As June is Black Music Month, spotlighting the achievement of Motown Records is an undertaking both highly rewarding and doubly timely, as Elemental Music’s Motown Sound Collection continues this month with Smokey Robinson’s Smokey in a blue vinyl edition with a gatefold sleeve and the Four Tops’ Still Waters Run Deep, both available June 7. Elemental’s series will reissue over two dozen Motown albums from the 1960s and 1970s monthly throughout 2024 and into 2025, drawing from a broad spectrum of Motown acts.
Released in March 1970, Still Waters Run Deep kick-started a major comeback for the Four Tops, righting a creative and commercial stumble through a revamped direction shaped by Frank Wilson, the set’s producer and co-writer of five tracks on the album. Co-producer Smokey Robinson co-wrote three tracks with Wilson, including “Still Water (Love)” and “Still Water (Peace),” the record’s opening and closing numbers.
These cuts don’t necessarily give Still Waters Run Deep a thematic feel, but they certainly do reinforce the level of attention and care that was paid to shaping the ten selections into a fully-formed album. And right away, the group, with the original lineup of Levi Stubbs, Abdul “Duke” Fakir, Renaldo “Obie” Benson, and Lawrence Payton still intact, is in reinvigorated form.
Sharp renditions of “Reflections,” still fresh from The Supremes’ hit version and notably a Holland–Dozier–Holland tune (that team having composed a number of The Four Tops’ standout moments) and Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” which had broke out in a big way the previous year through the celebrated cover by Harry Nilsson, are included.
To be fair, the Four Tops didn’t succumb to shoddiness on the material that followed the release of Reach Out in 1967, but there was a tangible loss of focus that began with the chosen material. Bringing in Wilson, who’s been described as a protégé of songwriter, producer, and Temptation Norman Whitfield, and the man who was largely responsible for the Motown strain of psychedelic soul, sharpened the group’s forward trajectory.
Overall, Still Waters Run Deep sounds like it was recorded at the dawn of a new decade, and any lessons Wilson learned from Whitfield are executed with restraint. For the most part, Wilson uses the psych-soul sensibility as shading; in a version of the pop standard “It’s All in the Game,” he dispenses with it entirely.
“Love is the Answer” (the other Smokey co-write), with it’s opening guitar sizzle, and “Elusive Butterfly,” laden with harpsichord and a jarring mid-song effect, lay the psychedelia on heaviest, but they are both still recognizable as tunes by The Four Tops. A couple lesser tracks on side two, and particularly “L.A. (My Town),” keep the album from reaching classic status, but for anyone building a shelf of Motown long players, Still Waters Run Deep is still a keeper.
Smokey, the debut album by Smokey Robinson, released in 1973 after a year of retirement and having departed The Miracles, is more than a keeper; for fans of ’70s soul, it’s essential. Robinson’s quitting The Miracles wasn’t acrimonious. To the contrary, he was refocusing on his Vice President of Motown role, and it’s been said that the whole reason for Smokey’s existence is due to “Sweet Harmony,” Robinson’s tribute single to his former backing group, being such a killer that it was decided a full album was needed.
“Sweet Harmony” is a total gem reinforcing that Robinson’s skills as a songwriter (and as a vocalist, natch) were undiminished. Extending from the single, Robinson wrote or co-wrote seven of Smokey’s nine tracks, and in so doing pulled off an inspired blend of the personal and the political (the latter a new twist for Robinson) on an album, co-produced by Willie Hutch, that hits the ’70s soul target right in the bullseye.
Some have belittled this album as being derivative of Isaac Hayes, but no. Any similarities to Hayes (who took a beating in print from assorted critics during this period) are fleeting, at best. A bigger influence is Marvin Gaye’s work from the era (the personal and political), plus the string infusions build upon Motown’s sturdy symphonic foundation.
There are a couple nods to Curtis Mayfield, especially in the second half of the cover medley “Never My Love”/ “Never Can Say Goodbye,” but these likenesses are subtle turns rather than blatant cops. That Smokey features a non-crap medley is indicative of the album’s worth. The other non-original is a Goffin-King composition associated with The Shirelles, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” If not amongst the LP’s standouts, it too beats the quality odds.
On the personal side of the subject matter spectrum, Robinson remains skilled at giving love songs significant emotional weight. With a track like “A Silent Partner in a Three-Way Love Affair,” this isn’t such a surprise perhaps, though Robinson does avoid falling into a clichéd triangular love rut. More impressively, Smokey’s closer “Baby Come Close,” which for other singers would just be standard prelude to lovey-dovey stuff, rises up by keeping it lyrically simple and letting the sound of his voice and the rich arrangement carry the feeling.
Smokey’s political side is really just one song, but it’s a doozy. “Just My Soul Responding” features Tom Bee of Motown’s Native American rock act XIT, performing a Sioux medicine man chant. In lesser hands, even if well-intentioned, this sort of maneuver could’ve been disastrous, but it soars on Smokey, delivering the album its standout track and firmly establishing Robinson’s post-Miracles success.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
Four Tops, Still Waters Run Deep
B+
Smokey Robinson, Smokey
A
