FEATURE:
Higher Ground
Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions at Fifty: Will We See An Anniversary Edition?
_________
THIS masterpiece album…
from Stevie Wonder was during a golden period for him. His fifteenth studio album, Talking Book, came out in 1972. Following Innversions, Wonder put out Fulfillingness' First Finale in 1974. He put out another masterpiece, Songs in the Key of Life, in 1976. Released on 3rd August, 1973, Innervisions is considered to be one of Wonder’s greatest albums. Someone so prolific delivering an album of that quality over a decade from his debut. That shows what an innovative and continuously brilliant artist Stevie Wonder is! A chart success that is often seen as one of the best albums ever, Wonder’s lyrics of urban struggle and inequality rings true fifty years later. That may sound depressing, but it means Innversions is this relevant and enduring album that we can learn from. I am not sure whether a fiftieth anniversary edition is coming out. We are a little way off 2nd August, but I hope that something is planned. It would introduce Innversions to new people. I am sure that there are demos, extras and some new takes that could go into an anniversary package. As much as anything, it would celebrate and salute an album like no other. I am going to bring in some features and reviews that dive inside this work of genius. I will finish off by asking whether an anniversary is a possibility. Let’s hope that it is! You can get it on vinyl if you want to give it a spin now.
I will get to a couple of reviews. Five years ago, Albumism celebrated the forty-fifth anniversary of the magnificent Innervisions. I think that this is an album we will be talking about for generations to come. My favourite songs on it are Higher Ground and Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing…but you also have Living for the City, Golden Lady, He's Misstra Know-It-All, Too High and Visions! Deeper cuts like Jesus Children of America are also spellbinding. Each of the nine tracks seem essential and hugely powerful. There is not a weak moment throughout Innervisions:
“Okay, what were you doing with your life when you were 23? Most of us were still trying to figure out what our path in life was going to be. In 1973, 23-year-old Stevland Hardaway Morris, better known as Stevie Wonder, had already recorded fifteen studio albums, written hit songs for other artists like Smokey Robinson & the Miracles (“Tears of a Clown”) and The Spinners (“It’s a Shame”), and established himself as one of his generation’s most popular artists. In that same year, Wonder released Innervisions, the first in the holy trinity of his discography, with Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Songs in the Key of Life rounding it out.
To better understand the huge significance of Innervisions, let’s go back a couple of years to 1970. Wonder had a desire to have more autonomy in the studio. He wanted to comment on the social issues of the day though his music, which Motown chief Berry Gordy had no stomach for. In Gordy’s eyes, it was bad enough that he had the same, albeit on a more intense level, issue with Marvin Gaye. Now, he had to deal with Wonder’s demands.
Wisely, Wonder let his contract with Motown expire on his 21st birthday, giving him the freedom to record what he wanted, plus he owned the publishing rights to his music. With no record label, Wonder recorded two albums, Music of My Mind and Talking Book. In 1972, Motown signed Wonder to a contract that gave him a higher royalty rate and the artistic freedom that he had fought so hard for. The label also released the two aforementioned albums, which put Wonder in an entirely different atmosphere. In the same year he toured with the Rolling Stones, which expanded his growing audience even further.
With two classic albums and a successful tour in his rearview mirror, Wonder spent the beginning of 1973 recording Innervisions. As great as Music of My Mind and Talking Book are, Innervisions is where Wonder made a quantum leap into that rarified creative air that only a handful of artists can claim to have captured. It’s a smart and beautiful observation of the world that existed in 1973. Walter Cronkite gave us the news on television and Wonder put the truth on wax. It’s interesting how a blind man saw the world so much more clearly than many did with the gift of eyesight.
Three days after the release of the album, Wonder was involved in a serious car accident. While driving from a concert in Greenville, South Carolina, Wonder was asleep on the front passenger side. His vehicle collided with a truck carrying logs, and one of the logs smashed through the windshield, hitting Wonder in the forehead. Wonder was in a coma for four days. When he awoke from his coma, Wonder began a slow recovery process that would last well over a year.
