In May, the great singer, songwriter, and producer Smokey Robinson and his wife Frances were sued by four of their former housekeepers for sexual battery and false imprisonment, alleged to have occurred between 2012 and 2024. He’s counter-sued, citing slander and financial elder abuse (Smokey Robinson is 85). This reminds one of various scandals involving powerful men over the decades. It's not exactly Epstein, but Frances' alleged involvement might remind one of Ghislaine Maxwell. The string of young housekeepers theme recalls, for example, Elijah Muhammed, the leader of the Nation of Islam, whose proclivities led Nation preacher Malcolm X to repudiate the organization. In ensnaring a beloved and iconic figure, it reminds one of Cosby.
I’m more disturbed by this one, not because of the alleged misbehavior, but because of the person. Smokey Robinson's work, to me, has been the very essence of romantic love, and of sex as an expression of romantic love. His sometime collaborator Marvin Gaye, he of "Let's Get it On" and "Sexual Healing" might’ve had a similar status. But Marvin didn't survive long enough to witness his own sexual and aesthetic decline. Also, Marvin was pretty raw sex, it seemed. Smokey was about sex as the most profound expression of romantic love.
It might be the sweetest suite of love songs, the most meltingly romantic oeuvre in the history of popular music. For a lot of people, Smokey gave us "our song."
With my first little middle-school girlfriend Leslie, our song was "You've Really Got a Hold on Me," the classic 1962 Smokey composition beautifully covered, among others, by the Beatles and Mickey Gilley. We played it for humor, really, because at 13 the idea, for example, of not liking someone but loving them anyway or being tortured over years by not being able to quit someone seemed absurd. I think we both found out as we went on that such things are all too possible. But we started with the Beatles version but drifted to Smokey, who sang it in the warmest and most subtle falsetto the world has ever known: a perfect instrument for the love song.
But whether his voice was the instrument or not, the love songs were the greatest. The man wrote "My Girl" (with fellow Miracle Ronald White) and got David Ruffin to sing it.
When I got married to Rachael in 1983, our song was Smokey's recent hit "Being With You," one of the great love songs ever recorded. It also had a humorous flavor for us, as it's all about how people warned Smokey not to get with "you" because of "your heartbreak reputation." I think probably none of our friends and relations warned Rachael or me about the other; we seemed pretty conventional partners. But part of the romance in Smokey's lyrics is that overcoming terrible barriers shows the depth of one's love. The barriers for us came along later.
Smokey's ravishing song "Cruisin'" and "Being With You" established his sound for the 1980s, and Rachael and I listened throughout. Bruce Springsteen said that he'd like to put "Cruisin'" on an infinite loop so it never had to stop, and this was sort of Smokey's approach for the decade. At any rate, the gentle, gorgeous, sexy, “quiet storm” style of music-for-lovemaking became Smokey's undoubted métier. There were a number of beautiful love-and-sex songs in the 1980s and they were underappreciated. (See the playlist below for a sample of 1980s Smokey.)
It’s different listening to some of these songs since the news broke. For example, one of my favorites is I've Made Love to You a Thousand Times from Touch the Sky, an album I regard as a stone classic. In my head, running through the chorus, it's about monogamy: we've made love a thousand times, and still it's fun and creative and meaningful! I sent the video to my wife Jane when we got engaged. But suspecting now what we didn't suspect then, it has a “stalkerish” feel: it says, I've been fantasizing about you for years, baby. You wouldn't believe the mental pictures I've been having ("there you are all over me"). Let's make it real right now. I hate to say it, but it's a line you might try on your young housekeeper.
So now I'm pissed off that I can't hear some of my favorite songs in the way I once did. I've had worse problems from time to time, admittedly. And the song hasn't changed at all. It just creeps me out now, even as I can't get it out my head.
If Smokey did what’s alleged, he did it as an aging icon. And you can see how this might sort of happen to a love god as he goes on. He's world famous for the way he sees and treats young women. Now, can his seeing age as he does? Maybe his desires kind of freeze in place at the moment of his transcendent success. He thinks his success has to do with having sex with young women and thinking about having sex with young women, and loving young women freely (maybe Smokey wasn’t perfectly faithful in his marriages, for example). Then, writing about loving and making love to young women.
I think aging in a dignified or appropriate manner from where Smokey or Marvin Gaye was in 1980 might be difficult, sort of like being a female sex symbol such as Marilyn or Jayne Mansfield. What happens to you artistically and identity-wise when your sexual desires become less urgent, for example? This happens to virtually all men who age into their 60s, I believe, much less their 80s, where Smokey is now. Well, maybe you do everything you can to deny and forestall this. And now we have pills for that, and so on.
Behaving like you did in the 1960s when you were in your 20s gets less attractive in the 2010s when you're in your 70s. Trying to stay promiscuous in the 1980s might’ve kept Smokey artistically alive, but maybe he just kept going after that, with less in the way of artistic achievements to show for it, just a big empty mansion and a big empty life that needs cleaning.
Marvin Gaye didn't have to live with his own sexual decline or perform "Let's Get it On" in his 70s (as opposed to performing it in the 1970s, when we were all sensitive people with so much to give). But Smokey was left with the dilemma of how to deal with his own aging desires, and his identity as one of the world's greatest expressers of sexual love.
I want to point out, too, that the songs haven't actually changed and that "Touch the Sky" or "Let Me Be the Clock" are as beautiful as ever. Also, that Smokey hasn't been convicted of anything. Yet even as I am listening to these songs again, I’m hearing them differently.
Great Smokey Robinson love songs of the 1980s (or thereabouts).
(1) Cruisin'
(2) Being With You
(3) I've Made Love to You a Thousand Times
(4) Train of Thought
(5) One Heartbeat
(6) Keep Me
(7) Let Me Be the Clock
(8) Touch the Sky
(9) If You Wanna Make Love (Come Round Here)
(10) Dynamite
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell