About twelve years ago, Berry Gordy told Smokey Robinson how to write songs. “Every song should have an idea, tell a story, mean something.” Smokey put aside his exercise book, full of painstakingly-written teen songs about being in love with his fifth-grade teacher and not wanting to go in the army, and started again. “Shop Around,” “You Really Got A Hold On Me,” “My Guy,” and “I Second That Emotion” were among the songs he came up with to meet Berry Gordy’s specifications.

In a list of the hundred best songs of the 1960s, at least ten written by Smokey Robinson would have to be included. “Tracks Of My Tears,” “Since I Lost My Baby,” “My Girl,” “Ain’t That Peculiar,” “It’s Growing,” “The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage.” For anybody who has heard the songs a few times, the titles by themselves conjure a mood, a few intricately-rhyming lines, even a place where a vocal group comes in to harmonize.

And then there’s his singing. If few people would argue with his importance as a song-writer, more would wince at the idea of including him in a list of all-time great singers. Most British record reviewers goofed at least once during the sixties by referring to the female lead singer of the Miracles, and a lot of people still haven’t got used to

that pure high voice. But, although it doesn’t suit all songs equally well, Smokey’s style can establish innocence and devotion better than any other singer — and those are two of the most common and important moods in popular music.

He’s been singing for as long as he can remember, and while he was still at high school in Detroit Smokey formed a vocal group with some friends: Bob Rogers, Pete Moore, Ronnie White — who used to be the. paper boy where Smokey lived — the guitarist Marv Tarplin, and Claudia, who’s Smokey’s wife. Marv became a session musician at Motown, and Claudia stayed home to bring up a family, but the rest of the Miracles have stayed together. There’s been pressure on Smokey to break away from his friends ever since they became professionals, as, Smokey recalled in an interview when he was in London to tape a guest spot for the Tom Jones Show:

“Soon after ‘Shop Around’ made the charts, we were at the Apollo, and a man came up to me in the dressing room, just before we were due to go on, and said, ‘Listen, Smokey, those guys in the Miracles are just riding on your back. You don’t need them. If you drop them, I’ll buy your contract from Gordy and I’ll make you the biggest star in the country. By yourself.’ I was very young, eighteen or nineteen, but somehow I knew that my best interests were where my loyalties were, with Berry and with the Miracles. But that was a terrible pressure to have, to go on stage arid perform with something like that on your mind. When I came off, I told him, ‘O.K. I’ll sign with you; but only on condition that you make Berry Gordy president of whatever record company I record for, and that ydu sign the Miracles with me’. He wasn’t interested.”

Smokey had met Berry Gordy a couple of years earlier, at a music publisher’s office in New York. The publisher hadn’t been too impressed with Smokey’s demos, but Berry was. He introduced himself, looked through Smokey’s exercise book, suggested they work together, and advised Smokey to learn how to write effective songs, to make them mean something.

At that time Berry Gordy was a free lance writer and producer, providing Songs for Jackie Wilson and producing records by Marv Johnson and Eddie Holland for United Artists. He licensed the first Miracles record, “Got A Job,” to End (owned by George Goldner in New York) and the second, “Bad Girl,” to Chess (owned by Leonard Chess in Chicago). If Berry Gordy had been properly paid for what he did, he might never have been driven to start his own company. But, frustrated with royalty cheques that were too low and too late — when they came at all — he decided to go on his own. Jackie Wilson was already signed to Brunswick and Marv Johnson to United Artists, but Eddie Holland and the Miracles were contracted to Berry, and they formed the nucleus of his roster when he founded the Tammie, later Tamla, label.

Eddie Holland was a singer-composer with a vocal style very similar to Jackie Wilson’s; when Berry wrote songs for Jackie, Eddie sang on the demo records that indicated the arrangement and melody for Jackie to follow. But although Eddie’s “Jamie” was a moderate pop hit, he didn’t establish himself as a major figure until he, his brother Brian and Lamont Dozier started working with the Supremes and the Four Tops in 1964, as the production-and-writing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland.

