Post by ClassicSoul on Feb 4, 2006 11:44:06 GMT -5
2003 article
Miracle Man
Essence Festival performer Smokey Robinson talks about growing up in Detroit, the craft of songwriting, and the color of soul.
By Nick Spitzer
The sweet sound of William Robinson's songs has been working miracles for generations. Beginning in his doo-wop days in 1950s Detroit and continuing through his solo career, Smokey -- the nickname came from a favorite uncle, partly to remind the light-skinned, blue-eyed youth of his African-American roots -- is regarded as one of America's finest singers and songwriters. His lyrics, mostly first-person accounts of an ideal love found, or the perfect sorrow of love lost, have an elegant simplicity and offbeat clarity that prompted Bob Dylan to refer to him as "America's greatest living poet."
Robinson grew from a musically aware family in a neighborhood of singers. He found his performing self by singing lead in teenage vocal groups like the Five Chimes and Matadors. Initially concerned that his voice was too high or feminine, he never looked back after he heard the high vocals of Clyde McPhatter, the lead singer of the Dominoes. Robinson's own smooth siren song -- building on a long tradition of falsetto singing in black blues and gospel as well as doo-wop -- defined the sound of his newly named Miracles. They in turn, with Smokey as the leader, became the prototypes for Motown's roll-out of polished and powerful vocal groups that would dominate American pop music throughout the 1960s.
The Motor City would perfect the assembly line in producing cars from Chevys to Caddys for newly mobile post-war Americans of all backgrounds. It also was the birthplace of this dominant black record company -- Motown -- that was equally effective at reaching consumers who took pleasure in a great song as performed by the Temptations, Four Tops, Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and many more artists we can all name. Motown was fathered by Berry Gordy, the streetwise producer and businessman who first seriously responded to the poetic verve in Robinson's songwriting and heard the perfectly matched emotional elixir of his voice. Gordy needed Smokey Robinson's talent and support in finding and writing for Motown singers as much as Smokey needed a vehicle for the Miracles' sound.
The original Miracles included Robinson's girlfriend and later wife Claudette Rogers, also singing lead, Bobby Rogers (tenor), Ronnie White (baritone) and Pete Moore (bass). They were later augmented by the infectious guitar lines of Marv Tarplin. In contrast to the simmering blues and gospel-drenched sound of Southern soul as recorded in Muscle Shoals, Ala., or Memphis' Stax Records, the Northern soul of Motown had perky production with shimmering strings, finger-pop rhythms and those catchy lyrics. "I Second that Emotion," "The Tracks of My Tears," "The Way You Do the Things You Do," and both "My Girl" and "My Guy" are among the reportedly 4,000 songs written or co-written by Robinson.
Robinson split amicably with the Miracles in 1972, deciding to devote more of his time to solo recordings and the business side of Motown. In the ensuing years, the Miracles went back to day jobs, some in the music industry, and occasional incarnations in the road show. Smokey and Claudette traveled their own ways. I spoke with him by phone, preparing for shows in Las Vegas; even long distance, the voice and spirit of Smokey Robinson remain miraculous.
Q: I wonder if you wouldn't mind just taking us back a little in time to your early days in Detroit and setting the scene as to your growing up and life on the home front.
A: I had a pretty normal childhood for somebody growing up in the place section of Detroit. You never realized that you were in the place until you got out. At least I didn't -- because everybody was living the same way. I have two sisters and both of them are older than me, but my older sister raised me along with her 10 kids because my mom passed when I was 10. I've always been interested in sports and music, so those are the things that I did to occupy my time.
As a kid in Detroit at the time, you were either in a gang or a group. So I chose to be in a group. I guess we started when I was about 12 years old and carried on until just after we graduated from high school, which was the time when I met Berry Gordy. At the time, he was the mainstay songwriter for Jackie Wilson. Jackie Wilson happened to be my number one singing idol at the time. I had all of Jackie Wilson's records and I had all of Sam Cooke's records, and all of Clyde McPhatter records and Frankie Lymon records. And there was a group in New York called the Diablos and their lead singer was Nolan Strong. These were the voices that I kind of liked or mimicked in my young years.
I've always been interested in writing songs and who the songwriters were. I grew up in a house where there was always music happening. I grew up on Cole Porter and the Gershwins and people like that, so I always was interested in who was writing the music.
