Smokey: Life After Motown
TALES OF DEPARTURE AND RETURN, OF INTIMACY AND SPIRITUALITY
“Just because you may be an older urban artist,” said the president of Motown Records, “it doesn’t mean you’re over. Frank Sinatra wasn’t over. Neither is Tony Bennett. And when you think of Smokey, you’ve got to think of him in that light.”
Kedar Massenburg spoke those words to Billboard almost a quarter-century ago, but Smokey Robinson will be hoping the same attitude exists today, just a few weeks before the release of his latest album.
Due on April 28
That’s called Gasms, and it’s due out on April 28 via TLR Music Group. Two tracks have already been made available on streaming services, “If We Don’t Have Each Other” and “How You Make Me Feel,” and Robinson has begun promotional activities. (TLR, by the way, was co-founded by Cory Rooney, son of Herb Rooney and Brenda Reid of the Exciters, for those who recall the 1960s hitmakers.)
This will be Robinson’s ninth album since he left Motown – for the first time – in 1990, and his first since 2017’s seasonal selection for Amazon, Christmas Everyday. The most successful of the previous eight? Smokey & Friends, his big-name duets package, which reached the Top 20 of the Billboard charts in 2014. So while we wait for Gasms, here’s a more detailed dive into that octet: what they were, with whom they were made, and the reception received.
Released in October 1991, Double Good Everything was assured of plentiful media coverage because it also marked Robinson’s exit from Motown – a news story in its own right. “Motown loses its miracle man,” declared the Los Angeles Daily News that spring, with a headline typical of other outlets, adding, “Smokey defects to SBK.” His new home was an independent label best-known at that point for Vanilla Ice’s Number One, “Ice Ice Baby,” and three chart-toppers by California femme trio Wilson Phillips.
When Double Good Everything was shipped to stores, Robinson hit the interview trail to talk about the music, and his Motown exit. “After we sold the company, it was never really quite the same for me,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “Shortly after we sold, my contract was up and I had the option of leaving. But I was friends with [then-Motown president] Jheryl Busby, so that more or less made me stay on a little longer than I ordinarily would have.”
Naturally, Robinson self-produced the new album, wrote all but one of its ten tracks, and recruited longtime musical associates Marv Tarplin and Sonny Burke, among others, for the project. “It feels like a new day or something, man,” he said. “This is the first thing I’ve ever done outside of Motown. That’s a big deal to me. I feel like a new artist, almost.”
Released in 1991
Positive reviews followed. “One of Robinson’s best recent releases,” declared syndicated music critic Gary Graff, citing “the buoyant feel of his ’60s hits, with catchy melodies and supple arrangements.” The Chicago Tribune chipped in, “He sounds as youthful as ever,” describing the production as “marvellously uncluttered and effective.”
Even so, the commercial result was close to a dud. Double Good Everything failed to make Billboard’s Top 200 chart and rose no higher than No. 64 on the R&B listings. As a single, the title track scraped into the Hot 100, while failing to reach the Top 20 of the R&B charts.
The ex-Motown maestro might not have done any better with the other album which SBK had in mind: a country-slanted set to be cut in Nashville with producer Jimmy Bowen and others operating in the genre. “Country-western is the hottest music in the world today, really,” Robinson told Graff. “I think country-western writers are some of the most profound writers in the history of music. I started reminiscing on Ray Charles’ country-western album, and I was into it.” For all that enthusiasm, the idea never took flight, and soon enough, he quit SBK.
Perhaps dismayed by the experience, Robinson waited eight years before making another album – and it was for Motown once again. Intimate came out in September 1999 (when Kedar Massenburg made the comments mentioned above) with material produced by the likes of Michael Stokes, Michael Lovesmith and, yes, Berry Gordy. Top-drawer musicians came on board, including Gerald Albright, Paul Jackson Jr. and Paulihno Da Costa; background vocalists included the Emotions.
