![]() ![]() His set is a well-practiced digest of the classics he recorded at Motown – with whose founder, Berry Gordy Jr., he recently received the Recording Academy’s prestigious MusiCares Persons of the Year award – although he throws in “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” a deep cut from “A Quiet Storm,” at the request of an audience member with a lyric from the song tattooed on her arm. Onstage in Rancho Mirage, Robinson’s voice is as soft and silky as the purple shirt he’s wearing beneath a crisp white suit. and Las Vegas with his second wife, Frances Gladney. “All the guys at Motown were growing beards back then,” recalls the singer, who splits his time between L.A. “Couldn’t do that in Detroit,” he says with a laugh of the city where he and Motown were born.Ī set of luxuriously appointed R&B slow jams, “Gasms” looks back to “A Quiet Storm,” the boudoir-minded LP Robinson released in 1975 after he’d left the Miracles, worked as a Motown record exec, then returned to performing as a mustached solo artist. ![]() Whatever he’s doing, it’s working: Dressed in high-end athleisure wear, his blue-green eyes so clear that they look like they could chill a drink, this master of the American love song is the picture of health as he discusses “Gasms” and recounts detailed episodes from throughout the career he launched nearly seven decades ago as frontman of the Miracles.Īmong the many, many foundational hits he sang or wrote for other Motown acts – and which got him into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – are “My Girl,” “Shop Around,” “The Tears of a Clown,” “I Second That Emotion,” “The Tracks of My Tears,” “Ooo Baby Baby,” “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” “Get Ready” and “Cruisin’,” the last of which he says he struggled to finish for five years until one December afternoon in 1978 when he found himself driving down Sunset Boulevard with the car’s top down. “Ain’t s– else you could call me for at 5 o’clock in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go.’”įor Robinson, golf is the most enjoyable part of an overall wellness regime that also includes yoga – he’s been practicing for 37 years – and a diet he says has been free of red meat since 1972. “There’s really nothing like it,” he says of the game, nodding toward his clubs in a corner of the room. The 83-year-old Motown legend is here in the desert to play a sold-out gig several weeks ahead of Friday’s release of his provocatively titled new album, “Gasms.” (You know what that’s short for.) But Robinson, who calls golf “the heroin of sports,” drove out early from his home in Los Angeles to squeeze in a round before showtime. ― Smokey Robinson rises from an overstuffed armchair and lowers the volume of the Masters golf tournament on the TV in his 11th-floor suite at the Agua Caliente casino here.
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