Robinson Looks Back on Years of Renown

The one truly great moment at last year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner came when Smokey Robinson came out for his induction. The Waldorf-Astoria Ballroom in New York City was packed with record industry veterans--label heads, artists, deejays and movers and shakers of many stripes--and for much of the evening they’d been curiously sedate. But when Robinson walked onstage, they rose, en masse, clapping madly. Then, quite spontaneously, they started singing, sweetly, softly:

“Ooo Oooo Ooooooo . . . baby, baby. . . .

“Oooo Ooooo Oooooooo . . . baby, baby. . . .”

“That was an awesome moment in my life,” Robinson recalled before a performance at Wolf Trap Farm Park outside Washington. “I hate to admit this, but I didn’t even realize there was a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame until I’d been inducted. The first one totally went by me --I don’t know what I was doing to not realize they were creating it.

“I found out when Cecil Franklin --Aretha’s brother and a lifelong friend, we grew up in the same (Detroit) neighborhood--calls up and says, ‘You think you’re great, you think you’re smart, don’t you? You and Aretha both, you really think you’re something.’

“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’

“He said, ‘You’ve both been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.’

“I said, ‘What’s that?’ ”

Robinson didn’t take it all in, he says, until that January night, when he realized “how all these people I was going to be in the Hall of Fame with were my idols-- Jackie Wilson, Clyde McPhatter, Sam Cooke. It was incredible.”

Introducing him, Brian Wilson recited Smokey Robinson’s achievements--as the lead singer with the Miracles and the first real hit maker for Motown; as songwriter and producer extraordinaire not only for the Miracles, but for the Temptations, Marvelettes, Mary Wells and others (which led to Bob Dylan’s famous remark that Smokey was “America’s greatest living poet”); as a longtime Motown executive, and on and on.

As Robinson was listening to all this, he says, he was thinking “how blessed, how fortunate I am, because here it’s only the second annual dinner and I’m being inducted and all these other people who are there from this moment on have to wonder if in fact they’re ever going to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and I don’t have to think about that!”

Smokey Robinson probably wouldn’t have had to worry about such things anyway. Not with classics like “Shop Around,” “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Going to a Go-Go,” “Ooo Baby Baby,” “The Tracks of My Tears,” “I Second That Emotion,” “The Tears of a Clown” and “More Love,” all recorded with the Miracles. For the Temptations, he came up with “My Girl” (actually written for his young daughter), “The Way You Do the Things You Do” and “Get Ready.” For Mary Wells, there was “My Guy,” and for Marvin Gaye, “Ain’t That Peculiar.”

Smokey Robinson has a timelessness about him. He’s 48 now, but he looks younger than he did in 1972 when he retired from the Miracles and went through a three-year performing hiatus before returning as a solo artist. Unlike some singers, Robinson has never abandoned his past, and his concerts are chock full of hits past and present. Ever the diplomat, he refuses now, as always, to pick favorites.

“If I ever really sat down and thought about it. . . .” he teases. “But I never do. . . . Some of those songs I sang thousands of times with the Miracles and since I’ve been a solo artist, and every time is like a new time for me. They all have a special place in my heart. I refer to them as my kids.

“But I love song, you see. Even the songs that I sing that I didn’t write, I love singing those songs. I’ve loved songs since I was a little boy.”

Robinson’s first song emerged when he was at Detroit’s Dwyer Elementary School and contributed lyrics to a class musical. He was also a member of the Young Writers Club, his work proudly displayed on the school’s bulletin board. And when he listened to the radio, he didn’t just hear the music, he paid particular attention to the words, followed the songwriters and producers, “not even realizing that it was going to be my life.”

“I had written a few songs,” he explains, “but I didn’t think it would be anything serious in my life because at that time I wanted to be a baseball player. I was very serious about it up until my late teens--played summer league baseball, and in high school I played football and basketball.”

One of the few regrets he expresses is that none of those early songs has survived.

“When I met Berry,” he says, referring to Berry Gordy Jr., founder of the Motown empire but then still employed on the Ford assembly line, “I had a ‘Big Ten’ notebook with about 100 songs I’d written, and I wish I had that. But as you’re living your life, you never think of things becoming historically significant. I don’t even have a copy of all the records I’ve made, and I wish I had those.”

Still writing after all these years, he continues to “jot things down. I’ve always done that. They always have stationery in a hotel, and I have a little tape recorder that I carry with me for melodies and so on.”

With the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame behind him and a likely induction this year into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York, with more than 40 albums that have produced several dozen hits, with a million tour miles behind him, it’s hard to imagine the time three decades ago when Smokey Robinson was auditioning for a Jackie Wilson tour with the four Northern High School buddies with whom he’d been performing at school functions and local dances as the Matadors. Rechristened the Miracles, they’d already been turned down by several labels when Gordy, a part-time producer and songwriter, heard them and expressed an interest in recording them. It was a fortunate encounter--because Motown, you could say, was built on Miracles.

After some near misses, of course.