So the Miracles and I -- we were not called the Miracles at that time -- we auditioned for Jackie Wilson's managers and we sang about four or five songs that I had written, rather than singing stuff that was currently popular by other artists. And Berry happened to be there that day because he was gonna turn in some new songs for Jackie Wilson. That was the day that he came to show Jackie "To Be Loved" and "Lonely Teardrops." He had those songs with him and so we were rejected by Jackie Wilson's managers.
But Berry was impressed that we sang all songs that he had never heard. So he comes outside after we are finished and had been rejected, and he questioned us as to where we got the songs. I told him that I wrote them and he said that there were a couple of them that he liked. At the time, Berry looked like he was about 15 or 16 years old, so I thought that he was just a guy waiting to audition after us. And perhaps he wanted to use some of my songs or something.
Q: A little suspicious there?
A: Yes, so I was curious to who he was, but I told him, I said, "Thank you very much for liking my songs." And he said "Yeah, I am Berry Gordy." So then my lip dropped down to the ground. So I said, "Berry Gordy who writes for Jackie Wilson?" He said, "Yeah, that's me you know." So that day I had a loose-leaf notebook, about 100 songs, and I must have sang 30 of them for Berry and he never, ever said, "OK man, that's enough," or "OK, OK, I'm tired," or any of that. He just critiqued every one. Berry Gordy was the main instrument in teaching me how to write professional songs.
Q: When I listen back to some of the early recordings that you made, I guess I would call them "doo-wop." There is a very strong focus on vocal harmony.
A: That is what was happening in those days. You know it was the group era, it was the era of the doo-wop groups. They were everywhere. There were so many groups in our neighborhood. I grew up in a neighborhood where Diana Ross lived right down the street from me and Aretha Franklin lived around the corner and the Four Tops lived two blocks over and the Temptations lived about four blocks away. This is where I grew up and so we had one of those neighborhoods.
Q: That's a heck of a 'hood, I have to say!
A: There is no question about it. And about a year or so after I met Berry, we started Motown and so the rest is history.
Q: In terms of your desire to sing and your willingness to be in a group, at what point do you say to yourself, "I've got a voice and I can sing." That must have happened in your early youth.
A: You know something, I am not sure that I've gotten to that point yet. But I am very, very, very, very blessed because I am living my dream. I am living beyond my wildest dreams because my first and foremost thought for all of my life was to be a singer. Now I say that I am blessed because I was in the right place at the right time, by the hand of God. I am sure because there were guys in my neighborhood who could sing me under the table. You never heard of them because they never made it out of there.
Q: It helps to have a great voice though, to carry you on.
A: I have always considered myself more of a "feeler" than a singer. Because I consider people like Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin and Luther Vandross -- God bless him, I hope he has a speedy recovery -- but these are people who are real, real, real singers to me. I am a feeler, I feel songs, so that is what I consider myself.
Q: In the classic black vocal tradition, there is a long history in quartet harmony of people who sing the high tenors and the falsetto. Is that something that you discovered before puberty, that you had a voice that could go where you go?
A: Well, I always had a high voice. I guess that's why I picked my singing idols to be guys with high voices. I was in glee club and in choir and all those things like that in school, and even when I was in high school, I was in the alto section. I was not in the tenor section or anything like that. I was in the alto section and I think that just before I graduated from high school, I went to the first tenor section. But I always had a high voice and that's just how I sound and who I am.
Q: Any great female singers that you liked growing up?
A: Well, I think that the very first voice that I ever remember hearing was Sarah Vaughan, and Sarah Vaughan was absolutely an instrument as far as I am concerned. She and Ella Fitzgerald. These were the kind of people that were being played at my house 'cause my two older sisters were into the jazz era, and so they loved that kind of music.
Q: In your earlier records you had your old girlfriend and later wife, Claudette, singing high harmony. How did that work? Did you really figure that your voices could fit together in those harmonies back then?
A: No, we didn't figure that. Claudette was just in our group, that's just the way it was. There were a lot of brother-sister groups at the time. For instance, at the time the Temptations were called the "Primes" and the Supremes were the "Primettes." So there was lot of that going on.
