Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street

Thanks to Guy for pointing this YouTube video out to me. It's Stevie Wonder doing an epic take on "Superstition" live on Sesame Street. Guy remembers being completely freaked out by this as a four or five year old. I can understand why, I am not sure children that age should be exposed to music this funky. I have to say, this version completely crushes the studio version of the song from Talking Book.

Unfortunately, I don't remember seeing this. I would have been three years old on April 28, 1973, so I would have been the right age. Perhaps it's buried somewhere deep in my subconscious.

It's always been a bit disappointing to me that neither of my kids has ever shown much interesting in Sesame Street (although as I type this Will is wearing an Elmo t-shirt that Amelia picked out for him to wear today). Will also completely wore out a Cookie Monster shirt (Cookie Monster is pure id, so of course children love him). But just a couple weeks ago, I could not talk Will into letting me buy him a Bert t-shirt. "Come on," I said, "you'll be the only kid in school cool enough to have a Bert shirt." He told me if I could find him another Cookie Monster shirt, he'd wear it, but Bert wasn't happening (Bert is all superego, so I guess he's a tougher sell).

Anyway, from the little bits of Sesame Street I've seen over the past several years, I can tell you without a doubt it is nowhere near as cool, or dangerous, as this. Check out the kid with the long hair in a full-on funk freak-out on the fire escape. Awesome!

And here's Stevie teaching Grover a little bit about soul.



Finally we have a Wonder's vocoder drenched classic written specially for his Sesame Street appearance.