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I needed to see some pages with the
ISO-8859-2 character set; this means I go to
IE5 and Windows. This was all on purpose, actually, since
Windows Media Player is also there, and WHRB at
Harvard is having an overnight
Stevie Wonder marathon.
Stream on. So I marvel at the
Czech spelling of composer Alfred Schnittke's name, etc, as I listen to decades worth of music from Stevie, the man to whom I semi-affectionately refer as "The
Cornrowed
Buddha of
L.A."
The marathon is a mixed blessing. Stevie's great, but some songs you've already heard a thousand times, and some later ones are merely the latter-day good craftsmanship of the Tubby Cornrowed Buddha, nothing especially great - you can't get a sustained buzz from an all-over-the-map selection of his work. In his defense, he has to live up to STEVIE WONDER every time he opens his mouth;
that's not easy.
The songs that got my attention were, oddly, the ones that predated his famed period of innovation and world domination - i.e. the stuff he was co-writing and/or producing in the mid-to-late 1960s. This was the "Hey, the kid writes, too!" phase of his career, aged 16 or 17, no longer "Little" Stevie Wonder, "the 12-year-old genius", but someone who was beginning to master Motown-style hitmaking.
So it was cool to hear "Hey Love", an old B-side from 1966, and Aretha Franklin's definitive
rendition of "Until You Come Back to Me", and "I Was Made to Love Her", et al. He'd stretch Motown's boundaries a couple of years later, with stuff like "My Cherie Amour", "For Once in My Life", and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered", and then, a couple more years later, become fully independent of "Mister Gordy" and build his modern-day legend.
He grew up and became much more eloquent, but the older teenage songs, merely cool tunes to me when I was a four-year-old tagging along with the bigger kids, connect with the 16-year-old in me; it's even more special now, since I'd forgotten that 16-year-old was in there. Welcome back, kid. Make yourself at home.
"...like a sweet magnolia tree
my love blossomed tenderly..."
"...Hey love
You're my one true soul desire
Hey love, baby
Can you feel this burning fire?"
"...I was made to love her,
build my whole world around her,
yeah, yeah, yeah..."
"...even if the mountain tumbles,
if this whole world crumbles,
by her side I'll still be standing there..."
"...when you are near me
I go through a change or two
Hearing your footsteps
I hurry to catch your eye..."
"...my nights are so long
as I watch each hour go by
hoping and praying
that someday I will be your guy..."
Etcetera.