SMOKEY ROBINSON: WHERE THERE’S FIRE

Detroit, October, 1960: It was three o'clock in the morning when 20-year-old William "Smokey" Robinson got a surprise phone call from his boss, Berry Gordy of Motown. Smokey and his group, the Miracles, had by that time released a few singles with Gordy, and the latest, "Shop Around," had just been mastered. But Gordy still wasn't satisfied with it. Smokey and the Miracles were to come down to the studio—now, at 3 a.m.—to cut the song yet another time, at a quicker tempo.

Smokey didn't argue. The session took place as ordered, and a week later the record was in the stores, on the radio, and on its way to becoming both Motown's and Robinson's first bona fide million selling hit.

"Shop Around" neatly encapsulated the attitudes that would remain prominent in Smokey's work for the next two decades. Then, as now, he was emotionally conservative—an old fashioned guy who stood reverent before the temple of love, with his heart on his sleeve. To Smokey, love wasn't just a stock subject for pop lyrics; it was serious business, the stuff of life itself, and he'd be able to spend the rest of his existence writing songs about it without ever running out of things to say.

As Motown grew and blossomed, so did Smokey, not only as a singer but as a producer and writer as well. His only peers behind the scene were the Holland-DozierHolland team, but while H-D-H excelled at hard driving, gospel-derived dance hits with lyrics that were unobtrusive at best, Smokey was coupling thoughtful words with rich, resonant melodies. Furthermore, he was singing them himself, better than anyone else could.

From "Shop Around" onwards, Smokey has been preoccupied with the opposition between real love and fake love. Never, never, never has he played the seductive stud; one night stands are out of the question. As he put it in 1967's "I Second That Emotion:" "A taste of honey is worse than none at all." Security and stability are what this guy needs, and it only figures he's still happily married to the same Claudette who sang with him in the original Miracles lineup over a quarter century ago. Who says cozy domesticity is bad for an artist?

In 1 964, Smokey wrote and produced "My Guy" for Mary Wells, which included lyrics that gave new hope to scrawny, pimply adolescent guys everywhere: "No muscle bound man will ever take my hand.../no handsome face will ever take the place/of my guy." But then, Smokey had already been saying for years that "goodlooking girls are a dime a dozen" ("Shop Around") and that "she doesn't have to be a beauty" ("I Like It Like That"). He's always been willing to look beyond the surface of people for what's inside, and on his masterpiece, 1970's "The Tears Of A Clown" he beseeched others to do the same for him too.

Naturally a man so committed to sincerity has no desire to hide behind the macho facade, which is why Smokey is so good at demonstrating how emotional vulnerability is not the same thing as wimpiness. When Smokey's up, he finds sublime joy in the most commonplace things; he's got sunshine on a cloudy day. And when he's down, he sings to the woman who's left him, who's in some other guy's arms now, who isn't even thinking about him anymore. Smokey's voice makes the stuff come alive. It's a fragile falsetto that perfectly expresses his vulnerability, with just enough of a fast trill to bring out the romance in the spaces between the words. By keeping it under precise control, Smokey keeps himself from wallowing in self-pity. Even on as sad a song as "The Tracks Of My Tears."

After 1970, of course, the Motown sound started disintegrating. While his stablemates fled the label, or started cutting their own idiosyncratic manifestoes, Smokey kept a low profile, making records that were erratic in quality but which contained many overlooked gems. 1974's Pure Smokey contains "Virgin Man," in which Smokey's persona laments his lack of bedroom experience, while reasoning that at least it's better than being used and abused by the wrong woman. And 1982's Touch The Sky has the tender, masturbatory confession "I've Made Love To You A Thousand Times."

But as good as the music still is, these days writing and performing is only a part of Smokey's life. It only figures that such a cautious, loyal guy would stick with Motown and eventually get a secure job as a vice president in the firm. After all, for Smokey Robinson, it's not a moment's thrill that counts. It's those long range goals.