When I posted a list of "my top 20 favorite albums" with a rule of no more than one album per artist, it was a no-brainer to include a Stevie Wonder album. The hard part was deciding which one.
At the end of this post, I've embedded one song from each of those albums, without including any of the hits, because he's about so much more than the hits. He's one of those artists where you have to listen to the full albums from start to finish. Of course he put out a lot of great songs before and after the 1972-76 albums, but those albums stand out. Of all the dozens and dozens of songs on those albums, there isn't a single dud, and there are many buried treasures.
His music from the late '60s onward still holds up well as a pure listening experience, with no need to explain why we should appreciate it or how he fits into the history of anything. At the same time, he's had a ubiquitous influence on the last 50 years of music — so many artists like Prince, Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, etc. It's hard to imagine what pop music would sound like without him.
The combination of songwriting and performing is astounding. Not only did he develop a style of melismatic singing that generations have imitated, but he's also an excellent keyboardist, harmonica player, and drummer.
He's done all that with a physical condition many of us would think of as bringing unfathomable misery to anyone who suffers from it. Yet Stevie Wonder gives the impression that an effusive, impassioned joy flows out of him more naturally than from almost anyone else.
Bill Withers, a onetime Navy aircraft mechanic who after teaching himself to play the guitar wrote some of the most memorable and often-covered songs of the 1970s, including “Lean on Me,” “Use Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81.
His death was announced in a statement from his family, which said he died of “heart complications.”
More from the obituary:
Mr. Withers, who had an evocative, gritty R&B voice that could embody loss or hope, was in his 30s when he released his first album, “Just as I Am,” in 1971. It included “Ain’t No Sunshine,” a mournful lament (“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone/And she’s always gone too long/Anytime she goes away”) that cracked the Billboard Top 10. Other hits followed, perhaps none better known than “Lean on Me,” an anthem of friendship and support that hit No. 1 in 1972 and has been repurposed countless times by a wide variety of artists.
There were also “Use Me” (1972), “Lovely Day” (1977) and “Just the Two of Us” (1981), among other hits. But after the 1985 album “Watching You Watching Me,” frustrated with the music business, Mr. Withers stopped recording and performing.
“I wouldn’t know a pop chart from a Pop-Tart,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015, when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The New York Times on how he got started:
William Harrison Withers Jr. was born on July 4, 1938, in Slab Fork, W.Va. His father worked in the coal mines.
At 17, eager to avoid a coal-mine career himself, Mr. Withers joined the Navy....
He spent nine years in the service, some of it stationed in Guam. He quit the Navy in 1965, while stationed in California, and eventually got a job at an airplane parts factory. A visit to a club to see Lou Rawls perform was a catalyst for changing his life.
“I was making $3 an hour, looking for friendly women, but nobody found me interesting,” he said. “Then Rawls walked in, and all these women are talking to him.”
He bought a cheap guitar at a pawnshop, started learning to play it and writing songs, and eventually recorded a demo. Clarence Avent, a music executive who had just founded an independent label, Sussex, took note and set him up with the keyboardist Booker T. Jones, of Booker T. & the MG’s, to produce an album.
“Bill came right from the factory and showed up in his old brogans and his old clunk of a car with a notebook full of songs,” Mr. Jones told Rolling Stone. “When he saw everyone in the studio, he asked to speak to me privately and said, ‘Booker, who is going to sing these songs?’ I said, ‘You are, Bill.’ He was expecting some other vocalist to show up.”
"Still Bill" is about a man who topped the charts, walked away from it all in 1985 and is pleased that he did.
He didn't burn out. He hasn't burned out. He was free of the demons of drink and drugs. He is still happily married to his first and only wife. His grown kids still live at home -- Kori, who would like to follow her dad into music, and Todd, who is a law student. Marcia, his wife, has her MBA from UCLA and has manifestly looked after their finances, as we can guess after a look around their rambling hilltop home in a high-priced area of Los Angeles.…
He had a serious stutter until he was 20. We don't learn why it went away. Maybe music helped. The most emotional scenes in "Still Bill" show him accepting an award from a stutterers' association, and then talking with a roomful of kids who stutter. His advice is calm: He identifies with them, he observes that stuttering can make other people nervous, he says "we have to go just that little bit further to help them feel at ease."
