DISCOGRAPHY SOURCES PLAYLISTS PARTS: ONE TWO THREE
ACT I: THE SOUL CABINET
Blue lights in the basement/ Freedom was at hand and you could just taste it…Everything was cool/ The brothers were singing “Ain’t no woman like the one I’ve got”…
Me’Shell Ndegéocello, “I’m Diggin’ You (Like an Old Soul Record),” 1993.
The Four Tops at cruising altitude. The spring of 1973 and they have a hit again, a big hit, one to rival their Motown triumphs: “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got),” found on every notch of the radio dial, peaking in early April at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 (#1 in Cash Box), hitting #2 R&B.
Its co-producer, Steve Barri, will take a job with Motown years later. One day Berry Gordy walks into Barri’s office carrying a golf club, sees the gold record for “Ain’t No Woman” on the wall, raises his club and says, with a half-smile, “mind if I smash that?”
“Ain’t No Woman” glides in the radio stream, segued into The Carpenters’ “Sing” and Tony Orlando & Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon”; its fading strings become the Mellotron line that opens Elton John’s “Daniel”; its harmonies soothe after the roadkill yawp of Loudon Wainwright’s “Dead Skunk.”
A song that keeps “Ain’t No Woman” from hitting number one is Gladys Knight & The Pips’ majestic “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye).” Like the Tops, Knight & The Pips have left Motown, after years of service, having grown tired of being the reliable pros, the ones who had to make do. “Neither One of Us” is their last Motown single. Knight & The Pips sign with Buddah, as the Tops do with ABC-Dunhill; 1973 is the year when they all shine elsewhere.
Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds were the first to cut “Ain’t No Woman,” as an LP track in 1972. They do it with broad stage smiles, while the brass players crowd into any space they find: ain’t no wuh-man like the ONE I got y’know it takes a LOT to find uh-nuh-ther BET-ter.
But the Tops parcel out the refrain, each Top taking a line, and they sing the title as a calm affirmation, echoed by a guitar’s satisfied musings, relieving a light tension (“aaain’t no woman like-the-“) by descending a third to close the phrase; it’s like a bottle being uncorked (“one-I’ve GOT”).
Everything about it is assured: the modest but rock-solid beat, the velvet bass, the whoo! that Stubbs exhales as the strings, flute, and increasingly funky guitar usher out the track. “Ain’t No Woman” is sexual equanimity and ease—a song that murmurs and confides at nightclubs and basement parties (Me’Shell Ndegéocello used it as an example of a time when men on the radio praised their women, instead of running them down). But there’s a harsh note near the end: “cause it’s my word, my word she’ll obey.”
Craftsmen
Word quickly spread that Motown had dumped the Four Tops. One Motown executive, Larry Maxwell, told the Tops he’d ask around LA to see if anyone had material for them. He soon called to say he’d found “a couple of badass songs” (as per Duke Fakir) by a pair of songwriters working for ABC-Dunhill: Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter.
Lambert was born in Brooklyn, became a songwriter (he co-wrote “Do the Freddie“), and worked in A&R for Mercury and DCP Records. When he moved to LA, he met Potter, who was nearly a decade older, from England, had drummed in beat groups, had worked for Lionel Bart, and had co-written “Whatcha Gonna Do About It” for the Small Faces.
Within two years, Lambert and Potter had built a catalog, enough for Dusty Springfield to call them a hit factory: “One Tin Soldier,” “Don’t Pull Your Love,” “Two Divided By Love.” And they’d signed a deal with ABC-Dunhill in which they co-owned everything they wrote and produced (“like a label deal, but we don’t have our own label per se,” Lambert told Billboard in 1973).
The Tops liked the demos (“Keeper of the Castle” and “Ain’t No Woman”) and met with ABC-Dunhill president Jay Lasker. He offered them a four-album contract and agreed that the Tops wouldn’t need to relocate to LA (the label would put them up at the Beverly Hills Hilton when they were recording). The Tops asked for $100,000 an album, Lasker countered with $50,000; they settled on $61,500, with the Tops getting a piece of the publishing. The latter point was crucial, as Tops yearned to become self-sufficient, to “create our own publishing company with those royalties coming to us,” Fakir said, and ultimately run their own label.
Talking to Sepia in 1974, Obie Benson described the Tops’ Motown years as “the people who were screwing us were managing us and lawyering us and everything else—it was a bad scene—almost a dictatorship—a plantation. When you’re on the top of the charts you don’t feel it much because they give you a little something to make you happy.” (An anonymous Motown spokesman replied that “we didn’t think they were hot enough for the bread they wanted. When they split they weren’t what they used to be.”)
Lasker agreed, though apparently not on paper, that the Tops would get their own label. At last “we’d be able to control our own product…sign new artists and expand businesswise,” Fakir wrote in his memoir. The deal was announced in September 1972. Legal expenses ate up much of the advance the Tops got for their first ABC-Dunhill album, Keeper of the Castle, released that November.
Working on the album, Lambert and Potter encouraged the Tops to develop their own songs and handle the vocal arranging, “hoping to give them something to say rather than making them the victims of the chorus,” Lambert told Billboard.
They wanted to prise the Tops loose from their past, to avoid the “grinding, chugging beat in 4/4 time…the Four Tops trademark,” as Potter said, and to spotlight the group’s other members. “Through the Motown years, the group was thought of as a great lead singer with three guys yelling in the background,” he said. “But they really are a consummate vocal group…we wanted to avoid the monotony of one guy doing all the singing.” In another counter-Motown move, “we tried to put songs back into realistic non-screaming keys for them,” Lambert said.
The title track was the lead-off single. Lambert said he introduced the song to the Tops by claiming it was “about the Black man being the true centerpiece of the family, and historically the weak link in the Black family.” (He failed to mention how they reacted to this allegedly “historical” statement, apart from “they said yes—in theory.”) “Keeper of the Castle” is one of the warmest songs about domestic tyranny ever recorded: advice for benevolent patriarchs (to children, be “the provider of all their daily needs/ like a sovereign lord protector, be their destiny’s director”); it hit #10.
“Ain’t No Woman,” released in January 1973, was the clincher. “That motherfucker became a hit the minute it went out,” Fakir recalled. Word got back to them that Berry Gordy was pissed there was a hot new Tops single. When they ran into him in LA, he acted incredulous that they were no longer on his label. “How could I let you go? I never imagined [Ewart Abner] would do that.”
Keeper of the Castle was crafted and packaged as a fresh start—the cover has the Tops as men of property. One of its best tracks was a composition by all four Tops, “Turn on the Light of Your Love,” with a Moog intro, saxophone breaks, and Obie Benson’s rich, raspy performance, especially the darting melody that he sings midway through (starting at 1:38), a series of feints and stresses, as if he’s trying to outflank the chorus. (You can hear how they’d been yearning for their own wild Norman Whitfield-style funk number—being slotted as Motown’s “straight” counterpart to The Temptations had grated on them.)
Benson is the spine of the record. He wrote, with his wife Valaida, two of its best numbers, “Jubilee with Soul” and “Love Makes You Human” (whose keyboard intro was reused in “Catfish,” see below). The latter has a sly Lawrence Payton vocal and subtle, in-the-pocket drumming by Paul Humphrey—it’s the most “Jazz Tops” track on the album, complete with a twenty-four-bar organ solo, chased with a saxophone break, and closed out with more organ. Lambert-Potter’s “Love Music” (“Dennis and Brian got into the groove with us and started tailoring songs for us,” Payton said) is the Tops holding their own with The O’Jays, with a bright Tony Terran trumpet solo. Barri later said that ABC-Dunhill stopped issuing singles from Castle too soon, and that they could have milked it for another year.
The ballads were strong as well—Stubbs scaling the heights of “Put a Little Love Away” (with electric sitar), lingering in the depths of Benson and Payton’s “When Tonight Meets Tomorrow” (piccolo). Lambert and Potter would later give the grand weeper “Remember What I Told You to Forget” (tympani!) to Tavares. And the Benson-sung and Benson/Payton-written “The Good Lord Knows” is gorgeous, especially its ambling verses (Fender Rhodes!).
Main Street People
While making Keeper of the Castle, Lambert, Potter and Barri were working with Dusty Springfield in the same studio in LA. Springfield was undermining herself, cutting note-perfect reference vocals and obsessing over re-recording them. “We weren’t able to convince her how good her reference vocals were, with more flow and feel,” Barri told Springfield’s biographer Lucy O’Brien. Springfield “could never accept that her vocal, cold, was fabulous,” Lambert added. They wound up “punching in so much” that the resulting album, Cameo, often sounded lifeless. Springfield grew frustrated, and once showed up so drunk that she collapsed on the floor.
