The Perfect 'Storm'?
CATCHING FIRE, BUT NEVER MORE MELLOW
A couple of weeks ago, Smokey Robinson’s vintage “Quiet Storm” earned 23 plays on American radio – almost all from the four stations which still play the track every night as a theme song.
Next week, Robinson celebrates the 50th anniversary of his album, A Quiet Storm, with concert dates in California and Texas. They’re part of his ongoing “Legacy” tour, which could also pretty much describe most of his live appearances of the past 50 years.
Bringing the ‘Legacy’ to Britain
That the singer/songwriter is still devoted to performing is hardly news, save, perhaps, for the fact that he turns 85 next month. What makes this tour more interesting is that he’s recalling an album – and a theme – which significantly influenced the business of radio during the 1970s and ’80s.
“Smokey Catches Fire as a Solo,” declared the Los Angeles Times on April 26, 1975, assessing Robinson’s first post-Miracles show, held at the city’s Roxy nightclub (there were earlier, warm-up dates elsewhere). “He has some outstanding new material,” wrote Dennis Hunt. “ ‘Quiet Storm,’ a niftily arranged, gently rocking number, and the jaunty ‘Virgin Man’ are among his finest compositions.”
Rolling Stone was similarly effusive. “Storm is a soft, sensuous album with extended instrumental breaks, jazzy overtones and unifying sound effects,” judged Judith Sims, “as if the entire album had been recorded in a light thunderstorm.”
In his autobiography, Inside My Life, Robinson recalled the moment of inspiration. “A butterfly caught up in a hurricane – the image suddenly came to me. I put the words in the song. I heard distant thunder, smelled the air just before the rain, saw lightning streak across the sky, felt the windows blow.” It finally was, he wrote, the musical concept he’d been seeking since Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. “I saw seven songs carried on the back of a breeze, blowing through the record from start to finish.”
The trade press took note, too. “Smokey has never been more mellow,” observed Cash Box when reviewing A Quiet Storm upon its release on March 26, 1975. “Probably the most ‘pop’ album Robinson has done yet,” added Billboard.
A ‘Quiet’ month of May ‘75
What no one in the music business anticipated was the radio programme, then format, which A Quiet Storm helped to birth. This began when Washington, D.C. outlet WHUR-FM, owned by Howard University, introduced a show featuring mellow music by a range of black artists from jazz, pop and R&B. “It started as a weekend evening programme in the summer of ’76,” the station’s Melvin Lindsey later told Walt Love at Radio & Records, “and it expanded to a daily schedule [in] the fall of ’77.”
As for the featured artists, Lindsey – who is widely credited as the successful format’s originator – name-checked Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Isley Brothers, Stevie Wonder, the Delfonics, the Chi-Lites and more. “We only use ballads by those artists,” he said. “It’s a combination of currents and older material.” The format became popular among upscale black listeners, making it very attractive to advertisers.
From there, other broadcasters across the U.S. followed suit, with many turning it into a full-time format (although that became better known as “Urban AC” or “Adult R&B”). By its mid-1980s peak, there were more than 120 stations nationwide with Quiet Storm programming, which helped to break artists such as Anita Baker, Kenny G and Whitney Houston. Eventually, pop stations would follow suit with their own evening love songs programmes like the syndicated “Delilah.” Those continue to this day as well.
Earlier this month, Robinson himself recalled the “Quiet Storm” backstory with talk show host/podcaster Tavis Smiley. “We should all be so lucky to do anything, put a song out that literally changes a whole genre of an industry,” enthused Smiley. “So it was more than just a song, more than just an album. It changed the whole radio business.”
ROSE ELLA BRINGS IT HOME
Robinson told Smiley about his song’s origins, remembering its co-writer, Rose Ella Jones (“my youngest sister at 14 when I was born”). He continued, “So she was a great lyricist, man. So I started [the song] and I knew I was going to work on that album there…so I took the beginnings of ‘Quiet Storm’ to her and I said, ‘Hey, baby, finish this song.’ And she did, you know.”
It wasn’t the first time that Robinson and Jones had collaborated. Songs written by the pair were on two Motown albums in 1970: Chuck Jackson’s Teardrops Keep Fallin’ On My Heart (“Have You Heard About The Fool”) and the Miracles’ A Pocket Full Of Miracles (“You’ve Got The Love I Need”). Also, on Robinson’s first two solo sets, Smokey (“A Silent Partner In A Three-Way Love Affair”), and Pure Smokey (“Virgin Man”). The siblings continued to work together in later years.
It’s ‘Backatcha’ 50 years later
A Quiet Storm proved to be Robinson’s commercial peak for most of the 1970s, albeit that it only just reached the Top 40 of the pop charts (plus Top 10 R&B) and sold approximately 400,000 copies. Finally, in 1979, the Motown star had his first true solo crossover success with “Cruisin’,” beginning an on-and-off hit streak that lasted for nearly another decade.
To this day, A Quiet Storm continues to sell – and stream. The well-regarded Spanish catalogue label, Elemental Music, recently reissued it on vinyl in Europe, while the album can also be heard on digital services in standard audio as well as in hi-res, and in Dolby Atmos.
And there’s still radio. WHUR’s “Quiet Storm” continues, now hosted by an R&B recording artist, Raheem DeVaughn. Four years ago, the station created the digital Quiet Storm Channel, entirely devoted to mellow R&B. Sean Ross, author of the Ross On Radio newsletter, took a listen then to both the Quiet Storm show and the separate station. (Follow Ross or subscribe to his newsletter here.) At the time of the article, it was available on a low-power FM, but is now digital only.
Meanwhile, you can also hear Robinson’s anthemic ballad every night on WWDM in Columbia, South Carolina, WCFB (Star 94.5) in Orlando, Florida, and WHQT (Hot 105) in Miami. All three of them are very successful, long-running Adult R&B stations.
Fifty years on, that breeze still blows through…
Music notes: this latest WGB playlist includes a selection of Smokey songs from his A Quiet Storm period, plus two more recent versions of the album’s title track. One is by Snoop Dogg protégé, October London, the other by SR himself, with John Legend.
Concert notes: this July, Smokey Robinson’s “Legacy” tour is taking him to the U.K. for the first time since 2010, with dates in Glasgow, Birmingham, Cardiff and London. The opening act? Kiki Dee and Carmelo Luggeri, the former having once been a Motown recording artist, of course. There, she recorded at least three Robinson copyrights, including “I’ll Try Something New” and “Oh Be My Love.”
Sad notes: in June 1992, the lyricist of “Quiet Storm,” Rose Ella Jones, sued half-brother Robinson (they had different fathers) for failing to pay her songwriting royalties from 1976-83 and for failing to account for royalties from 1980-88. The suit is thought to have been settled out of court. Jones died in 2010, with Smokey reportedly at her bedside.