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Stevie Wonder Is Not Blind

Oh dear!

Know I shouldn't.... old school joke (sic)...

'So, Stevie, what's it like being blind'?

'Could be worse man, I might have been born black'...

:yellowc:
 
Roy Orbison was not blind but had a substantial visual impairment. The dark glasses started as a response to that and became his "trademark" — like Buddy Holly only more so!

As for Stevie Wonder, the real Fortean thing is how blindness is somehow the only thing he is known for, and why he is so often used as a symbol to represent all blind people.

If you hear a joke that starts, "Stevie Wonder walks into a bar..." you can be pretty sure that the whole joke will hinge on his blindness and not on any aspect of his musical career. After 50 years in music and 25 Grammies, he is still known primarily as "the blind one."

When someone wants to tell a joke about a generic blind person, they always say "Stevie Wonder" rather than, say, David Blunkett, Blind Lemon Jefferson, or Lennie Peters. Somehow, he is the only blind person who everyone knows and feels able to joke about.

Meanwhile, for those of you who like conspiracy, I'm just saying, but you never see Stevie Wonder and Daredevil together...
 
I've read that Roy Orbison's dark glasses persona came about accidentally.

He apparently left his glasses on a plane when he arrived to tour the UK early in his career, so ended up having to wear his prescription sunglasses the whole tour. He was therefore pictured wearing them in all the publicity shots from his visit and decided to stick with the image.

Dylan incidentally seemed to go through a phrase of constantly wearing sunglasses in the mid 60s but then grew out of it. Maybe he was copying Orbison?
 
According to Keith Richards, when the Stones toured in the US with Stevie Wonder in the 70’s some of them were convinced he wasn’t blind. They’d watch him check into hotels and walk to his room seemingly without any issue. However, it seems that Stevie Wonder had been into so many Holiday Inn’s over the years he’d memorised the lay out so well he was able to walk around without any assistance!
 
In the Fortean documentary The Secret Life of Plants, Stevie provided the soundtrack and is seen walking around a forest unaided. It's kind of obscure as a film, but if you see that you may have your suspicions, though the director presumably pointed him in the right direction and guided him off camera.
 
GNC said:
In the Fortean documentary The Secret Life of Plants, Stevie provided the soundtrack and is seen walking around a forest unaided.
Click to expand...

“Cut! Reset the nose, wipe off the blood. Quiet on set! Take Eighteen!”

maximus otter
 
graylien said:
[Bob]Dylan incidentally seemed to go through a phrase of constantly wearing sunglasses in the mid 60s but then grew out of it. Maybe he was copying Orbison?
Click to expand...

I've read somewhere that Bob had taken up pills and pot-smoking by then. In the mid-1960s, recreational drug use was not just illegal, but really illegal, so he started wearing shades most of the time in order to conceal the red-shot, dilated state of his eyes.
 
Real name Steveland Hardaway Judkins, the young Stevie Wonder was born six weeks premature in Saginaw, Michigan. The stunted growth of blood vessels in the back of his eyes caused his retinas to detach. The oxygen pumped into his incubator exacerbated the condition, leaving the tiny baby permanently blind.
A form of this is called.....retrolental fibroplasia...abnormal proliferation of fibrous tissue immediately behind the lens of the eye, leading to blindness. It affected many premature babies in the 1950s, owing to the excessive administration of oxygen.
 
Mikefule said:
When someone wants to tell a joke about a generic blind person, they always say "Stevie Wonder" rather than, say, David Blunkett, Blind Lemon Jefferson, or Lennie Peters. Somehow, he is the only blind person who everyone knows and feels able to joke about.
Click to expand...
Don't forget David Rathband - as in "you're as useless as PC Rathband's Etch-a-Sketch..."
(Hey, don't blame me, I didn't laugh when I heard that one. Much)

I quite liked Blind Melon Chitlin' myself, I often sing about how I'm going to "sing her a song, goin' to show her my ding-dong"

graylien said:
Dylan incidentally seemed to go through a phrase of constantly wearing sunglasses in the mid 60s but then grew out of it. Maybe he was copying Orbison?
Click to expand...

Maybe that's what Bonio from U2 is doing.
No, wait, he just wears sunglasses indoors because he is a total bell-end.
 
If Stevie Wonder is not blind, does it mean that his penis is not, therefore, erect?

To make sense of this statement, read on:

You Too Can Be A Recording Star!
by John Trubee

Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind. This ludicrous line was invented out of sheer boredom and homicidal frustration as I labored as a cashier in a convenience store in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1975. I'd scribble some poems and weird phrases on a legal pad to vent my seething anguish. Writing on the job was a kind of self-invented therapy to prevent the onset of mental illness due to occupational stress and severe teenage alienation.

