“A one-in-a-million group”: The Motown group Smokey Robinson said couldn’t be beat
While Motown might have been a record label first and foremost, the name became so synonymous with the sound of the records it released in its early years that the term ‘Motown’ was almost used as a substitute for the genre of music its artists actually made. Championing artists that fused together pop, funk and soul, the Motown sound is unmistakable, and it was largely down to the fact that the label used an in-house writing, production and performance team in order to create a sense of uniformity across their releases.
From Stevie Wonder to The Jackson 5 and Marvin Gaye to The Supremes, the list of acclaimed artists that the label discovered and nurtured on their way to success is astounding, and the dominance that their artists had over the charts in both the US and UK is unlike any other individual label. Their prominence also contributed a remarkable amount to the desegregation of music of Black origin in a commercial sense, with their roster of predominantly non-white artists becoming popular with white audiences.
One of their most successful artists throughout the 1960s was Smokey Robinson, who, alongside his backing group The Miracles, had hits with several songs such as ‘I Second That Emotion’ and ‘The Tracks of My Tears’, as well as a US and UK number one with ‘The Tears of a Clown’. Their association with Motown from 1959 to 1972 before Billy Griffin replaced Robinson as the lead vocalist was one of the most illustrious runs from a group signed to the label, and their continued legacy only goes to show how formidable they were as a group.
However, there was one other group on Motown’s roster that Robinson believes eclipsed them in every way. With Motown’s origins lying in the vibrant musical hotbed of Detroit, many of the acts who were signed to the label were incredibly familiar with one another from before they were famous, and Robinson revealed to Rolling Stone that his relationship with The Four Tops goes back even as far as his childhood.
“The Four Tops are a one-in-a-million singing group,” he told the magazine. “They were the best in my neighbourhood in Detroit when I was growing up.” Digging further into the past, he then went on to reveal that he had been familiar with the group since the age of 11 when he was starting out the earliest incarnation of what would become the Miracles.
Robinson continued: “Back then the Four Tops were called the Four Aims. We all used to sing on the corners, at school functions and at house parties. Sometimes we’d have talent competitions. But all the groups in the neighbourhood knew that if the Four Aims were going to be there, you were going to be singing for second place at best.”
While Robinson is certainly no slouch when it comes to delivering incredible vocal performances, his praise of their leader Levi Stubbs, alongside backing vocalists Duke Fakir, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton, was apparently such a force to be reckoned with that he had to concede to their excellence.
“When they came to Motown and teamed up with Holland-Dozier-Holland,” he reflected, “There was no looking back. They performed some of the most dramatic records ever written.”
