Review: The Miracles - Hi We're The Miracles (1961)
Tracks: 1) Who’s Lovin’ You; 2) Depend On Me; 3) Heart Like Mine; 4) Shop Around; 5) Won’t You Take Me Back; 6) Cause I Love You; 7) Your Love; 8) After All; 9) Way Over There; 10) Money; 11) Don’t Leave Me.
REVIEW
It is a little awkward for me to be writing about The Miracles — and, clearly, no account of the musical life in the early 1960s can be comprehensive without writing about The Miracles — just because, unlike the absolute majority of music writers past and present, I have always found it difficult to worship at the altar of William Robinson Jr., better known to us all as «Smokey». As a prolific songwriter who almost singlehandedly built up the legend of Motown; as a hard-working, demanding, and professional bandleader whose charisma helped elevate African-American pop music to new, previously unscalable heights; as the owner of a distinctive, immediately recognizable, versatile, and perfectly trained voice — as all those things and more, Smokey Robinson is owed a big box of sincere respect. But few of us probably value theoretical respect over personal connection; and when I think of all the great black voices of the late Fifties / early Sixties, Smokey lingers far, far beyond the likes of Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Bobby «Blue» Bland, and quite a few others.
"When Smokey sings, I hear violins", says Martin Fry; "thank you Lord for giving us pure Smokey", adds George Harrison. There is no reason to doubt their sincerity, yet something inside me softly protests each time I hear those odes, insisting that they should have rather been re-addressed to the likes of Sam Cooke or Otis Redding. (Maybe they could — if both of those guys hadn’t been long dead by the time those other guys decided to write ‘Pure Smokey’ and ‘When Smokey Sings’. Add Smokey’s persistence, tenacity, and longevity to the list of his formal values). To me, Smokey Robinson is probably the quintessential Motown entertainer, an absolute master of his craft who has, however, never made me shed a single tear (no, not even while singing ‘The Tracks Of My Tears’, which is no more tear-inducing than any other sentimental ballad he’d written or sung, be it hook-filled or unmemorable). And, to a large extent, it is probably Smokey who is responsible for coloring my original perception of Motown as a temple of perfectly polished, but heartless pop gloss — which is only part of a much more complicated series of truths, yet a valid part that I still urge everybody to remember.
To put it simply, Smokey Robinson is overrated (and I don’t throw that word around lightly these days), and I might probably have an easier time writing about him if he weren’t so revered as an exquisite American national treasure. Of all the black pop singer-songwriters of the Sixties, he was the most influenced by the Fifties’ doo-wop culture, all of whose sides — the inventive ones and the corny ones — he continued to cherish throughout his life; and of all the Fifties’ subgenres of African-American music, I’ve always had the most problems with doo-wop, at least in its «pure» form (whenever doo-wop is being «inverted» or deconstructed, all the way from The Coasters to, uh, Frank Zappa, it’s fine by me). The Miracles themselves started out as a bona fide doo-wop band, only gradually sucking in influences from other styles; and Smokey’s early songwriting days for the label showed that there was always a fifty-fifty chance of his picking up genuine inspiration or writing a mediocre hack job — the trademarks of a professional songwriter who’s in it for the money at least as much as for anything else. It’s hardly a crime — we all have to eat — but it’s just one more reason not to treat the man as an actual «miracle worker», if you’ll excuse the pun, but rather take him for what he was: a talent, held back by the stereotypical chains of an old-fashioned epoch which he kept trying to paint in the bright colors of a modern age.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, it’s time to go ahead and finally say Hi to We’re The Miracles, either the first or the second LP released on the Motown label, depending on how you count the difference in a few days between its release and that of Marvin Gaye’s Soulful Moods. Actually, before we do that, let’s backtrack even a bit further and remember the very first song recorded by The Miracles, because it’s somewhat telling. The number, called ‘Got A Job’, was co-written by Berry Gordy and another songwriter (not Smokey) as a response to ‘Get A Job’ by The Silhouettes, a recent doo-wop hit that was rockin’ the nation in late 1957 / early 1958; where the original song depicted a situation where the protagonist was being constantly harassed by his wife for sitting on his ass and letting his family starve, the «sequel» portrays him as finally having gotten a job in a grocery store and now slaving away for the boss ("And though the boss keeps a-runnin’ through my brain / I’ll never never never quit my brand new job / Workin’ all day and workin’ all night"). While the «sequel» might thus be a little more socially biting than the original, what really matters is that ‘Get A Job’ sounds precisely like we’d expect a fast-paced doo-wop number from the Fifties to sound like — by contrast, ‘Got A Job’, with its odd echoey production, deep bass, cracking drums, and multi-layered harmonies sounds like... well, more like points the way to a somewhat more exciting musical future. The B-side, ‘My Mama Done Told Me’, a little piece of classic harmless misogyny also credited to Berry, is a curious exercise in marrying country-rock to doo-wop harmonies, and I’m not sure it works exactly the way it was supposed to work... though I have no idea how it was supposed to work, honestly. (Weird random association: on some of the verses here, Smokey sounds spookily close to Morrissey on ‘The Queen Is Dead’ — the song, that is.)
