Don't you worry 'bout a thing: Stevie Wonder, circa the '70s.
By Joshua Rotter
When two travel four hours to see one of their all-time favorite artists, Stevie Wonder, perform at a venue that should have been a 40-minute drive away - the usual journey from San Francisco - a simple outing becomes a vision quest.
En route to Wonder's Sleep Train Pavilion show in Concord on Tuesday, July 8, amid triple digit temperature, and dehydrated and dampened by sweat in my friend's passenger seat, I was convinced that we would never see the legendary R&B performer. Car accidents and heat-induced area power outages seemed to conspire against us. San Francisco may have been as hot as July elsewhere in the county, but Concord was hotter than hell. We inched closer and closer, but the venue, obscured by rolling hills, wasn't even in eye shot, much less the eighth Wonder of the world.
Whether it was the excess of heat, the lack of liquids and nicotine, or being hopped up on myriad packs of sugary gum, an image of the vocalist suddenly appeared in my mind's eye, and I was set adrift on memory's bliss, imagining much of his career, from the innocent tracks of his early Motown period - "Uptight (Everything's Alright)," "My Cherie Amour," "For Once in My Life" - to his '70s consciousness-spreading classics "Superstition," "Living for the City," and "Higher Ground," through the Stevie of my youth - "I Just Called to Say I Love You," "Part Time Lover," and "That's What Friends Are For," as well as his guest-starring role on The Cosby Show, in which he invites the Huxtables to join him in the studio after his driver hits two in a fender bender. But traffic was too stalled at this point for any such luck to befall me.
When we finally arrived, only half an hour into what would be an impressive two-hour-and-20-minute career set, the 58-year-old vocalist, sporting his trademark braids dotted with pukka shells and sunglasses, was settling into the relaxed, Afro-Cuban-tinged "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing." If Wonder appeared as a mirage, then the Caribbean-inflected music turned the amphitheatre into a tropical oasis. All that was missing was my fruity cocktail. Oh yeah, that's what friends are for.
Wonder, subsisting only on sips of green tea to soothe his dry throat, made worse by the arid heat, veered from his Hohner clavinet to his Yamaha piano, accompanied by a well-orchestrated 12-piece band and back-ups. The career-spanning set included the ballads "Ribbon in the Sky," "Gold Lady," and the audience sing-a-long "My Cherie Amore," and a short but sweet medley of "Signed Sealed Delivered," "I Wish," and "Do I Do." One extra-precious moment occurred when Wonder serenaded his daughter and backing vocalist Aisha Morris with "Isn't She Lovely," the song he penned for her more than 30 years ago.
Still, the sweetest thing on my mind was the frozen strawberry Rockin' Rita that my friend was then procuring, which would beat the heat and soothe the nerves as two Jimmy Buffet look-alikes, seated behind me, provided running commentary throughout the show.
But the real action soon happened offstage when one presumably drunk and heat-stroked audience member face-planted on the aisle. As he lay unconscious for almost 10 minutes, I was having inner visions of Kate Hudson's overdose scene to the same song in the film Almost Famous. Worse yet, my friend, blocked by EMT personnel, couldn't rescue me with my margarita until it had become a melted mess.
But the romance returned with my drink as Wonder turned up the heat with a new, totally adequate downtempo track "Through the Eyes of Wonder" about being "so in love, you can't see straight" and part of an upcoming R&B album that the songwriter plans to release (along with a gospel disc, inspired by his recently departed mother Lula Mae Hardaway) next year, to coincide with a tour.
The necessity of love on a wider scale was stressed with the socially aware and still topical classic "Living for the City," where Wonder croons, "I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow and that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow," followed by a sermon to the crowd: "We must be color free," the vocalist said. "All diseases can be cured...those who are deaf and blind, all those things are possible if we come together and love in the spirit of oneness."
Unfortunately the only color I was concerned with at that moment was the orange cheese sauce from some concert-goer's earlier nacho spillage that I had unknowingly stood on throughout the show. As the concert closed with the classic "Superstition," on which Wonder's mohawked, 6-year-old grandson guested, the weather was cooling down and all was right in the world. So by the time that the two old fogies behind me, relying on dated urban slang, concluded with, "Yeah -- that was bad," I had fortunately learned the lesson that the messianic melody-maker had in store for me: to take all margaritas - errr, people - with a grain of salt, and kept my own prejudices against the drunken, old, chatter-boxes to myself.
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