VIDEO INTERVIEW: Smokey Robinson shuns AC in the Vegas desert

If you see Smokey Robinson driving around Summerlin, where he lives, you may see him sweating bullets, because when he’s preparing for shows, he doesn’t turn on the air conditioning in his car or home.

“Even when I’m riding in the car, I don’t have it on,” he tells me. “Yeah, it’s 116 sometimes. You think I’m kidding? Come to my room.”

Sounds crazy, right? But Robinson was happy to speak out against air conditioning when I chatted with him Monday at the Flamingo — where he was doing press for Imperial Palace’s showroom act, Human Nature.

The reason he’s anti-A.C: It destroys voices of singers, who mistakenly think the desert dryness has given them “Vegas throat.”

“I’m glad you brought that up, because I don’t think there is a Vegas throat,” Robinson told me.

“See, air [conditioning] is very bad for the respiratory system, especially for singers,” he says. “It’s so hot, they have the room at 65 degrees. The air’s blasting and all that. And two or three days later, they can’t sing.”

People around Robinson have to deal with this, he says.

“The members of my band, and my singers my dancers — they all tease me. They’ll say, ‘I’m gonna come today and sit in your living room, to take a sauna, because I don’t have the air on.”