Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - Make it Happen (Very Good R&B US 1967)

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Make It Happen is a 1967 album by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles. It featured ballads such as the hit singles "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage" and "More Love", as well as the up-tempo "The Tears of a Clown" co-written by Stevie Wonder and his producer Hank Cosby.

Three years after the album's release, "The Tears of a Clown" was issued as a single, and charted at #1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and UK Singles Chart. As a result, Make It Happen was reissued as The Tears of a Clown in 1970.

Stevie Wonder was a contributing writer on 3 of the album's songs, the aforementioned "The Tears of a Clown" ,"After You Put Back the Pieces (I'll Still Have a Broken Heart)" , and "My Love Is Your Love (Forever)". Holland-Dozier-Holland contributed the delightful good-times dance song "It's a Good Feeling". Smokey's fellow Miracles Warren "Pete" Moore and Marv Tarplin collaborated with him on the songs "You Must Be Love" (a popular regional hit tune) , and "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage" (a Top 20 Hit) respectively, and all of The Miracles (except Claudette) co-wrote the up-tempo rocker "Dancing's Alright". The album also features a rendition of their good friends, Little Anthony & The Imperials' 1964 Top 20 smash, "I'm on the Outside (Looking In)"

Critics at Allmusic at the time loved the album, giving it 4-1/2 out of five stars, calling it "The most underrated Miracles LP of the '60s",and that , in addition to album's 3 hits, it also had "featured a spate of great songs, including three or four (others) that really should've been hits".

The most underrated Miracles LP of the '60s, Make It Happen featured a spate of great songs, including three or four that really should've been hits (plus one that only became the group's biggest hit three years after release). Opening with "The Soulful Shack," a grooving dance number that would've fit perfectly on the previous year's Away We a Go-Go, the album featured plenty of near-misses, including a pair of delightful good-times dance songs, "My Love Is Your Love (Forever)" and "It's a Good Feeling," plus a great choice for a cover, a tender version of Little Anthony & the Imperials' "I'm on the Outside (Looking In)." 

The hits really did shine more than any of the other songs, though, marking yet another leap in the level of Smokey Robinson's compositional sophistication. "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage" is a brilliant twist on a romantic novelty in the Motown mold (with a production that deftly references the British Invasion), while "More Love" is the most sincere lyric and most emotive performance in the group's catalog, a song of reassurance occasioned by several miscarriages suffered by Robinson's wife (and fellow Miracle), Claudette. The capstone, however, was the last song, "The Tears of a Clown," originally written as an up-tempo instrumental groover by Stevie Wonder and his producer, Hank Cosby. 

Robinson's lyric is witty yet sublime, and his lead vocal is one of the best performances of his recording career. One of the biggest misses by the notoriously hit-conscious Motown organization was failing to release this as a single before it became an album hit on British radio in 1970, three years after it first appeared. It shot to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and prompted Motown to re-release Make It Happen under a new title, The Tears of a Clown. [Wikipedia & AMG]

*** Released in August 1967 during the Summer of Love, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ Make It Happen is one of the strongest, yet most underrated, albums in the Miracles catalog. Filled with great dance floor numbers and beautiful balladry, Make It Happen is a milestone in the evolution of both the group’s sound and Robinson’s compositional sophistication. It is also an example of a tremendous marketing misstep and outright corporate greed.

Side A of Make It Happen bookends with two hot dance floor numbers: “The Soulful Shack”, a groovy, upbeat number that bridges the album with the previous releases Going to a Go-Go and Away We a Go-Go, and “My Love is Your Love (Forever)”. The lion’s share of side A is a sequence of ballads that beautifully demonstrate the Miracles at their finest. The sequence of the four ballads together provide for a great, easy listen that is somewhat disrupted by the suddenly happy cries of Smokey and crew. It is the placement of the dance numbers that feel out of place. Starting an album off with an upbeat number that is both new and yet familiar enough for the audience to connect with is both creatively and financially astute. However, the first of the ballads, “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage”, features production referencing the British Invasion as well as recognized Motown staples, including beginning with Funk Brother Marv Tarplin’s signature guitar and Robinson’s lyrics characteristically about a man fooled by beauty and the false promises of love. It would have served nicely as the introduction to the album. (On a historical note, this song was also the first single billed as Smokey Robinson & the Miracles and was the biggest single from the album at the time of its release.)

