Stevie, Guided and Empowered

‘YOU CAN TELL HIM THE TRUTH, THAT’S WHAT HE WANTED’

“Frogs bring good luck,” said Diana Ross’ then-husband, talent manager Bob Ellis, as he sat in his Sunset Boulevard office in the company of a respected record producer, with frog figurines on his desk and on nearby tables.

      “Ever since then,” writes Robert Margouleff – that producer – in his forthcoming autobiography, “I, too, have kept a small brass frog on my desk for good luck.”

      It is observations like that which make Shaping Sounds an engaging piece of work by Margouleff, best-known – with the late Malcolm Cecil – for helping to empower Stevie Wonder and co-produce the four extraordinary albums of the 1970s by which he is most often measured and revered: Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale. (The memoir is written with musician/educator Jim Reilly, and due for publication by Jawbone Press on May 19.)

Due out on May 19

      And then there were the off-duty moments. “Malcolm offered him a puff on a joint,” recalls Margouleff when Wonder once visited his house in Santa Monica Canyon. “He sat quietly for a few minutes and said, ‘It’s making my head feel tight.’ He didn’t dig it at all. It was the only time in all the years I’ve known him that I’ve seen Stevie use anything.”

      Another such observation? At the Record Plant recording studio in Los Angeles, “Stevie mastered air hockey in the canteen,” Margouleff remembers, “making some employees question if he was really blind.”

      Technically, Margouleff and Cecil were credited as “associate producers, engineering, Moog programming” on that quartet of Wonder works. They were much more, of course, and that’s a familiar tale. Both men have spoken in the past about their Wonder years, including for The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits. “He is very straight to the point, very clear on what he wants,” Cecil told me in 1991. “You can also tell him the truth, you could tell him what you really thought. That’s what he wanted, and he would listen to us.”

      “That was a great thing we had,” Wonder confirmed to Rolling Stone’s Elias Leight upon Cecil’s death in 2021. “We always gave our opinions. Fortunately for me, I was overly critical. I could be inside hearing it, but also as someone saying, ‘How do I feel about the way that sounds outside of being an artist?’ ”

      Margouleff knew about artists, not least the idiosyncratic, challenging circle around Andy Warhol during the making of Ciao! Manhattan, several years before he met Wonder. This was a provocative “underground” movie co-produced by Margouleff, reports of which may have even caught the attention of a few Motown employees in Detroit. He figured in a Grand Rapids Press report in 1968 when one of the movie’s “stars” was tried on narcotics charges in the Michigan city of Allergan.

THE SAME TRIBE, ANOTHER PLANET

      “We were well into Ciao! when, on one of my nighttime adventures in the East Village, I heard some strange electronic beeping and blooping coming from an eccentric nightclub called Cerebrum. I went inside and stuck my nose into the sound booth, where a few modules from a Moog synthesizer were set up on the floor.” He adds, “In that single moment, I had fallen in love with the synthesizer – and, as it turned out, I loved it more than making movies.”

      The synthesizer and related technology – in particular, The Original New Timbral Orchestra (TONTO) – are, of course, what attracted Wonder to New York’s Mediasound studio over the Memorial Day weekend of 1971. Margouleff had joined the firm the year before, and soon afterwards, British-born Cecil came on board as its chief engineer. “He and I instantly realized that we belonged to the same tribe and that both of us came from another planet,” declares the Shaping Sounds author. Together, the pair guided Wonder as he explored these horizons and revolutionised his music.

Malcolm (left) and Bob with their Grammys for best engineered recording, namely, Innervisions

      And so the book offers in detail the trio’s working relationship in New York and Los Angeles (and occasionally London) from 1971-74. “Usually Stevie would play keyboards and sing a guide track simultaneously, then build the rest of the song around that,” writes Margouleff, getting specific about “Superstition,” for one. “He played the entire drum track for over five minutes, not singing at all, with nothing else to guide him.” For the Hohner clavinet on the track, “We hooked it up to all kinds of funny guitar boxes, like a Mu-Tron Bi-Phase, a wah-wah pedal, and various distortion, delay, and echo boxes.” Margouleff adds: “No one else, before or since, plays the clavinet like Stevie Wonder.”

