Black, Blind and on Top of Pop

"What is it, Stevie?" the folks would ask as they dropped a coin on the kitchen table. Though only five, Stevie would chirp right back: "Dime" ... "Nickel" ..."Quarter"--whatever it was. That was more of a feat than it might seem. Steveland Morris had been blind since birth. He had also been unstoppable. By the time he was two, spoons in hand, Stevie was beating away rhythmically on pans and tabletops, or on dime-store cardboard drums. At nine, he was singing and playing harmonica up and down the Detroit ghetto streets, and being eased out of the church choir for singing rock 'n' roll. Three years later, he had become the "twelve-year-old genius" of Motown Records, the black pop giant. Rechristened Little Stevie Wonder, he was a strutting, shimmying minibopper who rode to the top of the record charts and $1 million in sales with a rhythm-and-blues shouter called Fingertips, Part 2:

Evvybody say yeah,

Say yeah, say yeah ...

Clap yo'hands

Just a little bit louder...

Today Stevie Wonder no longer needs to coax applause. At 23, he is the prince regent of soul, a slender, 6 ft.-plus superstar in an Afro, whose songs about love, evil, oppression, freedom, Jesus and promised lands are a kind of ecumenical apotheosis of the blues. Still blind, Wonder in the eleven years of his professional career has distilled a wide array of black and white musical styles into a hugely popular personal idiom that emphatically defines where pop is at right now.

As a result, Wonder has become what the trade calls a "monster," a star who can automatically fill any arena or stadium and whose records, both in the stores and on radio, transcend musical categories in their appeal. He has had 20 hit singles and eleven bestselling albums, and now he is a multimillionaire. A month ago at the Grammy Awards show in Los Angeles, the record industry's equivalent of the annual Oscar presentations, he came close to turning the affair into a one-man show by copping four major awards. The prizes included best pop vocal performance by a male for his interpretation of his own song, You Are the Sunshine of My Life, and album of the year for Wonder's most recent LP, Innervisions.

In a crazy-quilt pop era that salutes everything from transvestite glitter and sadomasochism to Rocky Mountain fresh air and the Andrews Sisters, Wonder has managed the considerable task of establishing himself as both a hot commercial property and an authentic voice. Being black, blind and up from poverty entitles him, of course, to say that he has been there and back. A near-fatal auto accident outside Winston-Salem, N.C., last August has threatened to turn saga into legend. Stevie was riding in the front seat of his car when a log tore loose from a truck, crashed through the windshield and struck him in the forehead. He was pried from the wreck bloody and unconscious, and lay in a coma for a week. Friends knew that he was going to make it only when his aide, Ira Tucker Jr., knelt down next to Wonder's ear, started singing his song Higher Ground ("God is gonna show you higher ground/ He's the only friend you have around"), and Stevie's fingers slowly began moving in time to the music.

Last week in New York's Madison Square Garden, Wonder gave his first American concert since the accident. Sporting a mustache and his familiar dark glasses, he pointed toward heaven, then to his forehead and finally cut loose with a survivor's smile. From the balcony, loges and floor of the Garden came a roar--20,000 voices strong--of adulation, welcome and animal joy. He warmed up with a leisurely bit of improvisation called Approaching Contusion, then swung into some of his most famous hits: Superwoman, Superstition, Keep on Running. It was fine to hear a voice so long addicted to sweet soul now revel in husky, emotive blues growls. The pulsating climax came with an almost symphonic version of his Living for the City, a black odyssey that begins in Mississippi and ends with the arrest of an innocent youth in New York:

I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow

And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow

This place is cruel, nowhere could be much colder

Wonder topped that off by bringing out three fellow blacks -- Sly Stone, Eddie Kendricks and Roberta Flack -- for a reprise of Superstition and a rollick ing, hand-clapping, ear-piercing finale.

Right now Stevie has everything going for him. Sitting up there onstage, his head bobbing and weaving sightlessly as though trying to tune in on some private radar of the mind, he recalls no one so much as his old idol to whom he used to listen on Detroit's WCHB, the blind rhythm-and-blues great, Ray Charles.

Stevie was the third of six children in a not particularly musical family. He grew up in Detroit in what he likes to call "upper-lower-class circumstances." When he was ten, Stevie was picked up by Motown after a routine audition and subsequently enrolled at the Michigan School for the Blind, where classes were fitted into his career schedule. It would have been a mad life for any child. Stevie spent years on tour with the Motown Revue. Other performers would joke about not wanting to sleep in the hotel room next to his because he would keep them awake bumping into the walls. That used to break Stevie up, because he rarely bumped into anything. His hearing is so sensitive that he can recognize an acoustical change as he approaches something solid, like a wall.

When Stevie turned 21, he rebelled against Motown. Yearning for a chance to experiment and weary of the record company's predilection for formula Top-40 hits, Wonder came to his contract-renewal sessions in 1971 demanding his own publishing company, higher royalties and the right to compose his words and music and cut his albums as he saw fit. After months of haggling, he got the total artistic freedom he wanted.

The first result was Wonder's 1972 album Music of My Mind, in which he showed complex new textures with the Moog and Arp synthesizers and a fresh repose in his love ballads. He had just married Syreeta Wright, a Motown secretary, and they collaborated on the lead song, Love Having You Around ("And when the day is through/ Nothin' to do, just sit around groovin' with you"). Alas, the groovin' lasted only 1 1/2 years. Stevie and Syreeta are now divorced.

High Jinks. Also in 1972, Wonder performed as the opening act in the record-shattering coast-to-coast tour by the Rolling Stones. For the first time, he was exposed to a massive white audience. That helped launch him as a monster star. But the Stones and their life-style came as a shock. By rock standards, Stevie is square. He does not drink; he has smoked pot only twice, and "it scared me to death."

Life with Stevie may be relatively clean, but in every other way it is a circus of indecision, chaotic scheduling and the totally unexpected. It is not that he is a prima donna or purposely rude, says a friend, but "he just doesn't have days or nights, and he's seldom thinking more than ten minutes ahead." Scheduled to meet a photographer, he may march off to the recording studio or back to his apartment on Manhattan's East Side to whisper musical phrases into his "notebook," a portable cassette recorder.

Following Stevie around, one almost forgets his blindness. He spends hours watching television, going to the movies or shopping for clothes. During all of these moments, he has a companion to narrate the action or describe the lapels. He is a telephone addict, and his phone directory is a cassette on which he narrates to himself all the numbers that he regularly dials. If he could acquire sight, he is regularly asked, what would he want to see? And he regularly replies: The world, the earth, the birds, the grass and the people he loves. "But there are a lot of things I wouldn't want to see. Destruction, corruption and war. Hate and sin. But you can already feel all those things anyway. It may sound contradictory, but if I did see such ugly things, they would make me appreciate the beauty I already know even more."

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