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THE STORY OF HIGHER GROUND
by Johnny Black
Stevie Wonder has written songs that make people laugh, cry, dance and sometimes even change their lives. That’s as much as any artist can hope for but, in 1973, Stevie went much further and wrote a song that literally saved his life.
“Higher Ground was a very special song,” he explained in John Swenson’s biography, Stevie Wonder, “ I wrote it on May 11. I remember the date. I did the whole thing – the words, the music and recorded the track – in three hours. That’s the first time I ever finished a song so fast. It was almost as if I had to get it done. I felt something was going to happen. I didn’t know what or when, but I felt something.”
Higher Ground was written for his 14th album, Inner Visions, which was also his third collaboration with a pair of sonic architects, Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, better known as experimental synthesiser duo Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. They had helped him transform the soulful pop of his Little Stevie Wonder years, into the ground-breaking funk that characterised his coming of age.
“Stevie turned 21 on the thirteenth of May, 1971,” explains Cecil. “When you turn 21 in this country, any contracts you made prior are null and void because you're no longer a minor.” The effect of this was that when Cecil and Margouleff met Wonder just seven days after that birthday, he was bursting with new songs written over the previous three years which he had not recorded because he knew that any publishing profits from those songs would have gone to Motown’s publishing arm, Jobete Music.
With his contract re-negotiated, Wonder was ready to start recording again and, within hours of encountering Cecil and Margouleff in New York’s Electric Ladyland studio, they were working on new sounds that would re-shape the sonic palette of popular music.
“Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil,” Stevie told Rolling Stone in 1973, “They are responsible for [synthesizer] programming, and I just tell them the kind of sound that I want."
Their fruitful collaboration started with the album Music Of My Mind and continued into Talking Book and Innervisions. So while it’s true, and fairly astonishing, that Wonder not only wrote the music and lyrics for Higher Ground but also played all the instruments and acted as his own producer, the specific electronic sounds he was using were largely realised by Margouleff and Cecil.
Thus, when Wonder started building the track from his clavinet, he was playing it through a new sound filtering device, the Mu-Tron III, which brought to the keyboard a sound not unlike the wah-wah effect so beloved of guitarists at the time. Immediately, because of Margouleff and Cecil’s familiarity with such high-end technologies, the track sounded like nothing that had ever been recorded before.
They can’t, however, claim any responsibility for the fact that Wonder laid down his irresistibly danceable clavinet groove - the foundation of the entire song - with no drums and not even a click track, relying entirely on his own internal sense of rhythm to keep in time.
Topping it all off, the man who had once been content to warble Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day, created a lyric for Higher Ground that turned out to be even more mind-blowing than the music. Wonder had become gripped by the idea that his life was reaching a turning point emotionally, spiritually and physically, to such an extent that he felt his death might be imminent – and this was reflected in a lyric dealing with the concept of spiritual progression towards a higher plane through re-incarnation.
The song was released on the last day of July and, just six days later, on the way to a gig at Duke University in North Carolina, Wonder was seriously injured in a car crash. By the time he reached the North Carolina Baptist Hospital in nearby Winston-Salem, Wonder was in a coma, with his life hanging in the balance.
“I couldn’t even recognize him,” recalls his long-time friend Ira Tucker Jr. “His head was swollen up about five times normal size. And nobody could get through to him.”
With his vital signs perilously low, Wonder remained comatose for the best part of a week, until Tucker decided that maybe the healing powers of medicine could use a boost from a more spiritual resource. “I got right down in his ear and sang Higher Ground… his hand was resting on my arm and after a while his fingers started going in time with the song. I said, ‘Yeah! This dude is gonna make it.’”
The recovery was not instantaneous, but Tucker and Wonder both remain convinced that hearing Higher Ground was the turning point. In a statement issued shortly after his release from hospital, Wonder declared, “The only thing I know 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.”
Reflecting on the experience a year later for Crawdaddy magazine, he said, “what happened to me was a very, very critical thing and I was really supposed to die." Asked specifically about re-incarnation, he said that he wanted to believe in it, and noted that, “I wrote Higher Ground even before the accident. But something must have been telling me that something was going to happen to make me aware of a lot of things and to get myself together. This is like my second chance for life."
Unfortunately, not everyone around him felt he fully realised the potential of that second chance. “Stevie became much more controlling and less free with himself,” says Margouleff. “I think he began to realise he was mortal. I think he took a lot of medication after the accident because it was very severe. I think it gave him a very different perspective on his life. He became more and more famous and we became less and less important.”
Sour grapes perhaps, because Margouleff and Cecil were now on the way out of Wonder’s inner circle, but few critics would disagree with the idea that the essence of Wonder’s creative genius remains distilled on those early 70s collaborations and, effectively, ended with Innervisions.
None of this, however, diminishes Higher Ground, which remains a classic, covered by artists as diverse as Michael McDonald and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and even collecting a Grammy earlier this year (2003) as the title track of the latest album from veteran gospel group The Blind Boys Of Alabama.