The highlight of side A, however, is the gorgeously tender treatment of Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “I’m On the Outside (Looking In)”.  It is on this track that the Miracles connect both with an audience from ten years earlier and the contemporary, youthful audience of 1967.  With lyrics mirroring sentiments so often found in Robinson’s songs and sublime harmonies, the song evokes more emotion in its two-plus minutes than most albums do in their entirety.

UK Single 1967

Side B is not quite a mirror image of side A. While slow, tearful ballads make up the bulk of the album’s front, the opposite is true for side B, sort of. Beginning with the slower numbers “More Love” (itself a single released after “The Love I Saw in You…”) and “After You Put Back the Pieces (I’ll Still Have a Broken Heart)”, the listener is eased in, almost as deceptively as on side A. “It’s a Good Feeling” raises the tempo of the album back to the level of the album’s opening track. The go-go grooves are present along with the traditional Motown percussion progression (it was written by the powerhouse team behind many of Motown’s hits Holland-Dozier-Holland). This is one of those songs that could have been farmed out to multiple acts in the Motown stable, especially Marvin Gaye. Just as you are getting into the groove, the tempo drops again with “You Must Be Love”, a gentle song that isn’t sad but rather positive, a nice change in subject from the other ballads, despite interrupting the groove.

The album closes with two awesome dance numbers, “Dancing’s Alright” and “The Tears of a Clown”. The liveliest track on the album, “Dancing’s Alright” is a smoker that perfectly captures the hot sounds of Northern Soul. Like fellow Tamla artist Earl Van Dyke’s “Soul Stomp”, the song blasts off right out of the gate and never lets up. The placement of this track cements my idea that the album should have been broken in half, with one side ballads and the other filled with the dance numbers.

However, it is the album closer, “The Tears of a Clown”, that is perhaps the biggest (eventual) success of the album, as well as the key to a huge miscalculation on the part of Motown Records. The music was written by Stevie Wonder with Robinson’s lyrics playing on the carnival feel of the calliope sound opening the track. The song itself was ignored by Motown executives and never released as a single from Make It Happen.

Motown Records was notoriously (or famously) known for a stringent process that each potential single underwent, so not initially seeing the potential behind the song is mystifying.

US Single 1967

Three years later in 1970, the Miracles (and other Motown artists) received a boost in popularity via UK DJs playing the upbeat Tamla recordings that we currently refer to as Northern Soul. With no new material coming out, a new mix of “The Tears of a Clown” was produced and released. The song immediately soared to the top of the charts in the UK, providing the Miracles with the first #1 single of their career (eight years after their debut recording). Seeing the reaction across the pond, Motown released the song in the US to similar results. The success of the song forced Smokey Robinson to postpone his plans for retirement and stay with the Miracles for another two years.

With the success of “The Tears of a Clown”, Motown saw an opportunity to blatantly cash in on their audience. Make It Happen was re-released in 1970 under the title The Tears of a Clown, with the obvious intent of cashing in on name recognition. The label didn’t even bother changing the album imagery, with the exception of the title being renamed.  The photograph, artwork, and track sequencing are identical to the 1967 release. [http://consequenceofsound.net/]

01. "The Soulful Shack" (Smokey Robinson) 
02. "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage" (Robinson, Marvin Tarplin) 
03. "My Love for You" (Clarence Paul, Morris Broadnax) 
04. "I'm on the Outside (Looking In)" (Bob Weinstein, Teddy Randazzo) 
05. "Don't Think It's Me" (Robinson) 
06. "My Love Is Your Love (Forever)" (Ivy Jo Hunter, Stevie Wonder) 
07. "More Love" (Robinson) 
08. "After You Put Back the Pieces (I'll Still Have a Broken Heart)" (Paul, Broadnax, Wonder) 
09. "It's a Good Feeling" (Holland-Dozier-Holland) 
10. "You Must Be Love" (Robinson, Warren Moore) 
11. "Dancing's Alright" (Robinson, Tarplin, Moore, Robert Rogers, Ronald White) 
12. "The Tears of a Clown" (Robinson, Wonder, Henry Cosby)

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UK Promo Single 1967 (click on picture for bigger size)