But thereafter success was his, almost overnight. By 1965 Stevie Wonder became resentful of Motown's stanglehold over his career. Efforts to renegotiate his career were constantly stonewalled. Years later Stevie performed a skit about his career-crisis on the popular American show Saturday Night Live. In the skit Wonder approached a record company executive with a request for artistic freedom.
Boy geniuses are a dime a dozen.
Stevie Wonder had to push really hard to exercise creative freedom. In 1966, he succeeded in having his say through Uptight the song that came to be identified as Stevie's mainstay. Several successful albums followed. But it wasn't until Talking Book in 1972 that Wonder finally managed to become independent of what Motown needed and demanded from him. Right from the way the title was written in braille on the cover of the album to the shape, placing and suggestions of individual tracks, Talking Book was Stevie Wonder's most personal album.