      Not only music was an inspiration: Cecil would read him excerpts from George Orwell’s 1984. “One day, Stevie arrived at the studio and announced that he’d written a new song.” It was “Big Brother,” with its theme of a monitoring, malignant state (“You say that you got me in your notebook/Writing it down everyday”). About “Living For The City,” Margouleff summons specifics: the use of an Electro-Voice RE20 mike to record vocals, with Wonder singing two inches in front of it. “This produced a proximity effect…giving the vocals a close, dry, intimate sound. It felt like you were standing next to him, his voice unfolding in your head.”

      About “Boogie On Reggae Woman,” Margouleff remembers the acoustic piano being recorded in stereo from the player’s point of view. “You can feel the motion as Stevie moves from low to high. We controlled the width of all the images with pan pots and added very little reverb or echo. Stevie played a traditional blues harmonica, not his usual chromatic one.”

      There is more to Shaping Sounds than Motown’s most admired living musician. With Cecil but also without, Margouleff collaborated with many others, including the Isley Brothers, DEVO, David Sanborn, the Doobie Brothers, Minnie Riperton, Weather Report, Billy Preston (whose manager was the afore-mentioned Bob Ellis) and, for Motown, Wilson Pickett.

Bob and Malcolm: listed near the bottom

      For the Isleys, he has nothing but praise, and calls time spent with Ernie, in particular, a sonic adventure. “We developed a very original sound for Ernie’s lead guitar parts. We recorded his amp through a Dolby 361 noise reduction unit, but didn’t decode the signal. We left it raw and then compressed it with a Flickinger tube limiter.” (Of course they did.) And when the Isleys’ album was finished, “O’Kelly brought in a briefcase with a stack of hundred-dollar bills and paid our $12,000 fee in cash.”

      Perhaps the most candid part of Margouleff’s memoir is the chapter recalling the end of his and Cecil’s relationship with Wonder. When the star collected each of four Grammys in person in March 1974, his thank-you list delivered during the awards telecast excluded his associate producers. “The lack of recognition stung.” When Wonder bought a page in Billboard to express gratitude to his team, “Malcolm and I were listed at the bottom of the ad, just above the staff of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”

      By then, it also seemed apparent that Motown and others in Wonder’s circle were diminishing or disregarding the pair, even as they prepared to work with him on what would become Fulfillingness’ First Finale. “The label’s strategy was to make Stevie seem more like a solitary, all-powerful, highly capable genius.” Margouleff continues, “No one, least of all Malcolm or I, would ever deny Stevie’s incomparable genius, but we were responsible for many of the textures and sounds that became forever associated with Stevie Wonder.”

      The end came at the Record Plant studio in Los Angeles (which earned its own book last year). Recording a vocal with Wonder, Margouleff and Cecil found themselves surrounded by his ever-growing entourage, talking, voicing their opinions, smoking weed, bringing it into the control room, and otherwise disturbing the session. When Cecil called out the crowd, the artist took issue: “Hey, man, don’t talk to my friends that way.”

      “Finally,” concludes Margouleff, “Malcolm stood up from the console and said, ‘Then perhaps they can help you make your album.’ He walked out and didn’t return. That was it. It was over. I spent the next week or two trying to make peace, but the angels had left the building.”

      Perhaps the frogs had, too.

Book notes: the passage of time evidently healed wounds between Stevie, Bob and Malcolm. At the end of Shaping Sounds, Margouleff notes that he and Wonder “have stayed in touch over the years,” and that when Cecil died in 2021, the musician called him with condolences. (For his part, Cecil helped Wonder with engineering and programming for his film score for Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever in 1991.) “Over the past several years,” writes Margouleff, “Stevie has consistently acknowledged Malcolm and me and our contribution to his work.”

Music notes: this latest WGB playlist features a selection of tracks from the four albums on which Stevie Wonder worked with Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil. They’re in chronological order of release, and also include the very last number which the “associate producers” recorded with Wonder, “They Won’t Go When I Go,” according to Shaping Sounds. The playlist closes with a cut from Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever soundtrack, “Gotta Have You.” The movie project reunited the Motown star with Cecil, and several of the instruments on this particular track were synthesizer-fuelled, including bass, horns, guitar and organ.