Stevie Wonder Hits New Heights With ‘Superstition’

In 1972, 22-year-old Stevie Wonder launched his fifteenth album, Talking Book. The LP’s lead single, “Superstition,” marked a profession turning level for the artist.

By the early Nineteen Seventies, R&B music was altering, led by such albums as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On and Sly & the Family Stone’s musical reply to Gaye’s query, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Other albums, like Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly and Isaac Hayes’ groundbreaking, Academy Award-winning soundtrack to Shaft, continued to increase the style’s subject material past dance flooring and relationships, discussing social points related to the African American group in addition to wanting on the world.

Like his contemporaries, Wonder wished to do extra together with his music. This need to stretch his inventive boundaries would assist in the singer’s rise from a younger R&B prodigy into one of the vital extremely influential and critically lauded inventive juggernauts of his technology.

That transition would begin earlier in 1972 with Wonder’s 14th album, Music of My Mind, however it was “Superstition” – launched Oct. 24, 1972 – that pushed Wonder to new inventive and business heights. The track featured Wonder taking part in all of the devices besides the horns. The musician’s funky drum intro and percussive, deep-in-the-pocket comping on the Hohner Clavinet – a five-octave amplified model of the clavichord, a keyboard from the Renaissance period – gave the tune its distinctive sound.

The track’s lyrics are comparatively easy, with Wonder warning listeners about falling prey to and permitting superstitions to direct their actions and selections.

“I think that the reason that I talked about being superstitious is because I really didn’t believe in it,” Wonder instructed NPR in 2000. “I didn’t believe in the different things that people say about breaking glasses or the number 13 is bad luck and all those various things. And to those, I said, ‘When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer.'”

Wonder additionally instructed NPR that the monitor was shaped in his thoughts whereas opening for the Rolling Stones.

“I was sitting on the drums, and the first thing that I put down were the drums, and then after that, I put the Clavinet down, and really, I just started singing the melody,” Wonder recalled. At that early stage within the course of, the singer had just one lyric that will make it to the ultimate model. “Probably the first thing – the only thing I can remember that I said that I remember keeping was the line ‘Wash your face and hands,'” Wonder admitted. “I think that was from when I was real little; I remember hearing this song saying, ‘Get out of that bed, wash your face and hands.’ [It was the song] ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll.'”

Listen to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ 

Despite Wonder’s connection to “Superstition,” the track practically grew to become a success for an additional established and creatively stressed artist, Jeff Beck, who wished so as to add components of soul and funk to his music.

“There was a time when I was pretty bored with my music, and I think somebody at CBS asked me what I wanted to do,” Beck recalled within the e-book The Guitar Greats. “I said I loved Stevie’s stuff, so they quietly broke it to him that I was interested in doing something together, and he was really receptive. The original agreement was that he’d write me a song, and in return, I’d play on his album, and that’s where ‘Superstition’ came in.”

The pair of music innovators hit it off, and Beck was current within the studio throughout a number of the periods that grew to become Talking Book. He even contributed guitar on the monitor “Lookin’ for Another Pure Love” and performed the easy however funky drum groove on the unique demo of “Superstition” at Wonder’s insistence.

Due to delays in each artist’s album releases and Motown maven Berry Gordy’s insistence that Wonder file the track, Wonder’s model of “Superstition” hit the radio and file shops first. Beck’s model would not be launched till 1973 on his collaborative album Beck, Bogart & Appice with bassist Tom Bogart and drummer Carmine Appice.

The confusion would trigger a pressure within the relationship between the 2 music icons. But Wonder would make it as much as Beck a couple of years later by writing two songs for the guitarist: the funky “Thelonious” and the ballad “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” which grew to become considered one of Beck’s signature tunes.

Listen to Jeff Beck’s Version of ‘Superstition’ 

In January 1973, “Superstition” reached No. 1 on the Billboard 100, changing into Wonder’s second chart-topping hit (his first, “Fingertips – Part 2” was launched in 1963 when the singer was often called “Little” Stevie Wonder). The success of “Superstition” signaled the start of what’s extensively accepted as one of many biggest inventive runs of songwriting and album releases in pop music historical past.

Decades later, Robert Margouleff, considered one of Talking Book’s co-associate producers, admitted he sensed greatness the second Wonder introduced “Superstition” into the studio.

“The whole song was in his head,” Margouleff recalled to The Atlantic in 2012. “Stevie is a genius. He is one of the greatest living songwriters of our generation, no question. He may be the greatest ever. God might have taken his sight, but he put his thumb on his forehead because Stevie is full of music.”