Planting the Seeds of History
A NEW BOOK CAPTURES YEARS OF WONDER
In the early hours of Friday, November 10, 1972, they gathered. The venue was the Record Plant recording studio on Los Angeles’ West 3rd Street. Stevie Wonder was there – it was his session – together with fellow musicians Ray Parker Jr. (guitar), Ollie Brown (drums) and Keith Stevens (congas). The AFM contract for the night showed the booking as 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., hours not unusual for Wonder when working.
Two songs were committed to tape, according to the union paperwork: “Cause I Love You” and “All That’s In Love.” Wonder aside, each of the players earned $236.25 for their work. The following night (once again at 1:00-5:00 a.m.), Wonder, Stevens and Brown were joined by Steve Madaio (trumpet) and Scott Edwards (bass), when “Tin Soldier” was recorded. In particular, Madaio must have put in considerable work, earning $472.50 – the equivalent of $3,600 today.
Malcolm Cecil navigates TONTO (photo: William K. Matthias)
Such contractual detail can’t begin to tell the whole story of Wonder’s momentous output of the 1970s, of course. Was it during that November ’72 session that “All In Love Is Fair” was born? Was “All That’s In Love” a different song? Or was whoever filled in the AFM sheet merely taking a guess at its title?
What helps to paint a more contextual picture is Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant Studios, the newly-published book about the revered studio that was Record Plant. Wonder was but one of the scores of famous names who used the room to record, shape and advance their music and their careers, including the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Sly Stone and Bruce Springsteen. All of them figure in Buzz Me In in one way or another.
The authors are Martin Porter and David Goggin; the latter was for more than 25 years a confidant and close associate of the studio’s co-founder, Chris Stone, who died in 2016. The pair interviewed an impressive number of music industry professionals, including Malcolm Cecil and Bob Margouleff, the magicians who helped Stevie Wonder to deliver four milestones of 20th century culture: his albums Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale.
BOOKED BY THE YEAR
Cecil and Margouleff have told their life stories before, and how TONTO, once the world’s largest music synthesizer, inspired and facilitated Wonder’s creativity. Twelve years ago, Cecil gave an extensive lecture for the Red Bull Music Academy; he and Margouleff were also heard in a notable BBC Radio 4 documentary, Stevie’s Wonder Men, in 2010. And yours truly was fortunate enough to interview both in 1991 for The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, chronicling their work.
What Porter and Goggin’s 384-page epic includes are compelling details and anecdotes of Wonder’s recording process: how, when and where he did it. After meeting and working with Cecil, Margouleff and TONTO in 1971 at New York’s Mediasound studio, he relocated to Los Angeles. There, Crystal Recording became his temporary home until Cecil and Margouleff “cut a deal for an exclusive one-year residency at Record Plant Studio B,” according to Buzz Me In, “a relatively small room with a quirky Quad 8 console, right across the hall from the Jacuzzi.”
Stevie in Record Plant’s Studio B
“Of course, we were big shots at that point,” Margouleff remembered. “We were just finishing up Music Of My Mind, which we had started in New York. We negotiated and ended up with what we considered a very favourable deal, because we were, at that point – just think of it – booking a studio by the year…not by the hour, by the minute, or the day, or the week.”
The arrangement yielded an isolation booth for TONTO, as well as a private vault for Wonder’s tapes. “Everything was recorded in quad and mixed down to stereo, which created the underlying aural palette of Stevie Wonder’s Record Plant sound.” Margouleff went on, “By recording in quad, Stevie occupied the same space as the music. It wasn’t in front of him like a picture frame. He was literally inside the music.
“During session breaks, Stevie made use of the facilities. ‘Little Stevie’ had grown into a six-foot-tall man, a star, and there was no shortage of young women willing to join him in the Jacuzzi. Somehow, he was always able to pick out the prettiest ones. A favourite prank was freaking them out by removing his sunglasses to reveal two unnerving, clouded pupils.”
UNDER DIFFERENT NAMES?
It appears that the Motown star’s permanency at Record Plant began during the second half of 1972. American Federation of Musicians paperwork shows him working at New York’s Electric Lady in May that year (“Superstition” being among tracks developed there) and Los Angeles’ Crystal Recording in June (“Maybe Your Baby,” “Tuesday Heartbreak”). From September onwards, it was Record Plant.
Wonder’s recording habits defied precise timelines, though, and AFM contracts are testimony to how prolific he was, but not necessarily to the outcome. During the first week of November ’72, for instance, he cut tracks at Record Plant identified as “Grasshopper,” “Bumble Bee” and “Funkville,” none of which appear to have been issued as such – although those may have been working titles for songs subsequently released under different names.
Margouleff and Cecil, back in the day
Buzz Me In contends that “Living For The City,” for one, was recorded in just two days, but required an additional six months of editing. It also notes that “a cast of Record Plant employees spoke the parts in the song’s famous arrest vignette.” However, Bob Margouleff recalled for me that at least some of those parts were cut in Great Neck, New York, where Jean Margouleff was mayor. “We went out one rainy afternoon with a stereo Nagra [recorder], took a policeman – because my father was the mayor – to a village park and actually staged the bust. The judge in the piece is Johanan Vigoda [Wonder’s lawyer], Milton [Hardaway, Wonder’s brother] was the victim. The sound of the bus was a Shell oil truck recorded outside Mediasound at three in the morning.”
According to the authors of Buzz Me In, Cecil and Margouleff’s “Stevie deal” was a handshake-only agreement for one percent of record sales. Trust and understanding enabled the trio to toil and triumph together from 1971-73, but because there was nothing in writing, Malcolm and Bob eventually found themselves at “an impasse with Motown over getting production points.” Cecil told Margouleff that they should use Wonder’s session tapes as leverage: “Take all the unreleased stuff and hold onto them until Stevie agrees that we get production points on anything that was released off this stock.”
Unfortunately for them, the tapes had already been removed – an act which Cecil attributed to Record Plant’s Chris Stone. Soon, the relationship with Wonder began deteriorating, compounded by what the pair regarded as inadequate credit on the Innervisions album sleeve. “The heart went out of me at that point,” said Cecil. Even so, he and Margouleff continued working with Wonder on Fulfillingness’ First Finale, and as Buzz Me In notes, it went on to win the Grammy for 1974’s album of the year.
“We were the witch doctors of our culture,” Margouleff once said. “We created the pagan rituals that people follow and believe in. We have taken music out of the churches and made it part of secular events. Stevie is one of the great witch doctors – and we were his helpers.
“Sometimes you just reach up and touch the sun.”
Kemosabe notes: TONTO stood for The Original New Timbral Orchestra, and it was the music on a 1971 LP featuring this synthesizer which caught Stevie Wonder’s ear and led him to seek out its originators. To create the album, notes Buzz Me In, Malcolm Cecil and Bob Margouleff “cobbled together synthesizers from Moog and ARP along with a mix of custom modules from a Russian electronic composer and Jimi Hendrix’s guitar tech.”
Living room notes: as mentioned above, Buzz Me In contains the sagas of various other superstars besides Stevie Wonder who recorded at Record Plant. In particular, the influence of Jimi Hendrix is evident: the facility’s founder, Gary Kellgren, built what was then the first living room-style studio in New York in 1968, and Hendrix recorded Electric Ladyland there. From that followed what the book’s authors call “a recording studio empire.”