So the producers came to treasure the jovial, no-fuss Tops, who could nail their vocals in a handful of takes and finish off a background session before dinnertime. “We were recording the Four Tops at the same time, which was so easy in comparison,” Barri said. Sometimes the Tops would chat with Springfield in the studio, heading out for the evening as she was coming in for another grueling night.
The potential for a long-term partnership was there: The Tops, Lambert, Potter, Barri, and ABC-Dunhill. They quickly followed up on “Ain’t No Woman” with a song done for the Shaft in Africa soundtrack, the fierce “Are You Man Enough” (#15 Pop, #2 R&B) (one of its few critics was Stubbs, who claimed “we had far better in the can, but…because the movie was about to be shown nationwide, it would have to be now or never, so they went with it”).
Main Street People (1973) was meant to be a consolidator, to establish the Tops on the same level as their old labelmates Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. In interviews around the time of its making, the Tops were talking about a concept album on “urban issues” but the idea apparently was discarded somewhere along the line, apart from its nostalgia-as-(vague)-social-commentary title track.
The album faltered—its only hit was the earlier-released “Are You Man Enough,” while its two other singles stalled: “I Just Can’t Get You Out of My Mind” (another Tops “Philly Soul” track, if cut in LA) and “Sweet Understanding Love.” The latter, a solid Benson co-composition, was the last time the Tops hit the Pop Top 40 in the Seventies, peaking at #33.
While Lambert and Potter could deliver the catchy radio hit, they had a tendency to dull out in their ballads. In the year of Innervisions and Let’s Get It On, stuffing a Tops record with tracks like “It Won’t Be the First Time” and “Too Little, Too Late,” variations on the same blah theme, didn’t cut it.
Its best tracks were Tops-made. Payton and the Bensons wrote “Am I My Brother’s Keeper” (“my smile’s for children only”), while Fakir, Benson and ex-Contour Huey Marvin Davis wrote “Peace of Mind,” built on a base of chicken-scratch guitar and bongos, with a righteous Stubbs vocal (“we fight for the right to fight and fight again…go on! destroy your soul, brother, to pacify your so-called friends!”).
Meeting of the Minds
In April 1974, the Tops talked to Blues and Soul. They were—at long last!—about to start their own label, to be distributed through ABC-Dunhill. “We enjoy working now. We’re up at eight in the morning, working on a new song,” Benson said. “When we were at Motown, I didn’t even have a record player. I wouldn’t even carry any electronic equipment around because I thought, ‘for what?'” Fakir said the Tops had “a few artists ready to sign whom we won’t name yet until everything’s set up, and we’ll have some releases almost immediately. All the members of the group will serve as producers, A&R men, etc.”
The Tops would develop “young acts who are trying to get into the business,” Benson said. “We’re going to call it the Career Guidance Department. We won’t say Management because that’s a nasty word that has come to mean just taking ten per cent of the artist’s earnings.” Young artists would get “the right contacts” and “when we take a tour, we’ll have a couple of them with us to give them exposure.”
The ethos was “we want to prove that you can be in business without ripping people off. It can be done…We’ve had some big disappointments throughout the years, so we’re going to try to keep them to a minimum for our artists.”
The Tops arranged themselves as a business-in-waiting, a soul cabinet. Fakir, who’d always kept track of the money, was Attorney General, a role described to Sepia as “the one who visits the record company and makes the deals…the business figure.” Benson and Payton, the songwriters and vocal arrangers, would be Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of State, respectively. Stubbs, as the group’s public face, was naturally the President.
But the album meant to launch Four Tops Inc., Meeting of the Minds, released in April 1974, did even worse than Main Street People on the charts, failing to break the R&B Top 20. Its singles—”One Chain Don’t Make No Prison,” their last great moment of strife on record, and “Midnight Flower,” in the inexhaustible rock tradition of songs about magical sex workers—were both hits, but only on Black radio.
Barri said the Tops were among the casualties of the increasing segregation of radio in the mid-Seventies—their singles would consistently make the R&B Top 20, but now died well outside the Pop Top 40. “It wasn’t the records,” he said. “The Tops were no longer embraced by pop radio programmers. The market was changing. Radio went on to other things.”
The group had hit a wall. Touring the UK in November 1974, Stubbs spoke with Blues & Soul and said of Meeting of the Minds, “not our best, I’ll agree, but then we had to work with new producers and we felt obligated to give them a fair crack of the whip and allow them to get across what they felt they wanted.”
A strange statement, given that Meeting of the Minds was the last of the Barri-Lambert-Potter productions, with Lambert and Potter doing their best to give the group livelier and more “relevant” material (the title track, “Right on Brother,” and the back-to-Motown “The Well Is Dry,” complete with “Reach Out I’ll Be There” horseclops in the intro). I wonder if Stubbs was actually talking about the record they were making at the time, Night Lights Harmony, although Barri and Lawrence Payton were doing that one.
ABC, which had been on an acquisition spree in the early Seventies, retired Dunhill in 1975. The Tops were finishing Night Lights Harmony, which fulfilled their original contract (released in April 1975, it was their first LP issued as an ABC release). A quiet, soulful record, it extended their chart collapse.
They met with Lasker to negotiate a new deal and pressed him on the perpetually-delayed plan to have their own imprint. The idea had grown in scope, expanding as the potential for it becoming a reality dwindled. Obie Benson, in a 1975 interview, talked about the Tops opening a “twenty-four-track studio” in Detroit.
Otis Smith, ABC’s newly-appointed head of Black promotions, was at the meeting, and scoffed. “Y’all ain’t ready for that shit,” Fakir recalled Smith saying. “You got that Detroit swagger and all, but you’re not ready to be the kind of businessman it takes to care of this album.” Fakir grabbed Smith, saying “motherfucker, I’ll throw you out this window.” A nonplussed Lasker said “well, you’re sure not gonna get a label now.”
The Tops eventually re-signed with ABC, but their last years there were a recursion of the Tops’ late Motown period. Again, they had lost their champions. In mid-1974, Lambert and Potter moved to Capitol, where they made Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Barri would stick with ABC until it was bought, but he no longer worked on Four Tops records. Lasker was pushed out in January 1975, and formed Ariola America Records later that year.
For the Tops, unlike at Motown, there was no vast, lucrative body of work to draw upon in the lean years—their peak with ABC was two Top 10 singles and one Top 40 album, all of which were now five years old. They had become a second-tier group. “We were devastated,” Fakir recalled. Their candled hopes to build their own business, to be mentors and Detroit boosters, to play the game with ethics—all of it came to nothing.
Moving into their forties, they were still product, and now orphaned on a label that barely wanted them. “We started caring less about what they thought,” Fakir said of ABC. “I suppose they felt the same way about us.”
Disco Daddies, Lost in Space
Fakir thought so little of his late Seventies albums that he claimed in his memoir ABC had released LPs of stale studio outtakes, “material we had recorded under contract to them. By then we were gone.” This doesn’t appear to be accurate, though. The truth is that Catfish (1976) and The Show Must Go On (1977) are the Tops running their own show at last—the most independent that they would ever be, if only because their label didn’t care what they were doing.
The records had Ray Parker Jr. and Melvin “Wah Wah” Watson on guitar, Paulinho Da Costa on percussion, and a host of former Motown Funk Brothers (inc. Earl Van Dyke, Uriel Jones, Eddie “Bongo” Brown) and were mostly cut in Detroit. Lawrence Payton produced them, and most of the tracks were written or co-written by Payton and/or Benson and/or their wives.
Catfish is the Tops, inevitably, going disco. The title track (an R&B #7) is as goofy as it’s horny—in the refrains, the Tops groan “Catfish…makes my nature rise.” Levi Stubbs has to sing “she took me to a fish fry/ that girl danced all night” but can’t bring himself to provide the insinuation the line begs for. Instead he sings “Took Me To A Fish! Fry!” with precise enunciation, as if trying to get a detail right in a deposition. (Catfish returns on “I Know You Like It,” a dance track written for a cruise ship’s margarita hour.) Payton’s stirred up on “Feel Free,” to the point of delirium; Benson’s sated reverie is “Strung Out for Your Love.”
There’s also “Disco Daddy,” which is what you’d imagine the Four Tops doing a song called “Disco Daddy” in 1976 would sound like, apart from a third of it being devoted to the most shredding guitar solo ever heard on a Tops record (possibly by Dennis Coffey).
The Show Must Go On works best when heard at low volume, when it becomes a pleasant half-hour sequence of muted strings, lively bass and Tops harmonies, the words indistinguishable. The title track is a credo for the group’s autumn years (“I’ll go on singing my song/ show must go on, rain or shine, all the time”) and was depicted, for whatever reason, on the LP cover as the Tops being confronted by a cobra. “Runnin’ From Your Love” has labored harmonies that sound like the Tops are hauling logs up a hill.
