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The Iconic Smokey Robinson at Eighty: The Playlist
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IT is always great celebrating a music birthday…
and I could not pass up the chance to mark Smokey Robinson’s eightieth birthday today (19th February)! He is an artist that I grew up listening to, and was instantly fascinated by. As a solo artist or with The Miracles, there is nobody who has the same sort of range and talent as Robinson! Seen as The King of Motown, Smokey Robinson is credited with four-thousand songs, and thirty-seven Top-40 hits, including Tears of a Clown, Tracks of My Tears, and Love Machine. Robinson also served as Vice President of Motown Records, writing and producing hits for groups such as The Temptations (My Girl) and Mary Wells (My Guy). William ‘Smokey’ Robinson Jr. was born on 19th February, 1940, and is a truly legendary American singer, songwriter, record producer, and former record executive. Robinson is the founder and lead of the Motown vocal group, The Miracles. He fronted the group from 1955 until 1972, but announced his retirement from the group to concentrate on his role as Motown's Vice President. Robinson came back to music as a solo artist the next year - following the sale of Motown Records in 1988, Robinson left the company in 1990. Quite rightly, Robinson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. There is no telling just how far his influence spreads as, as we have already discovered, he has written so many songs and his genius seems to know no limits!
I want to bring in an interview from 1968, where Rolling Stone declared Robinson the ‘reigning genius of the top 40’. It was clear, even then, how much music and creating meant to him:
“Smokey does four tunes an afternoon because he is a Top-40 hitmaker, a professional. He is Mr. Motown; small, agile, and very lightskinned, his physical presence is the opposite of the late Otis Redding‘s. In his dressing room after a show at a plush, white middle class club in San Francisco, he whipped off the orange handkerchief he had put over his closely razored process when he noticed pictures were being taken; the do-rag, apparently, is not the Motown image.
Interviewed, he was like a bright salesman for a progressive company. Yet his politeness, good nature, and respect for all performers, while the cliched public attributes of a showman, seemed also the virtues of a man beyond vanity. He and his group, he said, “just dig music, jazz, pop, rock and roll, folk, blues, or whatever.”
Up at the top of his great list (also on it are Henry Mancini, Bacharach and David, Otis Redding, baseball, basketball, swimming, and Motown – “one big happy, spiritual family, man”) are the Miracles. “We’ve stayed together because we legitimately love each other. Some groups, everything becomes more important to the group than the members. You see groups of cats, and they’re falling out about a different girl or this and that. It’s a drag.
IN THIS PHOTO: Smokey Robinson performs at the BET Awards on 28th June, 2015 in Los Angeles/PHOTO CREDIT: MPI10/MediaPunch/IPX
“Staying together has a lot to do with the way you treat people and the simple aspect of being lucky that people dig you for that long – because people don’t have to dig you. This is one thing that recording artists get off into where after they’ve had a few hit records they think it’s them. They think, ‘well, if I was the milkman, when I was coming down the street all the girls would come out of the house and say “oh, he’s coming with the milk,” and tear their clothes off’.
I wonder whether we will see another album from Smokey Robinson. He released Christmas Everyday (Amazon Original) through his Smokey Robinson label, and Smokey & Friends through Verve Records in 2015. As the wonderful, one and only Smokey Robinson celebrates his eightieth birthday, I have compiled a playlist below contained some of his best songs. I have skimmed his history and legacy, and I would encourage people to read up and look at interviews he has conducted to learn more about the great man. In this 2018 interview, Robinson was asked what it was like being a central figure of the Motown label:
“You were a central figure in the most important label of the century, in terms of music and in terms of social impact. What does that mean to you?
That means everything to me, man. That’s beyond our wildest dreams. Berry and I talk about it all the time. We never dared to dream that Motown would become what it has become. The very first day of Motown, there were five people there. Berry Gordy sat us down and said, “I’m going to start my own record company. We are not just going to make black music — we’re going to make music for the world.” That was our plan, and we did it”.
Just listen to Smokey Robinson’s amazing and decades-spanning back catalogue, and one realises there is nobody else in the world quite like this…
SIMPLY masterful songwriter.