Memorial Day weekend, May 1971. Media Sound Studios, New York City.
Chief engineer Malcolm Cecil is asleep in his third-floor apartment above the studio. Suddenly, the doorbell rings. Cecil stirs but the studio is closed this weekend. Another ring. Cecil peers out of the window. Standing below is a pal, bassist Ronnie Blanco. He’s with a familiar-looking man holding an album and wearing a pistachio-green jumpsuit.
Presumably at this point, Cecil rubbed his eyes several times.
'This is Stevie Wonder. He wants to see the synthesizer’
‘Ronnie says, “Hey, come on down, Malcolm! Bring the keys to the studio. I’ve got someone here that wants to see TONTO,”’ Cecil told Wax Poetics in 2013. ‘I told him, “OK! Let me throw something on.” I put on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and grabbed the studio keys. I walked down and opened the door. And Ronnie said, “Hey, man. This is Stevie Wonder. He wants to see the synthesizer.’
Cecil had never met Wonder, nor had he ever been in touch with the Motown superstar. He soon realised that Wonder was clutching a copy of Zero Time, the already-obscure album he’d recently made with Robert Margouleff under the name Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.
‘Stevie asked me, “Hey, man. Did you make this album?” I said, “Yes, I did. It was me and my partner Bob.” And he said, “Hey, man. Is this a keyboard instrument?” I told him, “Yes, it has a keyboard and knobs and lots of patch-cords.” He said, “Show me.”’
The biggest synthesizer on the planet
The instrument Wonder was so keen to see was TONTO (‘The Original New Timbral Orchestra’), the largest, multi-timbral polyphonic analogue synthesizer in the world, built by Cecil and bandmate Robert Margouleff. The pair had begun work on TONTO in 1969, shortly after Cecil, a bassist from London, started working at Media Sound.
One evening, he chanced upon a Moog Model III synthesizer in the studio. Curious about the bank of equipment covered in labels saying intriguing things such as “envelope generator”, “oscillator” and “voltage controlled amplifier”, he made some inquiries. The Moog belonged to Margouleff, who asked Cecil to teach him how to operate the studio mixing desk; in return he’d show Cecil how to operate the synth. Two weeks later, they set about building the biggest synthesizer on the planet.
Before long, TONTO was six foot tall, a stack of synths and experimental modules, and the pair began using it to make music designed to test its limits. Eager to share the results, Cecil and Margouleff formed Tonto’s Expanding Head and recorded Zero Time, a suite of progressive electronic music composed entirely on TONTO. Whereas synth-only albums had mainly been novelty recordings, Zero Time used the instrument to create prog symphonies and avant-garde soundscapes, with noticeably warmer tones than had previously been associated with synths.
Stevie Wonder was getting disillusioned
Zero Time was a commercial flop, but some copies found their way into influential hands. Cecil’s friend Ronnie Blanco was among them. In May 1971, Blanco was playing bass for Stevie Wonder in New York, standing in for Wonder’s regular bassist, Bob Cranshaw. Knowing that Wonder would be intrigued by Zero Time, particularly by the fact that it was all played on a single keyboard, Blanco played him a copy.
Cranshaw’s timing was perfect. Wonder had just turned 21, which meant the expiration of his Motown contract. For the past few years, Wonder had become increasingly disillusioned with the poor royalty rates and the lack of creative control his contract – signed when he was just 16 – afforded him.
Singles such as ‘For Once In My Life’ (1968), ‘My Cherie Amour’ (1969) and ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours’ (1970) tracked a growing maturity in Wonder’s sound and were international hits, giving him serious clout. Meanwhile, he’d been absorbing ever-more sophisticated, heavier and esoteric music like a sponge while writing and producing records for other Motown artists, such as the Spinners’ hit ‘It’s A Shame’. Under the radar, Wonder was growing up fast, and he was craving freedom.
'That was not Stevie'
Motown boss Berry Gordy expected Wonder to re-sign to the label, but the young star allowed his contract to run down. The night before Wonder’s 21st birthday, Gordy threw his charge an extravagant party on his Boston Boulevard estate. Wonder attended with this family but, unbeknown to Gordy had hired an entertainment lawyer who had estimated unpaid royalties owed to the star at $3.5 million.
The morning after, Gordy had a rude awakening. “Waiting for me at the office was a letter from a lawyer I’d never heard of disaffirming every contract Stevie had with us – effective upon his turning 21,” Gordy wrote in his autobiography, To Be Loved. “I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe we could have been together the night before like we were and he [did] not prepare me for something like this. That was not Stevie. But if it was, I was definitely going to tell him about it.”
An incensed Gordy hit back and before long a guilt-ridden Wonder apologised for the way things had been handled – and fired his lawyer. But any satisfaction on Gordy’s part was short-lived; Wonder informed Motown that he wanted an unprecedented 20% royalty rate, total artistic control of his music and his own publishing company.