At the Top (1978) was ABC’s last bid to revive the Tops’ fortunes, handing them to the team of Norman Harris and Ron Tyson, who wrote almost all of the LP’s songs. Harris, a Philly Soul legend, produced the record at Sigma Sound: it resulted in their most promising single in years, “H.E.L.P.” (you can envision Village People-esque choreography for it), but the song died at #38 on the R&B charts.
By the time ABC was bought by MCA in early 1979, the Tops were gone. A decade that had opened with the promise of Still Waters Run Deep would end with the Four Tops much as they had been twenty years earlier. Working the nightclubs and state fairs, doing one-night-stands in towns a day’s drive apart, playing casino ballrooms in the late afternoons; being the foundation of a solid R&B revue; always hustling, forever on the road, able to hook an audience as easily as they put on a suit. No record deal. The occasional three-paragraph newspaper review, the occasional radio spot.
ACT II: DON’T WALK AWAY
The Second Chance, 6 January 1982
The house lights need to stay on, Levi Stubbs regrets. They’re filming the show.
Far East Productions, on behalf of the Pioneer Co. of Japan, is taping in Ann Arbor tonight for future videodisc sale. They’ve roped off much of the dance floor for the cameramen, the lighting and sound techs, and cables that spool out to twin production trailers parked on East Liberty Street.
The Four Tops wear matching black suits, whose jackets they soon cast off. Lawrence Payton is stage left, Duke Fakir to his right, Obie Benson the man in motion—officially to the left of Stubbs, he often darts around to Stubbs’ right, working the room. Stubbs himself: mustached; a touch heftier than when we last saw him; an oak of charisma.
Three decades on the road have burnished the Tops. Stubbs is the great wheel. Payton has always seemed as if he was savoring a private joke: it’s more like a private novel now. He moves lightly, his steps refined. When Fakir and Benson do an aerobic touch-your-toes move, Payton just dips at the waist. Fakir has built up a hustling stage patter. “Sit back and relax, make yourself at home!” he barks as one song ends. “Did you get what you came to see? You doing all right out there?” He has the sharp eye of a maître d’. And Benson is a graceful comedian. He’s grown more agile in middle age, bounding and skating and sliding across the stage, waving and pointing at everyone he sees, as if naming each face.
The Second Chance has a small, low stage and is surmounted by tiers of balconies. It has a dicey reputation in Ann Arbor, known for its heavy metal shows and caveman bouncers, who have a habit of getting sued for assault, including slamming a kid’s hand in a door, booting another in the face, and dangling a third over a balcony (he’d coughed up blood for weeks afterward).
The Four Tops are an odd fit for the place, but the club’s owner, John Carver, sees them as agents of change. “I think he was tired of having a bar he was embarrassed to take his friends to,” one bartender recalls to the Detroit Free Press. The crowds who show up drunk and leave the bathrooms awash in filth and puke. Packs of spotty boys in denim jackets, ready to fight as soon as they park, sniffing around the college town. Carver dreams of having a place with class, somewhere for people with money and a little style. No metal bands, but DJs playing dance hits.
In 1984, he’ll shutter the Second Chance, rename it the Nectarine Ballroom, and try, for a time, to make it an upscale nightclub for “funsters,” as he tells the newspapers.
The Tops can handle any stage—they’ve certainly played worse—and there’s a wink in how Stubbs says “Ann Arbor,” rolling the last “r.” They make of the confined space a showbox, and always know where the cameras are looking (the Tops will get a substantial fee for their performance, along with a cut of the video sales).
They open with “Baby I Need Your Loving,” singing it luridly, with a feeling of impending consummation. “Get it on!” Stubbs yells. “Take it off! Fool around!” After “Ain’t No Woman Like the One I’ve Got,” Stubbs opens his arms, waving in his audience. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, conducting, “we’d like to take a little trip to the Sixties for just a few minutes and reminisce a while! I don’t know about you…but I had plenty of fun then. Do you remember? What it was like then?” Evangelical in his phrasing now. “Cut loose and do what you might’ve done then! We just want you to get involved!”
Stubbs yells “1960!” and the band kicks into “It’s the Same Old Song,” going at a fast tempo, the Tops locked in. A woman in the lower balcony sings as if she’d written the song. “1967!” “Walk Away Renee,” with impeccable harmonies and a wild bassline, brutally cut after its first chorus. “1968!” Stubbs dealing out years. “Do you remember this???” They leap into “Reach Out I’ll Be There” and the room convulses. A man is shaking his head, as if bewildered by memory. “Nineteen Sixty Nine! When we were drinkin’ that fifty cent wine!“ A “Standing in the Shadows of Love” that’s nothing but climax, sung over drum fills.
It’s the basest genre of performance: the greatest hits medley, one’s work reduced to headlines and photo captions. Yet the dexterity of the Tops, how they buckle onto these songs and dispatch them, one after the next, gives their medley a kind of grandeur. They haul in the past—theirs, the band’s, the audience’s, John Carver’s; the past that’s the lie people tell about their youth—and slam it down upon this wafer of a stage.
Yet what gets the most applause, what gets the balconies swaying, enough for the Tops to do it a second time as their encore, is a new song.
“When She Was My Girl,” which peaked at #11 on the pop charts a few months before. It has a lilting groove and Stubbs takes pleasure in its sturdy melody, making each phrase a hook (“shee-hee…used-to-be“) until he throws his curveball in the second chorus. She’s gooooooooooone….THE BIG LEG GIRL IS GONE! He’d improvised the line when the Tops cut the vocal; everyone in the booth cracked up but the producer knew he’d found it, the necessary twist, and Stubbs will sing “big leg girl” in this song for the rest of his life. Obie Benson gets a bassman’s spotlight, singing a run of low notes under a melodica solo.
They’re delighted to be in the same chart as Hall and Oates and Rick Springfield and Christopher Cross. “Anybody that says that they don’t enjoy being on the charts is telling a lie,” Stubbs tells the Washington Post. The single has a last-days-of-analog feel, with synthesizers prominent, not yet all-conquering. On the radio, it segues well with “For Your Eyes Only” and “Waiting for a Girl Like You.”
“When she was my girl,” the Four Tops regret. On their song, The Temptations had soared up on “my,” then wafted down a third to rest on “girl”; the Tops only fall by a tone (G to F), as if her memory has been compromised. The Tops in the early Eighties, summoning a piece of bliss from the mid-Sixties. Everything old is made new again and Motown, as a signifier of something lost, is about to come back, too.
A Night in Casablanca
Will these Detroiters follow the Four Tops into musical oblivion?
Detroit Free Press, review of The Spinners’ Labor of Love, 5 April 1981
Gladys Knight, talking to Newsday in August 1981, believed that the Four Tops had split (“so many pop and rock groups, like the Four Tops and the Supremes, have broken up at this point”). You can see why, as the Tops had been without a record deal for years. Disco was hard on many legacy acts—even James Brown floundered—and the Tops were considered one of its casualties.
The group signing with Casablanca Records, a top disco label and one known for its prodigal publicity campaigns, seemed like a savvy move. But by 1981 Casablanca was a cracked shell of itself.
For Larry Harris, the label’s co-founder, the slide began when Casablanca simultaneously released albums by each member of Kiss, all of which “emphatically bombed” and made its co-owner and distributor, PolyGram, finally aware that “we were losing a fortune…it was impossible that they would fail to notice two million returns. No amount of cooking the books was going to hide truckloads of unwanted records.”
Casablanca had lofted through the decade, its existence one of profitless prosperity, as its founder Neil Bogart described it. Bogart was a New York hustler with a great ear: he got “96 Tears” on tape, snaring a beast in the wild; he had Giorgio Moroder turn “Love to Love You Baby” into a canonical round of orgasms; he knew “Funkytown” was a smash when he heard its keyboard hook, the sound of a pushbutton future. He died of lymphoma at thirty-nine.
His label, founded in 1973, was a scrapper, an opportunist. Like Sixties Motown, Casablanca was a record company as a comic book publisher, its top titles the superhero teams of Kiss, the Village People, and Parliament (the X-Men of the set), along with Donna Summer (the original Dazzler). The label that spun on his records had an illustration of a desert oasis, a market town whisked together in the midst of nowhere. Casablanca lived every cliche of the Seventies music business—office cocaine deliveries, titanic levels of payola—and when the decade died, it followed suit.
The Kiss debacle, followed by the deflation of the disco bubble and Paul Volcker’s recession, was the end. In February 1980 PolyGram bought Bogart out and gutted the label—what had been a 175-person operation was winnowed to 25 by the end of the year. Summer left; Kiss stayed for an extortionate price. So by the time the Four Tops signed with Casablanca, it was a rump enterprise, “little more than a vanity label,” Harris wrote. “From 1981 to 1985, PolyGram used Casablanca as a dumping ground for artists and soundtracks.”
