http:\/\/www.RockRap.com<\/a><\/p>\nSOMETHING ABOUT YOU\u2026When I was 15, I met the Four Tops on a downtown Detroit street, where they were doing a photo shoot with the Supremes. The group\u2014especially Duke Fakir\u2014were extraordinarily kind to a trio of white kids totally out of their element. I love the Four Tops for that, but I would have loved them anyway. They are the voice of adolescent angst and adult heartbreak, the pure, the absolute joy that humans can take in one another. Call them love songs \u2013I\u2019d say it was more like lifelines\u2014but call them silly and you\u2019ve branded yourself as a fool.<\/p>\n
Phil Spector once said that \u201cBernadette\u201d was a black man singing Bob Dylan. The name of that black man was Levi Stubbs. And for those of you who are Bruce Springsteen fans, go find the Tops greatest album, The Four Tops Second Album, and listen to \u201cLove Feels Like Fire\u201d and \u201cHelpless,\u201d two of my alltime Motown tracks (and they weren\u2019t even singles). You\u2019ll feel the same thing. Those crazed sax breaks are as close to free jazz as Motown ever let itself come, and they got away with it there solely because the Tops were such a perfect machine with the most powerful voice of its time at the fore. I could never figure out whether Levi was the toughest or the tenderest singer at Motown, so I finally accepted that he was both.<\/p>\n
Yeah, a lot of the Tops is formula Holland Dozier Holland. Sometimes even I think it\u2019s the Supremes when the intro to \u201cIt\u2019s the Same Old Song\u201d or \u201cSomething About You\u201d comes on. So what? To begin with, HDH created the greatest formula in the history of rock and soul. Now: Go listen again to \u201cReach Out\u201d and see if you can think of a Supremes record that could grab you in the gut that way. It\u2019s the \u201cLike a Rolling Stone\u201d of soul\u2014with a flute and hand percussion leading the way! The group always got Eddie Holland\u2019s greatest lyrics (and he the most under-rated lyricist of the \u201860s) and that\u2019s one.<\/p>\n
They got those songs because Levi could sing the most impossible stuff. Any other soul singer I know would have insisted on editing. The great, long, image rich lines in \u201cBermandette\u201d and \u201cAsk the Lonely\u201d were too long, that they needed more space to really sing. Not Levi. He charged into those words and wrestled everything out of them, and somehow, he sounded graceful as he did. \u201cLoving you has made my life sweeter than ever\u201d is so multisyllabic that they had to shorten it for the title: \u201cLoving You Is Sweeter Than Ever\u201d fit the label better, I guess.<\/p>\n
The Tops got away with that as a group because they knew how to work with such vocal intricacy. By the time they had their first Motown hit they\u2019d already been together for ten years. Duke told me recently that their earlier sojourn at Columbia Records in the late \u201850s came after a brief appearance at the Apollo. The talent scout who signed them was John Hammond\u2014the same guy who found Bob, Bruce, and Aretha. That\u2019s the company the Four Tops, and Levi Stubbs, in particular belong in. Who else could turn \u201cWalk Away Renee\u201d into soul music? Who else could get away with \u201c7 Rooms of Gloom\u201d as a love song without a hint of irony, let alone comedy?<\/p>\n
I will testify. Levi and the Tops were among the graces of my own soul. When I get nervous before an interview, I always remember how kind those guys were to that 15 year old kid, and I feel beyond harm. When I listen to \u201cThe Same Old Song,\u201d I remember once again the sweetness of sour. \u201cBernadette\u201d calls to my mind the futility of believing you\u2019re in control, and how easy it is to confuse passion with obsession. \u201cReach Out\u201d is simply as colossal an extravaganza as rock and soul music have ever produced, as monumental in its way as \u201cLike a Rolling Stone.\u201d The focal point of all that musical gingerbread and the mighty Funk Brothers is not the group\u2014it\u2019s one man, Levi Stubbs, pushed not to his limit but way past it. But there\u2019s not a hint\u2014not a second\u2014where Levi Stubbs sounds like anything but a guy from down the street, across the way or in your mirror. Imagine a Pavarotti on the corner. There he is. All of it helped, somehow, make my own life possible.<\/p>\n
This is no case of \u201cShake Me, Wake Me (When It\u2019s Over).\u201d Levi Stubbs was 72 years old. He hadn\u2019t been in good health for several years. This isn\u2019t Marvin Gaye or David Ruffin or Tammi Terrell. This is a man who made his full contribution to our culture, our lives. That doesn\u2019t make it all that much easier to hear the word.<\/p>\n
At the Tops\u2019 golden anniversary show in Detroit several years ago, he sang from a wheelchair. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a dry eye in the house,\u201d his friend and attorney, Judy Tint, told me this afternoon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here’s Dave Marsh on The Four Tops frontman, Levi Stubbs: From http:\/\/www.RockRap.com SOMETHING ABOUT YOU\u2026When I was 15, I met the Four Tops on a downtown Detroit street, where they were doing a photo shoot with the Supremes. The group\u2014especially Duke Fakir\u2014were extraordinarily kind to a trio of white kids totally out of their element. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2154],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-listening-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}