Claudette's brother originally sang with us while we were in junior high school and in high school. We were called the Matadors. When we graduated from high school, he had his mom decide for him to go into the Army. Claudette was in a sister group called the Matadorettes, and when we got the chance to go for the audition, we were used to having a fifth voice, so we took her along and that is how she became one of the Miracles.
Q: What kind of clothes were you guys styling with when you were the Matadors?
A: I think that people think that Michael Jackson came up with the high-water pants, but those were the pants that were happening in our day, and that's what we wore all along. You look at some of those old pictures of the groups back then; we all had the high-water pants and the short waist-coat jackets, and stuff like that.
Q: Now not every kid in a group has a great voice, as you say is blessed, or moves out and does something with it. But not only did you do something with it, you also became the leader of the groups. I think that you were referred to as the "president" at one point and then obviously your own name was added in front of the Miracles. What do you think caused you to be a leader out of the group beyond just the singing ensemble?
A: Well, I don't know. I guess just the fact that I have been involved in earning a living all my life. Like I said, my sister raised me and she had 10 kids, so I had a job since I was 10 years old and ...
Q: Helped take care of the younger ones?
A: Absolutely, or just take care of myself. My brother-in-law is one of the hardest working men that I've ever known in my life, and I was most certainly not going to go to him and say, "Hey, have you got a quarter?" He was working real hard to take care of all of us, so I felt like I needed to have a job so that I could just help take care of myself. I've always worked and had sort of a business sense.
Q: In a lot of these early songs and later, too, the doo-wop influence is there. Did you have much of a church and gospel side, since so much of soul music seems to feel like it has the church side to it?
A: No, I really didn't. I am not one of those singers who can say, "Well, I grew up singing in the church," and all of that. My mom was a very church-going lady, and when she was alive, I went to church two or three times a week. But I never sang in church. Like I said, I grew up around the corner from Aretha Franklin, so as a kid growing up I would go to her father's church many times. Aretha's been singing like she sings now since she was 4 or 5 years old, but I was never a church singer.
However, I have just completed a spiritual album, and they are songs that I have been writing for people who are in the gospel arena. I know people like the Winans and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and they always asked me, "Well, Smokey, why don't you write us some songs?" So for about the last 10 years or so, even longer than that, I have been writing spiritual songs, but I never got around to sending it to them or we never hooked up again. So I ended up recording them myself.
Q: Let me ask you this though, when I listen back to some of the classic songs, something like "You've Really Got a Hold on Me," that has a gospel feel to it.
A: It may be because all music, as far as I am concerned, comes from the cotton fields. All American music has its origin in the cotton fields, when those people out there are humming and singing and praising. The songs were basically directed to God; they were basically singing spiritual music. So of course the blues being one of the main branches of that particular music. "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" is the blues. I wrote "Really Got a Hold on Me" because I loved Sam Cooke. I wanted to write something like "Bring It On Home To Me," so I wrote "You've Really Got a Hold on Me," which is in that same bluesy vein.
Q: Now you've been somebody that had taken the music, whether it's originally the blues or gospel or doo-wop -- some people would say "chitlin' circuit" music -- and you carried it off to a much wider, broad, mainstream audience, black and white.
A: I am very, very proud of my audience, because when I go and perform I am so happy that there are people there from every race that you can think of, and I love that. I can go and I can play places where they would say mostly black people come to this place, but when I go and play there are Asian people there, there are Hispanic people there, there are black people there, there are white people there. Another thing that I am so very, very proud of is the age range. I see people there now that, I see them and they have their children with them, and the first time that I saw them, they were with their parents.
Q: The songs obviously endure and you've been able to endure with them, both the older classics and later ones that you've been doing. You mention the idea that you go on the basis of feel; a song like "I Second That Emotion," it's really all about feeling and emoting. How do you approach a song that you must have sung thousands of times and still keep the feel?
A: I mean this from the bottom of my heart: I am going to go out tomorrow and we're opening in Las Vegas, and I am going to sing those songs for the umpteenth thousandth time, OK? Every single solitary night they are new to me. I love what I do. Performing is my favorite part of my work, because it's the time I get to one-on-one with the fans. I get a chance to have a good time with the people who are responsible, other than God, for me being whoever I am in show business. They think that they are coming to see me, but I am going to see them.
