Review: The Miracles - Cookin' With The Miracles (1961)
Tracks: 1) That’s The Way I Feel; 2) Everybody’s Gotta Pay Some Dues; 3) Mama; 4) Ain’t It Baby; 5) Determination; 6) You Never Miss A Good Thing; 7) Embraceable You; 8) The Only One I Love; 9) Broken Hearted; 10) I Can’t Believe; 11*) Mighty Good Lovin’.
REVIEW
This and the following LP, I’ll Try Something New, were released during one of the many relative lulls in The Miracles’ career: despite continuing to put out singles at a steady pace, Smokey did not succeed in getting a Top 10 hit in between ‘Shop Around’ (September 1960) and ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ (November 1962). The Miracles consistently fared better on the R&B charts, but even there it seemed like nothing could break the record of ‘Shop Around’ for quite a while. Despite that, Berry Gordy never lost faith in Smokey for a moment — not even when the poor fellow landed in the hospital with Asian flu and had to have Claudette temporarily assume leadership of The Miracles on their touring schedule. One might love or hate the group’s material, but there’s definitely something to be said about loyalty in those good old days...
Cookin’ With The Miracles — beside its obvious usefulness in being one of the very few Miracles LPs on which the entire original group is «democratically» featured on the cover — basically just covers the first half of that lull period, containing the first three singles they released in 1961 (with the exception of the B-side ‘Mighty Good Lovin’ which was, in retrospect, attached to some of the re-releases) plus five LP-only tracks; just like the first time around, pretty much every single song is credited or co-credited to Smokey, with the glaring exception of a Gershwin cover (‘Embraceable You’), maybe for the older folks’ sake or something. None of the included songs have really become classic Motown standards, not even in retrospect, but the good news is that Cookin’ does sound significantly more modern than its predecessor. By this time, The Miracles have pretty much shaken off the shackles of the Fifties’ doo-wop formula, and fully embraced a tighter, louder, more energetic sound that places huge emphasis on the groove of the rhythm section way before the vocals even begin to come in. At their best now, the lead singer, the backing vocalists, the horns, the bass, the drums, and the occasional strings can create little musical whirlwinds that promise excitement and involvement even without a memorable hook — though at their worst, these whirlwinds can get repetitive and background-ish-ly formulaic.
The formula is perfectly illustrated with ‘Ain’t It Baby’, released in February 1961: far from the catchiest tune Smokey ever wrote, its main point is to set up a two-and-a-half-minute groove that never ever lets go — apart from a short saxophone break, Smokey almost literally never shuts his mouth, bouncing his vocal cords off each single note pumped out by the bass and automatically triggering a response from his bandmates each time he does. It’s fun, except that it’s basically ‘Shop Around, Pt. 2’ without the stop-and-start hookline and a slightly less interesting story behind the lyrics (clearly "my mama told me you’d better shop around" carries more intrigue than "you wanna fool around and drive me crazy"). The B-side ‘The Only One I Love’, in contrast with the dance groove of ‘Ain’t It Baby’, was a generic sugar-sweet bit of doo-wop, great for admirers of the I-hear-violins attitude but still completely out-of-time with its Fifties’ fetish.
Four months later came ‘Broken Hearted’, whose only outstanding feature is a clever way in which the strings and horns are made to sound in unison on the opening, creating a lyrical-but-tough attitude from the get-go — and the strings then continue to provide the main hook, while Smokey and the gang feel more like superfluous appendages, a bunch of drifters chaotically tossed around by the waves of strings. They get a bigger break on the B-side, ‘Mighty Good Lovin’, which most likely works because it is really a Little Richard / Chuck Berry type of rock’n’rolling number disguised as friendly R&B, with Smokey again fully in charge, never letting up for a second. This is as close as The Miracles ever get to truly rocking out, and while Smokey could never have the angry/aggressive or sarcastic/sneering type of rock’n’roll voice, he can easily do with the exuberant/hysterical type of one. (Of course, it’s only natural that ‘Mighty Good Lovin’, probably the band’s single best recording of 1961, was the one song originally omitted from Cookin’.)
Finally, in October Smokey and Gordy released ‘Everybody’s Gotta Pay Some Dues’, a decent tune that showed, however, just how much Motown was still in the grip of ‘Shop Around’ — this is another one of those sat-him-on-my-knee moralistic tunes, except now the protagonist is passing life’s lessons on to his imaginary son rather than receiving them from his imaginary mother, oh, and the lesson is a bit more general than last time around, too: "son, don’t you know you can’t win all the time / sometime you’re gonna have to lose" — seems like somebody has been taking the inability to repeat the commercial success of ‘Shop Around’ quite close to the heart, no? Actually, I think the song might even have a bit more heart-tugging potential than ‘Shop Around’, what with the way they keep raising the verse melody up, up, up, before landing it quite sternly and brutally with the inescapable conclusion of "everybody’s gotta pay some dues". But it’s not nearly as optimistic, not to mention not nearly as surprising, which is why it still got held up on the charts.
Of the songs recorded to fill in the rest of the LP, one could perhaps single out ‘That’s The Way I Feel’, possibly the most dirge-like tune from the group up until that moment (weeping lead vocal + deep dark harmonies = as close to a Goth atmosphere as Smokey ever gets); ‘Mama’, a rather hilarious take on the craziness of sudden infatuation ("Mama, I’ve only known her for a week / But I’m glad that I waited like you told me to"); and ‘Determination’, another short and tight pop-rocker with the strings providing more of a hook than the vocals. The line about "I’ve got determination / Plus a whole lotta conversation" does hit close to home, though — on all of these tracks and most of the others, Smokey makes as much «conversation» as acoustically possible, filling up every single bar without even having to resort to spurious ad-libbing of the baby-baby-baby kind: he’s just a natural-sounding chatterbox, and this excited exuberance permeates every one of these mid-tempo numbers, be they happy, tragic, or just filled with «determination».
Thus, with the exception of a bunch of slow and boring doo-wop numbers (and that cover of ‘Embraceable You’ which is probably one of the last things you’ll ever need in your life), I would say that Cookin’ was still a big step in the right direction for those guys — it’s formulaic, it hardly has any obvious major highlights, but it does a good job of presenting the brand new Motown sound, leaving behind much, if not most, of the obsolete Fifties’ baggage and asserting The Miracles as one of the tightest and most infectious vocal bands of its time. If only there was a bit more diversity to this formula... but we’re talking 1961, after all, when «diversity» of musical approach wasn’t much of a thing for anybody, and definitely not for a guy who’d just hit upon a winning formula and probably thought he was stuck with it for the rest of his life anyway.
Only Solitaire reviews: The Miracles