Today’s song is in tribute to former frontman for The
Miracles Smokey Robinson (born William Robinson, Jr.), who turns 74 today. I have a distinct memory of when I fell in
love with this song. It was in the blue Falcon my brother, Tom, inherited from
our mother’s father, who died in the summer of 1970. This song was re-released as a single in
September, 1970 (though it was apparently released at first in 1967), and made #1. It may
have been fall or early spring when it got to me, but I know it wasn’t the
first time I heard it. Though it was probably the first time I really listened
to it. And it probably dates from one of my earliest rides (at 11 years old) in
my brother’s car with my brother at the wheel. He was 17. So I guess we can say that the song and the memory stem from
an early experience of riding shotgun in a car driven by a teen who I knew from
before he was a teen. It’s a proto-grown-up moment, I guess.
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| kinda like this |
I suspect that I had heard Dylan by then because I think
that first experience was from the previous spring. And the carnival sound on,
say, “Like a Rolling Stone,” found an answer, to me, in what Robinson
considered the calliope sound of this song. The music was written by Stevie
Wonder and Hank Cosby, who had created that sound, I believe, and then Robinson
wrote the words and did the vocal. That little carnivalesque melody is probably
what I noticed about the song and why, when it came on the radio in the car, I
listened up enough to get most of the words.
I’m willing to believe that, at 11, I’d already realized I
was kind of an internal person, not letting much show on the outside. This song
is about dissembling, about appearing happy around a woman the singer would
rather tell how he’s really feeling, but he can’t (except by singing the song). He can’t, I assume, because she’s already
rejected him. They had something once, and now they don’t. So he can’t go crying to her, or to anyone.
So, “Like a clown I pretend to be glad.”
The idea of clowns as actually sad figures is an old one.
Robinson’s lyrics reference Pagliacci. “Just like Pagliacci did / I try to keep
my sadness hid”: the reference recalls the opera Pagliacci, in which the character Canio, as Pagliacci (the clown), performs in white face
while claiming that his face is white from shame at his unfaithful wife. It’s a nicely loaded little reference there
from Smokey, and it comes off so easily in the song, illustrating the notion
that clowns wear paint and fake smiles to mask heartbreak. And Robinson does
some good work with the notion: I love the way he enunciates “it’s only to
ca-mou-flage my sad-ness.” Thanks to Tom’s
love of army movies, I knew all about camouflage. And I suspect I’d already,
like most kids do, learned how to camouflage my sadness.
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| 6th grade |
But it would be nice to know if the memory I have (I
remember the rain, I remember the road we were on) is from the fall or the
spring. The year was sixth grade, and in sixth grade I developed, by the end of
the year, an enormous crush on my teacher. But it was also the year when I
developed my first crush on a classmate: the girl who was sitting in front of
me in the spring (March, when Frazier and Ali fought “the Fight of the Century”). I’m rather thinking the day of “Tears of a
Clown” was in the fall, and that only an inkling of how my heart would be wrung
by, say, April and May, was present in me then, but I’d say I was primed for
the song’s lesson. “Don’t let the smile
I wear / Make you think that I don’t care.”
Or rather, please let this phoney smile be convincing, and let me off
the hook . . .
In any case, the chorus of this song is so infectious, I
never tire of it: “Now there’s some sad things known to man / But ain’t
too much sadder than / The tears of a clown / When no one’s around.” If that don’t hit ya where you live, then you
are blocks of stone. I was already a fan of Hendrix’ “and the clowns have all
gone to bed / You can hear happiness staggering on down the street.” The tired clown, taking off his face or mask,
like Dylan’s “clown who cried in the alley” or his “Just a ragged clown behind
/ I wouldn’t pay it any mind / It’s just a shadow you’re seeing that he’s
chasing.” The sad clown, the tragic
victim of his own emotional surfeit.
In my personal mythology, the school year 1970-71 counts for
a lot. And this song by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, though I didn’t own
a copy of it, is part of the texture of those days, maybe even more so as it
was just on the radio, at random. And
that bassoon! It really is a treat for
the ears, and I think it was Tom who changed the words to “but when it comes
down to fooling you / now honey that’s quite a different soft drink”—as opposed
to “different subject.” Yup, there I was,
starting already to learn, as Tim Buckley says, “what it means to fall in love.” Quite a different soft drink, indeed. Though to some, it’s just Bubble Gum.
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