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.