Q: Some of these songs are deeply emotional, personal kinds of statements about love and loss. I also think of one, I don't think that you authored it but you give voice to it: what an amazing rhythm on "Mickey's Monkey."
A: "Mickey's Monkey" was written by Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier. It was a song that I requested because of the fact that we had what you call piano rooms at the Hitsville building in Detroit. So one day I go into one and Lamont Dozier is sitting at the piano and he is playing that rhythm and he's singing "Lumdy, lumdy la. ..." I loved that. I said "Hey man, what's that?" He said, "I don't know yet, man." I said, "OK, when you finish that up, record that on us." He said, "OK," and they did, and I am happy.
Q: When you were really working in the record industry, we think of this gleaming grand Oz of Motown, but it really was people, voices, songs, getting together, creativity. Can you say a little about the process of creating songs for yourself and for other people in that studio setting?
A: I am glad of what you said leading up to that, because many people think that the Motown stories are mythical. They think that we must have made them up, but it's not, man. That's exactly what we had, a lot of young people making music, and even though we were highly, highly competitive with each other, we were also great aides to each other.
All the guys in all the groups, not so much the girls, they hung out there all day and all night. Not necessarily making music, but we'd be hanging there playing cards, we'd be playing chess, we'd be playing Ping-Pong and they had a basketball net hanging there. So, it would be nothing for me to be in the room doing something and Norman Whitfield would be recording something on Marvin Gaye and run in and say, "Hey man, Smoke, come in and put some hand claps on this record." And I'd go in and do it because that's how we were, that's how we operated.
I think that's what made Motown so unique and so everlasting is that that feeling and that camaraderie and all that comes across in that music. I hear that music on the radio today and it still sounds good.
On the very first day of Motown, Berry said -- and we only have five people at that time -- he said, "We're going to make music with a great beat, and some great stories for everybody. We are not going to be a black music company, we are going to be a music company. We are going to make music and we are going to be the sound of young America." It turns out we were the sound of young everywhere, but that's what we set out to do and that's what we've done.
I wish I had known that we were not only making music, we were making history, because I would have saved everything, man. I would have saved every scrap of tape; I would have saved every little card that I ever started a song on, every little matchbook, every little piece of paper.
Miracle Man
Essence Festival performer Smokey Robinson talks about growing up in Detroit, the craft of songwriting, and the color of soul.
By Nick Spitzer
The sweet sound of William Robinson's songs has been working miracles for generations. Beginning in his doo-wop days in 1950s Detroit and continuing through his solo career, Smokey -- the nickname came from a favorite uncle, partly to remind the light-skinned, blue-eyed youth of his African-American roots -- is regarded as one of America's finest singers and songwriters. His lyrics, mostly first-person accounts of an ideal love found, or the perfect sorrow of love lost, have an elegant simplicity and offbeat clarity that prompted Bob Dylan to refer to him as "America's greatest living poet."
Robinson grew from a musically aware family in a neighborhood of singers. He found his performing self by singing lead in teenage vocal groups like the Five Chimes and Matadors. Initially concerned that his voice was too high or feminine, he never looked back after he heard the high vocals of Clyde McPhatter, the lead singer of the Dominoes. Robinson's own smooth siren song -- building on a long tradition of falsetto singing in black blues and gospel as well as doo-wop -- defined the sound of his newly named Miracles. They in turn, with Smokey as the leader, became the prototypes for Motown's roll-out of polished and powerful vocal groups that would dominate American pop music throughout the 1960s.
The Motor City would perfect the assembly line in producing cars from Chevys to Caddys for newly mobile post-war Americans of all backgrounds. It also was the birthplace of this dominant black record company -- Motown -- that was equally effective at reaching consumers who took pleasure in a great song as performed by the Temptations, Four Tops, Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and many more artists we can all name. Motown was fathered by Berry Gordy, the streetwise producer and businessman who first seriously responded to the poetic verve in Robinson's songwriting and heard the perfectly matched emotional elixir of his voice. Gordy needed Smokey Robinson's talent and support in finding and writing for Motown singers as much as Smokey needed a vehicle for the Miracles' sound.
