MUSIC

Living where we do-in Dallas, halfway from either coast-we are especially used to the travelling show. The Harlem Globetrotters are here for a night, between Tulsa and New Orleans, to perform at Moody Coliseum. The circus blows through town, along with Liza Minelli, Johnny Cash or Frank Sinatra. We run over to Fort Worth to catch Elvis in the middle of a huge convention center. Promoters package and serve up big names, big drawing cards, as though the entertainers were wrestlers or evangelists. We’re on the tour, and if we shell out the eight or 10 or 12 bucks it costs to attend, it’s because Dallas offers few alternatives.

The soul show is particularly problematical: It promises the most while delivering the least. That goes back to the fact that soul music is born out of religion. The vast majority of soul singers sang, as children, in their parents’ churches. Take out the “my Lord,” the old formula goes, put in “my baby,” and you’re listening to the flip side of the same record. Just as gospel is based on certain articles of faith, so is soul music. The passion, the fervor, the spiritual celebration are all transferred to the secular form. And if so much of fundamental gospel music is positive-a denial of the certainty of the bleakness of death through religion-then one feels that same promise, that same renewal, when gospel turns to soul. It is Aretha, with Ray Charles, live at the Fillmore, singing, becoming the “Spirit in the Dark.”

The soul show, then, is close to a revival. You expect, you are promised, large emotional rewards. You want to be renewed; you want to be reached. If and when those shows don’t deliver, the disappointment is profound. When the opera-say Aida-attempts to be grand, when the work itself demands that it be produced in full glory, and when during the performance a mummy falls on the soprano’s head, the result is doubly absurd.

For a long time now, in spite of its spiritual promise, the soul show has been a well-known drag. It notoriously starts two hours late. The warm-up band is out of tune, brass blaring, playing the thinnest possible arrangements of the latest soul hits. You twiddle your thumbs; you look at the floor; you wait. And when the star finally appears, down there somewhere, he or she or they are specks in the distance. Even worse, the amplification is lousy – these events are held in barns, in cow palaces, in hockey arenas-and you can barely make out the general sounds of your favorite songs. (Try to count the times you’ve been to one of these productions when they haven’t had amplification problems.) You stretch; you strain. You want so much to be moved by the big event, but it just doesn’t come off. You swear off the soul show ritual, calling yourself a fool and a sucker. But then you find yourself waiting, at 10 o’clock on a Thursday night, for Stevie Wonder to appear on a stage at Memorial Auditorium which is a good half-mile from where you are seated. By then you’re expecting the worst.

Yet the paradox is this: Stevie does work within the rigid confines of the soul show; he does have a warm-up group perform first; he is two hours late; he does sing all his hits; I am sitting in the balcony, worlds away from him, straining to hear. Still, I am not just entertained, I am moved.

The answer, of course, is Stevie. But that requires a bit of explanation, and not the sort of stuff I have been reading in the hype articles. In News-week’s cover story on Stevie, for example, the writer could have as easily been discussing America’s most successful ski instructor and come up with the same insights. The Esquire piece, the Rolling Stone piece-they are all of the same mind, offer no clues or explanations. They say it over and again: Stevie is hot; Stevie is breaking through; Stevie is expanding soul; Stevie is messing around with new voicings and instrumentation; Stevie is making a mint; Stevie, in short, is amazing. The problem is that it is all true-but says little. Reporters follow Stevie around, watch him set up in the studio, ask him questions about life and God, but the enigma remains unexplained. The success stands. The meaning, I’m afraid, is lost. Why, after all, is Stevie able to leave the ordinary soul material behind and lift himself, as his song says, to higher ground?

I find a clue in the strangest of places, in a recent novel which I would recommend to no one and which I found, for the most part, a disastrous bore. It is Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, a pathetic tale about the hopeless life of an upper-management executive. (Actually the book is very reminiscent of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, only with less fun and more pretense.) Nonetheless, the central character says this about himself:

Lost: one child, age unknown, goes by the name of me. And I can’t keep looking back for sight of him to ask him hopefully where did you go and what did you mean. He would be too young still even to know what I was talking about – he was just a kid when he left me, he is younger than my own child – let alone succor me with the wise, experienced knowledge that I need from him.

