Post by Motorcity on Oct 21, 2008 19:37:13 GMT -5
He was the Tops - Levi Stubbs dead at 72
Friday, October 17th 2008, 5:39 PM
If you put a freight train up against Levi Stubbs' vocals on Four Tops classics like "Can't Help Myself" or "Reach Out, I'll Be There," the freight train wouldn't even cover the spread. Levi Stubbs died Friday at his home, age 72, and he took with him a voice that enriched the golden age of 1960s popular music.
It wasn't exactly a gospel voice, it wasn't exactly soul. Stubbs himself told author Don Waller years ago that he didn't even consider it all that remarkable. "I don't consider myself as being a heckuva singer," he told Waller. "I'm more of a stylist, if you will."
Yeah. And Michael Jordan was more of a point guard.
Stubbs' voice seemed to rise from the center of the Earth. His lead vocal on "Reach Out" propelled what critic Dave Marsh called "perhaps the truest single" in pop music history, a record that just rose above everything around it.
Even beyond the fact it's one of the strongest declarations of love ever put on record.
Yet at the same time, Stubbs could also slow things down to a plea. "Baby I Need Your Loving," or even better, the less-remembered "Ask the Lonely," were as powerful in their own way as "Bernadette" or the Tops' other uptempo hits.
Stubbs had the kind of instantly recognizable radio voice that propelled many other lead singers, including those in the Four Tops' contemporary musical deities, the Temptations, to go solo, with all the rewards that come from having your own name on the marquee.
He said years later he didn't even think about it. "The way our records are, that's the way I hear music," he said. "It's not about one voice."
So indelible were the Four Tops' greatest records that many fans assume they must have hung around producing hits for decades. In fact, their golden era - the years when everything was pretty much perfect - lasted three years, from "Baby I Need Your Loving" in 1964 to "Seven Rooms of Gloom" in 1967.
They'd already been singing for a decade before that, having formed as the Four Aims in 1954. They were a jazz harmony group then, working the jazz, lounge and cabaret circuit, and it was a big risk when they signed with Motown to try to "break pop."
But all those years of harmony training and live performing served them well, because Stubbs and the others - Abdul (Duke) Fakir, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton - integrated the polish and confidence of their training with the raw exuberance of a song like "Can't Help Myself."
It didn't hurt that Motown put its songwriting A-team of Eddie and Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier on the Tops' account, or that Motown understood making great radio records as well as any label that ever existed.
Yet perhaps ironically, the Tops didn't fit Motown's mantra - "The Sound of Young America" - as neatly as the Temptations, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Stevie Wonder or even the young Marvin Gaye.
The Tops sounded more grown-up, somehow. Their songs felt like they were aimed at someone who'd lived a while, and a big part of that was Levi Stubbs.
In "Standing in the Shadows of Love," he sings an intriguing bridge that goes, "Hold on a minute! / Gave you all the love I had, now didn't I? / And when you needed me I was always there, now wasn't I?"
It's like a call-and-response chorus without the chorus. It's not pop, it's not gospel. It's somewhere in the middle. It's the "style" Stubbs talked about, a musical place of their own. Stubbs said in the mid-'80s that when the group formed, it never expected to go the pop-radio path. Like many of the artists from the early '50s, they saw pop music as a trap, a place where you might get a couple of hits, but then you'd burn out and land on the discard pile.
They wanted the stability of a career, steady bookings in a more enduring style like jazz.
Fate has a way of reshaping those early dreams. But for Levi Stubbs and the Four Tops, the dream in many ways came true. They've spent the last several decades living not on the radio in the contemporary pop world, but on the road keeping alive the classics they created themselves.
Along the way, Stubbs treated a couple of lucky generations to the likes of "Can't Help Myself," "Shake Me, Wake Me" and "Reach Out."
They're the kind of songs that, the first time you heard them, you pulled the car over to the side of the road so you wouldn't cause an accident. After that, you just rolled down the windows and cranked the volume.