His concert tour was canceled, but it gave him time to reflect. Even though the album was recorded and released before the accident, many erroneously think that the spiritual nature of the album’s material is the result of the accident. Wonder once remarked, “I would like to believe in reincarnation. I would like to believe that there is another life. I think that sometimes your consciousness can happen on this earth a second time around. For me, 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, to do something or to do more, and to value the fact that I am alive.”
On seven of the nine tracks, Wonder plays all of the instruments, including the opening track “Too High,” a cautionary tale about drug abuse cleverly disguised by the bouncy arrangement. “Visions” slows it down a bit but leads us into “Living for the City.” Wonder paints a stark, but accurate picture of a young black man who faces systemic racism every day of his life. He leaves his home in Mississippi to venture to New York, only to get framed for a crime for which he is arrested and eventually convicted. It’s one of those songs that stays with you and never leaves. 45 years later and this scenario is still being played out in way too many places in this country. “Higher Ground” is a protest song and call-to-arms anthem that simply has no rival.
Innervisions was a rarity for a Motown record of its era in that it wasn’t a couple of hit singles, B-sides and useless filler. It was a reflection of life interpreted through the genius of Stevie Wonder, whose best work was yet to come. We tend to overuse the word spiritual or spirituality. So much so that one could argue that the words are almost meaningless. As hard as I’ve tried, I’m struggling to call Innervisions anything else but a 9-track spiritual journey that doesn’t preach, but instead, invites the listener to just take it all in and enjoy”.
I haven’t seen a review for Innervisions that is anything less than effusive and positive! Scoring so many five-star reviews and 10 out of 10s, there is no denying the brilliance and importance of Innvervisions. Not often dishing out 10s, Pitchfork awarded that high honour to Wonder’s sixteenth studio album for their 2022 review. When looking ahead to the fiftieth anniversary on 3rd August, I have been listening back to the classic. Every song blows you away and stays in the mind! Testament to the peerless artistry and songwriting talent Stevie Wonder possesses:
“The ’70s were boom times for groundbreaking work with synths, following ‘60s innovations at America’s Moog Music, the UK’s Electronic Music Studios, and elsewhere. In 1971 and 1972, synthetic, sequenced sounds swept into art-rock and jazz, trickling down into popular music. Caped keyboardist Rick Wakeman joined English prog group Yes and played the Minimoog on 1971’s Fragile. Todd Rundgren used EMS’s portable VCS3 synth on his early solo records. It’s the mess of knobs to the right of the singer-songwriter in the studio pic in the liner notes of 1972’s Something/Anything?, a crucial ingredient in the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and the instrument Brian Eno played in Roxy Music. Wonder pushed the envelope not just by playing most of Innervisions by himself at a time when popular Black artists could not all count on enjoying such freedoms, but also in his commitment to tones and textures still new to mainstream music. When summarizing he appeal of synthesizers to the presenter David Frost, Wonder said,“The whole point of the instrument, being that you can do so many beautiful things with it, [is to] make sounds that are bigger than life.” Stevie reveled in the funky possibilities of the clavinet on “Higher Ground.” In “Golden Lady,” a Moog bass stood in for the fretwork of a gifted session bassist, to say nothing of Wonder’s ease with the mercurial TONTO, innovation borne out of the artist’s insistence on recording with a skeleton crew.
Innervisions is a tricky album, very much a soul thing with direct ties to records in its Motown lineage like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, whose social consciousness Stevie tried to channel on 1971’s Where I’m Coming From, although it is best remembered for “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” and “If You Really Love Me,” notable detours from its political messaging. Innervisions surveys scenes outside of Motown. The anti-drug anthem “Too High” gestures to the technical, intricate grooves of jazz-fusion; “Living for the City” is as much art-rock epic as funk/soul masterpiece. Wonder traveled around the world in nine songs, matching the proggy experiments in contemporary rock gems like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star; the playful synthesizer parts in the funk bombs from Birds of Fire by Mahavishnu Orchestra and Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters; the nervous hope of Donny Hathaway’s Extension of a Man; the acoustic jazz of Baden Powell’s Solitude on Guitar; and the horn-filled salsa of Willie Colón and Héctor LaVoe’s Lo Mato. Innervisions collapsed the spaces between avant-garde and mainstream, rock and soul, and jazz and pop music. They had all been playing the same instruments.
