Stevie Wonder is on the phone recounting the experience — trying to recount the experience — of recording “Lovin’ You” half a century ago with his friend, the late Minnie Riperton.
“We were down at the Record Plant, and I was playing the Fender Rhodes,” he recalls. “She was singing, and obviously she sounded wonderful on it.” As he speaks, Wonder is noodling on the harpejji, the electric string instrument you’ve probably seen him play on TV on the Grammy Awards or “Dancing With the Stars.”
“It was just a magical time,” he adds before letting the music pour from his fingers for a moment: long, rippling melodic lines that keep veering between a major and a minor key.
“Sorry — I’m a little distracted because I’m thinking about then versus what’s happening now in this nation and how f— up it is,” he says. For Wonder, 75, Riperton’s music evokes a kinder, gentler era, her soothing voice an embodiment of “a commitment to music, a commitment to peace, a commitment to unity, a commitment to bringing people together.”
That steadfast serenity comes through nowhere more vividly than in “Lovin’ You,” which hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in April 1975. The next-to-last cut on Riperton’s album “Perfect Angel” — which Wonder co-produced with the singer’s husband, Richard Rudolph — is a radically stripped-down ballad about romantic devotion that makes you feel as though you’re eavesdropping on a couple in their home. And it’s got one of the most famous high notes in pop music history.
The success of “Lovin’ You” drove “Perfect Angel” to the top of Billboard’s R&B chart, where it sat for three weeks before making room for Earth, Wind & Fire’s “That’s the Way of the World.” Riperton, who by then had already been singing professionally for more than a decade, finally seemed set up for a long stretch in the spotlight. Yet within five years she was dead from breast cancer, a rising star pulled down too soon at age 31.
Now, 50 years after “Lovin’ You,” Riperton will be honored Wednesday night with a tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl featuring Wonder, George Benson, Lizz Wright, Aloe Blacc, Alex Isley and Chanté Moore, among other acts yet to be announced.
Wonder views the show as an opportunity to “get people to come back to the truth and the light,” as he puts it, at a moment when many are stuck “in a place of confusion.”
It’s also the latest sign that Riperton’s music — the stuff she did with Wonder in the mid-’70s as well as her earlier work as a member of the Rotary Connection — continues to resonate: In 2019, Jordan Peele memorably soundtracked the twist ending of his movie “Us” with Riperton’s song “Les Fleurs”; last year, Norah Jones put that tune into her live repertoire while Andra Day sang “Memory Lane” at the NAACP Image Awards; this past May, a video went viral on Instagram showing SZA reaching for (and almost nailing) the high note in “Lovin’ You” backstage at the American Music Awards.
Thanks in part to her premature departure, Riperton remains curiously underappreciated in the broader culture, according to Wonder and others, who say the singer with the so-called whistle register has yet to receive her due.
“You know how they say, ‘If you know, you know’?” asks Patrice Rushen. “I think that’s the situation with Minnie.” Rushen, a veteran jazz and R&B artist and former chair of the popular music program at USC’s Thornton School of Music, describes “the special subtlety and nuance” in Riperton’s singing — “her ability to be very sweet and very earthy at the same time.”
In 1980, Rushen recorded a virtual duet with Riperton for the album “Love Lives Forever,” which came out a year after Riperton died and featured appearances by Wonder, Benson, Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack. “There’s a simplicity to a song like ‘Lovin’ You,’ but when I say ‘simplicity,’ that doesn’t mean it’s easy,” Rushen says. “It actually shows great mastery — an understanding of what a song needs to get across.”
Isley, an up-and-coming R&B singer whose father is Ernie Isley of the Isley Brothers, calls Riperton “the prime example” of a voice that shows “the strength in restraint,” and indeed you can trace her influence through the softly confiding tone of music by Prince in the ’80s and Janet Jackson in the ’90s to modern-day songs like Isley’s dreamy “Good & Plenty” or Ravyn Lenae’s breathy pop hit “Love Me Not.”
Says Rudolph, whose two children with Riperton include the actor and comedian Maya Rudolph, “It really touches my heart that the younger generation of musicians is still moved by Minnie and what she did.”
Minnie Riperton, her husband Richard Rudolph and children Maya Rudolph and Marc Rudolph attend the Hollywood Christmas Parade in December 1978 in Los Angeles.
(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)
Riperton grew up in Chicago and got her start in music in a teenage girl group signed to Chess Records (where she also worked as a receptionist); later, she sang backup on some of the label’s hits, including Fontella Bass’ “Rescue Me,” which also featured the handiwork of drummer Maurice White and vibes player Charles Stepney, who would go on to huge renown with Earth, Wind & Fire.
