On June 6, 1936, Levi Stubbs was born. We take his birthday as the occasion to celebrate the career of the Four Tops, the Motown quartet which featured Stubbs as its lead singer for almost 50 years.
The members of the Four Tops met as high school students in Detroit. Stubbs and Abdul “Duke” Fakir, born December 26, 1935, attended Pershing High; Renaldo “Obie” Benson, born June 14, 1936, and Lawrence Payton, born March 2, 1938, went to Northern High. They first sang together at a 1953 birthday party, at the request of friends who had heard them sing separately.
The combination worked, and they decided to keep singing together. They chose the name the Four Aims, to reflect their high aims for success. In 1956, they signed with Chess Records, and the label’s executives suggested that they change their name to avoid confusion with the Ames Brothers, who were a popular male quartet at the time.
The idea that anyone might confuse the traditional pop of the Ames Brothers with the Four Tops seems silly today, but in their early going, the Four Tops sang mostly jazz and pop standards and performed mostly in dinner theater. And they performed a lot, polishing their stage presence while recording with a variety of record companies. Even when they signed with Motown in 1963, they spent their first year recording for Motown’s jazz label, Workshop, and singing backup on singles for Motown’s other acts.
Things changed in 1964. The Holland-Dozier-Holland writing/production team, made up of Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, had written a new song, and they gave it to the Four Tops to record. “Baby I Need Your Loving” was a hit, and the Four Tops weren’t relegated to the jazz label anymore.
Their sound was distinctive. Most male groups feature a tenor as their lead singer. Stubbs had a lower baritone voice, but Holland-Dozier-Holland usually wrote songs for him in the tenor range, requiring him to strain a bit to hit the notes and giving his voice a stronger sense of urgency.
For the next three years, the Four Tops could seemingly do no wrong. They had a pair of #1 pop hits—“I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” and “Reach Out I’ll Be There”—and made the top ten with several more songs. By the end of 1967, at the height of the Motown era, they were second only to the Temptations among the label’s male groups and began to record songs that took them a bit further from the core Motown sound. Their biggest hits of 1968 were both cover songs, versions of Tim Hardin’s instant folk standard “If I Were a Carpenter” and the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee.”
The departure from their usual sound wasn’t entirely of their own choosing. Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in late 1967 in a dispute over royalties. Without their usual writer/producer team, the Four Tops did struggle a bit in the late 1960s. They found their footing a bit in 1970, when “Still Water (Love)” and a cover of the 50s pop song “It’s All in the Game” both made the top ten of the R&B chart.
Also in 1970, the Four Tops recorded the first of three duet albums with the Supremes, collected as a box set under the name Magnificent. The Supremes had done well with a pair of albums with the Temptations a few years earlier, and Motown hoped to repeat the success. The Supremes/Four Tops albums weren’t quite as successful as the Supremes/Temptations albums had been, perhaps reflecting the difference between the Supremes with Diana Ross and the Supremes without, but the collaboration produced a modest hit in a cover of “River Deep - Mountain High.”
In 1972, Motown announced that it was moving from Detroit to Los Angeles. Some of the label’s older acts, including the Four Tops, chose to leave the label and remain in Detroit. They signed with ABC-Dunhill, and the title track from their first album for the label, Keeper of the Castle, was their first top ten pop hit in five years; the follow-up, “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got),” did even better.
The Four Tops continued to have R&B hits through the early 1970s, but by the end of the decade, had mostly faded from the spotlight. They spent the 1980s moving from one record company to another and had occasional flashes of their old success. The 1981 single “When She Was My Girl” took them back to the top 40 for the first time in almost a decade.
The 1983 TV special Motown 25 featured a “battle of the bands” between the Four Tops and the Temptations. It was a highlight of the show, and the two groups began touring together. The Four Tops had their last chart success with a pair of duets in 1988. “If Ever a Love There Was” paired the Four Tops and Aretha Franklin, and “Indestructible” teamed them with Smokey Robinson.
In December 1988, after finishing a European tour, the Four Tops overslept and missed their flight back to the United States. That turned out to be good luck; they had been booked on Pan Am flight 103, the Lockerbie bombing in which 270 people were killed.
After the release of Indestructible in 1988, the Four Tops focused on touring; their only new recording has been a 1995 Christmas album.
In 1997, Lawrence Payton died. The original Four Tops had performed together for 44 years. The three surviving members briefly performed as The Tops before recruiting Theo Peoples, a former member of the Temptations, to join the group. Levi Stubbs had to leave the group a few years later when he became ill with cancer; He died in 2008. Obie Benson died in 2005 and was replaced by Lawrence Payton’s son, Roquel.
There have been a few more membership changes in the last decade, but the Four Tops still perform, and original member Duke Fakir, now 84, has been singing with the group for more than 65 years.
The Four Tops have, not surprisingly, been inducted into every appropriate Hall of Fame—Rock and Roll in 1990, Vocal Group in 1999, and R&B in 2013. They received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, and two of their songs—"Reach Out I’ll Be There” and “I Can’t Help Myself”—have been added to the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Unless they’re specifically linked elsewhere, all of the songs mentioned above are included on the Four Tops Essential Collection. The box set Fourever is a more comprehensive overview of their career, and the 2007 collection Lost Without You collects some obscurities and previously unreleased songs from their Motown years. The rest of the Four Tops’ studio albums are available for streaming at Hoopla.