The original Miracles included Robinson's girlfriend and later wife Claudette Rogers, also singing lead, Bobby Rogers (tenor), Ronnie White (baritone) and Pete Moore (bass). They were later augmented by the infectious guitar lines of Marv Tarplin. In contrast to the simmering blues and gospel-drenched sound of Southern soul as recorded in Muscle Shoals, Ala., or Memphis' Stax Records, the Northern soul of Motown had perky production with shimmering strings, finger-pop rhythms and those catchy lyrics. "I Second that Emotion," "The Tracks of My Tears," "The Way You Do the Things You Do," and both "My Girl" and "My Guy" are among the reportedly 4,000 songs written or co-written by Robinson.
Robinson split amicably with the Miracles in 1972, deciding to devote more of his time to solo recordings and the business side of Motown. In the ensuing years, the Miracles went back to day jobs, some in the music industry, and occasional incarnations in the road show. Smokey and Claudette traveled their own ways. I spoke with him by phone, preparing for shows in Las Vegas; even long distance, the voice and spirit of Smokey Robinson remain miraculous.
Q: I wonder if you wouldn't mind just taking us back a little in time to your early days in Detroit and setting the scene as to your growing up and life on the home front.
A: I had a pretty normal childhood for somebody growing up in the place section of Detroit. You never realized that you were in the place until you got out. At least I didn't -- because everybody was living the same way. I have two sisters and both of them are older than me, but my older sister raised me along with her 10 kids because my mom passed when I was 10. I've always been interested in sports and music, so those are the things that I did to occupy my time.
As a kid in Detroit at the time, you were either in a gang or a group. So I chose to be in a group. I guess we started when I was about 12 years old and carried on until just after we graduated from high school, which was the time when I met Berry Gordy. At the time, he was the mainstay songwriter for Jackie Wilson. Jackie Wilson happened to be my number one singing idol at the time. I had all of Jackie Wilson's records and I had all of Sam Cooke's records, and all of Clyde McPhatter records and Frankie Lymon records. And there was a group in New York called the Diablos and their lead singer was Nolan Strong. These were the voices that I kind of liked or mimicked in my young years.
I've always been interested in writing songs and who the songwriters were. I grew up in a house where there was always music happening. I grew up on Cole Porter and the Gershwins and people like that, so I always was interested in who was writing the music.
So the Miracles and I -- we were not called the Miracles at that time -- we auditioned for Jackie Wilson's managers and we sang about four or five songs that I had written, rather than singing stuff that was currently popular by other artists. And Berry happened to be there that day because he was gonna turn in some new songs for Jackie Wilson. That was the day that he came to show Jackie "To Be Loved" and "Lonely Teardrops." He had those songs with him and so we were rejected by Jackie Wilson's managers.
But Berry was impressed that we sang all songs that he had never heard. So he comes outside after we are finished and had been rejected, and he questioned us as to where we got the songs. I told him that I wrote them and he said that there were a couple of them that he liked. At the time, Berry looked like he was about 15 or 16 years old, so I thought that he was just a guy waiting to audition after us. And perhaps he wanted to use some of my songs or something.
Q: A little suspicious there?
A: Yes, so I was curious to who he was, but I told him, I said, "Thank you very much for liking my songs." And he said "Yeah, I am Berry Gordy." So then my lip dropped down to the ground. So I said, "Berry Gordy who writes for Jackie Wilson?" He said, "Yeah, that's me you know." So that day I had a loose-leaf notebook, about 100 songs, and I must have sang 30 of them for Berry and he never, ever said, "OK man, that's enough," or "OK, OK, I'm tired," or any of that. He just critiqued every one. Berry Gordy was the main instrument in teaching me how to write professional songs.
Q: When I listen back to some of the early recordings that you made, I guess I would call them "doo-wop." There is a very strong focus on vocal harmony.
A: That is what was happening in those days. You know it was the group era, it was the era of the doo-wop groups. They were everywhere. There were so many groups in our neighborhood. I grew up in a neighborhood where Diana Ross lived right down the street from me and Aretha Franklin lived around the corner and the Four Tops lived two blocks over and the Temptations lived about four blocks away. This is where I grew up and so we had one of those neighborhoods.
Q: That's a heck of a 'hood, I have to say!
A: There is no question about it. And about a year or so after I met Berry, we started Motown and so the rest is history.
Q: In terms of your desire to sing and your willingness to be in a group, at what point do you say to yourself, "I've got a voice and I can sing." That must have happened in your early youth.