As the narrator in Heller’s novel finally does deny the child in himself, it seems to me that Stevie experiences the reverse: He embraces what he was in order to become what he wants to be.

Blind singers, we must remind ourselves, sing in the dark. They cannot see themselves, nor their gestures, nor their heads bobbing back and forth. I’m thinking first of Ray Charles who lately, on TV and here in the Venetian Room, seems a parody of himself. His act appears canned, slick and predictable. The raw, funkier stuff is simply too diluted. And when soul music is bad, it is particularly distasteful and often leads to the sort of jive Louie Armstrong could not resist, especially towards the end of his otherwise splendid career: unabashed Uncle Tom-ing. The result is mock religion. After all, the soul, as in soul music, is a deadly serious matter, and for a blind priest (the “High Priest,” they call Ray) not to display complete and convincing sincerity is a sacrilege.

Like Ray, Stevie is primarily a blues singer and, because of that, also like Ray, he has the painful advantage of being blind. But unlike Ray, he is not predictable. He sings his life-current, past and future. He sings it as though it were a book. (Talking Book is the name of one of his remarkable 1972 albums.) He talks too much; he jokes too much; he sentimentalizes too much. But he sings, always in touch with his feelings, for nearly two-and-a-half hours – something which never happens at a soul show – singing as a young man in his twenties, at the height of his vocal powers, looking straight back and straight ahead, at what he was, what he did not want to be, what he strives to become.

Stevie was a star before he was a teenager. He was almost a revival show gospel-freak-child, a blind boy who could sing ballads and play harmonica, bongos and drums. He could jump around the stage as though it were his playpen. He would frighten the audience by coming near the edge of a stage which he could not see. Often his emotions drove him to leap into a public which, he could sense, was awaiting him with outstretched arms. He wigged people out. Some, as in a revival meeting, would go all the way out and have to be brought back with smelling salts. He was advertised as somewhat of a miracle. His first hit, “Fingertips,” was an harmonica special, a rhythm-and-blues instrumental, with Stevie on the mouth harp, a youthful spirit in the dark. Then came nearly a decade of Motown-styled hits. There was a barrage of million sellers, ballads, uptempo numbers -“Uptight,” “My Cheri Amour,” “For Once in My Life,” “I Was Made to Love Her,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.”

Then in 1971, in an album which was appropriately titled (Where I’m Coming From) and inappropriately packaged (complete with a “Wonder” mobile cut-out), Stevie did what Brother Ray has never done: He broke the mold. He became his own producer. The songs were less canned, less hit-oriented. He ventured a bit. The lyrics were (as they are now) often sophomoric, but the music was fresher and, surprisingly enough, conservative: He seemed to keep what he had while looking for more.

When it first appeared, I thought Where I’m Coming From somewhat pretentious. But the records which followed-Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale – were startling; Stevie synthesized lush cocktail-jazz ballads, moogy bugaloos and irresistibly sweet pop melodies (most notably, “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”). His phrasing, his vocal intentions were those of a mature jazz musician. His confidence was overwhelming. Yet none of the old Wunderkind mystique was missing. He couldn’t be contained, but rather seemed to be combining a sense of childhood with a sense of fresh discovery.

Thus, the new Stevie Wonder I am witnessing this winter night in downtown Dallas. He is loose, chatty, anxious to give the audience an unguarded glimpse of himself. He mocks, jokes, imitates accents, makes fun in little ways. And when he moves, when he leaves the piano and starts to dance, he is awkward, almost spastic in his movements. Yet he is uninhibited, not afraid of his own movements, knowing all the while that those movements are quite his own. He cannot see himself. He is blind to the strange motions which he makes with his head and arms (like Ray bobbing back and forth, like Al Hibbler throwing himself about the stage).