The second single by the Miracles was most notable for (a) giving Claudette Rogers — soon-to-be Mrs. Claudette Robinson — her first lead vocal on a group song and (b) being called ‘Money’, but not the ‘Money’ we all know as ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’; rather, it is ‘(I Need Some) Money’, a much more poppy tune, and also co-credited to Berry Gordy (which probably goes to show the degree of his obsession with finding financial success in the pre-Motown and early Motown days). The B-side was ‘I Cry’, a very straightforward and generic slow doo-wop ballad that introduced the world to Smokey’s shrill falsetto — for better or for worse. The world, apparently, didn’t want to catch on; released again on the small End Records label, the record quickly sank without a trace. Interestingly, one more single that followed was actually picked up by Chess Records, the Miracles’ only release on that label: ‘I Need A Change’ is a quirky little tune, riding on a repetitive arpeggiated acoustic riff stuck somewhere in between blues and pop — unfortunately, it has no vocal hook to speak of, unless Smokey’s vocal magic counts as a hook by itself, as he (fruitlessly, I imagine) begs for his woman to let him back into her life because, apparently, he "needs a change". (Good argument there, Smokey!)
For the first year of the existence of Motown (more accurately, Tamla), the Miracles weren’t its hottest proposition — despite Smokey’s active involvement in the company’s affairs and close partnership with Gordy. The strongest selling single of 1959 was Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’ (the other one), while the Miracles put out three relative flops, all of which, in comparison to ‘Money’, probably sounded a bit feeble and outdated. Some nasty tongues actually spread rumors that Gordy kept vetoing Smokey’s contributions, one after another, as the man wrote them in maniacal droves — until he finally settled on ‘Shop Around’ as the one that might do the trick.
It’s not that easy, today, to understand what exactly made ‘Shop Around’ into a smash hit and earned Motown its first million. It’s a catchy pop song for sure, but its verse melody seems to be fairly trite, not too far removed from whatever was recorded by the more vaudeville-oriented doo-wop bands like The Clovers a decade earlier. Again, just as it was with ‘Got A Job’, the most important ingredient is arguably the arrangement and the production — very modern for 1960, very tight, very danceable, with the rhythm section of James Jamerson and Benny Benjamin providing a perfect piece of dance hall entertainment. Meanwhile, Smokey does his best to keep the tension high, skilfully switching between high and low registers and placing particular emphasis on the "you’d better shop around" hook — which, by the way, probably made the song quite popular among young males. (How often did you hear songs in 1960 about a mother extolling the virtues of promiscuity before her own son?). In fact, the song’s message was so controversial that Gordy and Smokey even wrote a «repentant» sequel, ‘Don’t Let Him Shop Around’, which they gave away to Debbie Dean, Motown’s first white girl singer, so as to have a competing feminist perspective.
Although ‘Money’ and ‘Shop Around’ actually have some melodic similarities, they ultimately illustrate the two sides of classic Motown — the «grittier» one, inspired and influenced by the R&B sound of Atlantic and other labels, and the «poppier» one, taking its cues from the doo-wop culture as well as the «whitebread pop» as illustrated by contemporary Elvis and other artists earning their living out of the hands of professional modern songwriters. Both sides would co-exist throughout the existence of Motown, but the gritty side would always be subservient to the poppy one — and Smokey Robinson would be the first to attend to that, both by flooding the label with his own recordings and by peddling his songs to just about every other Motown artist. This resulted in a lot of good and a lot of crap, and a perfect illustration of this can be formed already by listening to the Miracles’ first complete LP, very innocently titled Hi We’re The Miracles (which rather begs for the subtitle of Do You Have A Minute To Talk About Smokey?).
