On August 3, Stevie Wonder releases his greatest album, Innervisions, three days before a car crash puts him in a coma. Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On becomes the biggest-selling R&B LP of the year. And a strange Jackson Browne cover by the Jackson Five hints at the dysfunction beneath their idealized surface.
“They put a whole batch of us on a bus in Times Square and blindfolded us,” rock critic Dave Marsh recalled. “Each of us had a guide. (Mine turned out to be Patti Smith, a good friend of Stevie’s, as it turns out.) Then they played us the record. It was an amazing thing. Totally disorienting. The music had a clarity, a lucidity, and a flat-out power that was greatly increased by the limitation of the visual sense; no distraction, or complete distraction, but in the end, it really focused the whole experience, and not only because the music was unforgettable, although of course it was. It was one hell of a way to experience ‘Living for the City’ for the first time.”1
Marsh later judged Innervisions Wonder’s best album. Rolling Stone ranked it the 24th Greatest Album of All Time. Critic Jon Landau opined that the twenty-three-year-old surpassed Sly Stone as the most innovative R&B artist of the era.2 The album made it to No. 4 on the pop charts, No. 1 R&B, buoyed by three hit singles: the aforementioned “Living for the City,” “Higher Ground,” and “Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing.” And it was the first of three Grammy Album of the Year wins for him over the next four years. “Living for the City” won Best Rhythm and Blues Song.
Again, Wonder played the majority of instruments himself. Topical concerns dominated much of Innervisions. In “Living for the City” a family struggles to hold itself together through love as the parents work fourteen-hour days scrubbing floors, grossly underpaid. The son can’t find a job due to discrimination. When another family member rides a bus to join them, he’s wrongly arrested and sentenced to ten years. “Too High” laments a woman’s overdose. “He’s Misstra Know-It-All” was believed to be Wonder’s critique of the president. In this interpretation, the counterfeit dollar in the character’s hand refers to Nixon’s choice to take the country off the gold standard. Yet the song remains as devastating today, equally relevant for later generations of loudmouth con men.
The melancholy “All in Love Is Fair” reflected the end of his marriage to Syreeta Wright. She started out as a Motown receptionist, moved up to background vocalist, then cut her own singles. She and Wonder began dating and co-wrote hits like “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” and “If You Really Love Me,” marrying in September 1970. But Wonder stayed wrapped up in his music, didn’t spend enough time with her, and cheated. They divorced after eighteen months but remained friends, and he produced her solo albums.
Relief could be found in the Latin-inflected “Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing,” in which Wonder showed his humorous side as he tried to woo a woman in Spanish. “Jesus Children of America” extolled transcendental meditation.
With “Higher Ground” he gave radio a new installment of percolating funk perfection, but instead of the disturbing lyrics of “Superstition,” he offered words of relentless determination and optimism, praising God for allowing him another chance to rise beyond past sins.
Three days after the album was released, on August 6, Wonder was riding in a car driven by his cousin John Harris in Durham, North Carolina. Harris attempted to pass a logging truck but sideswiped one of the logs. “The log flew off the truck and crashed through the windshield,” wrote biographer Mark Ribowsky. “[It] plowed into [Wonder’s] forehead, shattering his glasses and knocking him unconscious.”3
Wonder remained in a coma for four days. Some horrified fans couldn’t help but notice the grim irony of the album cover. Efram Wolff had illustrated a beam of inspiration shooting out from Wonder’s forehead; it now recalled the accident.
“I lost my sense of smell a little bit; my sense of taste for a minute,” Wonder told Today. “I suffered a brain contusion and some lacerations on the right side of my forehead.” He had to take anticonvulsive medication.4 But on September 25, Elton John flew him to Boston Garden to join him onstage for an encore of “Superstition” and “Honky Tonk Women.” He received a fifteen-minute ovation from the audience.
“I wrote ‘Higher Ground’ even before the accident. But something must have been telling me that something was going to happen to make me aware of a lot of things and to get myself together. This is like my second chance for life, to do something or to do more, and to value the fact that I am alive.”5
Marvin Gaye had a breakthrough realization while recording Let’s Get It On. He didn’t need to get worked up and belt out the songs, he could just sit down and sing. He didn’t need to write down lyrics in advance, he just needed to relax and croon whatever came into his head, then overdub duets and harmonies with himself.6 Just “Keep Gettin’ It On.”
As his passion for Janis Hunter grew more intense, and as Sylvia Robinson groaned across the airwaves in “Pillow Talk,” Gaye added moaning to tracks like “You Sure Love to Ball,” kicking off the Quiet Storm genre alongside competitors like Al Green, Barry White, and Bill Withers: soft R&B to play in the background while making love all night long.
Janis wrote in her memoir that Gaye tried to talk her into dropping out of high school so he didn’t have to share her with “all those strapping young high-school football players looking to love on you.… I can teach you everything you need to know. I’ll be a far more loving and patient teacher than whomever the school provides.”7 She was pregnant by the end of the year with their first daughter, Nona.
The album’s final track broke the reverie lyrically, if not sonically. “Just to Keep You Satisfied” was a song he wrote with wife Anna Gordy four years earlier,8 when they were penning hits for the Originals together. Now Gaye saved the backing track but added new lyrics that bade Anna farewell, though they didn’t technically divorce for another four years. He assured her that he never loved anyone as much as her but was unable to resist a few twists of the knife, laying their demise as a couple on her “jealousy” and “bitchin’,” singing from the vantage of the one leaving and not being left, secure in his new love.
