Don’t Pass Up Part One and Part Two!
Billy didn’t have a touring band, so we got on the phones and reached out to all the great players we’d worked with in the past. It’s My Pleasure became a star-studded ensemble of musicians, and the results brought new meaning to the word “funky.” The group we assembled had all worked with Malcolm and me, or each other, on various productions. Everybody knew everybody. It immediately felt like a working band that had been together for years. We were family.
Stevie Wonder played harmonica on two tracks. George Harrison (under the pseudonym Hari Georgeson) played guitar on two tracks. Rufus, Tony Maiden, and Shuggie Otis added guitars. The great Ollie Brown played drums. Rocky Dijon joined in on percussion. Reggie McBride and Kenny Burke played bass. The incredible Waters family—Lorna, Maxine, Julia, Oren, and Luther—performed all the background vocals, harmonizing and arranging the parts with Billy on the fly. Syreeta Wright sang on one song, “Fancy Lady.” (After our time with Billy, Syreeta would collaborate again with him on the classic duet “With You, I’m Born Again.”) The sessions with Stevie and ‘Hari’ happened at night, with just Billy, Malcolm, and me.
There were no rehearsals with the other players, no sheet music. Billy had all the songs in his head, and he taught each player their parts from scratch. Sometimes a chord chart would be scrawled during the session, but mostly everybody just brought their ideas to the table, and it came together. Once the changes and the rhythms were locked down, Billy added his distinctive mixture of different harmonic ideas, using Clavinet, piano, organ, bass, and synth textures that defined the music. You could spot his playing from a mile away. He would be standing behind his stack of keyboards in the middle of the control room with his omnipresent gap-toothed grin, showing off his dazzling virtuosity and ability to combine soul and rock while never leaving his blues and gospel roots behind.
As usual, Malcolm and I always kept an open mic between the studio and the control room so that the wall between the two disappeared. We monitored the sessions in quad, as was our custom. It was loud, and we all lived inside the music in an immersive sonic bubble.
When the time came to bring in TONTO, we took the twenty-four track master tapes under our arms, and Billy and I drove (he in his Bentley, me in my own car) to Malcolm’s house. There were two broad steps down into a sunken living room, which was rectangular and had an enormous, rough, floor-to-ceiling stone wall with a fireplace at one end, where we placed our Hidley monitors at ear level. On the wall across from the stairs, facing the monitors, was TONTO. We used a Tascam twenty-four channel console to control the monitoring setup between the speakers and the synthesizer. Our tape machines were on the opposite wall. It was an ideal size, and it sounded great.
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Elsewhere at Malcolm’s, the garage was his lab/workshop, and the former dining room was our production/business office. It was a home studio in the truest sense of the word. His wife, Poli, kept us and the place organized, and, in keeping with the English tradition, she kept the teapot hot and the food flowing.
We cranked up TONTO, and Billy jumped in with both feet. The synth sounds became a key part of the sonic fabric of It’s My Pleasure. We made many trips back and forth between Malcolm’s and Kendun. The final mixing happened in real time, without automation, and Kent mastered the final product. There were lots of laughs and good hearts, and I think the results speak for themselves.
Excerpted from Shaping Sounds: Stevie Wonder, DEVO, The Synth Revolution, And My Life Behind The Music by Robert Margouleff with Jim Reilly, and reprinted by permission of Jawbone Press. Shaping Sounds will be published May 19, 2026. Shaping Sounds is available in audio at pushkin.fm/shapingsounds or wherever you purchase audiobooks.