Dark Glasses and All That, or How Stevie Wonder Inspired me to Create the Music of My Mind

When I was born, I had a pronounced squint and nystagmus, the latter of which improved but never completely went away. The squint was a reaction to bright light. As I got older, it was discovered that I was unable to distinguish colors. These are two classic symptoms of achromatopsia, a rare congenital condition. I also had poor visual acuity. From the age of six months until I was six years old, I wore ultra-dark prescription sunglasses.

Me in 1973. I was crazy about that toy helicopter.

My parents let me watch a small Sony black and white TV on the kitchen table so I could sit up close enough to see. I watched a lot of PBS, as did millions of children in the U.S. when educators, producers, performers, musicians, composers and artists applied their passions, skills and talents to create quality programming for children that educated and entertained. I was fortunate to be part of the noble experiment. All of the new shows had fantastic music.

On April 12th, 1973, I saw Stevie Wonder perform "Superstition" on Sesame Street and it was a pivotal moment. He wore dark glasses like me, and he was kicking some serious ass playing and singing with his band. His performance of "Superstition" completely blew my little mind apart. There he was, lost in the music, singing with palpable soul and emotion and the band is just killing it!

I gazed at the instruments and amplifiers and watched the body language and physical motions of a group of black and white musicians making music together. Hands, heads, elbows and fingers moved in tandem and accord while little kids danced around and behind the band, getting down in the truest sense and feeling the music. This was absolutely the coolest, hippest, most off-the-hook thing I had ever heard or seen in my short life. He also played a song where he sang using a "talk box", a new piece of electronic gear that made his voice sound like a singing robot, which completely knocked my socks off.

In 1976, my brother Ray, a budding trombonist and arranger, got Stevie's seminal album, "Songs in the Key of Life" as a Christmas present. I heard and loved all of it. "Sir Duke" and "I Wish" and "Isn't She Lovely" blared from every radio the following year. Ray wrote a big band arrangement of "Knocks Me Off My Feet" that was performed by a large ensemble of young jazz musicians that included himself and my brother Tom (also a trombonist), called Collage. They went on a European tour in 1978.

I heard Ray working on the arrangement at the family piano with a blank score book and several pencils. He learned the tune from the record and wrote it all out. I heard the song go from being a record to the piano to the arrangement to a performance. I had big ears and a great behind-the-scenes view of the processes involved in making music.

In the summer of 1977, I was taken to the record department at the Caldor department store in our town for my birthday to buy an album of my choice. They had a great record department where I would shop for jazz reissue vinyl and Beatles import LPs in my teens. I picked Stevie Wonder's Music of My Mind, a very personal album from 1972 and the first of four musically and technologically groundbreaking albums he made with electronic music duo Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, who were also the engineers and associate producers.

I loved it. I loved the playful and funky vibe, the soaring melodies, the emotional singing, the gorgeous synthesizer sounds and textures, the rippling Rhodes electric pianos, the trippy effects, the inventive arrangements. It was an album-length experience that simulated what it was like being inside Stevie's head, and it had musical continuity. Unlike his next several albums, there were no monster hit singles on it.

I responded to the deep groove and the "talk box" vocal effect on "Love Having You Around". He used these incredible Clavinet overdubs to sound like acoustic guitars on "Happier Than the Morning Sun". My heart swelled with the beauty of "Superwoman/Where You When I Needed You", a medley performed with such yearning intensity that it made me feel loss and loneliness I hadn't experienced, as only music can. It still gives me the chills every time I hear it. I was entranced.

In third grade, the Scholastic book fair came to my school and I had money to buy a book in the lobby after lunch. I chose an illustrated biography of Stevie Wonder written for children and I learned about his life. It told the story of how he lost his vision as an infant because he received too much oxygen in an incubator, a all too common occurrence for premature infants in 1950. I read about his life as a child prodigy who was able to play several instruments and had a string of hit singles, most of which were written by Motown staff writers. The book had these great photos showing him playing harmonica, keyboards, drums and singing on stage and in the studio making records. That looked like fun.

I learned about his artistic emancipation from the Motown assembly line when he turned twenty one and renegotiated his contract to give him complete control of his recorded work and how he wrote his own music and played many of the instruments on his albums himself. And the words, "Wow, you can do that?" echoed round and round in my head, encouraging new neural pathways to form in my eight-year-old brain. I began to formulate a plan.

The dark glasses were so significant; I wore dark glasses too. I met and befriended totally blind kids in the Head Start program when I was five and I knew and understood that Stevie Wonder was completely blind and faced challenges I didn't face. When I entered grade school, I switched to tinted lenses that weren't quite as dark but that was about the time when I started to get hell for them from the other kids. I knew I shouldn't be ashamed of it but at the same time, I didn't want people thinking I was blind because the message I got from my classmates made it seem like blindness was something that was socially undesirable.

People with visual impairments who are not completely blind straddle two identities: "partially sighted" and "legally blind". The former emphasizes the use and reliance on the vision I use to make my way in the world, while the latter emphasizes the things I can't see, do, or control. It's a schism that splits the psyche in two, a struggle to identify as either abled or disabled, a balancing act between my expectations of myself versus the expectations that others have of me. Lots of "either/or" and not enough "both/neither". I resisted being pigeon holed. It was fitting practice for adulthood.

But Stevie Wonder smashed boundaries and expectations. Here's this guy on TV, cooler than hell, making this incredible music and everybody loves him. He also advocated for himself and his art. I identified with him because he loved music and wore dark glasses like me and his blindness didn't matter. People didn't stare and make fun of him for looking different. In fact, they paid to see him perform. His music was transcendent. Stevie Wonder was someone I could look up to and identify with, and I imagined what kind of music I would make if I had access to the technology.

The economics of the art and business of music and technology have undergone seismic changes since 1973. Getting control of the costly equipment needed to produce records meant going through the gate kept by record labels. In exchange for access to the tools, Stevie was expected to make Motown's investment worthwhile by making them a lot of money. He was only twenty one. if his new artistic vision had failed to sell, he risked losing his keys to the kingdom (a realm where studio time is limitless). That took guts. He had clearly already heard the music in his head.

My eight-year-old self would be thrilled to know that in the future I would have my own studio. Advanced musical and technological tools to make great recordings are widespread and cheaply available in the twenty-first century and the market for music has become exponentially crowded with tens of millions of artists like me competing for attention. But with obscurity and diminished returns also comes a measure of independence; I have access to the tools I need to make whatever music I want to without commercial pressure.

Music is a powerful force. It can jump out and grab you, even through a tiny black and white TV with a crummy little speaker in a suburban kitchen in southern Connecticut, to stir your imagination and inspire you to overcome obstacles and strive to create something of your own.

Thank you so much, Stevie.