Smokey Robinson made his impact much faster. “Shop Around” by the Miracles made number two on the Billboard chart in 1960, followed in the next, two years by several Mary Wells hits, most of which Smokey wrote, and in 1962 by another Miracles hit, “You Really Got A Hold On Me.” (The only other consistent hit-makers for Gordy’s labels in that period were the Marvelettes and Marvin Gaye, working with writer-producers Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and William Stevenson).

From 1964 to 1966, Smokey was responsible for producing, and providing most of the material for, the Temptations, and in addition to keeping the Miracles going, he also contributed to some of Marvin Gaye’s best records, and the odd thing for other acts including “Don’t Mess With Bill” for the Marvelettes. Since 1967, when the group was officially retitled Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, there has been a decline in the quantity of studio work that Smokey has been involved in; curiously, this has coincided with a decline in the quality of his writing, suggesting either that he responds best to the pressure of writing a lot of material in a short time, or else that he is finding it harder to represent the anguish and ecstacy of love with the adolescent images and similes that once came so easily to him. Or maybe it is just that he has concentrated on writing so much, since he became increasingly involved in the administration of the Motown organization.

Originally signed to Berry Gordy on a management and production contract, Smokey outgrew that formal arrangement to such an extent that he was apy pointed as a vice president in 1967.

Long before this, he had attended regular weekly meetings with the rest of the Motown production staff.

“It was like a family organization then,” he recalled. “About ten of us took all the decisions on a collective basis. Berry had the final say, of course, but we had a chance to make pur contributions. It was all very informal, we knew all the secretaries and studio staff by their first names. But now there are more than 250 people employed there, and of course the whole organization has moved from the houses where Berry started it.

“I’m in charge of the department that looks after the new artists that are signed to Motown, those that haven’t had a hit yet. If and when they do get a hit, they move onto Artist Development, to learn choreography, stage presentation, that kind of thing.”

In contrast to other companies such as Atlantic, Motown insists on firm control of its performers, especially those under 21, paying them only a proportion of their royalties, banking the rest so that they can’t spend it all at once.

“That’s one of Motown’s biggest headaches, trying to instill a responsible attitude towards money. You’d be surprised how hard it is to explain to a young star that he is going to have to pay taxes out of the money his record has earned. Atlantic doesn’t take on all that responsibility, but that company doesn’t have the same long-term success with performers that Motown has had with all of its top acts. One or two Motown singers have complained about the system and left the company, but they haven’t been able to repeat their success — Mary Wells, Kim Weston. And Barrett Strong, who had a hit with “Money” and later left Motown, has come back to become a very successful session musician, writer, and now coproducer with Norman Whitfield.”

The difference between a good Smokey Robinson song and a good song by Tony Macauley or Greenaway-Cooke is that Smokey doesn’t relax after he’s thought of a good lyric-and-melody hook for the chorus. His songs do have an attractive chorus to draw attention and hum along to; but he fills the gaps between them with a, succession of secondary rhymes and melodic diversions, so that the song is a pleasure not just to hear but to listen to and get to know. Listen to “I Second That Emotion,” whose title alone would be enough for most writers - if they dared to risk so potentially corny a concept. Smokey surrounds it with words like “notion” and “devotion,” so you accept the chorus as being just the right line in that situation.

But then Smokey goes on, and fills the song out:

, “Maybe you think that love was just for fools,

And so it makes you wise to break the rules.”

It’s clever, but it’s also so smoothly melodic that these two lines, rather than the repeated chorus, become the focus of the song. Or maybe you prefer some other rhyme; the point is, the songs have so much in them, there is a choice for each person to make. “I Second That Emotion” has, on top of everything else — or rather, underneath everything else — an amazing guitarist, who squeezes a succession of perfectly appropriate comments between and behind the vocal lines, as sensitive as King Curtis at his best, but at such a low volume you don’t notice him unless you concentrate. Subliminal accompaniments, yet!

As Smokey would be the first to acknowledge, the exceptional ability of Motown’s session men contribute incalculably to every record that comes from the compnay, no matter how much the focus seems to be on the vocal. Those musicians were there right at the start, on “Shop Around,” a record that betrays little evidence of having been made as long ago as 1960. Smokey and the Miracles might have found it much harder to generate such an infectious spirit without the sax player, and without the bass player who somehow manages to sound as if he was playing a stand-up string bass, with all that booming reverb some of us miss in these fuhky times.

