Motown icon Smokey Robinson coming to Green Music Center

Smokey Robinson doesn’t perform because he needs to. He says he plays because he loves the energy he gets from a live audience. And that’s abundantly clear at his shows.

The one-time Motown star is exuberant and energetic, and though his voice isn’t quite as crystalline as it was years ago, his falsetto remains sweet, and he still gives the audience chills with soaring renditions of his classics, such as “Tracks of My Tears.”

More than a half-century after Robinson became Motown’s vice president in his early 20s, the supremely talented singer and songwriter returns to Sonoma County with a show at Sonoma State’s Green Music Center.

“Smokey Robinson is one of very few true living legends performing today,” said Peter Williams, the Green’s senior director of popular programming. “The countless Motown hits he wrote transformed America’s musical landscape. To have Smokey Robinson perform in Weill Hall represents exactly what this venue was created to do: Bring the finest musicians across diverse genres to perform for the people of Sonoma County.”

Growing up in Detroit, Robinson’s mother died when he was 10, and he went to live with an older sister.

Miraculously, Diana Ross lived four doors away and Aretha Franklin (“I’ve known her since I was 8 years old”) lived around the corner, Robinson said in an interview last year on Howard Stern’s radio show.

As a teen, Smokey delivered Western Union telegrams on his bicycle and excelled in school. He loved to sing, he told Stern, but planned on studying electrical engineering at college because “I never thought singing was gonna work out.”

Robinson’s “number-one singing idol” back then was Jackie Wilson, whose songs were mostly written by Berry Gordy, Motown’s founder.

In his late teens, Robinson auditioned for Jackie Wilson’s manager, who wasn’t impressed with the songs Smokey had written.

But in one of those fortuitous moments that suggest Smokey was meant to be a star, Gordy was there that day to deliver some new songs to Wilson and heard Smokey perform.

“He liked a couple of songs we sang and met us outside,” Robinson told Stern. “He asked if we had any more songs, and I had about 100 songs in a looseleaf notebook that I’d written during my school years - he just critiqued them. He was my mentor in teaching me how to write professionally.”

Robinson has been inducted to both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

He’s been called America’s “greatest living poet” by an artist who could hold the title himself: Bob Dylan.

Robinson’s most recent recording is 2014’s “Smokey & Friends,” a collection of his classics sung in duets with other A-list performers.

Among the highlights are “Track of My Tears” with Elton John, “You Really Got a Hold on Me” with Steven Tyler, and “Quiet Storm” with John Legend.

He joins Sheryl Crow for “Tears of a Clown” and CeeLo Green on “The Way You Do (The Things You Do).”

“Smokey & Friends” was produced by “American Idol” judge Randy Jackson, who chose the artists and matched them to Robinson’s songs.

At age 75, Robinson remains remarkably spry, lean and fit. But in the 1980s, just after his song “Being With You” became a big hit, his life almost fell apart when he succumbed to the allure of cocaine.

“I thought that it (addiction) couldn’t happen to me,” Robinson told the British newspaper The Guardian last year. “That’s the cunning of drugs. I could never become addicted! But I did.”

He credits going to a church in Los Angeles with turning his life around.

“I gave it (my addiction) to God,” he told The Press Democrat in 2010. “And He don’t give it back unless you go back to get it.” Robinson now speaks at drug-rehab graduations.

From an early age, Robinson has managed his money wisely and speaks at seminars for young people to teach them the art of business.

“Most kids in the inner cities think they have to be an entertainer or a sports figure to make it, but we stress that there are all sorts of avenues open to them,” he told The Press Democrat. “They can be doctors or attorneys or senators or president.”

Asked during that interview if he ever wondered about how many children had been conceived to his songs, he laughed.

“People tell me all the time either that they had some kids to my music, or someone comes up to me and says, ‘Hey man, I was born because of your music.’ I love that.”