Like What’s Going On, Innervisions lays out a problem, then offers solutions: The stresses of the modern age are many, but with truth, goodness, love, and faithfulness, we can beat back the darkness. Wonder’s albums had never been this concise or cohesive in message. Innervisions was his first full-length without any co-writers or covers, a monumental endeavor for both Motown—a hit factory betting against its history again by letting an artist write his own songs—and Stevie, who was pulling thematically consistent pieces out of thin air. The album doesn’t judge or sell easy answers. It nudges you in the direction of a more mindful stewardship of our world and then lets you know that the task will be difficult. (“Jesus Children of America” is fascinatingly slippery. It implores you to place less stock in physical gratification and more in the edification of the mind and soul. It reminds you that this path is riddled with grifters and conmen. And it’s way too hyped about transcendental meditation to qualify as run-of-the-mill church proselytizing. Innervisions is a potpourri of ideas from Eastern and Western philosophies, but its call to inspire change through personal and cultural reckoning is grounded, less pie in the sky and more mutual aid and good vibes. It’s a very ’70s outlook, a specific response to the reverberations in modern bohemian culture as the counterculture grew more fractured and paranoid, but it still rings true in its questing for peace and love in the shadows of systemic racism and widespread political corruption”.
I will source from one more review. SLANT added their name to a long list of admirers. They provided their take on Innvervisions in 2003. Thirty years after its release, it was still making an impact. Twenty years following the review below, and a new generation are discovering and playing one of Wonder’s true masterpieces. Many of its songs are radio staples. It is impossible to dislike or ignore an album that should be preserved for all time:
“Sadly, Stevie Wonder’s pop-culture reputation centers around his final mega-hit “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” so new Wonder recruits who choose to delve into the singer’s unparalleled ’70s output are inevitably surprised by the depth and power of his funky-bad earlier self. His phenomenal seven-and-1/4-album-long string of definitive soul music began with 1972’s densely layered Music of My Mind, climaxed with his gargantuan 1976 opus Songs in the Key of Life, and ended in 1982 with the four new tracks tacked onto his retrospective Original Musiquarium (the best of which, the post-disco romp “Do I Do,” is surely among the most joyful tunes ever penned). But the one album that basically all Wonderlovers can agree represents the man working at the very pinnacle of his considerable abilities is the keenly focused, brooding Innervisions.
Innervisions was something of a departure because Wonder, who was previously more than content to allow his lyrics, both bitter and sweet, to apply to simple love scenarios, had discovered a desire to tap into a larger reserve of collective emotion—in this case, the disenfranchised rage of America’s Nixon era. Unlike 1972’s Talking Book, which opened with the edging-on-insipid upward whole-tone progressions of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” Innervisions’s opening salvo, “Too High,” begins with a jangling cymbal and a bass-heavy minor-key riff that immediately segues into a frightening vocal break before repeating the cycle. Wonder enters singing the obtusely metered phrase “Too high, I’m so high, I feel like I’m about to die,” which, incidentally, descends down the whole-tone scale in an inversion of “Sunshine.” Hobbling along, the protagonist of Wonder’s anti-drug screed finds himself (or herself) lost in a musical labyrinth that threatens to loop itself into a whirlpool of insanity. Clearly this was a different Wonder than the kid who just two years earlier had a major hit with the clap-happy “If You Really Love Me.”
The overt scare tactics of “Too High” melt into the soothing and gentle utopian ruminations of “Visions.” Wonder has frequently claimed that of all his songs, “Visions” is perhaps his favorite, and it certainly fits his personality: both politically conscious and still optimistically obsessed with a better future. A song as wispy and ephemeral as “Visions” would’ve been lost on any other album, and probably dismissed by critics as flakey. But one less-heralded tenet of Wonder’s genius on Innervisions is his intuitive mastery of song sequencing.
