From The Beginning

From The Beginning

Dave Marsh

Smokey is leaving the Miracles. This may mean more to those of us in Detroit, who’ve watched the Miracles almost, but never quite, make the break into the Top Forty success that they always deserved, over the last fourteen years, than it does to anyone else but it is a significant event.

“Smokey” Robinson, Bobby Rogers, Ronnie White, and Pete Moore are all 31 years old; they’ve been together, in a group called the Miracles, for seventeen of those years, half of them with the addition^ of Smokey’s wife, Claudette. There are almost no other groups who have been together that long, intact, in either white rock and roll or black music: the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers, and the mind searches from there.

Still, they made it very clear, this is an essential step. Robinson feels the pressure of his other commitments — production, his family, songwriting, and his chores as Executive Vice President of Motown itself — far too heavily to continue touring. “It’s a blow to us, too. It’s a hell of a thing. In the past year when we were home three or four weeks, we’re ready to go do a gig. I love it, in a way.”

“In the same instance,” Bobby Rogers cut in, “we’re ready to come home after three or four days when we’re out on the road.”

Plans for the Miracles remain unclear. Yes, they will be together for another few months . . . until July, in all probability. Yes, they might replace Smokey. No, they might not. (“With David Ruffin?” I asked. They laughed, although not everyone from Motown present did.)

“When the Supremes split,” Smokey assured us, “the idea in mind was to create two hit acts out of what had previously been one. But that was the Supremes’ split thing. Not mine. I don’t know when I’ll be able to perform live again.”

The Miracles have an album and a half in the can, plan to do some more recording with Smokey, and then look around for other singers. Lead singers: “Personally,” Ronnie White said, “I don’t want to lead. I’ve had the position and I don’t want to do it. In the event we do decide and want to do it, the person chosen would be explicitly for the purpose of singing lead.”

Smokey’s not the easiest person, in the world to replace though. That high, tenor floating to alto voice" which is occasionally a soprano, even, isn’t very common. (Michael Jackson has it but he’s got other commitments.) “I think,” Bobby Rogers commented, “it would be impossible to replace Smokey after fourteen years. (Since “Shop Around” —Ed.) We’ll have to have, almost, a different type of sound. Pete has come up with a lot of new things, a more progressive sound. We are interested. in that sound. But specifically, we don’t know what ...”

“Well,” White added, “there is one specific: we’d like a HIT sound.”

Smokey, says Smokey, will be producing the new Supremes album, and has already produced their current (now, probably still when you read this) hit single, “Floy Joy.” As for writing, “I’ve really gotten back into it for the past seyen or eight months. I’ve written about twelve or fifteen songs, the most I’ve done in three or four years.”

The perfect key for the obvious question: Do you have a favorite song?

“No, not really, man. If I did have, it would be among the songs written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, or John Lennon and Paul McCartney, not something I wrote myself.

“I’ll tell you though,” he said, thinking a minute. “There is one song. Everywhere we go there’s one song we absolutely have to do, no matter what, someone always demands it. That song is “Ooo Baby Baby.” I guess you could call it our national anthem.”

The conversation drifted off into other things. Inspirations for the Miracles’ formation: the Dells, Hank Ballard, the Drifters, the Spaniels, Frankie Lymon. “And a group you’ve never heard of, because they grew up in our neighborhood, the Five Quills.”

“We used to have group battles at parties, where all the groups — because you were either in a group or a gang in our neighborhood would come in and try to beat the other groups. And there was one group,” Ronnie White said, with a tone of respect and maybe a little awe in his voice even now, “there was one group that we really aimed for, that were really the top. The Four Tops.”

And more things. “I had a complex about my voice, a real thing about it for several years. People would confuse me with Claudette, people would go, ‘Oh, I thought you were a girl.’ I remember, one of our first hits, probably “Shop Around,” I got sick and couldn’t go on stage, so Claudette sang for me. And in the middle of the songs, guys would be yellin’ out, ‘Sing it, Smokey!’ All of this combined to give me a real complex about my voice — something Michael Jackson is going to have to face, something I think Jermaine Jackson may be going through right now.”

Yet even hour after hour of reminiscence couldn’t capture all the Miracles, and Smokey in particular, leave behind when they split. True, the Miracles have had “only” three gold single in those fourteen years: but what singles! “Shop Around,” “The Tracks of My Tears,” “Tears of A Clown.” And Smokey has penned five more, from Mary Wells’ “My Guy,” to the Temptations’ “My Girl.”

We walked out of the press conference with a lot of things rumbling through our heads (“Take a goodlook at my face . . . ”) maybe just because we knew it was one of the last times we were going to have the privilege of spending an hour or so in the same room with these four men.

We’re down to records now, and the line that finished it all just came on, buried in a more obscure Smokey tune called “My Girl Has Gone”:

Now happiness and all the best That’s all I’m wishin’ for you But you left me In misery

I’m feeling’ sad, and I’m blue I said, I’m sad, and I’m blue