The Tops LPs were in the same catalog as Meco’s Impressions of ‘An American Werewolf in London,’ Aerobic Dance Hits Volume One, Funky Fitness, Heavyhands: The Ultimate Exercise, and the soundtrack to Monsignor.
Still, Tonight! wasn’t thrown together in the hopes of making a cheap trade on a faded reputation. Charles Koppelman, a Casablanca exec who had survived the purges, saw the Tops as a potentially strong seller, offered them the most promising compositions he had, and gave the record a substantial budget (and the Tops “a nice little advance,” as per Fakir), with tracking done in LA at Cherokee and vocals at RCA in New York.
David Wolfert produced it; Lawrence Payton, as always, did vocal arrangements. Its players were top-echelon pros: drummer Jeff Porcaro; Ron Carter on string bass; Henry Davis, who plays the luxurious bassline on “From a Distance”; the guitarist Carlos Rios; Crusher Bennett on percussion; David Friedman on vibes and orchestra bells; Ralph Schuckett, who plays piano and melodica on “When She Was My Girl.” Composers included Kenny Loggins (“Who’s Right Who’s Wrong”), Raydio’s Jerry Knight (“Don’t Walk Away”) and Stevie Wonder (“All I Do”).
The days of the more democratic Four Tops were over—the record is built on the voice of Levi Stubbs, with the rest of the group as colorists, aside-givers, and supporting actors (Tonight! has some of the best-recorded Tops vocals of their career, with great dynamics). While there are throwbacks to past glories (“look over your shoulder!” Stubbs yells in “Something to Remember”), Tonight! was crafted to be contemporary “adult” R&B, its sound glossed, each instrument placed in the mix as if in a velvet casing.
Take “Don’t Walk Away,” which opens with chimes and rainfall patterns on keyboards, has tensed strings that fly off when a drum fill opens the chorus, a bass figure that shifts from a rapid pulse to a popped-note excursion in the verses, and synth handclaps to rival those on “Bette Davis Eyes.”
It’s a collection of extravagant intros: the guitar, keyboard, strings dialogue of “Tonight I’m Going To Love You All Over” that sets the stage for the four-part harmonies; the saxophone musing on “Who’s Right Who’s Wrong“; the nylon string guitar on “I’ll Never Leave Again“; the synthesizer-to-strings entry ramp of “Let Me Set You Free” (which pits echoed handclaps against a restless bassline—it’s the closest the Tops ever came to a Rick James sound). The essential player is Kashif Saleem, who drapes the record in sounds coaxed from the NED Synclavier II and MiniMoog, particularly on “All I Do,” where Kashif rivals Stevie Wonder in his synth palette: nasally basslines; a high tenor counterpart to Stubbs in the verses; whirring, dancing melodies in the eight-bar solo.
At its best—”Don’t Walk Away,” “When She Was My Girl,” “All I Do,” the fierce “Something to Remember” (Stubbs opens under the gun: “Rumors hound me! Lies surround me!/ Say it isn’t true!”) and “I’ll Never Leave Again,” a fallen man’s beg for forgiveness—Tonight! is the Four Tops at their strongest in a decade. Dressed in late-stage disco finery, they sound hungry again.
One More Mountain (1982) is a lesser Tonight!: same producer, same studios, many of the same musicians—it’s as if Casablanca cloned the earlier record but something went akilter in the lab. If weakened by compositions whose writers have sworn an oath to banality (“take this sad heart, make it a glad heart”), the Tops sound assured, still lively. The uptempo pieces work best—“Givin’ It Up” (longtime player retires, set to scratch guitar); “One More Mountain to Climb” (gentlemen’s electro-funk); “Keep On Lightin’ My Fire” (retired longtime player makes request); “Nobody’s Gonna Love You Like I Do” (marred by canned applause, but Obie Benson saves it); the ballads sag.
Except for “I Believe in You and Me,” which Duke Fakir singled out as a Stubbs vocal masterpiece. It’s Stubbs soaring into falsetto, as if revealing that a grand house has, suddenly, a new top floor. The Tops thought it should have been a smash, but Casablanca dropped the bag by instead making it a B-side to “Sad Hearts”; Whitney Houston finally made the song a hit in the Nineties. A few years before his death, Stubbs sang “I Believe in You and Me” in his last performance. He had suffered a stroke, was in a wheelchair. Aretha Franklin leads it off, and Stubbs finds anchorage in it, singing whatever pieces of the song he can voice.
The Casablanca records sold respectably, put the Tops back on the radio. When they appeared on Motown’s 25th Anniversary television special, filmed in March 1983, they could boast they weren’t some crumbling pillar of the Sixties, but a still-vital act. They were paired with The Temptations for a sing-off (a dress rehearsal: the Tops versus Kool & the Gang for Schlitz Malt Liquor). Cornball yet majestic, the performance is one of the show’s best moments, if eclipsed by Michael Jackson: the grand arrival of Thriller to mass America.
Fakir likened the show’s rehearsals at the Santa Monica Civic Center to a sprawling, oft-estranged family coming together for a wedding.
For the first time since the Sixties, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Tops, Stevie Wonder, Junior Walker, the Temptations were all in the same room. Contesting memories, shit-talking, slapping the boasts down like cards. Michael Jackson took Stubbs aside, said that he played Tops records every morning, that he was in awe of Stubbs’ voice.
Berry Gordy wasn’t around for much of the rehearsals, but took time to pay his respects to the Tops. “Sounding great and looking great,” he said. “Y’all ready to come back?” And they were.
INTERMISSION: EVERY MOTOWN SINGLE RELEASED BETWEEN 1980 AND 1983
ACT III: MOTOWN REDUX
One Million “Baby Love”s
In the last month of the Seventies, days after he turned fifty years old, Berry Gordy learned from his accountant that Motown was insolvent. “You’ve got more liabilities than assets.”
“I knew the responsibility was mine,” Gordy wrote in his memoir. “I hadn’t been paying attention.” He’d gone lost, producing a run of flop movies (The Wiz, Thank God It’s Friday, Almost Summer), and his label was stagnant.
Disco was the province of the shameless and the reckless (see Casablanca); Motown was rooted, cautious. Its marketing operation, once the envy of the industry, was reduced to “let’s hope Stevie Wonder puts out an album this year.” Then even Wonder stumbled, with the brilliant, strange, and unsellable Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants—Motown planned to press two million copies of it until Gordy, upon hearing the record, cut the order by half (“which was still 900,000 too many”).
Another once-savior, Marvin Gaye, turned in a tortured divorce/alimony record and then spent three years on a semi-ironic “love man” record. An exasperated Motown released the latter, In Our Lifetime, without his approval, touching up some rough mixes; it prompted him to bolt to Columbia (Gaye to David Ritz: “Motown shafted me…can you imagine saying to an artist, say Picasso, ‘Okay Pablo, you’ve been fooling with this picture long enough?'”) The Jacksons, The Miracles, The Temptations, Ashford & Simpson, Norman Whitfield were gone. Diana Ross was soon to follow.
Spending under the delusion that it was still Hitsville USA, Motown’s record division lost $3 million in 1980; the film division was, unsurprisingly, also in the red. It was dire enough for Gordy to consider selling his prime asset: his publishing company, Jobete. Instead he took out a bank loan, to be collateralized by record sale revenues. He described the terms as “the money we got from our distributors [went] directly to a locked box at the bank, where they would pay themselves first, then us.”
An inveterate gambler, Gordy then threw a winning roll. Motown’s last reliables came through for him. Ross’ Chic collaboration, Wonder’s Hotter Than July, Smokey Robinson’s Being with You, the Commodores’ In the Pocket: all went gold or platinum and each had at least one Top 10 hit. He paid off the loan within the year.
But the near-disaster had exposed how fragile Motown had become. The network of independent record distributors it had built over decades—the circulatory system of one of the last big US independent labels left—was fraying. Each time an indie label signed with a major to move their records (A&M, Motown’s former distribution partner, went with RCA in 1979; Chrysalis and Arista with CBS and RCA, respectively, in 1982), more independent distributors collapsed. Each year brought more shipping delays, spottier coverage, more late to non-existent payments.
Bowing to the inevitable, Motown signed a national distribution deal with MCA in 1983. It looked good on paper (Gordy: “one company, one check—that we knew would be there on time”) but it was the start of the end. Motown could no longer dictate marketing strategies to its distributors; it was now a client of a rival.
The Eighties were Motown’s time of scrabbling. Hope the reliables come through yet again, hope for a fluke hit (as happened when DJs revived Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me,” a grotesque “courtesan regrets” single that she’d cut for Motown years before, and made it one of the label’s top sellers of 1982). Gordy slashed executive pay by 15% and hired Jay Lasker, who had signed the Four Tops to ABC/Dunhill, as the label’s new president and COO.