The first Miracles recording, “Got a Job” (an answer to the Silhouettes’ “Get a Job,” co-written by Robinson, Gordy and Jackie Wilson’s cousin), came out in 1958 and caused barely a ripple on the R & B charts. Another Robinson-Berry tune, “Bad Girl,” came out a year later (leased to Chess, which had national distribution). Then another year went by before “Way Over There” came out on Gordy’s own Tamla label (one of Motown’s sister labels). It became a minor regional hit. (Actually, the Miracles’ first Tamla release was a song called “The Feeling Is So Fine,” but it was withdrawn almost immediately after release and is now one of the most valuable Motown items on the collectors’ market.)

The breakthrough came with “Shop Around,” yet another Robinson-Gordy tune. At this stage, those two were the fledgling label’s chief writers and producers, and after the song was rejected by Barrett Strong (“Money (That’s What I Want)”), the Miracles decided try it themselves. Out it went one day. That night Gordy, a notorious perfectionist, called Robinson and the Miracles into a 4 a.m. recording session to punch up the rhythm at bit. The new version became Gordy’s first million-seller and first No. 1 national hit.

“The first version I’d recorded myself with the Miracles,” Robinson recalls, “and it was slower and more funky than the record Berry re-recorded. I don’t even have copies of those (early releases).”

“Shop Around” gave Berry Gordy the lift he needed. Over the next decade, Motown and Gordy’s various other labels would offer up what they billed as the Sound of Young America, turning out hit after hit. It may have been the last time that a whole genre of music (as opposed to individual artists) truly overcame the barriers dividing black and white audiences. Motown was crossover before the word existed.

“Berry’s idea of making music was music that everyone could enjoy,” Robinson says, “music that had a very powerful beat but had stories that everyone could relate to. He didn’t specifically talk about it racially, but as to everyone being able to relate to what was being said. That’s what we set out to do.”

Gordy and his inner circle (including Robinson, who was made a vice president of the company in 1963) created a pop assembly line and developed an enviable in-house empire that embraced everything from management and booking to the legendary artists’ grooming and finishing school (a.k.a. “artist development”). Gordy was after quality control, and he got both quality and control.

As for Robinson, he was busy making Miracles hits and lending a helping hand--or song--to the rest of the Motown roster, usually writing for specific voices or personalities. “I’d even try to incorporate words into the song that I thought they sang well,” he says. He knew how to work with limitations--”My Guy” is a triumph of songwriting and production over Mary Wells’ weak singing that allowed Wells to displace the Beatles at the top of the charts, something Motown would do off and on throughout the ‘60s.

Robinson could also draw out new talent.

“I wrote ‘My Girl’ for David Ruffin because he was a sleeping giant (in the Temptations),” he recalls. “I’d used Eddie Kendricks’ voice for ‘The Way You Do the Things You Do,’ and everyone who recorded them from that point on was just using Eddie’s voice. So I tailored ‘My Girl’ to David’s voice, to what I thought he sang well.

“It worked.”

And so did Robinson for the next decade. Then in 1972, he left the Miracles, retiring at the age of 32. The road and the studio had taken their toll, not just on Robinson but on his wife, Claudette, an original Miracle who’d retired in 1964 after eight miscarriages she blamed on the stress of her career. (Their 27-year marriage ended amicably in 1986.) At his last concert with the Miracles--at Washington’s Carter Barron Amphitheatre--Robinson looked beaten, much older than he does today.

“I was bedraggled around that era, I really was,” he admits. “I had really had it. Those were trying times--I was about to leave my brothers, and that was a very hard decision for me to make. It took me from 1968 to 1972 to do it, saying I was going to do it every year.”

Three years later, Robinson retired from retirement (though he’d been recording all along), returning to the stage as a solo act. By then, Motown itself had also gone through a major transition, abandoning Detroit for Los Angeles.

“A lot of things happened during that time period. When I became a vice president at Motown in 1963, my office was for the induction of new talent, and all that talent was signed in through my office. I coordinated their schedules with producers and writers, their school schedule for artist development, things like that.

“When I moved to Los Angeles, my office became the financial center. All the incoming checks came through my office; I signed all the payroll checks and all the outgoing checks. It wasn’t as much fun. . . . I was really going up the wall.”

Like many in the Motown family, Robinson had resisted the move to California, partly for sentimental reasons (so many of the artists were Detroit natives) and partly because he was apprehensive about earthquakes. But now, he says, “I’m sorry Randy Newman beat me to that song, because ‘I Love L.A.’ I can’t think of a solitary place in the entire world that I’d rather live.

“I’m a golf fanatic, and there’s a golf course on every other corner. And it’s true we have a smog problem, but we’re not No. 1,” he adds protectively.

Leave it to Smokey to put a happy face on smog. The brightness is part of his enduring appeal, of course, as he brings one of pop’s most romantic voices to bear on matters of the heart (though Time did once refer to the tracks-of-his-tears troubadour as “The Prince of Self-Pity”). For Robinson, love is the lasting thing on people’s minds, which may be why his best songs speak as clearly now as they ever did.

They speak so clearly at times that Robinson gets introduced to children who are the consequences of one or another Smokey Robinson song. “That makes me feel very good,” he says with a laugh.