He wipes away some tears in his eyes, and we suspect they have been unshed since childhood. Later he recalls being taunted to "spit it out!" -- as if stuttering were his decision. He says he decided while young to make the most of his opportunities, and did. He studied, joined the Navy, didn't own a guitar until 1970, and achieved his first hit record, "Ain't No Sunshine," in 1971.
Withers wasn't part of mainstream soul music. He used a few instruments -- guitar, bass, drums, piano -- and no driving beat. He depended on his pure baritone and his lyrics. Listen again to "Ain't No Sunshine," and you realize it is a rarity: a hit song that is essentially just a man singing.
Ebert was critical of only one part of the documentary:
Perhaps in an attempt to slip some "meaning" into the film, the documentarians Damani Baker and Alex Vlack arrange a conversation with the scholar Cornel West and Tavis Smiley from PBS. It feels like they're trying to lead Bill into heavy generalizations, but he won't go there. Withers seems as close to everyday Zen as I can imagine. He talks a great deal about his philosophy, to be sure, but it's direct and manifestly true: Make the most of your chances, do the best you can, stop when you're finished, love your family, enjoy life.
At 70, he sings once in the film, at a tribute to him in Brooklyn. And in his home recording studio, he and guitarist and songwriter Raul Midon collaborate on a song in Spanish, which I liked. He still has the voice, the chops and the presence. But he doesn't feel a need to spend days and weeks away from home proving that.... "I'm like pennies in your pocket," he says. "You know they're there, but you don't think about them."
Freddie Mercury — Queen's lead singer and pianist, who wrote many of the band's most beloved songs ("Bohemian Rhapsody," "We Are the Champions," "Killer Queen," "Somebody to Love") — would have turned 70 years old today. He died in 1991 at age 45.
If you asked me who the greatest rock singer of all time is, I'd probably think for about one second before saying: Freddie Mercury.
The multitalented artist, whose last album, “Blackstar,” was released on Friday — on his birthday — was to be honored with a concert at Carnegie Hall on March 31 featuring the Roots, Cyndi Lauper and the Mountain Goats. He also has a musical, “Lazarus,” running Off Broadway.
More from the NYT obit:
"Mr. Bowie was his generation’s standard-bearer for rock as theater: something constructed and inflated yet sincere in its artifice, saying more than naturalism could. With a voice that dipped down to baritone and leapt into falsetto, he was complexly androgynous, an explorer of human impulses that could not be quantified."
He also pushed the limits of “Fashion” and “Fame,” writing songs with those titles and also thinking deeply about the possibilities and strictures of pop renown. . . .
In the late 1960s, Lindsay Kemp, a dancer, actor and mime, became a lasting influence on Mr. Bowie, focusing his interest in movement and artifice. Mr. Bowie’s music turned toward folk-rock and psychedelia. The release of “Space Oddity,” shortly before the Apollo 11 mission, gained him a British pop audience and, when it was rereleased in 1973 in the United States, an American one.
By then, with the albums “Hunky Dory,” “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars” and “Aladdin Sane,” Mr. Bowie had become a pioneer of glam rock and a major star in Britain, playing up an androgynous image. But he also had difficulties separating his onstage personas from real life and succumbed to drug problems, particularly cocaine use. In 1973, he abruptly announced his retirement — though it was the retirement of Ziggy Stardust, not of Mr. Bowie.
He moved to the United States in 1974 and made “Diamond Dogs,” which included the hit “Rebel Rebel.” In 1975, he turned toward funk with the album “Young Americans,” recorded primarily in Philadelphia with collaborators, including a young Luther Vandross; John Lennon joined Mr. Bowie in writing and singing the hit “Fame.” Mr. Bowie’s 1976 album “Station to Station” yielded more hits, but drug problems were making Mr. Bowie increasingly unstable; in interviews, he made pro-fascist pronouncements that he would soon disown.
For a far-reaching change of environment, and to get away from drugs, Mr. Bowie moved in 1976 to Switzerland and then to West Berlin, part of a divided city with a sound that fascinated him: the Krautrock of Kraftwerk, Can, Neu! and other groups. Mr. Bowie shared a Berlin apartment with Iggy Pop, and he helped produce and write songs for two Iggy Pop albums, “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life.”
