Stevie Wonder’s “classic period”

The involvement of Margouleff and Cecil needs to be further highlighted. They were not only talented musicians, they were also engineers, producers, and pioneers in early synthesizer experimentation. They patched together a massive electronic synthesizer dubbed TONTO that consisted of various components including a Moog, which Stevie Wonder heard on their avant-garde 1971 synth album Zero Time. He literally showed up at their studio with the album under his arm and asked how TONTO worked. The story is told here (1):

So he takes my elbow and I escort him to the studio. We went down to the studio and I showed him the instrument. 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. He asked me if we could record. I went upstairs and got my test tape and we put it on the two-inch machine. At this time, the Moog had been moved to Studio B in the basement. We ended up recording the entire weekend. I had to break into the tape store, and I had no authority to do it, but I did it anyway. 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 twenty-one. 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. We got seventeen songs done that first weekend. And that’s how it all started.

In films from that era, you can see Wonder performing with TONTO in the background, with Cecil or Margouleff patching together components on the fly.

I saw an interview with one of them (see Soundbreaking, below) who says that they recorded something like 250 songs with Wonder, and they picked the best ones to go on the albums. I would love to hear some of the stuff that didn't make it onto vinyl!

PBS recently released an eight-part series on music production called Soundbreaking that includes clips and interviews with Cecil and Margouleff. It was co-produced by the late George Martin, and includes so many stories about the production of pop music from the 1950s to the present, including early multitrack recording with Les Paul, The Beach Boys and The Beatles, the synth era, disco, sampling, rap, the impact of music videos, EDM, laptop-based production, and more. It's amazing. Some short clips are here (2) but I urge readers to seek out the full program!

1. http://www.waxpoetics.com/blog/features/articles/malcolm-cec...

2. http://www.pbs.org/show/soundbreaking/