Smokey Can Do All The Tamla Jobs —– but still finds time for his golf!

Ann Moses, New Musical Express, 12 September 1970

It was hard to find Smokey Robinson “at home” at the A Century Plaza Hotel this week, where he and the Miracles are staying during their week’s engagement at the Greek Theatre with Stevie Wonder.
If he’s not engrossed in business, he’s usually out on the golf course! “I’m a golf nut,” he told me, “I’m horrible, but I have lots of fun!”

I had finally reached Smokey and his bright, always-cheerful voice boomed over the telephone line as he enthusiastically told me what he and the Miracles have been doing. He already knew ‘Tears Of A Clown’ had reached No. I in Britain and he said: “Isn’t that fantastic! I still can’t believe it! You know, we were in England last February or March and we had planned to return, whether or not the record was a hit!”

Smokey and the group hope to make a trip to Britain to play the Talk of the Town. “Several of our acts have been there and they’ve all done very well. I hope it comes through for us, I’m really looking forward to playing there!”

Less touring

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles have been touring considerably less as a group than in former years, mainly because Smokey has taken such an active part in the Motown Recording Company. He’s Vice-president of the company and that title has many connotations. Like Smokey points out: “With a person who’s been there (Motown) from the beginning like I have, it means I’m Vice-President of Everything!

“You see. some of the newer people we have, the newer vice-presidents that we have hired since the beginning, or maybe in the last two or three years, they have worked their way to that position in their particular field.

“An example, there is a vice-president in charge of management. He just deals in management of our acts, but I might be involved in that, just as easily as I might be involved in recording. My main role is that, after an artist has been accepted, I co-ordinate their schedules, get them recorded and start them on their way.”

Too much?

I wondered with so many varied activities and duties, if Smokey didn’t feel he was stretching himself a little thin.

“Well no,” he admitted, “Only to it, because I’ve been in it practically my whole life. It’s kind of second nature to me. In the beginning, when the company was just being formed, I was working hard on the road, performing, recording other people. It just became second nature. I don’t know what I would do if I was cut off.”

Besides the many hit songs Smokey has penned for the Miracles, he has written a lot for other Motown performers. Even with all his work, he didn’t feel he’s lost time writing, because “you can write anywhere. It doesn’t matter. I can write a song in the car on the way to a business meeting.”

Although he likes every facet of his work, he had to admit that live performances “had a little more spark, because we have a chance to meet so many people.”

He also commented that although there was a time when he did get tired of performing, that now “I don’t even have a chance, because we go out and do a week somewhere, then we don’t tour for three weeks, so I don’t really have time to become tired of it.” When I asked Smokey to what he attributed the lasting power of his Miracles, he found the answer easy. “There’s only one thing I really can attribute it to and I think it’s our love for one another. We really dig each other and we really love each other!

No rows

“We don’t have one of those groups where everyone is bickering back and forth. We are exactly the same group as we were starting singing together back in high school – that should say something right there. We’ve never changed a member, ever, and that’s why we have the rapport we have with one another and I think when people see us they can sense it!”

Following our telephone conversation, Smokey and his friends, the Miracles were going across town, to a private screening of their first TV Special, to be aired here in December.

“It’s a really terrific show,” Smokey sounded excited, “because our guests were the Supremes, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder and a girl named Fran Jefferies. We’re just looking forward to it and keeping our fingers crossed and hoping the public will like it so perhaps we can do more of those.”

As a final question, I asked Smokey If there wasn’t some hidden desire or secret ambition that he had that no one would guess as being part of Smokey Robinson.

Shangri La

He thought tor a moment and then confided: “I have a hidden desire, but I don’t know if it will ever come true. I would like to buy an island, like Onassis has, and I’d like to take two kids of about the age of six months from every nation and race on the face of the earth and take them to this island and raise them, loving and understanding each other, just to prove it can be done, if they don’t know the prejudices that are handed down from the older people in the world. It could be so beautiful.”