Duke Fakir received his Lifetime Achievement Award backstage at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards on February 8, 2009 in Los Angeles. The last one died of heart failure on Monday at the age of 88.
Matt Sayles/AP
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Matt Sayles/AP
NEW YORK — Abdul “Duke” Fakir is the last surviving original member of the beloved Motown band The Four Tops, best known for their hit “Reach Out” , I’ll Be There” and “Standing in the Shadows of Love”.
Fakir died Monday of heart failure at his home in Detroit with his wife and other loved ones by his side, according to a family spokesman. Motown founder Berry Gordy said in a statement that Fakir helped embody the Tops’ “showmanship, class and artistry.”
“Duke was the first tenor—smooth, urbane, and always sharp,” Gordy said. “For 70 years, he kept the extraordinary legacy of four top stars intact.”
The Four Tops were one of Motown’s most popular and enduring groups, reaching their peak in the 1960s. Between 1964 and 1967, they had 11 top 20 hits, including two number one hits: “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” and the opera classic “Reach Out I’ll Be There”. Other songs are often sagas of romantic pain and bereavement, including “Baby I Need Your Love,” “Standing in Love’s Shadow,” “Bernadette” and “Just Ask the Lonely.”
From the Supremes to Stevie Wonder, many of Motown’s biggest stars grew up on the Detroit company founded by Gordy in the late 1950s. But Fakir, lead vocalist Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Lawrence Payton were the first to join Gordy in 1963 When he signed with them (the band turned him down a few years ago), they had been together for ten years and they already had a great stage show. (like “Paper Doll”).
They first called themselves Four Tops, but quickly renamed themselves Four Tops to avoid confusion with white harmony quartet the Ames Brothers.
The Tops recorded for several record labels, including Chicago’s famous Chess Records, but did not achieve any commercial success. But Gordy and A&R member Mickey Stevenson paired them with the songwriting-production team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland, and they quickly caught on, blending a tight, haunting blend behind Stubbs’ urgent, sometimes desperate baritone. Unforgettable harmonies.
After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Tops enjoyed some sporadic success, releasing hits including “Still Water (Love)” and two ABC/Dunhill Records singles over the next few years Top ten songs of the early 1970s, “Keeper of the Castle” and “No Woman (Like the One Around Me)”. Their last top 20 hit was in the early 1980s with the sentimental ballad “When She Was My Girl.”
Throughout, they maintained a busy concert schedule and sometimes toured with later members of the Temptations. A friendly competition. Although the Temptations and other contemporaries were plagued by drug problems, disagreements and personnel changes, the Top Four remained united and intact until Payton’s death in 1997 (Benson died in 2005 and Stubbs died in died in 2008).
“The thing I love most about them is — they’re so professional, they have so much fun with what they do, they’re so caring, they’ve always been gentlemen,” Wonder said of them as he helped them get into the Rock Hall. Become famous.
Fakir later toured with the Four Tops, along with lead vocalist Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNeil and Lawrence “Rockell” Payton (Lawrence Payton’s son).
“Each one of them[the original members]left a little bit of me,” Fakir told British Music Review in 2021. “When Levi left us, I found myself in a dilemma, not knowing what to do from that moment on, but after a while, I realized that this name and the legacy they left us must continue, Judging by the reaction from the audience, it quickly became obvious that I had done the right thing, and I really felt good about it.
In addition to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, their honors include being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and receiving the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. in the Broadway musical and has completed the memoir I’ll Be There, due out in 2022.
Fakir has been married twice in the past 50 years to Piper Gibson, with whom he has seven children. (He is survived by six people). In the mid-1960s, he was briefly engaged to Supremes member Mary Wilson.
A lifelong resident of Detroit, Fakir remained at home even after Gordy moved the brand to Los Angeles in the early 1970s. He had early dreams of becoming a professional athlete and was also a talented singer whose tenor voice brought him attention as a performer in church choirs. He became friends with Stubbs when he was a teenager, and the two first sang with Benson and Peyton at a birthday party thrown by a local “girls” group, Fakir remembers The group is “high class, very fine young ladies”.
“Singing is a by-product of us going to parties and looking for girls!” Fakir told https://writewyattuk.com in 2016.
“We told Levi to just pick a song and sing lead vocals. We just backed him up. Well, when he started, we were all into it, like we’d been rehearsing this song for months! Our mix It was unbelievable. We were singing and looking at each other and we were like, ‘Man, this is a band!’
