The rest, it is not exaggeration to note, is music history.The Miracles bridged the worlds of doo-wop and soul, with Robinson as their guiding light. Gordy founded Tamla Records in 1959, soon reincorporating it as Motown Records, with his friend and protégé Smokey Robinson as vice-president by 1961. The song came true: young Smokey really got a job. They changed names again, to the Miracles, and they met up with the young Berry Gordy, Jr., who in 1958 co-wrote for th the single “Got A Job,” a humorous, nevertheless very positive answer song to The Silhouettes’ hit “Get a Job.”
Playing Detroit clubs, they renamed the group The Matadors in 1957, and were joined by Bobby Rogers, Pete Moore Ronnie Whites and Smokey Robinson’s future wife, Claudette Rogers. He was just 15 when he founded a doo-wop group called The Five Chimes with four friends from Northern High School. William Robinson was born and raised in Detroit, where as a child he was nicknamed “Smokey” because of his love of Westerns.
Doo-wop came of age, and the Motown sound was born. Together with The supremes, The temptations and the Four Tops, Smokey Robinson - with the Miracles and on his own as a composer, producer and hit-maker - was a powerful and influential creative force alongside Motown’s visionary Berry Gordy in combining the naïve sweetness of mainstream American pop with the gritty sensuality of the most daring of rhythm and blues. Everybody loved his songs, everybody still does. That he wrote his own songs seemed like so much icing on a sweet cake. Everybody loved his songs, and he had a leg up on all the other singers, with that slightly raspy, very high voice. Back then the radio played the rougher stuff, Smokey Robinson – they played him all day. The Temptations had the better dance moves. They were that good, and everybody knew it. Perhaps Bob Seger put it best in Rolling Stone magazine, when he recalled nostalgically how “I used to go to the Motown revues, and the Miracles always closed the show. Think not only of his lyrics to “Tears of a Clown,” but also of “The Track of My Tears,” “Shop Around,” “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me,” “My Guy,” “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” “Get Ready,” “It’s Growing,” “I Second That Emotion,” “Sweet Harmony,” “Baby Come Close,” “Baby That’s Backatcha,” “I Am I Am,” “The Agony And The Ecstasy,” “Open,” “Quiet Storm,” and “Let Your Love Shine On Me.” Impressive by any standards as a string of hits, taken together they add up to a body of work that has transformed and defined American music across any pop, soul, R&B, or Rock and Roll divide. To hear Smokey Robinson shine his way through his “The Tears of a Clown” is to understand a lovely, perfect moment in American music.Ī Detroit native and the very soul of Motown, a singer’s singer, a poet’s own poet, everyone’s giving, loving clown - do these begin to describe the miracle that is Smokey Robinson?
0 kommentar(er)