A: You know something, I am not sure that I've gotten to that point yet. But I am very, very, very, very blessed because I am living my dream. I am living beyond my wildest dreams because my first and foremost thought for all of my life was to be a singer. Now I say that I am blessed because I was in the right place at the right time, by the hand of God. I am sure because there were guys in my neighborhood who could sing me under the table. You never heard of them because they never made it out of there.
Q: It helps to have a great voice though, to carry you on.
A: I have always considered myself more of a "feeler" than a singer. Because I consider people like Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin and Luther Vandross -- God bless him, I hope he has a speedy recovery -- but these are people who are real, real, real singers to me. I am a feeler, I feel songs, so that is what I consider myself.
Q: In the classic black vocal tradition, there is a long history in quartet harmony of people who sing the high tenors and the falsetto. Is that something that you discovered before puberty, that you had a voice that could go where you go?
A: Well, I always had a high voice. I guess that's why I picked my singing idols to be guys with high voices. I was in glee club and in choir and all those things like that in school, and even when I was in high school, I was in the alto section. I was not in the tenor section or anything like that. I was in the alto section and I think that just before I graduated from high school, I went to the first tenor section. But I always had a high voice and that's just how I sound and who I am.
Q: Any great female singers that you liked growing up?
A: Well, I think that the very first voice that I ever remember hearing was Sarah Vaughan, and Sarah Vaughan was absolutely an instrument as far as I am concerned. She and Ella Fitzgerald. These were the kind of people that were being played at my house 'cause my two older sisters were into the jazz era, and so they loved that kind of music.
Q: In your earlier records you had your old girlfriend and later wife, Claudette, singing high harmony. How did that work? Did you really figure that your voices could fit together in those harmonies back then?
A: No, we didn't figure that. Claudette was just in our group, that's just the way it was. There were a lot of brother-sister groups at the time. For instance, at the time the Temptations were called the "Primes" and the Supremes were the "Primettes." So there was lot of that going on.
Claudette's brother originally sang with us while we were in junior high school and in high school. We were called the Matadors. When we graduated from high school, he had his mom decide for him to go into the Army. Claudette was in a sister group called the Matadorettes, and when we got the chance to go for the audition, we were used to having a fifth voice, so we took her along and that is how she became one of the Miracles.
Q: What kind of clothes were you guys styling with when you were the Matadors?
A: I think that people think that Michael Jackson came up with the high-water pants, but those were the pants that were happening in our day, and that's what we wore all along. You look at some of those old pictures of the groups back then; we all had the high-water pants and the short waist-coat jackets, and stuff like that.
Q: Now not every kid in a group has a great voice, as you say is blessed, or moves out and does something with it. But not only did you do something with it, you also became the leader of the groups. I think that you were referred to as the "president" at one point and then obviously your own name was added in front of the Miracles. What do you think caused you to be a leader out of the group beyond just the singing ensemble?
A: Well, I don't know. I guess just the fact that I have been involved in earning a living all my life. Like I said, my sister raised me and she had 10 kids, so I had a job since I was 10 years old and ...
Q: Helped take care of the younger ones?
A: Absolutely, or just take care of myself. My brother-in-law is one of the hardest working men that I've ever known in my life, and I was most certainly not going to go to him and say, "Hey, have you got a quarter?" He was working real hard to take care of all of us, so I felt like I needed to have a job so that I could just help take care of myself. I've always worked and had sort of a business sense.
Q: In a lot of these early songs and later, too, the doo-wop influence is there. Did you have much of a church and gospel side, since so much of soul music seems to feel like it has the church side to it?
A: No, I really didn't. I am not one of those singers who can say, "Well, I grew up singing in the church," and all of that. My mom was a very church-going lady, and when she was alive, I went to church two or three times a week. But I never sang in church. Like I said, I grew up around the corner from Aretha Franklin, so as a kid growing up I would go to her father's church many times. Aretha's been singing like she sings now since she was 4 or 5 years old, but I was never a church singer.
However, I have just completed a spiritual album, and they are songs that I have been writing for people who are in the gospel arena. I know people like the Winans and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and they always asked me, "Well, Smokey, why don't you write us some songs?" So for about the last 10 years or so, even longer than that, I have been writing spiritual songs, but I never got around to sending it to them or we never hooked up again. So I ended up recording them myself.