(Source : this feature by Johnny Black originally appeared in Blender Magazine)
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by Johnny Black
Stevie Wonder has written songs that make people laugh, cry, dance and sometimes even change their lives. That’s as much as any artist can hope for but, in 1973, Stevie went much further and wrote a song that literally saved his life.
“Higher Ground was a very special song,” he explained in John Swenson’s biography, Stevie Wonder, “ I wrote it on May 11. I remember the date. I did the whole thing – the words, the music and recorded the track – in three hours. That’s the first time I ever finished a song so fast. It was almost as if I had to get it done. I felt something was going to happen. I didn’t know what or when, but I felt something.”
Higher Ground was written for his 14th album, Inner Visions, which was also his third collaboration with a pair of sonic architects, Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, better known as experimental synthesiser duo Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. They had helped him transform the soulful pop of his Little Stevie Wonder years, into the ground-breaking funk that characterised his coming of age.
“Stevie turned 21 on the thirteenth of May, 1971,” explains Cecil. “When you turn 21 in this country, any contracts you made prior are null and void because you're no longer a minor.” The effect of this was that when Cecil and Margouleff met Wonder just seven days after that birthday, he was bursting with new songs written over the previous three years which he had not recorded because he knew that any publishing profits from those songs would have gone to Motown’s publishing arm, Jobete Music.
With his contract re-negotiated, Wonder was ready to start recording again and, within hours of encountering Cecil and Margouleff in New York’s Electric Ladyland studio, they were working on new sounds that would re-shape the sonic palette of popular music.
“Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil,” Stevie told Rolling Stone in 1973, “They are responsible for [synthesizer] programming, and I just tell them the kind of sound that I want."
Their fruitful collaboration started with the album Music Of My Mind and continued into Talking Book and Innervisions. So while it’s true, and fairly astonishing, that Wonder not only wrote the music and lyrics for Higher Ground but also played all the instruments and acted as his own producer, the specific electronic sounds he was using were largely realised by Margouleff and Cecil.
Thus, when Wonder started building the track from his clavinet, he was playing it through a new sound filtering device, the Mu-Tron III, which brought to the keyboard a sound not unlike the wah-wah effect so beloved of guitarists at the time. Immediately, because of Margouleff and Cecil’s familiarity with such high-end technologies, the track sounded like nothing that had ever been recorded before.
They can’t, however, claim any responsibility for the fact that Wonder laid down his irresistibly danceable clavinet groove - the foundation of the entire song - with no drums and not even a click track, relying entirely on his own internal sense of rhythm to keep in time.
Topping it all off, the man who had once been content to warble Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day, created a lyric for Higher Ground that turned out to be even more mind-blowing than the music. Wonder had become gripped by the idea that his life was reaching a turning point emotionally, spiritually and physically, to such an extent that he felt his death might be imminent – and this was reflected in a lyric dealing with the concept of spiritual progression towards a higher plane through re-incarnation.
The song was released on the last day of July and, just six days later, on the way to a gig at Duke University in North Carolina, Wonder was seriously injured in a car crash. By the time he reached the North Carolina Baptist Hospital in nearby Winston-Salem, Wonder was in a coma, with his life hanging in the balance.
“I couldn’t even recognize him,” recalls his long-time friend Ira Tucker Jr. “His head was swollen up about five times normal size. And nobody could get through to him.”
With his vital signs perilously low, Wonder remained comatose for the best part of a week, until Tucker decided that maybe the healing powers of medicine could use a boost from a more spiritual resource. “I got right down in his ear and sang Higher Ground… his hand was resting on my arm and after a while his fingers started going in time with the song. I said, ‘Yeah! This dude is gonna make it.’”
The recovery was not instantaneous, but Tucker and Wonder both remain convinced that hearing Higher Ground was the turning point. In a statement issued shortly after his release from hospital, Wonder declared, “The only thing I know 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.”
Reflecting on the experience a year later for Crawdaddy magazine, he said, “what happened to me was a very, very critical thing and I was really supposed to die." Asked specifically about re-incarnation, he said that he wanted to believe in it, and noted that, “I wrote Higher Ground even before the accident. But something must have been telling me that something was going to happen to make me aware of a lot of things and to get myself together. This is like my second chance for life."
Unfortunately, not everyone around him felt he fully realised the potential of that second chance. “Stevie became much more controlling and less free with himself,” says Margouleff. “I think he began to realise he was mortal. I think he took a lot of medication after the accident because it was very severe. I think it gave him a very different perspective on his life. He became more and more famous and we became less and less important.”
Sour grapes perhaps, because Margouleff and Cecil were now on the way out of Wonder’s inner circle, but few critics would disagree with the idea that the essence of Wonder’s creative genius remains distilled on those early 70s collaborations and, effectively, ended with Innervisions.
None of this, however, diminishes Higher Ground, which remains a classic, covered by artists as diverse as Michael McDonald and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and even collecting a Grammy earlier this year (2003) as the title track of the latest album from veteran gospel group The Blind Boys Of Alabama.
(Source : this feature by Johnny Black originally appeared in Blender Magazine)