Lasker soon discovered that Motown was riddled through with nepotism: Gordy’s children, siblings, and extended family were in every nook of the business. And he believed the label wasn’t exploiting a trend for which it was ideally suited to exploit.
The Baby Boomers, now in their thirties and forties, were primed to buy albums they had already owned, and almost all of them had owned a Motown record. “Time flies by so fast that the Temptations are becoming nostalgia,” as Chuck Thurston of the Detroit Free Press wrote in October 1980.
In the Motor City, Berry Gordy is seen as an old friend who got advice, didn’t lose his money, but somehow forgot how he’d made it. “Motown has no sound now,” says one Detroiter whose views echo so many others. “It’s just another record company…All they do out there is live off the past.”
Nelson George, Where Did Our Love Go? (1985)
So Lasker issued a score of compilations (Gordy called him “the packager”), flogging them on late-night TV commercials. A syndicated six-hour special, narrated by Smokey Robinson (“The Artists and the Music That Started It All”—Motown as the place where things once had happened), was offered to radio stations for free: giving them a “documentary” that was, in truth, a lengthy advertisement for the Motown catalog. To capitalize on this, as Adam White wrote, Lasker “reactivated dozens of Motown catalog albums as “midlines,” pricing them at $5.98 [the Tops’ Still Waters Run Deep among them] and grossing more than $5 million as a consequence.”
When he saw that Lasker was releasing classic albums as “two-fer” reissues (e.g., What’s Going On and Let’s Get It On on one CD), Gordy thought the discs looked like “schlock merchandise,” fit for the back bin. “The two-for-ones are keeping us in business,” Lasker told him. “But for how long?” Gordy replied. “We’re selling off our cream.”
No matter. Lasker came to regard his role at Motown as an executor, supervising its inevitable demise. Speaking to the Atlanta Journal in 1983, he claimed Motown’s “sales were up significantly…because we kept a closer eye on what we were doing. We had to. Very frankly, we didn’t have any rich uncle with a deep pocket in Germany or England or a broadcast company to turn to when we get in trouble like other labels owned by conglomerates. So we were very frugal and very selective in the records we put out.”
One result, as per Raynoma Gordy: “What Motown had to show for itself was a million different albums with “Baby Love” and no new talent.”
Motown as a premiere nostalgia brand, increasingly positioned to older white buyers (“The Label That Started It All,” with the unspoken caveat that “It” had ended at some point, probably around the time you hit thirty). And its counterlife: the actual Motown of the early Eighties—a label of mostly Black artists who played R&B and funk, whose records hit in clubs and on the R&B/”urban” charts, but who were rarely in the Pop Top 40: Rick James, the Stone City Band, Teena Marie, High Inergy, Switch, Bettye LaVette, Bobby Nunn, the Dazz Band.
The two Motowns could not be reconciled. Its legacy acts could still manage to get on Top 40 radio, but most of its younger talent was frozen out. A mix of institutional racism at MTV (“they told me Rick James was just not white enough,” Motown’s Nancy Leiviska told Billboard) and Lasker’s refusal to spend money on videos meant that Motown was nowhere on music television.
Apart from one video: a remix of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” cut to scenes from The Big Chill.
Big Chill Campaigns
Even if you’ve never watched Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, you may know the scene. Old friends from the University of Michigan—alleged former student radicals, now in their thirties—reunite for a funeral, spending a weekend in the grand home of Kevin Kline and Glenn Close’s characters. After dinner, Kline puts on The Temptations’ Anthology, kissing the cover as if it’s a holy relic. Jeff Goldblum, who plays the one character who might own a Talking Heads record, teases Kline: “Don’t you have any other music, you know, from this century?” Kline replies, with a sniff: “There is no other music, not in my house.”
Goldblum: There’s been a lot of terrific music in the last ten years.
Kline: Like what?
Case closed. Everyone dances to “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” while doing the dishes.
Music from The Big Chill Soundtrack, issued by Motown in September 1983, was one of the label’s biggest sellers of the decade (“a wonderful soundtrack from a genuinely despicable film,” as per Dave Marsh)—its only rival of the period, in terms of units shifted, was Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down.
Motown first had thought the soundtrack wouldn’t do much. These were old songs you couldn’t promote on the radio and there wasn’t the budget for the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” one of the film’s big numbers. But The Big Chill would be the triumph of Nostalgia Motown (even if only five of its eleven tracks were Motown songs).
Lasker quickly came around once the film was a hit, buying ads on a hundred FM stations with primarily white audiences. “AOR programmers would say this music doesn’t fit their demographics,” he told Billboard. “But the people going to see this movie are basically the same people they say are their demographics. Columbia Pictures tells me, and my own common sense tells me, what the market is on the picture: white, upper middle class college kids and alumni…I think it’s also going to sell in some black shops. But I don’t think that’s where the big market is.”
By early 1984, the soundtrack had sold over 800,000 copies and eventually went triple platinum, spurring the release of More Songs from The Big Chill Soundtrack (also platinum). Columbia Pictures’ Robert Holmes claimed that “Motown has found that people see the movie in a mall theater and come out so happy that they walk right across to the record store and buy the album.” Synergy!
Soon to follow: what the ad industry termed “Big Chill campaigns,” usually set to a Motown track. Lincoln-Mercury kicked it off with a TV spot cued to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (middle-aged people drive to their 25th high school reunion through valley low, river wide, etc.) Young & Rubicam, who made the ad, said it was targeting a market group with “a proclivity to buy imports” to instead consider “buying American.”
Levi’s had an ad in which a soldier, home from some indeterminate war, is handed a pair of 501 jeans by his girlfriend; it’s scored to, naturally, “My Girl.” It culminated in 1986 with the California Raisins dancing to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” a piece of late 20th Century minstrelsy in Claymation. There were 300 licensed Raisins products by 1988, including four albums issued within two years (Motown really missed a beat by not being the label to release them).
The other Big Chill effect was the Motown needle-drop, inescapable in movies by the end of the decade. My Girl; nuns singing “My God” and “Ball of Confusion” in the Sister Act pictures; Susan Sarandon, given a terminal diagnosis in Stepmom, warding off the blues by singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” with her kids.
In The Big Chill, the music at least was meant to evoke the characters’ youth. Now there was Motown—reduced to a set of a dozen or so golden hits—as a mood ventilation system. A music free of contemporary troubles, “universal,” bright and solid and everlasting, a music of good times, of elegance, well-cut suits and American cars. A Sixties without a Vietnam, without a Watts ’65 or Detroit ’67; monochrome and monaural and, increasingly, monoracial.
All the compromises that Gordy had made when building his empire, the evasions, the side-steps, all the glosses and airbrushes and tonedowns that he needed to sell his artists and his records: all had been done in the service of a future in which these compromises would not need to be made. But now people yearned for the choreography, to consider as perfection what was meant to be transitory. That the bridge was the destination.
Against this, how could the Motown of the present compete? How could it not seem irrelevant? The Motown 25 special, hosted by a wary-looking Richard Pryor, was greatly the loving recreation of old glories—the Miracles reunited with Smokey Robinson, the classic Supremes (grudgingly) singing together—until Michael Jackson broke the frame with his performance of “Billie Jean,” a sudden incursion of the new. But of course, Jackson was on Epic now.
Back to Back to Basics
The return of the Four Tops to Motown, announced in the summer of 1983, was another sign that the label was calling everyone home.
To keep playing off the “stage rivalry” bit the Tops had done with the Temptations (who had returned to Motown in 1980), the two groups would release albums simultaneously in late 1983, crafted as counterpart reunions.
The Temptations’ Back to Basics, which featured a tuneless duet with the Tops (“The Battle Song”) and a nautical-themed track (“Sail Away”), had songs and production by Norman Whitfield, with whom the Temptations hadn’t worked in a decade. And the Tops’ Back Where I Belong, which had a tuneless duet with the Temptations (“Hang”) and a nautical-themed track (“Sail On”), had songs and production by Lamont Dozier and Brian & Eddie Holland.
The recording of Back Where I Belong was the first time that the Tops and H-D-H had been in the same room since 1967. “A lot of the magic that had sparked between us had gone,” Brian Holland later wrote. “But some of it returned. We came up with half an album’s worth of new songs, which we wrote and produced in exactly the same fashion as we did in the old days. Listening to Levi’s voice after all those years was like stepping into a time machine.”
D Without the H-H
By 1973, Invictus and Hot Wax, the record labels that Holland-Dozier-Holland had founded in the wake of their split with Motown, were crumbling.