THE LONGER BETWEEN ALBUMS…
“It’s like a homecoming,” Robinson told Billboard’s Gail Mitchell. “I’m very pleased to be here, because the atmosphere now is very akin to what it was like in the early days when we first started. Kedar Massenburg…is an aggressive musical person, out to do some wonderful things.” Reviewers were equally upbeat. “After 40 years in the business, Robinson hasn’t lost his edge,” judged one. “The agreeably sparse production makes [the songs] nice vehicles for one of Robinson’s finest singing performances yet,” wrote another.
“The longer it gets between albums, the more important it becomes that the new album is good,” Robinson told the New York Daily News. “After two years, it should be good. After four, really good. And after eight, really, really good!”
Released in 2004
Yet Intimate charted barely better than Double Good Everything – and led to still more time out of the album market for its maker. When he returned, it was with his own record label, Robso, and nothing less than a gospel offering, Food for the Spirit, released in April 2004. “I’ve always had a very intimate relationship with God,” Robinson advised Billboard. “I’ve been writing those songs for years. But this is my first album like this.”
He had originally intended to pitch the material to others in the gospel field, such as Shirley Caesar, Kirk Franklin and Yolanda Adams. But, he said, “the Lord impressed upon me [that] I was supposed to record them, so I did. I called it Food for the Spirit because I wanted to feed people’s spirits.” Doing just that was familiar to Robinson in the new century: he spoke at churches, rehab facilities and juvenile detention centres about his ’80s triumph over drug addiction, and how he was “saved” by faith and belief.
For the album, he wrote nine songs, including the first single, “I Have Prayed On It,” and the entire assembly was produced by Michael Stokes. Within its field, Food for the Spirit was a success, hitting the Top 5 of Billboard’s gospel charts in May 2004, while also reaching respectable heights in the magazine’s independent albums and R&B sales lists.
Yet not all the reviews were favourable. “Track after track lapses into the kind of pedestrian slush that tries so hard to be inoffensive that it ends up irritating the hell out of you,” grumped British critic Andy Gill in The Independent. “Worst of all is ‘Gang Bangin’,’ a limp critique of gang culture with all the decisive power of being scolded by your maiden aunt.”
Distribution for Robso was handled by Minneapolis-based Liquid 8 Records & Entertainment. Coincidentally, the latter’s owner, Michael Catain, had also signed Robinson’s former labelmate at SBK, Vanilla Ice. More disturbingly, Catain – whose father was a reputed mob figure and loan shark – later confessed to investment fraud in a business unconnected with his label.
Released in 2006
Robinson returned to the mainstream for his second album of the 21st century, Timeless Love, released in June 2006 by Universal Music’s New Door imprint. He produced the set himself, and again brought in the likes of Tarplin, Burke and Da Costa.
With one exception, its 13 songs were drawn from the so-called “great American songbook” – that is, the work of Cole Porter and George and Ira Gershwin, among others. “These songs are the first music I ever heard in my life as a child in the house with two older sisters and our mom,” Robinson told Kevin Johnson at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Actually, he did earlier versions of two tracks on the album, “Speak Low” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” which were both part of the Miracles’ 1962 LP, I’ll Try Something New.)
The result was a respectable chart showing for Timeless Love, including a Top 20 slot on Billboard’s R&B rankings. Universal Music had judged its audience well. “Likely to be older (47 percent over the age of 50) than the typical music buyer,” noted one of the firm’s pre-release marketing documents. “There is a slight female slant (55 percent) to likely purchasers,” it added.
By and large, reviewers were impressed, too. The singer brought “artful sophistication” to the songs, suggested Gannett News’ Steve Jones, who praised the singer’s “yearning tenor” and the “lush arrangements” of the album. “The emotions Robinson evokes are still worth seconding.”
“I haven’t by any means done everything I want to do yet,” confessed the singer/songwriter himself to Kevin Johnson, “though I’ve sung every kind of song I would want to sing except opera, and I don’t see myself doing that. Because of the reaction to Timeless Love, I might do that again, or I might do an original album.”
The second part of Smokey: Life After Motown will follow next week.
Music notes: three of the four Smokey Robinson albums detailed above are available on streaming services worldwide, the exception being Food for the Spirit – but that’s still obtainable on compact disc (and DVD) from sellers such as Amazon, and several tracks can be found on YouTube.