I can think of fewer than a half-dozen groups that stoked my teenage fires the way the Four Tops did. Their music was the epitome of the Motown Sound. The Supremes and the Temptations and The Miracles were great, too, but the Tops...damn, they rocked.
They weren't just Soul music. The Four Tops delivered their music hard and heavily produced with magical harmonies.
"Larry, Levi, Duke and Renaldo," Hy Lit called them when he played their songs on WIBG on the station I listened to during my youth in Philadelphia. Damn, their songs sounded great on AM radio.
Sadly, the years took their toll and the group had fewer and fewer hits, eventually leaving Motown but continuing their concert rounds. I saw them at The Latin Casino in Cherry Hill NJ and it was a couple of the most magical hours ever in my life.
Larry Payton was the first to pass away, Levi Stubbs (also the voice of Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors..."feed me, Seymour!") fell ill and was replaced and today we receive the news that Renaldo Benson is gone, leaving Duke Fakir as the sole surviving original member.
As of July 1, 2005, there are Seven Rooms of Gloom in the my home.
My Four Tops Greatest Hits CD is getting a lot of play these days.
I don't want to see these guys as some "remembered and reassembled " group on PBS, populated by twenty-something sound-alike singers. The Tops' original work stands on it's own.
Never was anything like it before, never will be again.
Larry, Levi, Duke and Renaldo. Mighty, mighty Four Tops. Bless 'em all.