Singles missed the charts, the acts were restless, payments dried up, the partnership foundered. “We rarely got together to discuss songs or who could cut them and we each began traveling different roads as we got our own responsibilities at the company,” Lamont Dozier wrote in his memoir.
Without Motown as their financier and common cause of complaint, the H-D-H alliance was exposed as the fragile union of two brothers and an outsider. Dozier rarely got his way, as the Hollands were a block vote. He blamed them for Invictus failing to sign Al Green and the Ohio Players, for letting a relationship with George Clinton wither.
Also, Eddie Holland got half of the partnership’s earnings, the remainder split between his brother and Dozier. Eddie claimed this was due to “the other tasks that had fallen to me…I was effectively producing (not to mention schooling) the singers in the studio. I was also active from an administrative angle. Whenever there was a decision to be made, or a problem to be solved, I was the one to whom both Brian and Lamont, and everybody else, turned.”
Lost in a disastrous marriage, an alcoholic who was now suffering panic attacks, Dozier could no longer find solace or even distraction in work. He started recording under his own name again, only to see his singles get barely promoted by a label he co-owned.
Keeping an eye on the Four Tops, Dozier saw the group revive upon departing Motown for ABC/Dunhill. So as Eddie Holland tried to salvage Invictus (“Holland–Dozier–Holland had never known failure in the past. I was adamant that they never would”), Dozier walked away, leaving the Hollands behind in Detroit. He moved to Los Angeles and signed with ABC as a solo artist. Hot Wax folded; Invictus limped on for another few years.
A breakup with the usual repercussions: years of litigation among the Hollands, ABC, and Dozier. “In the end I was finally freed from all my contracts with the Hollands, but I had to forfeit my ownership share of Invictus, Hot Wax and our publishing companies to get completely disentangled. The whole thing was unpleasant, unfortunate, and very expensive,” Dozier wrote.
Goin’ back to being myself
I can’t live for nobody else
“Going Back to My Roots”
Still, he could be Lamont Dozier again, not the middle initial of a brand.
He hit with “Trying to Hold On to My Woman” in 1973 and had a solid run, moving to Warner Brothers mid-decade. Some of his finest records were “Fish Ain’t Bitin’,” an R&B #4 whose Nixon barbs (“Tricky Dick is trying to be slick/ And the short end of the stick is all I’m gonna get/ Tricky Dick, please quit!”) earned ABC an angry letter from the White House (some things are eternal); the diaspora funk Going Back to My Roots (1977), cut with Hugh Masekela; and the refined disco Bittersweet (1979), produced by Frank Wilson.
An endearing thing about Dozier as a singer is his inherent gruffness; he’s the most exasperated-sounding of love men. On “Boogie Business,” he yells “Boogie!” like a subway conductor.
Eddie Holland felt betrayed, but over time he could look through Dozier’s eyes. “Throughout those first few years after he went out on his own, people were constantly asking for the three of us. He was always having to explain that he could do it himself and he didn’t need us.”
“[But] I don’t think he understood that the three of us really were much stronger together than apart,” he added. “He could never get that into his head. He would always fight it. He had the thirst for it to be D without the HH. And now it was. But I remember telling him, ‘You could do whatever you wanted on your own, and Brian and I could do whatever we wanted on our own. But we could never be bigger than Holland–Dozier–Holland. Never.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘You believe that, don’t you?’ ‘Absolutely,’ I answered.”
In the early Eighties, Dozier had stopped drinking, was in a marriage which would endure for the rest of his life, and was otherwise a complete disaster. He was being audited by the IRS. He was stuck in an onerous publishing contract and his albums weren’t selling. His house was being foreclosed on. His business manager quit, as there was no money to manage.
So he reconciled with the Hollands, with H-D-H writing and producing for the Real World label (including the 1980 self-titled debut of Sterling Harrison, who sang like a variation on Dozier). His reconciliation with Motown came a few years later, when H-D-H were at the Motown 25 taping, hanging out in rehearsals.
The Hollands already had made their peace with Berry Gordy, once the lawsuits were (temporarily) settled and Eddie had confronted him face to face. “We talked over the past, my departure, the conflict, the lawsuit, and I told him, ‘I blame you for that, because you were the oldest. You knew how to handle that stuff, but you sent me to this person and that person, you refused to talk to me about it and it spiraled out of control,'” Eddie wrote. “And [Gordy] said, ‘Yeah, you’re right. So, let’s make a deal.'”
The Hollands wrote and produced for The Supremes and the Jackson 5, but found the work unrewarding. Motown was no longer Hitsville on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, but a second-tier general entertainment business in Los Angeles. And the Hollands were no longer the magical equation “H-D-H” but a pair of hired guns with a middling track record of late.
One idea, suggested by Motown Productions head Suzanne de Passe, was for the reunited H-D-H to write a Motown-produced Broadway adaptation of Oliver Twist, called Twist, with an all-Black cast. “We were able to set aside the disputes of the recent past, and we worked diligently together, just like we’d done in the old days,” Dozier said. “We came up with a handful of great songs that we were all really proud of.” They wanted to top what Lionel Bart had done in Oliver!: do a Detroit takeover of a storied London property.
Until Motown sent H-D-H “some funky paperwork, asking us to sign over our publishing rights to the songs we created for the score,” Dozier said. He’d already signed a publishing deal with Warner Chappell “and couldn’t have given over the publishing rights even if I’d wanted to! I ended up having to withdraw from the project. Since I was the “idea man,” the Hollands withdrew as well, and the project fell apart.”
This isn’t quite how Eddie Holland recalls it. While he agreed that H-D-H “were going great guns” on Twist, he noted that Dozier was also working on a play of his own, called Angel Quest (a play not mentioned once in Dozier’s memoir). “He wanted to spend [more time] on it, to the detriment of Twist. And finally, he got a bite, and that was it. He pulled out and, because that entire project was predicated on having new songs by Holland–Dozier–Holland, that was the end of it.”
But another 1983 project survived—composing and producing for the Four Tops’ Motown return. The songs came together easily enough. The trio lined up the keyboardist John Barnes for rhythm arrangements and synthesizer programming (Barnes was a Motown regular who’d soon work with Michael Jackson); the Tops were, as always, a quick study in the studio.
One afternoon, a couple of hours after an H-D-H writing session, a pair of FBI agents knocked on Dozier’s door. They asked if the Holland brothers had been there earlier. Dozier realized the FBI had been surveilling his house.
“Now, Eddie and Brian and I have had our differences over the years, but there’s a bond of loyalty there that can’t ever be broken,” Dozier wrote. So he told the FBI, no, the two men they had seen leaving were Jehovah’s Witnesses. He had invited them in and listened to them talk about God in his living room. The FBI came back with a warrant, searched Dozier’s house, found nothing of interest, and left. They never contacted him again. “I still don’t know what it was all about,” Dozier said.
Don’t Look Back, You Can Never Look Back
Motown eventually put the album out, but they didn’t really put it out.
Duke Fakir
In 1983, the Four Tops were back at Motown, back with H-D-H and Berry Gordy, and they made a record whose guests include Aretha Franklin and The Temptations. If you’re not familiar with this album (quite possible), you might wonder if it’s a late-in-career classic, remembered fondly over forty years later. It’s not.
Back Where I Belong stiffed upon release (an R&B #47) and was swiftly forgotten (Fakir, in his memoir, thought that the record had come out in 1985, after Magic). It’s a record on which everyone involved does work so inferior to their past efforts that it feels like a collective act of self-sabotage. “It was the first time we had worked together in so long, there were probably some cobwebs,” Fakir told Billboard in 1985. “We were so glad to be back that we rushed the album.”
It didn’t help that H-D-H and Gordy were at loggerheads again. Dozier claimed that Motown tried the same play as with Twist, asking H-D-H to sign over their publishing to Jobete. “I couldn’t believe that, after everything we’d been through on that very issue,” he wrote. “I wasn’t in a position to do it…and I wouldn’t have considered it. As a result, Motown didn’t really promote the album like they could have, and the whole thing sort of fizzled.”
The Hollands blamed the Jay Lasker-era Motown for being cheap. The first single, one of the LP’s more listenable tracks, ‘”I Just Can’t Walk Away,” started off strongly. “Radio was keen, sales were good, and the promo man was adamant that it was heading for the Top 20,” Brian said. “But only, he said, if Motown put some money behind it.” Eddie: “Berry and I went back and forth on that…but ultimately we could never reach an accord. And then the single started to drop down the chart, so it didn’t matter anymore.”
Back Where I Belong sounds like what it was: men who had been around since the Eisenhower administration flailing in the mid-Eighties. The Tops had been adept, able to handle changing tastes, singing disco and light funk with as much élan as they’d sung Rodgers and Hammerstein numbers. And H-D-H’s records of the start of the decade, particularly the Sterling Harrison album and Dozier’s Lamont, were still credible R&B.
