Barely made a dollar
You guessed it right — yet another classic Gillan video has been restored and posted to the intertubes.
Living for the City:
Thanks to steve4422 for keeping us up to date.
![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/mcbride1.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/mcbride5.jpg)
You guessed it right — yet another classic Gillan video has been restored and posted to the intertubes.
Living for the City:
Thanks to steve4422 for keeping us up to date.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
It really is much better now 😃
February 1st, 2025 at 05:01It‘s nice to see this stuff restored for historical fan value, but the vid is naff and so was the idea for GILLAN to cover the Stevie Wonder song – stripping it of its original context as a call against black subjugation and for civil rights. (Nope, starting the vid blatantly with a shot of a sign reading “Mississippi Unemployment Center” to provide some kind of setting doesn’t cut it.)
https://youtu.be/rc0XEw4m-3w
https://youtu.be/7_RgaYueeh4
QUOTE from Wikipedia:
Born into a poor family in Mississippi, a young black man experiences discrimination in looking for work and eventually seeks to escape to New York City (alluding to the Second Great Migration) in hope of finding a new life. Through a series of background noises and spoken dialogue, the man reaches New York by bus, but is then promptly framed for a crime, arrested, convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison.
The basic track (electric piano and Wonder’s first vocal takes) was recorded on December 5, 1972. Moog bass was overdubbed the following day. Drums, harps, and Wonder’s finalized vocals were recorded on December 8, 1972. The track was left untouched until April 20, 1973, when Stevie recorded backing vocals while either slowing down or speeding up the tape, in order to make his backing vocals sound either higher or lower respectively in comparison to his natural voice. Wonder played all the instruments on the song and was assisted by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff for recording engineering and synthesizer programming. Tenley Williams, writing in Stevie Wonder (2002), feels it was “one of the first soul hits to include both a political message and … sampling … of the sounds of the streets – voices, buses, traffic, and sirens – mixed with the music recorded in the studio.”
UNQUOTE
GILLAN doing it was as incongruous as Blackmore‘s Night banalizing Bob Dylan‘s The Times They Are A-Changin‘ and that‘s saying something.
And the way GILLAN gave the song with its original Southern RnB/Gospel funky groove and city noises a lifeless drawing-by-numbers NWOBHM treatment just adds musical insult to sociological injury and proves that they were not exactly Glenn Hughes when it came down to appropriating Black Music for their purposes.
I read that it wasn’t Ian’s idea to cover the song and that he had to be talked into it, it’s probable then that it came either from Colin Towns or John McCoy as both had likely more exposure to Stevie Wonder’s music due to their fusion backgrounds. (In contrast, Mick Underwood is on record for disliking funk.) Still wasn’t a good idea (or good execution) though.
For the record: I don’t think the band meant ill, they were just thoughtless and perhaps naïve. Someone should have at one point asked the question: “Wait a minute, what are we doing here?”
February 1st, 2025 at 06:48If anyone can point me to a better Janick Gers solo than this, I’m all ears. Would be interesting to know who in the Gillan band camp suggested this audacious cover, given that for a large proportion of the music-aware population, Stevie Wonder had set a very high benchmark. Personally, I think the whole Gillan band exceeded expectations on this one, it’s an actual classic. And I wonder what Coverdale and Hughes, who were united in their idolisation of Stevie Wonder, thought of this?
February 1st, 2025 at 15:13