The first records that Smokey wrote and produced for Mary Wells sound much more dated, although they were made after “Shop Around.” Dee Dee Sharp and Little Eva were popular at the time, and one or tv/o songs that might have sounded O.K. with a less familiar twist-beat accompaniment now sound like ordinary heartache songs of the period — “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me To The Punch.”

But for “What’s Easy For Two Is So Hard For One” and “My Guy,” Smokey got an entirely different kind of musical setting — light drumming, finger-snapping — which seemed to free Mary’s Voice from the inhibiting conventions of the time, and she suddenly sounds real. So real, she even gets away with that pop worn cliche, “he may not be a movie star, but when it comes to being happy, we are” (borrowed, incidentally, from Berry Gordy’s song for Marv Johnson, “You Got What It Takes”).

Mary’s high, light voice could sound very similar to Smokey’s at times, and which he surely wouldn’t have done for a song he really cared about. In 1962, Carolyn Crawford recorded his song “My Smile Is Just A Frown Turned Upside Down,” which included the rhyme:

“Just like Pagliacci did,

I keep my sadness hid, ” which comes in at the end of “Tears Of a Clown.” (Or maybe it was the Carolyn Crawford song that was a throw-away; Smokey might have forgotten he’d ever written it). Anyway, this idea was one that Smokey used quite often, but surely never more effectively than in “Tracks Of My Tears.”

“Tracks Of My Tears” was recorded in 1965, probably the peak period for the Miracles, who also recorded “Ooo Baby, Baby,” “Fork In The Road,” and “Going To A-Go-Go” that year. “Ooo Baby” was possibly the purest song they ever did, relying almost entirely on Smokey’s expressiveness and scarcely having any words beyond the title and a sighed “I’m crying.” It is futile to describe how he sings it; but it’s the kind of song that causes you to stop whatever you are doing and close your eyes. A very concentrated trip.

“Going To A-Go-Go” is the opposite kind of mood song, open and carefree, but again has only a few words (the best line is “ ’most every taxi that you flag is going to a-go-go.”). Smokey confirms his amazing ability to abandon himself to a song; he doesn’t overstate the lyric, but stretches its implications as far as they’ll go. On “Going To A-Go-Go,” that isn’t very far; on “Fork In The Road,’ he really does “make you think.”

If 1965 was this peak year, Smokey still made some great records later, just not so often. “I Second That Emotion” was a 1967 record, and so were “The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage” and “More Love.” “More Love” was another mood song with not many words but a memorable extended line, “It’ll take a hundred lifetimes to live it down, wear it down, tear it down,” where each “down” seems to be the last word in the sentence, but is followed by another phrase. That’s a trick Smokey uses quite often, and I was planning to cite another example on the last Miracles LP, “Don’t Take It So Hard,” but the song was written by Johnson, Schofield, and Johnson, which proves that other people are learning the Robinson craft. “The Love I Saw In You” had ' a similar effect, where Smokey seemed to use a standard cliche about lipstick traces but then' made the line ring true to him by adding a specific definition: “all that’s left are lipstick traces of kisses you pretended to feel.” In most songs, the thing about lipstick traces is they never get washed off; in this one, you imagine the singer running to the bathroom to find a flannel.

We recently went through a period in popular music when innovators were expected to make their inventiveness self-evident, by using some outrageous device. Writers crammed" their songs with words, as if-that was song-writing; guitarists let their amplifying systems make noises for them, as if that was. playing guitar; and singers growled and talked and imitated other people, as if that was singing. Small wonder that Smokey Robinson seemed to lose his nerve, that he tried to make his songs and arrangements seem mature (too often, they seemed only' pretentious), and that he reached in desparation for those songs that did seem to be wellwritten, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Hey Jude.” If the young pop music audience has gone crazy, maybe the best thing to do is please the parents. Maybe, but I don’t think so. We’re coming out of the period where everybody was looking for something “new,” and are acknowledging that there some good people in pop music before the Beatles. One of them was Carole King, and it will, be interesting to see if her success inspires another of them, Smokey Robinson, to go for the same audience that bought her LP; not only is he a better singer, he’s a better writer too. But, whether he does or not, there is already enough material in the Motown catalogue to place him among the great ones.