Smokey Robinson on love, Motown and sex at 83: ‘I feel as good as I felt when I was 40’

Smokey Robinson rises from an overstuffed armchair and lowers the volume of the Masters golf tournament on the TV in his 11th-floor suite at the Agua Caliente casino. “Ain’t s— else you could call me for at 5 o’clock in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go.’” For Robinson, golf is the most enjoyable part of an overall wellness regime that also includes yoga — he’s been practicing for 37 years — and a diet he says has been free of red meat since 1972. Among the many, many foundational hits he sang or wrote for other Motown acts — and which got him into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — are “My Girl,” “Shop Around,” “The Tears of a Clown,” “I Second That Emotion,” “The Tracks of My Tears,” “Ooo Baby Baby,” “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” “Get Ready” and “Cruisin’,” the last of which he says he struggled to finish for five years until one December afternoon in 1978 when he found himself driving down Sunset Boulevard with the car’s top down. His set is a well-practiced digest of the classics he recorded at Motown — with whose founder, Berry Gordy Jr., he recently received the Recording Academy’s prestigious MusiCares Persons of the Year award — although he throws in “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” a deep cut from “A Quiet Storm,” at the request of an audience member with a lyric from the song tattooed on her arm. I told my wife, “If you ever let me get like that, I’ll kill you.” That would be the time to hang it up.