Mojo - The Music Magazine

...SEE NUMBER 6

Smokey Robinson And The Miracles
Going To A Go-Go
(Tamla, 1965)
America’s greatest poet, reckoned Bob Dylan, and here’s the proof.

A ‘Greatest Hits’ in all but name, 1965’s Going To A Go-Go was the first Miracles album to feature its lead singer and main songwriter’s name out-front. The album certainly isn’t coy about its gifts, introducing itself with four US pop Top 20 hits. In addition to the tom-tom-crazy title track, the album had two of the group’s most mesmerising ballads, the rightly famed Tracks Of My Tears and the breathtaking, heartaching Ooo Baby, Baby, slightly less well-known but, frankly, better, with Smokey’s bittersweet vocal, at the top of his register, raising twice as many goosebumps. Hard to imagine how song or performance could have been improved. My Girl Has Gone, the fourth US hit single, follows with its dramatic crashes of orchestration on each chorus, contrastingly sharply with each gentler, more ruminative verse. But the hits aren’t the only stand-outs. From Head To Toe is one of those wickedly infectious Smokey confections, outwardly simple, but as new layers of harmony build excitement and the mood is lifted even higher when the horns suddenly drop out of the track only to rejoin the arrangement with even higher intensity. (The horn arrangement leans heavily on Bobby Bland’s Turn On Your Lovelight, by the way.) Every bit as fine as the album’s hit ballads, last track A Fork In The Road is no ordinary ‘road’ song. “Beware,” Smokey sings quiveringly, of passion’s pitfalls, “the danger’s there,” before reminiscing about his own misdirection in affection. “Make sure you take the same bend at the fork in love’s road.” Smoke rarely lost his way in a song, and to prove it here’s an album of his best with The Miracles.

Geoff Brown

MORE MOTOWN! Check out this month’s issue of MOJO magazine to discover the 100 Greatest Motown Tracks!