Top of Their Game
LEVI, LARRY, OBIE AND DUKE RAISE THE RIVERSIDE ROOF
Technically, it’s a different album. And an intriguing one at that.
The original edition of Four Tops Live! was released by Motown in the U.S. on November 16, 1966. Now, a deluxe edition is due on vinyl from Spain’s Elemental Music on July 24. The Barcelona-based firm, working closely with Universal Music, is delivering a reissue that’s an unusual and evocative piece of work.
OK, OK, time for the detail.
‘The fullest historical document possible’
The ’66 release of Four Tops Live! featured performances recorded that year at the Upper Deck of Detroit’s Roostertail nightclub on Monday, August 22 and Sunday, September 11. The group played two shows there on both nights, with local disc jockey Scott Regen as master of ceremonies.
The forthcoming 2LP version of the album (it will also be available to stream) contains all the songs heard on the 1966 edition, but mostly in alternative versions, taken from performances on one or other of the two Roostertail nights. The set also has previously unissued renderings of “Something About You” and “Michelle,” as well as “I’m Falling For You,” a song with a special place in the Tops’ pre-Motown history.
“Producers recorded the Tops over two shows on August 22,” writes the set’s own producer, Harry Weinger, in the liner notes, “but it wasn’t enough. Beset by headshaking audio issues, they found the first set more of a tech rehearsal and stopped taping halfway through ‘If I Had A Hammer.’ Only ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ from that night made the [original] LP. Across the second show reels, an engineer scribbled ‘recut’ next to several tunes.”
That August night was the first of seven “Motown Mondays” staged at the riverside venue, featuring a succession of Motown hitmakers. Edited excerpts of 30 minutes’ duration were subsequently aired by Detroit’s WKNR (“Keener 13”) and hosted by Regen, an immensely popular broadcaster on the station at the time. “The Roostertail was the club in Detroit,” Regen told me years later. “It took Motown to a new level. The Roostertail was like the Copacabana.”
Yet the Upper Deck sought to attract a younger generation than the larger, downstairs room, which booked older, more established stars. (On the night of the Tops’ August show, the act playing downstairs was singer Patti Page, in floor-length sequined silver.) Even so, “you had to dress to go to the Upper Deck,” said Tom Schoenith, whose family owned the venue. “You had to be dressed [in] jacket and tie, the girls had to wear skirts, and they couldn’t be short or very tight.”
However outfitted, there was a full house of some 600 souls for the Tops’ Motown Monday, with various West Grand principals in the audience, including Berry Gordy, the Supremes, Brian Holland, Smokey Robinson, the Miracles’ Bobby Rogers and Marvin Gaye, who was name-checked by Regen for having completed a Copacabana run just two weeks earlier.
ECKSTINE AND THE TOPS REUNITE
In back-to-back August 22 shows, the Tops performed their growing inventory of Hitsville hits: “Baby I Need Your Loving” (“our national anthem,” declares lead singer Levi Stubbs), “Ask The Lonely,” “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” “It’s The Same Old Song,” “Shake Me, Wake Me (When It’s Over).” When they returned to the Roostertail on September 11, a boisterous “Reach Out I’ll Be There” was added to the mix, as was a tender “I’m Falling For You.”
The latter was part of Billy Eckstine’s repertoire in the early 1940s, and he continued to feature the number in concert when the Tops sang backup for him during the early ’60s. When both acts were on the same bill at New York’s Apollo Theatre in August 1965, they sang “I’m Falling For You” together. (That duet was part of a 1999 CD containing rare Tops material, including their previously-unissued Breaking Through jazz sessions for Motown.)
As well as the repertoire, what underpins the authenticity of the rejuvenated Four Tops Live! is the stage patter – there’s more of it than in the 1966 release – and the stripping out of the exaggerated audience reaction which Motown overdubbed onto the original LP. The musicians who played behind the Tops also seem better served by the new release’s audio quality – especially James Jamerson, whose bass lines are showcased to perfection on “I’ll Turn To Stone” and “You Can’t Hurry Love.”
Scott Regen makes the same point in his liner notes for the new album (he also wrote those of the 1966 edition). The Funk Brothers “did all sorts of things that you didn’t hear on the records. They’d rehearsed, of course, but there are some wonderfully spontaneous moments.” Leading the band was Earl Van Dyke, on organ.
Reaching out by the Detroit River, 60 years ago
By the time they stepped onto the Roostertail stage that summer, Levi Stubbs, Lawrence Payton, Obie Benson and Duke Fakir had been burnishing their showbiz skills for more than a decade. And they’d been especially busy in ’66 with prestigious dates in New York: Carnegie Hall in April, the Apollo Theatre in May, Basin Street East in June, and Central Park in July. “The old folks lapped it up,” wrote Billboard’s Aaron Sternfield of the Basin Street gig, “joining Levi Stubbs Jr. in clapalong and singalongs, and attempting to match the enthusiasm of the group.”
Credit for the Four Tops Live! rebirth belongs to the current group’s manager, Keith Hagan, and the afore-mentioned Harry Weinger, VP of Universal Music’s catalogue division, and longtime custodian of its classic Motown assets. “The project started because the Tops were planning a return to the Roostertail,” says Weinger, “and Keith was the one who, with this information, asked if we could reissue the album and that maybe there were some extras.”
Elemental Music founder Jordi Soley was approached “after Universal decided they would release the project digitally,” explains the European company’s general manager, Carlos Agustín Calembert. “Harry suggested that we could handle a worldwide physical edition on vinyl, and from there, the project evolved into something much more ambitious than a straightforward reissue. Once we started discussing the release, it became clear that simply reissuing the original LP would have been a missed opportunity. Harry, together with Drew Schultz, went back to the original tapes and discovered additional performances and alternate versions that had never been issued.” (Schultz, a Detroit musician/producer who is also digital music curator at the Motown Museum, is credited with mixing and mastering the Elemental Music release.)
“Rather than replacing the original album,” concludes Calembert, “the intention was to expand it into the fullest historical document possible. It has very much been a collaborative effort between Universal and Elemental.”
Perhaps the only melancholy note? That none of the original Four Tops are alive today to see how their history is respected, and their legacy sustained. But in Motown heaven…
Image notes: one of the minor delights of the Four Tops Live! vinyl reissue is the gatefold sleeve artwork, including a rare photo of the group in New York’s Times Square. It was taken during the shoot for the original album cover, then retouched to feature Detroit’s Roostertail behind them. Exactly the same Times Square backdrop appears on the cover of their next album, 4 Tops On Broadway. The photographer then was Frank Dandridge, and it seems likely that he also did the shoot for Four Tops Live! – perhaps on the same trip to Gotham.