By Craig McLean
Smokey, who was made Vice President of Motown in 1963, aged only 23, first met Michael Jackson when he was nine; he says he can’t imagine how it would have been for Jackson if he’d started out in the business in this day and age. As a result, he takes a tough yet paternalistic attitude towards the endlessly troubled likes of Justin Beiber.
“He does have genuine musical talent,” he says of the Canadian. “But I feel very bad for him ’cause he’s on the wrong track. And I’d like to have a one-on-one conversation with him. I met him in the beginning and he was a nice kid. I just think he’s running with the wrong people now, and being influenced by the wrong things.”
As for Jackson, he considers his life “paradoxical”. “When he was a little boy he had to be a man,” Robinson says quietly. “And he sang like he was a man, and he acted on stage like he was a man. Other than that he was a kid, he was playing around. But when it came down to anything entertainment-wise – in the studio, on stage – he was a man. He was 30. He was incredible!
“And then when he got to be 30, he was a little boy. Because he’d missed out on that. So he took advantage of the fact that he could afford to be a little boy – and he was.”
Jackson and his brothers left Motown in 1975, but Smokey remained close to Michael. Considering his untimely death, where does he think it started to go wrong for Jackson?
“It wasn’t one thing. It was a lot of things that led up to that. But I think the start of all that was getting burned, making the Pepsi commercial [in 1984]. That did a helluva thing – he had to have some kind of thing in his head, a plastic thing or a balloon kind of thing, that was there permanently. Because they had to do that in order to fix that spot [on his scalp]. Then he had to start taking lots of pain pills and stuff like that to cope with that. One thing led to another …”
Read FULL Interview Here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/11077737/Smokey-Robinson-interview-God-saved-me-from-cocaine.html
Source: telegraph.co.uk / Craig McLean / MJ-Upbeat.com
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