When Smokey Sings

Last week was Smokey Robinson's 69th birthday. Here's a piece I wrote for the Pop Music Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle a few years ago. The challenge was to write an essay about a given song that would last no longer than the song itself:

You can have "Tracks of My Tears" and "Ooh Baby Baby" and "Beauty's Only Skin Deep." Great songs all, but they are tragic victims of narrow playlists on oldies radio, which has killed the oldies. But that's another story. What we find then among the considerable ouevre of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles is this gem, "Save Me," from the album "Going to A-Go-Go," released in November of 1966. With its simple introduction distinguished by those pinging notes (what is that, a glockenspiel or a cheap toy xylophone?), the song's pulsing rhythm surges along, carrying Smokey's plaintive tenor. And of course, he's singing about a lost love. And he spoke to me because I had lost Susan Villarreal. Technically, we hadn't broken up because, well, we'd never been together. You see, we were in the 4th grade. But I knew that if someday we were to become a couple, she would break my heart. Because with her bouncy jet black hair and pixieish smile, she was simply too beautiful. And she would know the power of that beauty. And this would be the song that I would sing. I first heard it as I hunkered down on the backseat floorboard of my older brother's best friend's GTO. My parents had gone out for the evening and I was 9 years old, too young to be left alone, so I was left in my 18-year-old brother's care. But he and his friend couldn't resist going for a ride to cruise past the hot discotheque in downtown San Antonio--the Pussycat A-Go-Go. If they spotted some cute girls and could beckon them to the car for a chat, I couldn't be seen. How uncool would that be? So that's how I found myself down in the well, looking out the back window. All I could see were neon signs and telephone lines as Smokey's bittersweet lament poured out of the radio. And even at that tender age, I knew what heartbreak sounded like. It sounded like a man looking for salvation, and deep down knowing it wasn't going to come. It sounded like a man I didn't want to become. So I vowed, right then and there, that I would never, ever let a woman break my heart. Not after you, Susan Villarreal, not after you. Damn you.  

Comments

[Emory Holmes II]

Dead-on invocation of adolescent heartbreak and the nausea, anguish and confusion that are its inevitable wages when love's futile labors reveal that one is too young and inexperienced, and the object of our desires too elevated, too perfect and too beautiful to attain. Great writing, Oscar.

Emory