As I wrote in negatively reviewing the third Smokey Robinson solo album (Quiet Storm), my belated introduction to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles came just after the release in August of 1968 of “Special Occasion,” which seems to me more an album, less a collection of tracks than other Miracles albums. (Robinson’s first solo album, ‘Smokey” (1973) also feels to me something more than a collection of tracks, many of which are outstanding, especially, “Sweet Harmony.”)

More or less fresh from the five proms of my high school career, I always smiled at the title track lyrics “Like when you dress up in your tie and tails,” though I had no experience of toasts of champagne. And, though I’d broken up with the girl I’d been dating my senior year in high school soon after the last of those formal “special occasions,” I could recognize (without having experienced) how romantic
How the same old touch from the same old hand
Can make me feel like a different man .
I just can't understand
But every time you touch me
It's a real special occasion.
is. And Smokey could sell such sentiments with the greatest of ease with his smooth falsetto singing.

The mid-tempo “Yester Love” recycled a triple “Ooo”  (not the same triple “Ooo” from my favorite Miracles song, “Ooo, Baby Baby”) en route to one of those elegant, soulful, regret-filled (though not downbeat) recollection songs about a treasured love who has “slipped through my fingers” and is “giving other lips pleasure.” He’ll never forget her and will continue to dream of his “yester love.”

The strong opening to the album also included “If You Can Want,” which was the biggest hit single from the album. Robinson pleads “If you can want, you can need, if you can need, you can care, if you can care, you can love, So if you want me, I'll be there.” BTW, its background vocalists include Smokey’s then-wife, Claudette Rogers Robinson (whom I thought had retired before then and was not onstage when I saw the Miracles live in 1969; officially, she did not retire until 1972, when Smokey retired from performing… for a year).

"Everybody Needs Love,"  the only track on the A side of the LP not written or cowritten (with Al Cleveland) by Robinson (it was composed by Norman Whitfield and Edward Holland, Jr.), is a bit of a falling off from the opening three songs. Written for the Temptations, it was a successful song performed by Gladys Knight and the Pips, Jimmy Ruffin (and was first recorded by Mary Wells).

Robinson’s "Just Losing You (would be too much to bear)" is my favorite song on the first side of the album. This time, the singer is holding on to his love for dear life, fearing that the devastation were it to become a yester love.

"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" (which I long thought Smokey wrote, but was actually written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong) was released as a single in October 1968, but went nowhere on the charts. Heavily engineered (with the Andantes and the Detroit Symphony) by Whitfield, the song became a mega-hit for Marvin Gaye. I generally prefer Robinson to Gaye as a falsetto singer, but  think Whitfield was right about how to sell his song.

That is followed by an OK cover of the Lennon/McCartney “Yesterday” and the up-tempo celebratory "Your Mother's Only Daughter" (another song that makes me smile), and a big finish with “"Much Better Off" (in the mode of “"Just Losing You (would be too much to bear”), and a song I have deployed several times in my life since becoming acquainted with the album  (along with “I second that emotion” and “If that don’t do, I’ll try something new”): “You only build me up to tear me down (,down, down).” It’s those repeated, descending “down”s that make the hearer ache! He likens himself to a toy that is first treasured then torn apart, and a king for a day, and recalls being on a cloud and feeling real proud, but “then without a warning,  in front of a crowd, you bring me back to earth.”

I think the backup vocals, often echoing Robinson, add a lot, but his falsetto floating with some artful catching (implying being on the edge of tears) is what makes these songs work.

And the 72-year-old Mr. Robinson can still do it! Not only the purity of his voice but his amazing breath control continue, as I saw and heard last week — in which he did nothing from either this, my favorite Miracles album, or from my favorite solo album, “Smokey,” but did some of his greatest hits from the 1960s— Ooo, Baby, Baby; Tears of a Clown; The Track of My Tears’ I Second that Emotion—along with a very protracted “Whatcha Gonna Do” from his 2009 album “Time Flies When You're Having Fun” and something partly in Spanish (with “rico” repeated over and over) from an upcoming one.

©2012, Stephen O. Murray

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Great Music to Play While: Romancing