The Perpetual Miracle of Smokey

By JAY COCKS

A soul master eases through 40 with old gifts and new hits

The voice works its way every place, any time. Over a car radio at high noon in the Mojave. On a cassette recorder during a long day at the beach. No matter how early the hour or how bright the glare. When Smokey Robinson comes on, the shades are drawn and lights go down all over the world.

He made his first big hit, Shop Around, when he was 20. It launched Robinson, the group he helped form, the Miracles, and the upstart Detroit record company that released it on a wing and a prayer, Motown. In the decades since Smokey passed along some tuneful romantic advice ("My mama told me/ You better shop around"), Motown changed from a phenomenon to a corporation. Smokey became vice president of artist relations. He named his son Berry after his friend Berry Gordy Jr., founder of Motown, and christened his daughter Tamla after the Motown subsidiary for which Smokey still records. When he was not tending to official responsibilities and keeping business in the family, Smokey also wrote, produced and performed some of the most enduring rhythm and blues ever made.

The church kept easy company with the street corner in his rich melodies, and his lyrics had a shimmering, reflective grace that, at his pleasure, could challenge or seduce. With the Miracles, Smokey helped make a kind of soul music that balanced ghetto pride and middle-class ambition. Some of the group's best tunes--The Tracks of My Tears, You've Really Got a Hold on Me, I Second That Emotion, Ooo Baby Baby--stayed true to the R & B roots even as they beckoned, and found, a larger pop audience.

The son of a truck driver and a government worker who died when her only son was ten, William ("Smokey") Robinson was a kid who spent his candy money on music books but figured that the future would be brighter if he followed a more practical bent. He thought about dentistry, considered electrical engineering, "but between high school and college I met Berry Gordy." Smokey and four cronies from Detroit's North End--Warren Pete Moore, Bobby Rogers, Ron White and Claudette Rogers--formed the Miracles, and Smokey left college during the first semester. The name of the debut Miracles single could have been a proud rebuke to guidance counselors everywhere: Got a Job.

The Miracles ended 1960 with one gold record. By the end of the decade they had seven more. Motown grew into a kind of consortium of all-American soul as Gordy moved acts like the Supremes, Marvin Gaye and--yes--the Miracles out of the soul circuit and into the mainstream. Eventually Smokey seemed to lose his footing a little bit. He broke with the Miracles in 1972, wanting to spend time with his family. His solo records, smoothly crafted, were winning but not involving, irresolute, somehow, as if written and recorded on automatic.

The success last year of Where There's Smoke and its hit single Cruisin' started to change things. His new album, Warm Thoughts, shows that Smokey has snapped firmly back into gear. The album and its first single, Let Me Be the Clock, have both gone gold, helping to dispatch Smokey onto a just completed concert tour that will take off again this fall for Europe. Listening to Smokey's gift-wrapped voice, working through the easeful funk of Warm Thoughts, is a full curriculum of fine and applied musical science. Says Smokey's assistant, Randy Dunlap: "Being with Smokey is like getting a Ph.D. in soul." Adds longtime Fan Carolyn Collins: "Oh, man, I don't think he's changed. He got quiet for a while, but he's still cool-blooded. He's still bad."

Bad as the best and as cool as they come, Smokey is remarkably low key for a soul master. Onstage, like Sinatra, he just stands easy and sings. Before a show, Smokey, a vegetarian, will chew on nuts, cauliflower, celery and have a glass of tomato juice (he does not go near the hard stuff). Then, usually, he says a prayer of thanks. "I'm a very, very strong believer in God," Smokey told TIME Correspondent David Jackson backstage after a recent concert. "I will pray just to give thanks that I am able to do all this." What he cannot do, he insists, is dance ("Never could"). No matter. The snuggling sexuality of his voice seems to move him all over the stage and right out into the audience, even if he stays firmly rooted to the spot. "I want them to hear what they came to hear," Smokey says. "If I don't remember all the words to some of the old songs, I'll sing what I remember. We all have a great time. I can be down in the dumps and really feeling bad. But when I go onstage, it's like wow. It's like . . . oh, playing golf."

Smokey may seem like any suburban grandee offstage, but there probably are not many men on the golf course who remember what it was like to get shot at while their tour bus rolled down the backwoods of Dixie. Robinson's lead guitarist, Marvin Tarplin, who co-wrote Going to a Go-Go and Cruisin ', still carries for luck a towel he boosted from "the first Holiday Inn that would take blacks down South." Memories like that, as formative as any musical roots, give Robinson's songs the kind of force that sets them above standard love tunes. The loss and pain in his music always seem to go a little deeper than a broken heart. This may account in part for the fact that when Linda Ronstadt tried her own version of The Tracks of My Tears, she sounded like a jilted cheerleader crying into her looseleaf.

Smokey, however, steadfastly refuses to say a discouraging word about any of the multitude of cover versions of his tunes. "I don't have any criticism. When someone records your songs it's a form of flattery. I'm even happy when someone who can't carry a tune tries to sing along." Maybe so. But he has also got to know that, in any Smokey Robinson singalong, there is only going to be one voice you will hear. -- Jay Cocks

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