I had an innervision of going to see this concert when I was in high school. The problem was I didn't have the $25 or whatever it cost, and I didn't know anybody else who seriously wanted to catch the bus to Aloha Stadium. BIG MISTAKE. I should've found a way to go. Stevie in his prime... only in te years to follow, after devouring all of his 1970s work, did I realize he wasn't just a pop music icon, but one of the greatest artists of our generation. Still is. Talent is measurable. Genius is not, unless we count the tens of millions of souls he has touched with the gift he has honed.
I haven't been to many concerts at all. I saw Earth Wind & Fire in 1978 only because my sister had an extra ticket. It was incredible. But I've always had to work on concert nights in the years since. I liked his music so much — along with EWF, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye — I could just listen to my vinyl records on our old record player for hours and hours. By the time I was in high school (early 1980s), a lot of the music I loved was already a few years or more old — and would be on sale at Tower Records, where I also spent hours just listening and reading about artists. Shoot, my first R&B record was a Marvin Gaye Greatest Hits album for $4 in the discount rack at Ala Moana Sears. One of my friends teased me about it since he and some of my other friends were strictly into heavy metal at the time.
"Eh! That's the K-TEL TV commercial music."
Yeah. So what. Can't beat that era. Just can't. It's not even worth comparison to other decades. It's simply the base and foundation for all the beautiful R&B we got to hear for years to come.
So what would it have been like for a writer to follow Stevie Wonder around the world capturing his impact on people of all cultures and colors? That would've been an amazing journey.
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