He also made what is usually called his Berlin trilogy — “Low,” “ ‘Heroes’ ” and “Lodger” — working with Mr. Eno and Mr. Bowie’s collaborator over decades, the producer Tony Visconti. They used electronics and experimental methods, like having musicians play unfamiliar instruments, yet songs like “ ‘Heroes’ ” conveyed romance against the bleakest odds.
As the 1980s began, Mr. Bowie turned to live theater, performing in multiple cities (including a Broadway run) in the demanding title role of “The Elephant Man.” Yet he would also reach his peak as a mainstream pop musician in that decade — particularly with his 1983 album “Let’s Dance,” which he produced with Nile Rodgers of Chic; the Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan also performed on the album. But by 1989, Mr. Bowie was determined to change again; he recorded, without top billing, as a member of the rock band Tin Machine.
His experiments continued in the 1990s. In 1995, he reconnected with Mr. Eno on an album, “1. Outside,” — influenced by science fiction and film noir — that was intended to be the start of a trilogy. Mr. Bowie toured with Nine Inch Nails in an innovative concert that had his band and Nine Inch Nails merging partway through."
This is from a 2002 article based on an interview with Bowie and others:
"You can still put on 'Ziggy Stardust' and it [sounds] like it could have come out last month," commented [Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails], for a Bowie "Biography" to run on A&E later this year. "It set the foundations for a lot of trends that are happening now."
Following "Ziggy Stardust," Bowie began shifting personae "like an actor rather than a singer," as Glover puts it. Without such moves, a later chameleon like Madonna would have been unimaginable. Small wonder it was she who inducted Bowie into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. . . .
In 1978, Bowie was asked by a British journalist to assess his greatest contribution to rock. "I'm responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension," he famously quipped.
But looking back now at his first theatrical elaboration of the music, he reacts with both bemusement and pride. "It's 30 years ago," he says. "But it feels like 60. Everything, and everyone, has changed. I was recently looking at an old cover of New Musical Express from 1973. It's me and Mick [Jagger], and he's just found glam a little late. He's wearing this jumpsuit with epaulets, and he's dripping in makeup and mascara. And I'm on the other half of the page with this net costume with hands stuck everywhere. You look at it and think, 'What was that all about?'
"But it really did look great, and it was so exciting. My God, that period will never be repeated. It was a hell of a fk off to what came before."
To be specific, to hippie-dom.
"God, I hated the hippie period," Bowie says with a laugh. "They talked about being so creative, but there was so little creativity to it. Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.
"And I needed that myself," Bowie continues. "Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity. And then I learned to discard that identity to become a real self maybe not real to the point of Bruce Springsteen," he adds sarcastically. "But at least an approximation of reality on stage." . . .
Today, he says, "I'm frighteningly happy. I don't see ever wanting to change things in my personal life. Iman and I are very happy, and we have the most fabulous baby."
Yet, as a consequence, he says, he's lost what younger men have namely, "a sense of becoming. At a certain age, you realize you are no longer becoming. You are being. I like knowing what's up. But I do miss the excitement of not knowing quite what's around the next corner."
However content he is in his day-to-day existence, and while he may have "fewer and fewer questions about life," Bowie says this has focused him on "the questions that are unresolvable."
Namely, the existential ones. "I'm approaching those questions in the new songs," he says. "At first, I thought, 'Well, if I write about this, I won't have anything left to write about.' But then I realized that what life is about is quite a subject to take on. "And at the moment," he says, "I feel like I've only scratched the surface."
Bowie with Arcade Fire, performing the band's song "Wake Up":
Squire was the only member to appear on all 21 Yes albums, from 1969 to 2014.
Wikipedia says:
He was widely regarded as the dominant bass guitarist among the early seventies British progressive rock bands, influencing peers and later generations of bassists with his incisive sound and elaborately contoured, melodic bass lines.
Here's a live performance of "Roundabout," from their classic 1971 album Fragile.
You can more clearly see Squire's instrumental prowess in this 2003 performance of "Heart of the Sunrise," from the same album:
Sick to my stomach. I ordered a signed copy of the "Fish out of Water" CD [Squire's only solo album] and when it was held up due to a postal strike in the UK he personally called me on my cell phone to apologize. That's the man Chris Squire was.
I didn't even realize that the president was in my town, but yesterday, at a fundraiser in New York City, Obama paid tribute to Al Green (who was in attendance) by singing a line from "Let's Stay Together":
