Four Tops' Lawrence Payton dies Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle News Services
2:58 PM 6/20/1997 DETROIT -- Lawrence Payton, a member of the Four Tops who gave the Motown group its distinctive harmonies, died Friday of liver cancer. He was 59.
Payton died at his suburban Southfield home.
Payton was the quiet, laid-back one in a group that stayed together for four decades -- playing even in recent years, said Esther Gordy Edwards, who managed the group in the early 1960s.
"I always thought of them as closer than brothers," said Edwards, the sister of Motown founder Berry Gordy.
The Four Tops have sold more than 50 million records and produced such hits as Baby I Need Your Loving, Reach Out (I'll Be There), I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch) and Standing in the Shadows of Love.
Levi Stubbs, the group's lead singer, said Payton was crucial to the Tops because "he was responsible for the harmony."
The group -- Payton, Stubbs, Abdul "Duke" Fakir and Renaldo "Obie" Benson -- began singing together in the 1950s under the name the Four Aims. After singing backup for vocalist Billy Eckstine, they came to Motown in the early 1960s.
"After 43 years, it's just heartbreaking to us," Fakir said.
Payton recently became too ill to perform, and the other members took the stage without him. In April, all of them except Payton appeared at a ceremony to receive the group's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The Tops were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 and their last album was Christmas Here With You in 1995.
"To my knowledge they're the only Motown group that stayed intact with the original members all the way to the present," said John Wright, project director for the Motown Sound exhibit at Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. "That's just a remarkable career for all of them."
The members often rotated lead singing roles and every one was essential to the whole, Wright said.
"The Four Tops were so much a group and everybody really depended on everyone else that it's hard to imagine the loss of one of them," he said.
Stubbs said the group would continue to perform as a trio, renamed The Tops, rather than replace Payton, and would pay his salary to Payton's family.
Services were scheduled for Wednesday in Detroit.