One day when Gaye and Jan drove to Anna’s house to pick up Gaye’s son, Anna emerged from the house to glare at Jan through the car window. Jan wrote, “Anna was scary. Her eyes burned with anger.”
“I just want to see what someone like you looks like,” Anna said. “Now that I’ve seen it, don’t ever bring it back here again.”9
Upon its release at the end of August, Let’s Get It On became Motown’s bestseller to date, shipping over three million in the next couple of years.10 The title track became his second No. 1 single.
Like Gaye, Jermaine Jackson married into the Gordy empire, tying the knot with Gordy’s daughter Hazel. Smokey Robinson wrote a song for their wedding (“Starting Here and Now”), during which 175 doves were released.11
Jackie (born 1951), Tito (1953), Jermaine (1954), Michael (1958), and Marlon (1957) were into their ninth year as the Jackson Five. It had been three and a half years since Gordy promised to make them the biggest group in the world. Critic Nelson George called the Five Middle America’s safe antidote to black militancy.12 They performed on Ed Sullivan, Bob Hope, Andy Williams, Mike Douglas, Carol Burnett, Flip Wilson, and The Midnight Special. They played the Royal Variety Performance alongside Liberace and Carol Channing and met the Queen Mother. They toured Japan in the spring.
If the Beatles were a boy band that played their own instruments, in the “band” tradition that continued on through Duran Duran, the Five was one in the New Kids/Backstreet Boys sense, singer-dancers with choreographed dance moves like the Temptations, though in concert Jermaine played the bass and Tito the guitar. In the boy band tradition, an explosion of merch was unleashed in their image: View-Master reels, board games, coloring books, dolls, lunchboxes, posters, stickers, cereals, toy instruments, trading cards, Christmas albums.13 They had the first black cartoon series, beating Fat Albert by a year.
And they had their inverse/mirror-image rivals, the Osmonds, who also had a Rankin/Bass cartoon. The Osmonds were also fronted by the younger one who sounded like a girl, with a middle one who sometimes took the lead, and younger ones and sisters looming on the horizon for the spin-off operations. They both claimed allegiance to slightly nonmainstream yet determinedly wholesome religions: Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Osmonds came first, singing barbershop-quartet-style songs at Disneyland, then on The Andy Williams Show for the bulk of the ’60s. Patriarch Joe Jackson made his boys study the Osmonds. But the Osmonds didn’t make it big in the charts until they recorded a song that Gordy rejected for the Jacksons, “One Bad Apple,” at FAME Studios, where Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding cut soul classics.
The rivals were wary of each other, then became friends and played sports together.14 The Osmonds had one No. 1 hit versus the Jacksons’ four. Donny and Michael also both had solo chart-toppers. In the UK, Donny and his brother Jimmy had even more No. 1s. Their sister topped the country chart in November with “Paper Roses,” which was why the theme song for The Donny and Marie Show later became “I’m a Little Bit Country/I’m a Little Bit Rock and Roll.”
Like the Osmonds, David Cassidy of The Partridge Family also did better in the UK with “Daydreamer,” hitting No. 1 there in October. The Brady Bunch tried to get in on the bubblegum action as well, performing “It’s a Sunshine Day” on their January 26 episode. Meanwhile, the Bay City Rollers released “Saturday Night,” though it wouldn’t be a hit in the US for another three years.
In February, the Jacksons released a UK-only single that sounded sprightly but contained the most un-bubblegum lyrics possible: a cover of Jackson Browne’s “Doctor, My Eyes.” Why the label decided to pair them with this song is a mystery. Maybe the producers stumbled across it because of the shared Jackson name. But in retrospect, the lyrics, about a man appealing to his psychiatrist after a lifetime spent learning not to cry, were weirdly apropos for fifteen-year-old superstar Michael. One could imagine a cinematic montage unfolding to Michael and Jermaine’s vocals: Joe Jackson looms over his sons, forcing them to endlessly rehearse, belt in hand. Father flagrantly cheats while mother in denial tells her sons that Jehovah’s Witnesses have no sex outside of marriage. She cleans them with rubbing alcohol. The young group plays Joe Tex’s “Skinny Legs and All” at Mr. Lucky’s club in Gary, Indiana. Michael recounted, “We’d start and somewhere in the middle I’d go into the audience, crawl under the tables, and pull up the ladies’ skirts to look under.”15 The audience throws money; Michael picks it up as he dances. Father books them to play strip clubs.16 They make it when Michael turns ten. Amazon women lunge to tear him apart as he bumps and grinds onstage, snatch at him at airports. Father calls Michael “Big Nose,”17 hounds him about his acne. Both father and the label stress out when the boy’s voice cracks and changes from soprano to tenor. There’s no time off. He’s always recording (ten Jackson Five albums from 1970 to 1975, four solo albums) or shooting photo sessions for Tiger Beat or Ebony or Jet. Jet puts Michael on its cover forty times, more than any other celebrity. After shows, father organizes groupies for his sons and takes some for himself. One, Yolanda Lewis, recalls having sex with Jermaine in the hotel while fourteen-year-old Michael and Marlon “were sleeping three feet away in the next bed. Or at least I thought they were sleeping. As I was slipping out of the room, I heard Michael say to Jermaine, ‘Nice job. Now, can we please get some sleep?’”18 In 1973, Michael’s brothers decide it’s time for the fifteen-year-old to lose his virginity. Laughing, they lock him in the room with two hookers. He reads the Bible to the women, and they leave crying.19
“Michael Jackson: Too much … too fast … too soon?” asked the cover of Black Stars magazine.