Happily, Stubbs was wrong about one thing. Sometimes the same old song does have the same meaning when the man who sang it is gone.
Friday, October 17th 2008, 5:39 PM
If you put a freight train up against Levi Stubbs' vocals on Four Tops classics like "Can't Help Myself" or "Reach Out, I'll Be There," the freight train wouldn't even cover the spread. Levi Stubbs died Friday at his home, age 72, and he took with him a voice that enriched the golden age of 1960s popular music.
It wasn't exactly a gospel voice, it wasn't exactly soul. Stubbs himself told author Don Waller years ago that he didn't even consider it all that remarkable. "I don't consider myself as being a heckuva singer," he told Waller. "I'm more of a stylist, if you will."
Yeah. And Michael Jordan was more of a point guard.
Stubbs' voice seemed to rise from the center of the Earth. His lead vocal on "Reach Out" propelled what critic Dave Marsh called "perhaps the truest single" in pop music history, a record that just rose above everything around it.
Even beyond the fact it's one of the strongest declarations of love ever put on record.
Yet at the same time, Stubbs could also slow things down to a plea. "Baby I Need Your Loving," or even better, the less-remembered "Ask the Lonely," were as powerful in their own way as "Bernadette" or the Tops' other uptempo hits.
Stubbs had the kind of instantly recognizable radio voice that propelled many other lead singers, including those in the Four Tops' contemporary musical deities, the Temptations, to go solo, with all the rewards that come from having your own name on the marquee.
He said years later he didn't even think about it. "The way our records are, that's the way I hear music," he said. "It's not about one voice."
So indelible were the Four Tops' greatest records that many fans assume they must have hung around producing hits for decades. In fact, their golden era - the years when everything was pretty much perfect - lasted three years, from "Baby I Need Your Loving" in 1964 to "Seven Rooms of Gloom" in 1967.
They'd already been singing for a decade before that, having formed as the Four Aims in 1954. They were a jazz harmony group then, working the jazz, lounge and cabaret circuit, and it was a big risk when they signed with Motown to try to "break pop."
But all those years of harmony training and live performing served them well, because Stubbs and the others - Abdul (Duke) Fakir, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton - integrated the polish and confidence of their training with the raw exuberance of a song like "Can't Help Myself."
It didn't hurt that Motown put its songwriting A-team of Eddie and Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier on the Tops' account, or that Motown understood making great radio records as well as any label that ever existed.
Yet perhaps ironically, the Tops didn't fit Motown's mantra - "The Sound of Young America" - as neatly as the Temptations, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Stevie Wonder or even the young Marvin Gaye.
The Tops sounded more grown-up, somehow. Their songs felt like they were aimed at someone who'd lived a while, and a big part of that was Levi Stubbs.
In "Standing in the Shadows of Love," he sings an intriguing bridge that goes, "Hold on a minute! / Gave you all the love I had, now didn't I? / And when you needed me I was always there, now wasn't I?"
It's like a call-and-response chorus without the chorus. It's not pop, it's not gospel. It's somewhere in the middle. It's the "style" Stubbs talked about, a musical place of their own. Stubbs said in the mid-'80s that when the group formed, it never expected to go the pop-radio path. Like many of the artists from the early '50s, they saw pop music as a trap, a place where you might get a couple of hits, but then you'd burn out and land on the discard pile.
They wanted the stability of a career, steady bookings in a more enduring style like jazz.
Fate has a way of reshaping those early dreams. But for Levi Stubbs and the Four Tops, the dream in many ways came true. They've spent the last several decades living not on the radio in the contemporary pop world, but on the road keeping alive the classics they created themselves.
Along the way, Stubbs treated a couple of lucky generations to the likes of "Can't Help Myself," "Shake Me, Wake Me" and "Reach Out."
They're the kind of songs that, the first time you heard them, you pulled the car over to the side of the road so you wouldn't cause an accident. After that, you just rolled down the windows and cranked the volume.
Happily, Stubbs was wrong about one thing. Sometimes the same old song does have the same meaning when the man who sang it is gone.