Of the eleven songs on the album, ten are Robinson originals (though half are officially co-written with Gordy), with the sole exception of the Miracles’ own take on ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ — seriously extended and «jammified», but at the expense of the original’s immortal piano riff, sort of «dissolved» into a less impressive piano rhythm part so as to keep all the attention on Smokey’s vocalizing. Honestly, it doesn’t work: the song needs a bitter-cynical vocal delivery, like Barrett Strong’s original performance or the John Lennon approach — Smokey sings of his alleged addiction to money the same way he’d sing about an alleged addiction to his latest crush, replacing aggression with lyricism. As for the ten originals, ‘Shop Around’ is the clearly and immediately memorable highlight, of course... and what about the rest?
Well, the rest are more miss than hit, if you ask me. There’s some generic doo-wop (‘Depend On Me’), whose only «virtue» is Smokey’s piercing falsetto — a big win for you if you feel emotionally connected to it, a big loss for me if it thoroughly and utterly annoys me as exaggerated pop theater that should have, by all means, lost its relevancy in the new decade but ended up persisting (all the way to the Bee Gees fifteen years later, I might add). There’s a lot of slow, melodically trivial blues-pop (‘Who’s Lovin’ You’, ‘Won’t You Take Me Back’, ‘Your Love’), whose only virtue are Smokey’s achy-breaky undertones, using his colleagues’ harmonies as soft pillows underneath — these are more credible and enjoyable, I think, than his falsetto, but still not enough to distinguish all these tunes from one another. Finally, there are slightly faster and poppier numbers like ‘Don’t Leave Me’ which feel like second-rate imitations of Sam Cooke. Oh, and Claudette takes the lead on ‘After All’, another slow-moving number that she transforms into a «girl group» tune à la early Chantels or Crystals, but while she does have a strong, suitably expressive voice, I’d rather still recommend listening to actual girl groups for this vibe.
Honestly, I think that the only song from the album other than ‘Shop Around’ that occasionally crops up as a suggested highlight is ‘Way Over There’, and that the main reason for this is the inspired orchestration which takes its ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’-derived piano riff and adds a useful «epic» dimension — I mean, the title itself opts for a bit of a gospel feel, even if it’s ultimately just a girl that Smokey is looking for out there on the mountain top, rather than the Almighty. Starting out like Ray Charles, ‘Way Over There’ quickly transmogrifies into Sam Cooke, attitude-wise, but even then there seems to be more attitude than actual hooks: the "come to me baby, I’m on my way" chorus is belted out rather than sung, and in the end I remember nothing about the song except for that cocky orchestral theme.
Thus, Hi We’re The Miracles reveals one bitter, but — in my eyes and ears at least — inescapable truth about Smokey Robinson: the man is best taken in small doses. His songwriting drive is astonishing — name me another black pop artist who would write pretty much all of his own material back in 1960 — but the downside of it is that about 80% of that drive yields trivial and boring results (and no, that situation would not get that much better as time went by). Even after Gordy’s filtering, what remains is, for the most part, mediocre material that will only appeal to great big fans of Smokey’s vocal powers, a group to which, unfortunately, I do not belong. From this debut album, I can only take home the unquestionable catchiness of ‘Shop Around’ (give or take its somewhat unscrupulous message), the blaring orchestral pride of ‘Way Over There’, and... uh, well, maybe just the overall feeling of how much less embarrassing it is to hear a generic and conventional Smokey Robinson in 1960 than in, say, 1987. (Remember ‘Just To See Her’? no? good! keep it that way!).
Of course, the Miracles would have much better albums than this one, with different ratios of killer-to-filler, but the fact that they were the first of the Motown bands to achieve national success — the band that pretty much made Motown, as is commonly acknowledged — weighs heavier on my mind than it should. For all the good things to be associated with Smokey (and I’ll be happy to do the honors when we get to them), it is also possible to draw a relatively straight line from the Miracles’ version of pop music to mainstream dance-oriented pop music of each following decade (hey, it’s not for nothin’ that The Jackson 5 covered ‘Who’s Lovin’ You’ still in Michael’s big pink hat era), and it’s not always a beautiful line. The primary purpose of the Miracles was to make music that would sell; the secondary and tertiary purposes were to make music that would be emotionally sincere and artistically relevant. When all three overlapped — magic was in the air. But this required extra time; for the moment, Smokey and the gang were still busy «shopping around», looking for those particular formulae that would give them maximum exposure and maximum security.
Only Solitaire reviews: The Miracles