A young Leonard Pitts and Stevie Wonder sit at a table together. What’s the photo about?
Leonard Pitts Jr.’s wonderful career didn’t start at age 19 when he sat down with Stevie Wonder at 2:30 a.m. for a one-on-one interview inside Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California, in the summer of 1977.
It could have ended when Pitts challenged Wonder about his name and the blind music legend challenged the brash writer to a game of Air Hockey.
By then Pitts was already writing for Soul, a Black entertainment tabloid, for more than a year. Pitts was still in college in 1976 when Soul newspaper founder and editor Regina Jones recognized that the skinny teen seated before her desk — in checkered bell-bottom jeans, turtleneck sweater and a full-on ‘fro — was preternaturally talented.
Pitts interviewed everyone for Soul that was hot on the Black entertainment scene: LeVar Burton, who gave an early interview to an equally young Pitts in 1976. Gladys Knight. Michael Jackson. Diana Ross. Teddy Pendergrass. Members of his favorite group, The Temptations, as well as the Commodores and Spinners. Rick “Super Freak” James would tease Pitts about his straight-lace nature.
But only Stevie Wonder challenged him to an Air Hockey game and only Pitts challenged Wonder about his stage name inside Roscoe’s, which stayed open into the wee hours for that momentous interview for a Soul cover feature.
Pitts, now 65, wrote his final column for the Miami Herald on Tuesday. He chuckles at the long-ago memory.
“He said if I came by the studio one time he could kick my ass in Air Hockey because he was supposed to be very good at Air Hockey. Well, you know, he cheats. He covers the goal and then whales away at you. That was the story and I never played Air Hockey with him so I don’t know,” Pitts said.
The photo of Pitts and Wonder, taken by then Soul photo editor Bruce Talamon several months after Wonder had released his timely and still relevant “Songs in the Key of Life” landmark album in the fall of 1976, hung inside tourist destination Roscoe’s for years. The photo is also featured in Talamon’s coffee table book, “Soul R&B Funk: Photographs 1972-1982,” that was released by Taschen in 2018.
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“I’d interviewed pretty much everybody by the one and only time I ever talked to Stevie. You look back on stuff and I was such a dope in a lot of ways that I asked him about his next album and he said — what I didn’t realize was a joke and I reported it straight — he said the next album was going to be called One Mo’ Before 3-0. And I wrote it absolutely straight,” Pitts said.
Wonder, born Stevland Hardaway Judkins on May 13, 1950, was barely 27.
“The other thing I remember from the interview, I was 19, I just said stupid stuff. Sometimes I look back and how did I ever survive this?” Pitts laughs, recalling how he quizzed Wonder on his stage name that had been given to him at age 12 by Motown founder Berry Gordy.
At that table at Roscoe’s, which remains a destination eatery on Gower Street in Hollywood, the teenager Pitts told the superstar that while his stage name was something the world had gotten used to at that point it was, you know, “kind of strange or corny” Pitts told the superstar across the table who had collected his third consecutive Grammy album of the year. “Berry Gordy gave you Stevie Wonder. It’s like Joey Fantastic!” Pitts told Wonder. “Why didn’t he just reach over and find my face and slap the hell out of it and be done with it?”
Pitts doesn’t recall Wonder’s answer about his Gordy-given name. “He gave kind of an ambivalent answer. He didn’t kick my ass or anything. We actually ended up pretty good.”
That’s when Wonder offered up the Air Hockey challenge. Wonder, famed for keeping people waiting, is still waiting.
Talamon, who, like Pitts, started out with Soul as a young man fresh from college, a few years earlier in 1972 after photographing the Watts Festival, also went on to a high-profile career. He photographed music legends Bob Marley, Donna Summer and Isaac Hayes. He did still photography in the TV and film industry on projects starring Denzel Washington and Eddie Murphy and others.
“We were having a lot of fun but we had an opportunity to do some important work and when you think about it now you realize that was a special time,” Talamon, 73, told the Miami Herald about those early days at Soul and that Wonder photograph. “Regina gave us this opportunity and we had to do the work.”
The three, Talamon, Jones and Pitts, have remained friends for all of these years, Talamon said. “How many people remember and keep in touch with their first boss? Leonard was just out of school and here he is interviewing Stevie Wonder and we are now X number of years later and the work still stands.”
Documenting Wonder at the time — the young writer and the young photographer — in a popular restaurant that set aside space hours after closing time for the superstar and the Black newspaper kids Jones had championed was instructional and lasting, Talamon said.
“Stevie Wonder wrote ‘Love’s in Need of Love Today’ for that album that was out at the time and what we were doing — the writing and the photography — it’s never been more timely and relevant than it is right now when you look at where we are in the world today. The things that we were doing 40 and 50 years ago, it kind of feels timely to revisit the images and the writing of that period and look at it with fresh eyes,” Talamon said. “That was a time that’ll never come again.”
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Pitts and the Pulitzer
Pitts, who went on to publish numerous books alongside his Miami Herald career, may not be able to boast about playing Air Hockey with Stevie Wonder. But, like Wonder with his Grammys, Pitts won the highest honor in his chosen field, the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004.
As colleagues circled around Pitts in the newsroom on that April day in 2004, Pitts surprised Steve Sonsky, the editor who had hired him at the Herald in 1991, with a phone call to thank him. Sonsky had left the Herald by that point.
“It spoke to the graciousness, sensitivity, humility and class that Leonard has always embodied, qualities equally important to the quality of his work, and the man he is, as his prodigious talent,” Sonsky told the Herald ahead of Pitts’ recent farewell party in Miami with his colleagues and family.
David Lawrence Jr., who was Miami Herald publisher when Pitts was hired, also had words to say about the retirement. “The original sin of America is racism. Leonard Pitts has done more than anyone I know to enlighten all of us, confront the evil, and diminish racism. I so admire his decency, his humanity, his forthrightness.”