But in a year when labels were going as all-in on synthesizers as companies are now with generative AI, there was no time to adjust, to find the right footing. Instead, the Tops get hurled into the world of Oberheim and Yamaha and the uptempo numbers defeat them.
On the opener, “Make Yourself Right at Home,” Levi Stubbs has to sing over a raucous, downward-sliding synth bass and a battery of keyboard flourishes, and the result sounds like he’s cut his vocal on the floor of an industrial sand plant: “Relax your feelings in my easy chair!..lay back while I open up my…pleasure chest…relax!!!” (one of the more agitated calls to relax! ever recorded). On “Sail On,” the chorus hook is an air raid siren that makes the Tops run for cover.
The best you get are a few worn-out ballads and some “special guest star” shtick, with Aretha Franklin showing up as if the Tops had won a raffle. There’s one outlier: a slow, luxe-ominous version of “The Masquerade Is Over.” Even that track is mixed poorly: throughout the record, the harmonies sound as if they were run through a digital watch. The album’s ideal medium is probably a 96kpbs MP3 file.
D with the HH
Back Where I Belong was the end of H-D-H and the Tops: their footnote. In the following decades, the Hollands and Dozier would work together, drift apart, be drawn together again. As the years went on, the Hollands felt they were strangers in a music business they’d help build. “I suppose I stopped writing for the pop market when rap and hip hop became dominant, and I realized how much things had changed,” Eddie said.
Dozier kept in the game as long as he could. He co-wrote “Two Hearts” and “Loco in Acapulco” (see below) with Phil Collins; he co-wrote a Joss Stone single. H-D-H finally did a musical in the late 2000s—an adaptation of The First Wives Club. The original run closed quickly; a revival in 2015, with a new book and score that interspersed H-D-H’s Motown standards with their newly-written pieces, fared somewhat better. Now the play opened with “Stop! In the Name of Love!,” giving the audience what they wanted.
There came the epilogue years: awards in glass cases, medals, hall of fame inductions, Hollywood Boulevard stars.
After the Hollywood ceremony in 2015, the Hollands and Dozier went to a lunch in their honor. Stevie Wonder sat behind a piano and rifled through their catalog. Has high blood pressure got a hold on me? Love is like an itchin’ in my heart. When you feel that you can’t go on! Drumming chords, laughing upon the swoops of minors to majors, taking one melody line—re-flec-tions of…the way life used-to-be!—and stringing it to another: when I needed the shelter of someone’s arms..there. you. were.
As Wonder sang, Dozier felt everything he’d carried fall away—the resentments, the lawsuits, the grievances and frustrations. He was left with the work. Brian at the piano back in Detroit, seeking with his hands to resolve a verse. A trundle along the bass keys, a sketch for James Jamerson to embellish. Does this key work for Levi? For Marvin? Diana? Wonder sang Dozier a future, showed him where he’d be found in the world that went on after him. “The songs. That’s all that matters now,” Dozier wrote.
He died in 2022, less than a year after his wife passed. “It just took a lot out of him,” Eddie Holland said.
ACT IV: A WALL OF SOLID LOVE
You Know Darn Well, When You Cast Your Spell
The Four Tops’ grand return home had come to naught, so they spent another year trying to do it over again. Their next record, issued in May 1985, was optimistically titled Magic; its cover has each Top clad in a specific color, as if they were Clue suspects.
Rather than Holland-Dozier-Holland (represented only by a plastic caffeinated take on a Sixties H-D-H song, “I’m Ready for Love”), the key figure was now Willie Hutch, who co-wrote and produced most of the LP’s first side, centering the Tops in immaculate mid-Eighties R&B arrangements.
Take the opener, “I Can Feel the Magic,” built on punches of the Oberheim DMX, with washes of keyboards and margin comments by “tasty” guitar and alto sax—there’s room enough for a sixteen-bar Gerald Albright sax solo and an equally long break of volleying Tops harmonies, sax, and guitar, to the point where when Levi Stubbs finally returns to the mike, it’s a mild surprise. “Sexy Ways” has a synclavier hook that’s a cousin to the one in Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson’s “Excellent Birds.” On “Don’t Tell Me That It’s Over,” using an Alfredo Washington bassline as a tightrope, Stubbs is incredulously devastated; Payton, Fakir and Benson offer advice (“don’t do it!”) and comfort.
Hiring Reggie Lucas to write and produce the other half of the record seemed like an inspired choice—his work on Madonna’s debut LP had reminded the Gordys of H-D-H. But Lucas offered a set of nothing compositions (“Don’t Turn Away,” “Again”—just reading the titles fills you with inertia) which have occasionally rising melodies in lieu of choruses; they’re stand-ins for songs. The Tops politely wander through, as if being shown around a house by a realtor.
Magic flopped and the Tops pressed on, starting work on a third album. The sessions yielded the “Hot Nights” single in 1986, their last for Motown. “Hot Nights” is essentially a mid-Eighties Rod Stewart song, suitable for a wine cooler commercial. The Tops sing it better than he could have, but Rod might’ve sold the thing, while the Tops’ single went nowhere. Motown passed on doing another album, and the group was gone again. The Tops/Motown reunion was an empty bag: it might as well have never happened.
INTERMISSION: EVERY MOTOWN SINGLE RELEASED BETWEEN 1984 & JUNE 1988, PLUS A FEW EPILOGUE 45s
“I’m Tired, Smoke”
Every day now, he woke to find that the walls had moved closer to him.
Berry Gordy had spent nearly thirty years running a record label. Brian Holland said, of the last days of Motown, that there were “a lot more people making decisions, or not making decisions…In the Sixties, we could run in and record when we felt like it. You have an idea, you write it down, you call up the musicians you need, you go in and record. Out in California, though, everything was business. You had to book the studio weeks in advance. There were different people making decisions about what was going to be a hit; all these promotion guys, not really music people, sticking their personal opinions in.”
“It wasn’t about music anymore, it was about what would make money, or what they thought would,” he added. “The problem was, they often thought wrong.” The Hollands and Dozier said Gordy should have never left Detroit, that Motown, ripped from its roots, had become something nebulous and soulless, a brand management company with a gambling habit.
Gordy spent nights at his computer, trying to find an out. Sell the publishing, sell the master tapes at Sotheby’s. Go public. Merge with another indie label. Nothing looked feasible. It now cost a minimum of $100,000 to promote a record, Gordy said—any record, and “you weren’t even guaranteed airplay.” Motown carried a crushing overhead and needed to make $40 million per year just to break even (its income in 1986 was $8 million).
And Motown’s contemporaries were being swallowed up; even the corporations, by larger corporations. In 1986, Bertelsmann bought RCA for $300 million. Sony got Columbia for $2 billion the following year. PolyGram bought A&M in 1989, for $500 million, and then for good measure nabbed Island for $300 million; EMI bought Chrysalis for $75 million.
“It was not only that we were losing money,” Gordy wrote in his memoir. He was running a label whose new releases included Roq-In’ Zoo (“Frig-O-Rator”), Star Search winner Sam Harris (“Sugar Don’t Bite”), hip-hop adjacent General Kane (“Crack Killed Applejack”), and the remnants of a last folly, a “new wave” rock label called Morocco (in a final Marvel Comics parallel, Morocco was Motown’s equivalent, in ambition, embarrassment and longevity, to Marvel’s New Universe). He was the ruler of a kingdom of the ersatz. “I had lost interest,” he said. “After thirty years, it was work, real work.”
In late 1986, Gordy flirted with selling Motown, entering into negotiations with MCA, only to get cold feet when lawyers began hammering out details, which included Gordy being barred from using his name professionally for five years. Stevie Wonder had negotiated a clause in his contract that gave him veto power if he didn’t approve of a buyer for Motown, and the proposed deal, the sale of the largest Black US record label to a conglomerate, had drawn the ire of many, including Jesse Jackson.
Gordy tried to rally, or at least acted like it. In 1987 he fired Jay Lasker, made Skip Miller and Lee Young Jr. co-presidents; he got Al Bell from Stax to reinvigorate the label’s creative division and set a $38 million budget for developing new acts.
It was far too late. Motown had no pool of young talent to draw from (big signings of 1987 included Georgio and Carrie McDowell (“Uh Uh, No No, Casual Sex”)). The label had become a dependent of El DeBarge (dumping the rest of his family in 1986), Lionel Richie (about to go on hiatus until the Clinton administration), and its bottom cards, Robinson and Wonder. The only bet that paid off was Motown signing Bruce Willis to sing sub-karaoke versions of R&B classics, coordinating the album with an HBO special—”Respect Yourself” hit #5 and The Return of Bruno went gold.