A week after his birthday, Wonder sat down with Gordy and a court representative to hear the details of his trust fund payment from Motown, owed once he turned 21. Wonder was appalled to learn that, rather than the £3.5m he’d anticipated, the payment would be $100,000. This was the final straw. The star formally notified Motown that he’d be exercising his option to void his contract. Wonder finally had his freedom and, intent on making the music that had been formulating in his imagination, headed east to New York to make it.
'What is wrong with this keyboard?'
Which is where we came in. Excited and curious about the otherworldly music of Zero Time, Wonder asked Blanco to introduce him to the people – and the machine – who had made it. Following his unsolicited wake-up call, Cecil was delighted to show Wonder the ropes. ‘So he takes my elbow and I escort him to the studio and showed him the instrument,’ Cecil told Wax Poetics.
‘I put his hands over it and he realized that it wasn’t something that he could easily play. He tried to play it, but he couldn’t get it to sound like a normal keyboard, because in those days you could only get one note at a time. He asked me, “What is wrong with this keyboard?” I told him, “That’s how it works. It only plays one note at a time.” And then he got it.’
Before long, Wonder was in his element, and it quickly became apparent to Cecil that the music they were making should be captured for posterity. ‘Then we went over to a piano, he sat down and began to noodle on it, and by instinct I turned on the tape and we started to record,” Cecil said in Mark Ribowsky’s Signed, Sealed, And Delivered. ‘By the time we got to the second tune, he’s saying, “OK, let’s put some synthesizer on this.”
Within a few years, they had changed soul music forever
'Bob was away for the weekend but I called him and said, “Get your ass over here.” He showed up two or three hours later and we were still at it.' By the end of the weekend, Wonder, Cecil and Margouleff had recorded 17 songs together. Within a few years, they had changed soul music forever.
For Wonder, who’d never known anything but Motown’s strictly regimented, factory-like approach to making music, the freedom that the sessions offered was a revelation. In 2010, Cecil told the BBC Radio 4 documentary Stevie’s Wonder Men, ‘He was tired of having to play his songs to an arranger who would then go away and write the arrangement, record the track with the band, call Stevie in after it was recorded, tell him where he had to sing, what he had to sing, and then send him away again while they did the mix. And Stevie said it sounded nothing like what the song sounded like in his head.’
Wonder thrived in Media Sound, exploring the limitless possibilities that TONTO offered to translate his wildest musical ideas and the songs poured out of him. From that point, Wonder, Cecil and Margouleff were recording whenever possible, the tape constantly running to keep up with Wonder’s restless creativity.
'I had to break into the tape store'
‘We kept it rolling because we never knew when Stevie was going to come up with something,’ Cecil said in Signed, Sealed, And Delivered, ‘in fact, we fired more than one assistant for turning it off… We preserved everything – hours and hours of those tapes, with bits of hundreds of songs. We’d go over those tapes all the time, and if there was something really good we’d reference it, then later rewind it and say, “Hey Stevie what about this thing?” He’d go, “Oh yeah” and start singing to it and, like that, you had a song.’
Still, liberation comes at a cost and Cecil had one eye on the bottom line. ‘I had to break into the tape store, and I had no authority to do it, but I did it anyway,’ he told Wax Poetics. “I told Stevie, ‘Someone is going to have to pay for this tape at least.’ He said, “Oh, don’t worry. I just got money put into my trust fund from Motown because I just turned 21. I don’t have any contracts.”
'He explained the whole thing. He told Bob and me that he wanted us to be musical directors for his company and to help him get his music out there. He liked working with us, and we liked working with him.’
By far the most generous deal in Motown history
But before long, Wonder’s funds were dwindling and, at the recommendation of Cecil and Margouleff, he employed attorney Mike Vigoda to broker a new contract with Motown. Vigoda was an eccentric character but a tough customer. ‘To see him negotiate with Motown was amazing,' said Jay Lowy, vice president of Jobete Music, Motown’s publishing division. ‘He’d say, “This is what I want, this is how it’s going to be, goodbye.”’
In July 1971, Wonder signed a new, three-year contract with Motown. His royalty rate increased to 14%, he received an advance of more than $900,000 and a new publishing deal. The deal was by far the most generous in Motown history.
Wonder repaid the label with a run of stellar albums with Cecil and Margouleff at the helm. The first fruits of their labour, the aptly titled Music Of My Mind (1972) was a revelation – the grooves got thicker, the funk hit harder and the ballads cut deeper. Later that year, Talking Book pushed the sonic envelope even further while Wonder’s lyrics grew in maturity, embracing socially conscious themes and dealing with the aftermath of his divorce from Syreeta Wright.
Innervisions (1973) and Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974) went further out still, pushing musical boundaries, taking aim at the Nixon administration and exploring philosophy and spirituality. What’s more, the run of albums pushed Wonder to a previously unimaginable level of success, with 10 Grammy nominations across the period and millions of album sales.
Stevie Wonder had changed soul music had changed forever. And to think, it all started with a rude awakening.
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