Before that, Stepney recruited Riperton to sing in the Rotary Connection, a kind of psychedelic soul-rock act that made a string of records in the late ’60s that have since been widely sampled by the likes of DJ Shadow and A Tribe Called Quest. Riperton met Rudolph in a stairwell of the rock club he was managing — “It was one of those moments you see in the movies,” he says now — and the two quickly fell in love; Rudolph began writing songs with Stepney for what became Riperton’s solo debut, 1970’s ornately trippy “Come to My Garden,” which Stepney produced.
“Charles and I thought we were gonna be the next Burt Bacharach and Hal David,” says Rudolph, who recalls writing the words to “Les Fleurs” as he did his rounds as a bus driver for a Chicago nursery school. In reality, the LP flopped, which led the couple to split for Florida, where Rudolph had spent part of his childhood; they rented a house in Gainesville by a duck pond and he worked odd jobs including making sandals for a local head shop.
Yet Riperton and Rudolph were also writing songs. “Lovin’ You” began as a lullaby for baby Maya that they put on tape as a loop “so we could sneak off while she was in her little Swyngomatic,” Rudolph says; “The Edge of a Dream” captured their thoughts on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy in the years after his assassination. Eventually, a college rep for Epic Records found the couple in Gainesville and convinced his boss to listen to the music they’d been making; Epic signed Riperton, and she and Rudolph moved their young family to Los Angeles.
According to Rudolph, a friend of Riperton’s manager introduced the singer to Wonder, who immediately invited her to contribute backing vocals to his album “Fulfillingness’ First Finale.”
“Stevie was making his album and he was making an album for [his ex-wife] Syreeta, and he just said, ‘Why don’t we make an album for Minnie while we’re in here?’” Rudolph says of the sessions at the Record Plant on West 3rd Street near La Cienega Boulevard. “Perfect Angel” contains input by many of the same players as those other LPs — drummer Ollie E. Brown, for instance, and bassist Reggie McBride — though Rudolph ended up playing guitar on “Lovin’ You” due to guitarist Michael Sembello’s bout with carpal tunnel syndrome.
“These two lunatics, Stevie and Minnie, put me in the studio with a click track and the two of them in my headphones saying the most outrageous things you could say to try to get me to mess up,” Rudolph remembers, laughing. With the basic tracks complete, Wonder insisted the song needed chirping birds like those the couple had caught through an open window while recording their home demo; Rudolph says he, Riperton and Wonder ventured to UCLA’s botanic gardens with a microphone and a tape recorder to get the sound.
Because of the terms of his contract with Motown, Wonder wasn’t allowed to use his name on “Perfect Angel”; he’s credited on the album as El Toro Negro, though today he says, “I think most people knew who the bull was.”
In any event, the LP was not a hit right out of the box — it didn’t start selling until “Lovin’ You” blew up as a single months after the album’s release. Rudolph describes a brief period of hard-won excitement before Riperton was diagnosed with cancer. Yet she continued to work even as she was treated for the disease — touring with Benson, performing on TV, recording three more studio records (including 1979’s Grammy-nominated “Minnie”) and acting as a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society.
George Benson, from left, Minnie Riperton and Stevie Wonder circa 1978.
(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)
Benson laughs as he recalls one long-ago night on the road with his friend. “My manager was one of those strict guys: ‘It’s one minute after 10 — you were supposed to be on a minute ago,’” says the singer and guitarist. “He tried that on Minnie, who was opening the show — told her the promoter was very mad because she was late. She said, ‘If he wants the show to get started, tell him to get his behind out there and start it, because as you can see, I’m not ready.’”
Riperton died in L.A. in July 1979. In September of that year, Wonder appeared on “Soul Train” and spoke tenderly about the singer before performing a medley of “Lovin’ You” and “Perfect Angel’s” title track, which he wrote. Decades later, he says, he wrote the song “My Love Is on Fire,” from 2005’s “A Time to Love” LP, about Riperton.
“I had dreams about her, so it was kind of a fantasy song,” he says. “We were never intimate — she was married, obviously — but I had love for her, and it was a wide spectrum of love.”
Asked what it’s like to hear Riperton’s music now, Rudolph says, “Sometimes it’s beautiful and sometimes it’s very painful.” These days, he lives between L.A. and Japan with his second wife; not long ago, he was in a bar in Japan when the DJ put on Riperton’s 1975 “Adventures in Paradise” album.
“I was trying to talk to the people I was with, but eventually I just couldn’t,” he says. “I had to listen and relive the whole thing.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
