Abdul “Duke” Fakir, the final surviving unique member of the beloved Motown group the Four Tops that was recognized for such hits as “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” and “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” has died at age 88.
Fakir died Monday of coronary heart failure at his dwelling in Detroit, in line with a household spokesperson, along with his spouse and different family members by his aspect.
The Four Tops had been amongst Motown’s hottest and enduring acts, peaking within the Nineteen Sixties. Between 1964 and 1967, they’d 11 prime 20 hits and two No. 1’s: “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” and the operatic traditional “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” Other songs, usually sagas of romantic ache and bereavement, included “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” “Bernadette” and “Just Ask the Lonely.”
Many of Motown’s best stars, from the Supremes to Stevie Wonder, got here of age on the Detroit-based firm based by Berry Gordy within the late Nineteen Fifties. But Fakir, lead singer Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Lawrence Payton had been together for a decade when Gordy signed them up in 1963 (after the group had turned him down a few years earlier) and they already had a polished stage act and versatile vocal style that enabled them to perform anything from country songs to pop standards like “Paper Doll.”
They known as themselves the Four Aims after they began out, however quickly renamed themselves the Four Tops to keep away from confusion with the white concord quartet the Ames Brothers.
The Tops had recorded for a number of labels, together with the famed Chess Records in Chicago, with little industrial success. But Gordy and A&R man Mickey Stevenson paired them with the songwriting-production crew of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland they usually shortly caught on, mixing tight, haunting harmonies (with Fakir as lead tenor) behind Stubbs’ pressing, generally determined baritone.
After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Tops had extra sporadic success, with hits over the subsequent few years together with “Still Water (Love),” and a pair of prime 10 songs within the early Nineteen Seventies for ABC/Dunhill Records, ”Keeper of the Castle” and “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got).” They reached the highest 20 for the final time within the early Eighties, with the sentimental ballad “When She Was My Girl.”
Throughout, they remained a busy live performance act and at occasions toured with latter day members of the Temptations, a pleasant rivalry launched when the teams carried out collectively on the all-star 1983 tv live performance marking Motown’s twenty fifth anniversary. While the Temptations and different friends suffered from drug issues, inside dissension and personnel adjustments, the Four Tops remained united and intact till Payton died in 1997. (Benson died in 2005 and Stubbs in 2008).
“The things I love about them the most — they are very professional, they have fun with what they do, they are very loving, they have always been gentlemen,” Wonder stated of them when he helped induct them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
Fakir later toured because the Four Tops with lead vocalist Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNeir and Lawrence ‘Roquel’ Payton Jr., the son of Lawrence Payton.
“As each one of them (the original members) passed a little bit of me left with them,” Fakir informed UK Music Reviews in 2021. “When Levi left us, I found myself in a quandary as to what I was going to do from that moment on but after a while I realized that the name together with the legacy that they had left us simply had to carry on, and judging by the audience reaction it soon became pretty evident that I did the right thing and I really do feel good about that.”
Besides the Rock Hall of Fame, their honors included being voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and receiving a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2009. More lately, Fakir was engaged on a deliberate Broadway musical based mostly on their lives and accomplished the memoir “I’ll Be There,” revealed in 2022.
Fakir was married twice, for the final 50 years to Piper Gibson, and had seven kids. (Six survive him). In the mid-Nineteen Sixties, he was briefly engaged to Mary Wilson of the Supremes.
A lifelong Detroit resident who stayed dwelling even after Gordy moved the label to Los Angeles in early Nineteen Seventies, Fakir was of Ethiopian and Bangladeshi descent and grew up in a tough neighborhood the place rival Black and white gangs fought usually. He had early goals of being knowledgeable athlete, however was additionally a gifted singer whose tenor introduced him consideration as a performer in his church choir. He was in his teenagers when he befriended Stubbs, and the 2 first sang with Benson and Payton at a celebration thrown by an area “girl” group whom Fakir remembered as “high-class, very fine young ladies.”
“Singing was the by-product of us going to the party looking for the girls!” Fakir stated in a 2016 interview with https://writewyattuk.com.
“We told Levi to just pick a song and sing the lead. We’d just back him up. Well, when he started, we all fell in like we’d been rehearsing the song for months! Our blend was incredible. We were just looking at each other as we were singing, and right after we said, ’Man, this is a group! This is a group!’”
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