RIP Duke Fakir, Last of the Four Tops, Who Were Not Just a Same Old Song
One of the places I always wished I had been, besides at Yankee Stadium for the seventh game of the 1955 World Series, was riding in a car with four guys in Philadelphia in the early summer of 1965 when the Four Tops’s “I Can’t Help Myself” came on the radio.
As the story was relayed to me, and as I’ve often relayed it in the six decades since, the volume was cranked and there was a sing-along. As the final lines were arriving, the guys began yelling, “Play it again! Play it again!”
As if on cue, the deejay on this (black) radio station yelled, “WE GON’ PLAY IT AGAIN!”
Almost 60 years later, the electricity of that moment is palpable. It says everything about the power of radio and the power of a great record.
I have no idea what became of the four guys in that car or the deejay (WHAT? WDAS?). I do know that the last original member of the Four Tops, Abdul “Duke” Fakir, died today, July 22. He was 88 years old and had spent more than 70 of those years singing with the Four Tops. Not a bad life, that.
“We never thought about making history,” Fakir said in a 1986 interview. “We were thinking about the moment. I knew ‘Baby I Need Your Loving’ was a great record, but I never dreamed people would still be playing it 22, 23 years later.”
Or, presumably, that he would still be singing “Baby I Need Your Loving” in 2023, when he gave his farewell performance with a Four Tops group young enough to be his grandkids.
If all that surprised him, it also pleased him.
“People who grew up with our music still love it,” he said in 1986. “I never understood why we’re ‘nostalgia’ and Sinatra is not.”
Call it oldies, nostalgia or standards, the Four Tops had a remarkable career, and not just because they made remarkable records.
Fakir, Renaldo “Obie” Benson, Lawrence Payton and Levi Stubbs got together in high school in Detroit, at first drawn more by football than music. Then they discovered they all loved to sing, were good at it and had voices that blended.
Fakir was the high tenor, he told Gerri Hirshey in the splendid soul music book Nowhere to Run. Payton was the low tenor, Benson was the baritone and Stubbs was the lead. There was never a doubt about that, said Fakir. Few lead singers anywhere match the raw power of Stubbs on a record like “Bernadette” or “Reach Out I’ll Be There.”
It’s been often said that Motown, home of the Tops, Temptations, Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, etc., diluted “black” music by giving it a pop-friendly edge that crossed it over into the “mainstream,” that is, white radio market.
The corollary discussion is that other labels, notably the Stax-Volt complex, stayed truer to the “black” sound, often at the cost of pop radio airplay.
Still, listening to Stubbs and the Four Tops sing “Reach Out I’ll Be There” leaves little doubt these are black singers drawing deeply from the well of black music.
Not that Duke Fakir would have put it that way.
“We didn’t want to sound like anyone else,” he said in 1986, tacitly noting that when they got together in the early 1950s as the Four Aims, rhythm and blues vocal groups like the Orioles, Cardinals, Ravens and Swallows were proliferating in the black music market.
“We didn’t want to be a bird group,” Fakir said. ”We wanted to be our own cut of meat.”
Toward that end, he explained, “We learned every kind of music. Gospel, pop, jazz. We sang in foreign languages. We could sing like Ray Charles. We could sing ‘Jeepers Creepers’ and ‘Paper Doll.’ “
In 1956 they got a deal with Chess Records and cut the single “Kiss Me Baby.” It went nowhere, the kind of deflating experience that has broken up hundreds of musical groups.
Not the Tops. “We were hopeful about Chess, but we weren’t counting on it,” Fakir said. “We wanted to build a career and we knew the way to crack that nut was to be working. We developed a stage act that could appeal to every audience. Recording was secondary.”
Not that finding work and touring without a hit record was easy. The pay was short, the bus rides were long. “You slept,” Fakir mused, “where you sat.”
That scrambling life also broke up many groups. With the Tops, Fakir said, it had the opposite effect: “In the 10 struggling years, we learned how to live together and share.”
If they didn’t accumulate a catalog of hit records through the late 1950s and early 1960s, they built a reputation inside the industry as four guys who could sing, which led to session and concert work with the likes of Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine. A revue in upstate New York caught the eye of a producer and gave them four nights on Broadway.
So they were ready, Fakir said, when they signed with Motown and made the “overnight” leap from talented unknown singers to pop music institutions, starting with “Baby I Need Your Loving.”
“We were the older, more experienced ones there,” Fakir recalled, and they skipped most of the fabled Motown basic training in things like manners and stage presentation. “We knew all that already,” he said.
Nor did Motown mind, and Fakir remembered the early Motown years rhapsodically as a place where everyone from owner Berry Gordy down to the session players and secretaries focused on making great records.
“We’d come in from a club at 2 in the morning and everyone would be there, writing and recording,” Fakir said. “It was the kind of place you never wanted to leave.”
It was also, in his telling, musically collaborative,. If you listen closely to a lot of Motown hits, he told Hirshey, you can hear him and other Tops. For instance, he told her, when Gaye was recording “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” with Tammi Terrell, he waved Fakir into the studio for a little extra vocal power.
The Tops worked primarily with the songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, whose skill with words was often matched by their subtle sense of humor. When they were writing a follow-up to the Tops’s №1 hit “I Can’t Help Myself,” they found it was sounding very similar, so they titled it “The Same Old Song.”
“We were great friends with Holland, Dozier and Holland,” Fakir said. “The songs they wrote for us, like ‘Ain’t No Woman,’ were really our stories. They’d give us a demo with a lead vocal and a rhythm section and then we’d work on it. It was a collaboration.”
Nor did their string of Motown-produced songs lead the Tops to abandon their eclectic roots. They had a major hit with a remake of the Left Banke’s pop gem “Walk Away Renee,” a version some feel beats the original. Asked in 1986 for his personal favorite Four Tops songs, Fakir named “Baby I Need Your Loving” and “MacArthur Park.”
He added that when he listened to “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” he heard “some of Bob Dylan . . . and the Righteous Brothers.”
Everything in life didn’t go perfectly for the Four Tops, or Duke Fakir. But when he and Obie Benson decided to gamble in the early 1950s that they could skip college and make a living as singers, they had no idea how much, over the next 70 years, would break right. For those of us on the other side of the car radio, all it really would have taken was that one day in 1965 when the deejay played it again.
