There are recording sessions that run like clockwork. The musicians arrive, the producer settles everyone down, the tape starts rolling and, with a bit of luck, everybody gets home at a reasonable hour.
And then there are recording sessions involving Stevie Wonder.
By the mid-1980s, Stevie Wonder was already one of the biggest names in music. He had spent more than two decades making records, collected a formidable number of Grammys and created songs that had become part of the soundtrack of a generation.
So when Stevie was expected at a recording session, you waited.
And waited.
And, on one particular occasion, Gladys Knight waited too.
The story comes from a remarkable period when some of the biggest names in American music were working together. This wasn’t a room full of session musicians hoping somebody famous might turn up. These were major artists in their own right, gathered for a recording that would itself go on to become enormously successful.
There was just one problem.
Stevie wasn’t there.
Hours passed. The session continued. People wondered where he was. Telephone calls were made. Updates arrived.
The message, apparently, remained reassuringly simple:
He’s on his way.
Anyone who has ever worked in television or music will recognise that phrase. It can mean somebody is five minutes around the corner.
It can also mean almost anything.
What followed has become one of those wonderful stories that rarely makes it into the polished version of music history. The finished record gives you no indication of what was happening behind the scenes, how long people had been there or quite what happened when the missing superstar eventually appeared.
Fortunately, we were there years later when Gladys Knight told the story herself.
And her recollection is rather better than anything we could write about it.
It’s one of the reasons we’re going back through more than forty years of our recordings for RODtv. There are thousands of hours of interviews, performances, rehearsals and conversations in the archive. Sometimes it’s not the formal interview that proves most interesting. It’s the moment somebody remembers something, smiles and starts with words along the lines of, “I’ll tell you what happened…”
This is one of those moments.
We could tell you exactly how long Gladys Knight says they waited.
We could tell you what time Stevie finally arrived.
And we could tell you what happened next.
But that would rather spoil it.
STEVIE WONDER: HE’S ON HIS WAY
The full story, told by Gladys Knight, is now on RODtv as part of Off The Record.
Some stories are better heard from the people who were actually in the room.
