Soul Bearers

The plan, as dreamed up by Motown’s founder and the architect of its sound, Berry Gordy Jr., was not so much to make black music safe for a white audience but to make it colorblind, to get black and white kids out on the dance floor together without their having to think about it too much. And so his writers, producers and most of his marquee singers — Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross — sifted out the rougher parts of the blues; there was heartache, sure, but it was at the service of finger-snapping, hip- swaying joy. It was sexy, suave, sweetly spun soul. But when it came to Levi Stubbs, the lead singer of the Four Tops, the pain proved insoluble.

Stubbs had one of those big, load-bearing voices that hold up the weight not just of a musical style but also of an entire era’s moods. His booming, pleading baritone exploded into every line of every song, so that even as banal a phrase as “Sugar pie, honey bunch” packed waves of wallops. Perhaps because the Tops were a little older than most Motown acts and had sung together for nearly 10 years, Gordy decided not to tamp Stubbs down but instead had his writers and producers push him the other way. The tracks behind him, still the steady, trademark Motown 4/4, became a bit more martial and urgent, and Stubbs was encouraged to grab high-hanging fruit beyond his range; and he didn’t just grab, he lunged.

Think of the galloping thunder of “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” which thanks to Stubbs’s alternating grunts, chants and exhortations encapsulated all of the passion of the ’60s: civil rights, the sexual revolution, the war; or the skittering paranoia of “Shake Me, Wake Me,” whose Hitchcockian piano and strings were just a backdrop for Stubbs’s thrashing night sweats. In “Bernadette,” Stubbs sang of love not as a teenage crush but as an Othello-like obsession; the a cappella howl of her name near the end of the song was the sound of a man in the throes of sex or death, and of car radios going tilt. (According to the Motown historian Adam White, during the session, the prideful Stubbs was having trouble nailing a note, and the producers, Holland/Dozier/Holland, called over a few young women from an adjoining studio; Stubbs got the note on the next take.) Maybe the most devastating of all was “Ask the Lonely,” in which, as the notes surge higher and higher, Stubbs sings about “a story of sadness, a story too hard to believe.” This was as heavy as Motown got then, but heavy didn’t mean bogged down; the Tops were probably the only act of their time who could get the kids on “American Bandstand” dancing to a song called “Seven Rooms of Gloom.” (More than a decade later, new-wave nihilists like the Smiths had nothing on the Tops.)

There were calmer moments: one, a post-Motown hit, “Sweet Understanding Love,” showed the rare perky side of the Tops, but when Stubbs sang the line “You made me a winner,” his credibility was untarnished, because you could still hear all the bruises and battle scars. And by this time it was clear that Stubbs could have been singing as much about the Tops as about any romance. The original group stayed together more than 40 years; Stubbs had only one solo singing gig his entire career, as the voice of Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors,” and split his income with the rest of the group; there was never any thought of renaming the act “Levi Stubbs and the Tops.” Their legacy was so strong that of all the Motown legends, their songs have not produced any big hit remakes. And you get the feeling that’s because Stubbs’s voice, supported by the Tops’ fraternal harmonies and the grooves of the Motown studio cats, said: No need to look any further; I can carry you.

Dee Dee Warwick had a different burden to bear. Like Stubbs, she had a big whomp of a voice and got to work with some of the best producers and writers in the business. While she was still a teenager, she was among the most in-demand backup singers on the New York studio scene. She had a strong musical pedigree: her mother was the founder of a well-respected gospel group, the Drinkard Singers, which also included her aunt Emily, who went on to become Cissy Houston, the mother of Whitney. But she also had a big sister who happened to be the most successful female solo artist of the post-British Invasion ’60s, and that came to be a yoke, one she could never quite shake.