Nestled in between “Too High” and “Living For The City,” Wonder’s fiercest moment, “Visions” has a calming effect. Wonder is occasionally targeted for being a tad too milquetoast as a funkateer, but even George fuckin’ Clinton would probably shy away from the astringency of “City,” which tells the story of a black man who grows up poor, attempts to make a life for himself in the city, is arrested immediately upon his arrival, spends 10 years in jail, and winds up a grizzled, homeless, gritty-footed walking corpse. Wonder scores the man’s descent to a basic blues progression; hollow moog synthesizers and a low droning bass once again induce a surprising sort of terror (made all the more powerful following “Visions”).
“Living For The City” is the album’s centerpiece, and remains one of the only moments in Wonder’s career as a politically minded pop star where he allows himself to come face to face with utter pessimism and caves in to it wholesale (check the avant-garde, atonal parody of patriotic leitmotifs that underscores his final howl of “No!”). The sweet reward of following Wonder down the path of his own personal hell is “Golden Lady”—the light at the end of the tunnel, the rebirth of Wonder’s optimism, whatever cliché you wish to attach to it. What can’t be denied (even if you’re put off by the bi-polar bait-and-switch routine that characterizes Side A, and find yourself cynically alienated by the song’s joyful denouement) is that the rich, gorgeous chord progressions of “Golden Lady” make it a soul sister to Songs in the Key of Life’s unparalleled “Summer Soft,” and both remain the best case for giving in to Wonder’s uniquely charming brand of joie de vivre.
The album’s second side is much less high-stakes than the first, and even if it, too, bounces between extreme emotions, it’s still suffused with the spirited energy of a man who’s finally gotten something off of his chest (as in the rousing and deeply funky Latin hustle number “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing”). If one really wanted to, they could make a case that “Higher Ground” (the album’s biggest hit) and the incredibly wise “Jesus Children Of America” (which pleads for religious honesty even as it decries the showmanship of the “holy roller”) represent a religious awakening, and it’s this aspect of the second side that accounts for the feeling of relief. But with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, a genuine near-death experience (Wonder was put into a four-day coma after a freak car accident while promoting Innervisions) provided what was to become his ultimate statement on renewed spirituality: 1974’s Zen-calm and underrated Fulfillingness’ First Finale. But Innervisions remains Wonder’s most harrowing and tightly structured album—one that manages to say as much about life in 45 minutes as Songs in the Key of Life took an extra hour to convey”.
As we look ahead to the fiftieth anniversary of Innvervisions, I guess there will be questions as to whether a special reissue is coming. I am not sure how much there is in the vaults, but you know there will be stuff that could make for a really compelling and revealing anniversary set. Maybe providing different-coloured vinyl choices, putting out a cassette edition and a C.D. reissue with demos etc. Stevie Wonder fans would be up for that. There would be so many more discovering the album for the first time who would go and snap it up! One of the all-time greats, I am excited to see how the world embraces and reacts to this album when it hits fifty. As I say, I think it is still so relevant and moving. In 2020, Rolling Stone named the best 500 albums ever. Innversions made it to 34. It finished above The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and below Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. Explaining why the album ranked so high (“We as a people are not interested in ‘baby, baby’ songs any more, there’s more to life than that,” Stevie Wonder said in 1972. With Innervisions, Wonder offered a landmark fusion of social realism and spiritual idealism; he brings expressive color and irresistible funk to his synth-based keyboards on “Too High” (a cautionary anti-drug song) and “Higher Ground” (which echoes Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of transcendence). The album’s centerpiece is “Living for the City,” a cinematic depiction of exploitation and injustice. “Innervisions gives my own perspective on what’s happening in my world,” Wonder said. “I think it is my most personal album. I don’t care if it sells only five copies”), it makes me believe an announcement will come soon regarding a fiftieth anniversary reissue. There will be a lot of celebration and new inspection ahead of 3rd August. A towering and timeless album, I wanted to show my love and appreciation for…
THE phenomenal Innvervisions.