Smokey Robinson came into Gordy’s office in the spring of 1988, bustling as usual, talking up his new song as another potential smash. Gordy told him that another smash wouldn’t help. It was time to sell. Robinson sat down, incredulous. “I’m tired, Smoke,” Gordy said. “I know you are, I know you are,” Robinson said, nodding, and, with that, a story ended.
At the end of June 1988, Gordy sold Motown to MCA and Boston Ventures Management for $61 million (MCA would own 20% of the label). Gordy told Jesse Jackson that it had come down to three choices: “sell out, bail out or fall out.” So he’d sold. But he kept his publishing. After all, Jobete earned him $10 million a year, mostly on songs he’d released decades earlier. He wasn’t giving that up yet.
Two months after the sale, the Four Tops put out a new record, their twenty-third album, on a fresh label, Arista. They had been around years before Gordy had imagined Motown; they would be there after it.
The Last Charge
The Tops had approached Clive Davis at Arista, who liked what the group had cut in their last year at Motown, particularly a song by Michael Price and Bobby Sandstrom called “Indestructible.” Davis was masterful at the promotion of grand schmaltz, and “Indestructible” had a chorus worthy of Diane Warren (who also wrote a song on the Tops’ Arista album).
Davis could already hear “Indestructible” being played over workout montages in Stallone movies, soundtracking Super Bowl clips, Jeep Wrangler ads, or Army recruitment spots (U.S. marines storm a Grenadan beach, or Top Gun jocks engage enemy aircraft, while Levi Stubbs hollers “INDESTRUCTIBLE!”—it’s shocking that it didn’t happen).
So Davis signed the Tops, bought the in-progress tracks from Motown and soldered together an album, gave the group money to make a video (the Tops, all wearing Dad jeans, stride through a Hollywood backlot and inspire the gentlest of commotions) and went to work selling the single. Davis flew the Tops to a villa in Spain to do press interviews in Europe; he got the song in NBC promotions for the Seoul Olympics.
And after all of that, “Indestructible” barely cracked the Top 40, falling out after a week; it stalled at #57 on the R&B charts; the album peaked at #149. As Fakir noted, “something about that song just didn’t hit.” Indestructible, the last Tops album of original material, is the work of a dozen studios and nearly as many writing and production teams. The close of a recording life in bright corporate anonymity.
The album was best known for another single, a Phil Collins/Lamont Dozier composition written for Collins’ movie Buster. “Loco in Acapulco” is a more humane version of “Kokomo”—its chorus melody burrows into the brain. It would be the last pop bid (a UK #7) for the group that had sung “Baby I Need Your Loving,” the cosmonauts of “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” Going loco! DOWN in Aca-pulco!
The Tops did a performance of it on Top of the Pops in December 1988. Perfectly choreographed and dressed as always, singing with as much exuberance as they did “I Can’t Help Myself.” Because they had a UK hit, the TOTP producer kept them in London for another day to tape a second performance, causing them to miss the flight they’d booked, which was blown up over Scotland by terrorist bomb. “Loco in Acapulco,” whatever its sins, quite possibly saved their lives.
ACT V: EXEUNT OMNES
Lawrence
Their recording days were over and they settled into a touring life.
Around 1996, Lawrence Payton, who had felt worn down, went to a neurologist, who found that he had high PSA levels. He didn’t go back for a follow-up exam, as the doctor recommended. “He tried to put it out of his mind for a year,” Fakir wrote, until one night, when the Tops were playing Atlantic City, Payton couldn’t go on. He had developed a boil and felt awful. The engagement was cancelled and Payton flew home to Detroit, where he learned that cancer had spread from his prostate to his liver and bladder.
The other Tops visited Payton in the hospital, held “little meetings with him, talking like we always did,” Fakir wrote. “But it became too difficult for him to speak. He’d just nod.” Payton was moved to his house in Southfield, a Detroit suburb, where he died early in the morning of 20 July 1997.
“He just eased on out,” Fakir said. Payton was fifty-nine, “the youngest one of us. We weren’t prepared to let him go.”
The funeral was in Oak Grove. BeBe Winans sang. Stubbs, Fakir, and Benson did a tune that Payton had written a few years before: “there’ll always be the four of us.” They stood at Payton’s casket, “touching him for the last time,” Fakir said. “We cried like babies. It was inconceivable that he was gone.”
They had all thought that once one Top was gone, the others wouldn’t perform under that name again. “But somehow we decided to carry on,” Fakir said. They would tour as a trio. Their manager suggested an alteration—the Three Tops, or The Tops. After briefly considering the latter name, they balked. “We’d worked together for years to remain a foursome, which was our identity,” Fakir said. “The Four Tops was a brand, not a number.”
For a few seconds each night, in the space between when the announcer said their name and when they took their positions on stage, there were still four of them.
Obie
One day in 2004, Obie Benson stubbed his toe, or “at least that’s what we thought,” Fakir said. After a week, the toe grew discolored and Benson had pains shooting up his leg. He kept doing gigs although he could barely dance—he’d have a physical therapist massage him before and after. He passed out in the middle of a Christmas performance. Somehow he kept working until March 2005, when he sang “Reach Out I’ll Be There” with the Tops on the Late Show: it was his last appearance.
The doctors told him he had gangrene, that it had spread, that his leg had to be amputated. Benson woke up after surgery, dazed on painkillers, and screamed at the doctor, “motherfucker! I came to you with a hurt leg and a bad toe and you cut off my whole motherfucking leg!” Fakir said that Benson called him, incredulous, begging him to come get him out of the hospital, as though somehow “the two of us could fix it.”
While Benson was in the hospital, they ran further tests and found he had Stage Four lung cancer. He had a heart attack while undergoing chemotherapy and died in Harper University Hospital in Detroit, in the early morning of 1 July 2005. He was sixty-nine.
Levi
“Having Levi still alive was my greatest consolation,” Fakir wrote.
Stubbs was never the same after Payton died. The three-man Four Tops toured for a while, but Fakir had to do all of the high harmonies, and Stubbs grew wearied. They became a quartet again, hiring an ex-Temptation, Theo Peoples, as their new tenor.
One night, before a show co-headlining with the Beach Boys, Stubbs found that his legs and voice were too weak for him to perform. Ronnie McNeir, the Tops’ pianist, had to be the fourth Top that night. When the Tops walked on stage, the audience yelled “where’s Levi?” A Four Tops without Levi Stubbs was inconceivable, yet here it was. (Another shout: “what’s up with those shoes?” McNeir had had no time to get proper shoes and wore his own, which were fit for piano pedals, not dancing).
Stubbs left the Four Tops at the end of the century: his last show was a Christmas party at the White House, in the ebb of Bill Clinton’s presidency. In the years afterward, he had a series of strokes which, at times, left him unable to move. A man with one of the most magnificent voices on earth now struggled to speak. He developed diabetes and his teeth had deteriorated—the latter was owed to a horrific dentist Stubbs had seen during a UK tour, Fakir claimed, saying that Stubbs’ teeth had never recovered. Fakir would visit Stubbs to find him “lying in one spot, moaning and groaning.”
Stubbs died in his home in Detroit, early in the morning of 17 October 2008. “His passing was merciful for him but it just killed me,” Fakir said. “It was the first time in my life that I felt truly alone.”
Duke
Duke kept living.
“I’m not going to ever retire,” he wrote in 2021. “The Lord can retire me…I know I’m not in the fourth quarter anymore, I’m in overtime.”
He would be the remnant, the original in the group’s new formations [the early 2010s version seen above]. The Four Tops would be Peoples (1998-2010, 2025-; lead vocal), McNeir (2000-present; second tenor), Lawrence Payton Jr. (2005-present; bass/baritone—Payton’s son and Benson’s heir in the group), Harold “Spike” Bonhart (2010-2018; lead vocal), Alexander Morris (2018-2025; lead vocal), and Michael Brock (2024-present, first tenor).
Fakir did a podcast, he wrote a memoir, he was on stage until autumn 2023—in his old age, he had a baronial elegance in his manner. He was here for so long that it became difficult to imagine a world without him; it still does. He died of bladder cancer and heart failure in his home in Detroit, on 22 July 2024. He was eighty-eight.
The Four Tops (A Four Tops) are doing a run of shows in California in a month. Berry Gordy is still here, as are the Hollands. Motown is a brand, a playlist, an earmarked time. Hitsville is a museum. Detroit endures.
A night at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, at the dawn of the Sixties. The Four Tops are young; they ring with ambition. Tonight they’re part of Billy Eckstine’s act. Before the show, Eckstine takes Duke Fakir aside, parts the curtain with his hand, tells him to look out at the audience.
“Take care of them. They’ve been taking care of me no matter what I’ve done all my life,” Eckstine says. “Don’t play them cheap, because they will be your life.” And so they would be, and so they were.
64 Quartets 