs: but Benny would be late for sessions, Benny'd be drunk sometimes. I mean, he was a beautiful cat, but...Benny would come up with these stories, like [in an excited, fearful voice]: "Man, you'd never believe it, man, but like a goddamn elephant, man, in the middle of the road, stopped me from comin' to the session so that's why I'm late, baby, so [clap of hands] it's cool!" But he was ready, man. He could play drums, you wouldn't even need a bass, that's how bad he was. Just listen to all that Motown shit, like "Can't Help Myself " and "My World Is Empty Without You Babe" and "This Old Heart of Mine" and "Don't Mess with Bill." "Girl's All Right with Me," the drums would just pop!

  Did Benny teach you a lot about drumming?

  Yeah, you can hear it, you know. I learne
d from just listening to him.

  Is it true that you put out a drum album once?

  Well, I put out an album that I played drums on, called The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie. I did another album which was called Eivets Rednow about' 68, an instrumental with 'Alfie" and a few other things... "Eivets Rednow" being "Stevie Wonder" spelled backwards.

  Everybody knew who it was right away...

  Some people did, some didn't. As a matter of fact, there was a cat in the airport that came up and said, "Hey, man" [laughs], he said, "Man, these whites takin' over everything," he says. "Look, I heard a kid today, man, played Alfie' just like you, man!" "Oh, yeah, this cat named Rednow?" "Yeah, that's it!" I said, "Ooooh, man, that cat is-well, don't worry about him" [laughs].

  You've said that the first song that you ever wrote was "Uptight," but the credits were given to Sylvia Moy, Henry Cosby, and an "S. Judkins." Was that you?

  Well, Judkins is my father's name. But it's crazy to explain it. Morris was on my birth certificate and everything, but Judkins was the father. I took his name when I was in school. We just signed the song contract like that.

  You signed "Wonder" on songs like "I'm Wondering" and "I Was Made to Love Her."

  Well, that was later; I decided I wanted people to know that I wrote those songs.

  How did you get the name Wonder?

  It was given to me by Berry Gordy. They didn't like "Steve Morris," so they changed it.

  You weren't an immediate hit, were you? You put out a record called, I Call It Pretty Music.

  It was a thing that Clarence Paul wrote.. .an old blues thing.. .The first thing I recorded was a thing called "Mother Thank You." Originally it was called "You Made a Vow," but they thought that was too lovey for me, too adult.