9. Stevie WonderTalking Book
Again, I could have picked almost any record. Just being there when Stevie showed up at eleven years old, being around him, was something. He was talented right from the get-go. He had all this information around him; the Marvins, the David Ruffins, the Berry Gordys. And to be in school in the 60s? To be in school in the 60s was the best place you could have possibly been. It was about teenagers that changed the whole world. Stevie was in school at that time, had Motown at that time. He soaked it up the way you supposed to.
We partied! You know. But I couldn’t put everybody that I partied with in my book! But he ended up what he is today… singing and playing clean, straight songs. He’s one of the few that could put out anything he wanted to put out. I used to be upset cause he didn’t put out more funk records, because he can do it better than anybody. But he didn’t. He did standards. And he can sing them! Stevie. He is that representative of Motown that Michael [Jackson] would have been. Michael was that to the world. Michael was doing his art, not realising all the business, industry and government going on in the background. That’s dangerous. When you get that big that you can influence the entire planet. Kids like you? Foreign policy don’t like you. They did not like John Lennon, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy. Anybody that comes along with that kind of power, it’s threatening to foreign policies all over the world. ‘Cause kids like it. And when kids like you… there’s a lot of them.
Stevie was Stevie. But if you ever heard that song he and Michael did together… it was unbelievable. And he was just coming into his own! Stevie started off writing with the best: the Smokeys. He was there when writing was it. But Michael, that had played down and it was about tracks and the whole package by then. But Michael still survived with Quincy. Thriller was basically a rock & roll record! It was the equivalent of what George Martin did with The Beatles. Quincy did it with Michael.