In late spring of 1976, I bought one of those horrible sleazy tabloids you find in supermarkets by the check-out stand. I had to keep up on my UFO sightings and mass hatchet murders.

In the back pages of the Midnight Globe (not the National Enquirer, as erroneously reported elsewhere -- was it Time?), I scanned the geeky little ads and saw: "Cowrite on a 50-50 basis, earn $20,000 royalties, send your song poems to ..." some outfit in Nashville, Tennessee. I thought to myself: wouldn't it be fun to send these people the most ridiculous, stupid, vile, obscene, retarded Iyrics to see their response?

In five minutes of stream of consciousness (or unconsciousness), I hammered out the following:


Peace & Love

I got high last night on LSD
My mind was beautiful, and I was free
Warts loved my nipples because they are pink
Vomit on me, baby
Yeah Yeah Yeah.

Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind
It's erect because he's blind, it's erect because he's blind
Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind
It's erect because he is blind

Let's make love under the stars and watch for UFOs
And if little baby Martians come out of the UFOs
You can fuck them
Yeah Yeah Yeah.

The zebra spilled its plastinia* on bemis
And the gelatin fingers oozed electric marbles
Ramona's titties died in hell
And the Nazis want to kill everyone.

Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind ... etc.

*plastique in the lyrics Trubee wrote, mispronounced by the singer!


I wanted to get an emotional letter from the jerks in Nashville. I wanted them to tell me I was crazy. I wanted there to curse me out in writing so I could show all my friends.

Several weeks later I received a letter from Nashville Co-Writers which began:

Dear John,
We have just received your lyrics and think they are very worthy of being recorded with the full Nashville Sound Production. ... I am enclosing a contract of acceptance. Please sign and return along with $79.95 to cover the cost for each song to be completed ...

Aha! They wanted my money. I knew it! But if I send them the money, they would send me a tape and a record of my lyrics set to music. Although $79.95 was a lot to a minimum wage teenager, I signed the "contract of acceptance" and returned it with a check. Several weeks later I received a 7-inch, 45 RPM record that had a label and grooves only on one side. Typed on the white label was "Peace & Love" (John Trubee-Will Gentry). I immediately rushed upstairs and put this little gem on the turntable for a listen. Over the lamest, most minimal country track was some country hack singing the lyrics I wrote. I was stunned.

They did change one line, though -- they excised all mention of Stevie Wonder and had the singer croon repeatedly "A blind man" instead.

Also enclosed with the disc (actually an acetate) was a photograph of Ramsey Kearney, the guy who sang the damned thing. Wearing a butterfly-print polyester shirt, Ramsey looked like the perfect man to sing these demented lyrics.

Several weeks later, Nashville sent a teeny 3-inch reel tape of the song in extreme stereo -- one channel had only the prerecorded rhythm track while the other channel featured Ramsey singing those idiot lyrics with a little slap-back echo thrown in.

Blind Man's Penis

(Note: GNC mentioned this comic masterpiece in passing on the board a couple of years ago, but did not provide lyrics, song link, or details of the song's background and the Stevie Wonder reference.)
 
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This thread's just reminded me of that old joke:

Have you ever seen Stevie Wonder's wife?
No?
Neither has he.
 
In the recent movie Hustlers, experienced stripper Jennifer Lopez tells her student that Stevie Wonder likes to go to expensive strip clubs, and when the student wonders why, Jen replies it's because he's not blind at all, it's all an act.
 
Mikefule said:
Roy Orbison was not blind but had a substantial visual impairment. The dark glasses started as a response to that and became his "trademark" — like Buddy Holly only more so!

As for Stevie Wonder, the real Fortean thing is how blindness is somehow the only thing he is known for, and why he is so often used as a symbol to represent all blind people.

If you hear a joke that starts, "Stevie Wonder walks into a bar..." you can be pretty sure that the whole joke will hinge on his blindness and not on any aspect of his musical career. After 50 years in music and 25 Grammies, he is still known primarily as "the blind one."

When someone wants to tell a joke about a generic blind person, they always say "Stevie Wonder" rather than, say, David Blunkett, Blind Lemon Jefferson, or Lennie Peters. Somehow, he is the only blind person who everyone knows and feels able to joke about.

Meanwhile, for those of you who like conspiracy, I'm just saying, but you never see Stevie Wonder and Daredevil together...
Click to expand...
Good point though I believe in the US they also tell Helen Keller jokes.
 
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