Q: Let me ask you this though, when I listen back to some of the classic songs, something like "You've Really Got a Hold on Me," that has a gospel feel to it.
A: It may be because all music, as far as I am concerned, comes from the cotton fields. All American music has its origin in the cotton fields, when those people out there are humming and singing and praising. The songs were basically directed to God; they were basically singing spiritual music. So of course the blues being one of the main branches of that particular music. "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" is the blues. I wrote "Really Got a Hold on Me" because I loved Sam Cooke. I wanted to write something like "Bring It On Home To Me," so I wrote "You've Really Got a Hold on Me," which is in that same bluesy vein.
Q: Now you've been somebody that had taken the music, whether it's originally the blues or gospel or doo-wop -- some people would say "chitlin' circuit" music -- and you carried it off to a much wider, broad, mainstream audience, black and white.
A: I am very, very proud of my audience, because when I go and perform I am so happy that there are people there from every race that you can think of, and I love that. I can go and I can play places where they would say mostly black people come to this place, but when I go and play there are Asian people there, there are Hispanic people there, there are black people there, there are white people there. Another thing that I am so very, very proud of is the age range. I see people there now that, I see them and they have their children with them, and the first time that I saw them, they were with their parents.
Q: The songs obviously endure and you've been able to endure with them, both the older classics and later ones that you've been doing. You mention the idea that you go on the basis of feel; a song like "I Second That Emotion," it's really all about feeling and emoting. How do you approach a song that you must have sung thousands of times and still keep the feel?
A: I mean this from the bottom of my heart: I am going to go out tomorrow and we're opening in Las Vegas, and I am going to sing those songs for the umpteenth thousandth time, OK? Every single solitary night they are new to me. I love what I do. Performing is my favorite part of my work, because it's the time I get to one-on-one with the fans. I get a chance to have a good time with the people who are responsible, other than God, for me being whoever I am in show business. They think that they are coming to see me, but I am going to see them.
Q: Some of these songs are deeply emotional, personal kinds of statements about love and loss. I also think of one, I don't think that you authored it but you give voice to it: what an amazing rhythm on "Mickey's Monkey."
A: "Mickey's Monkey" was written by Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier. It was a song that I requested because of the fact that we had what you call piano rooms at the Hitsville building in Detroit. So one day I go into one and Lamont Dozier is sitting at the piano and he is playing that rhythm and he's singing "Lumdy, lumdy la. ..." I loved that. I said "Hey man, what's that?" He said, "I don't know yet, man." I said, "OK, when you finish that up, record that on us." He said, "OK," and they did, and I am happy.
Q: When you were really working in the record industry, we think of this gleaming grand Oz of Motown, but it really was people, voices, songs, getting together, creativity. Can you say a little about the process of creating songs for yourself and for other people in that studio setting?
A: I am glad of what you said leading up to that, because many people think that the Motown stories are mythical. They think that we must have made them up, but it's not, man. That's exactly what we had, a lot of young people making music, and even though we were highly, highly competitive with each other, we were also great aides to each other.
All the guys in all the groups, not so much the girls, they hung out there all day and all night. Not necessarily making music, but we'd be hanging there playing cards, we'd be playing chess, we'd be playing Ping-Pong and they had a basketball net hanging there. So, it would be nothing for me to be in the room doing something and Norman Whitfield would be recording something on Marvin Gaye and run in and say, "Hey man, Smoke, come in and put some hand claps on this record." And I'd go in and do it because that's how we were, that's how we operated.
I think that's what made Motown so unique and so everlasting is that that feeling and that camaraderie and all that comes across in that music. I hear that music on the radio today and it still sounds good.
On the very first day of Motown, Berry said -- and we only have five people at that time -- he said, "We're going to make music with a great beat, and some great stories for everybody. We are not going to be a black music company, we are going to be a music company. We are going to make music and we are going to be the sound of young America." It turns out we were the sound of young everywhere, but that's what we set out to do and that's what we've done.
I wish I had known that we were not only making music, we were making history, because I would have saved everything, man. I would have saved every scrap of tape; I would have saved every little card that I ever started a song on, every little matchbook, every little piece of paper.