There is nothing of the traditional narcissism of the Big Star, no strut, no cocky bumping and grinding. There is nothing of the sensationally slick dancing that you see on “Soul Train.” Stevie trips over wires and you fear for his safety. But he plunges ahead, jumping around like a man, a boy, a spirit possessed.

And when he leaves the stage only to be reintroduced by his old name-Little Stevie Wonder-he returns as a child, leaping back in the middle of that music, from 1960 and 1961, blowing the harmonica on “Fingertips,” literally imitating himself as the 10-year-old child star. He loves it, I sense; he loves whom he has been as a crazed and almost infantile performer. Then he stops. Then he plays solo piano and sings lilting ballads, drive-you-out-of-your-mind blues. Then to the moog, the present and, after midnight, it is still aglow, his special light, still burning. Nothing is concluded, nothing completely satisfying. And the show itself-radically untraditional for a soul show-leaves you puzzled: Who is Stevie? What is he? What is to become of so much energy, so many musical tangents?

I leave, thinking of what Heller’s narrator had said about himself and, thinking, too, of the one work which never seems resolved and yet more and more wonderful each time it unravels before me: the movie 8 1/2. I remember the final scene in which director Guido/Mastroianni/Fellini decides to murder himself, to climb under the makeshift table and blow his brains out rather than continue the press conference which has been called to celebrate his new movie, his life’s work, which remains confused and incomplete. Behind him is the gigantic jungle gym, the “movie set”- a meaningless structure which might come tumbling down with the first gust of wind. Then the unexpected miracle: The director is reborn as a child, the child, we have seen, that was literally Guido/Mastroianni/ Fellini as a boy. And all the characters from that glorious movie come together, form a circle, and, as though they were playing ring-around-the-rosy, they dance. For the first time, the director lifts his megaphone and directs. Like Stevie, he comes to embrace the child in himself.

That’s what I hear on Stevie’s records. That’s what I see in Stevie’s show. He is carrying on like a madman – looking ridiculous, singing and playing in at least a half-dozen different and conflicting styles – as though his entire life depends upon it. There is, I think, a precarious line between a breakthrough and a breakdown. I see Stevie driving himself close to the edge. And that, in the middle of drafty old Memorial Auditorium, is quite an act.

Waxing Critically

Joe Cocker’s / Can Stand A Little Rain (A&M), along with Joe’s recent appearances, have been booed and hissed by the press. Critically, Cocker has been taking a terrible beating, and when I learned of the new album I was barely interested. It comes as a great surprise, then, that three weeks and some three dozen listenings later, I am convinced that it is not only a fine record, but Cocker’s best.



Anna Moffo is a show-off. And The Incomparable Anna Moffo (RCA) has her showing off in rich and glowing fashion. Her voice lifts you, then slams you against the wall with arias from Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini, et al. She indulges herself, she indulges you, with spectacular arias, the most thrilling of which are”Ah, tardai troppo” from Linda di Chamounix and “Qual prodigio” from / Lombardi. Moffo is featured on another recording, Humperdinck’s Hansel & Gretel (RCA) which is delightful from beginning to end.



Gladys Knight & The Pips, / Feel a Song (Buddah), I thought, would be album of the year, given the fact that this is Gladys’ year. No such luck. There are nice moments-but most of it is standard Knight, which is good, but at this point she should be breaking through and coming out the other side. It doesn’t happen here.

Rufus, Rufusized (ABC). The album’s all Chaka Khan, a brilliant soul singer who seems the perfect cross between Aretha, Stevie and Sly. On this record it works, particularly Side A, “Once You Get Started,” “Stop On By,” “Smile.”

Tina Turner, Tina Turns the Country On (United Artists). This album is the most effective attempt I know of to translate coun-try-and-western to soul. Tina scares you into submission.

Millie Jackson, Caught Up (Spring). A standard, you’re cheating on me, I’m cheating on you, female soul album. The notable exception is “If Loving You is Wrong” followed by the nearly six-minute “Rap.” The “Rap” saves the day and if it doesn’t break you up, then grits ain’t groceries, meat ain’t poultry and Mona Lisa was a man.

D.R.