“I could never figure out whether Levi was the toughest or the tenderest singer at Motown, so I finally accepted that he was both.”

It was also a “duh!” moment for me. And a revelation which made me laugh out loud and impress people with for the next 17 or 18 years.

Levi Stubbs could turn flowery prog into apocalyptic soul (Simple Game, which used to scare the hell out of me and was only kept from a Popular post by Maggie May and Redbone’s Witch Queen Of New Orleans). He could take two unimpeachable classics - Tim Hardin’s If I Were A Carpenter and the Left Banke’s Walk Away Renee - and make them new, more intense, doubly emotional. Soul has many screamers who over-emote (I’ll court trouble by citing Aretha Franklin and James Brown) but Levi Stubbs was always entirely beautiful, believable, walking a lonely street, standing in the shadows.

Beyond Reach Out, The Four Tops’ best records were brumal (the stormy strings on Simple Game) and brittle with frost (the harpsichord on If I Were A Carpenter), the eerie angelic bv’s (see Seven Rooms Of Gloom) sounding like Christmas gone wrong. Their desperation and resignation - exemplified by the “…makes me feel half alive” line on Baby I Need Your Loving - seems somehow Unamerican.

Add all this up and it makes sense the Four Tops were the biggest Motown act in the UK, bigger even than the Supremes.

A great pity that we haven’t seen more of the Four Tops in Popular, but he’s remembered here by one of the very best.

Oopps!

Eric

“Reach Out I’ll Be There” is one of the greatest songs ever recorded (in the history of Rhythm and Blues). . . . There is nothing like it in the entire literature!

Take another listen to the Tops’ backing vocals. Check out how the song builds in intensity and, seemingly, speed with the Tops’ great antiphonal chanting (e.g., “No piece of mind to be found”) against Levi’s tremendous lead vocal.

The Four Tops also harmonize the ‘Reach out’ choruses slightly different each time. So, the song contains more than just “Dylanesque phrasing.” It contains a level of vocal dynamicism that’s unrivaled.

- Eric

But I think the Miss Lonely is a personification of all that was wrong with American at the time. And as the the “times were a changing” the old guard found themselves invisible with no secrets to conceal.

Granted it didn’t all come off as planned/hoped but there were many smug comforatable lives that were changed by a new awareness ushered in during this volatile social & political era.

But I think the Miss Lonely is a personification of all that was wrong with American at the time. And as the the “times were a changing” the old guard found themselves invisible with no secrets to conceal.

Granted it didn’t all come off as planned/hoped but there were many smug comforatable lives that were changed by a new awareness ushered in during this volatile social & political era.

By the way, the New York Dolls’ “Frankenstein” manages to do “Reach Out I’ll Be There” and “Like A Rolling Stone” simultaneously.

BUT, it seems to me that this Motown v.s Dylan thing has really gotten out of hand.

I can’t really see any R ‘n’ B or ” Soul ” singer looking to Bob Dylan to help his delivery or phrasing.

Motown , Stax, Atlantic artists were more in tune with Gospel and Blues than folkie Dylan. They don’t have to borrow from Bob wehne they had Sam Cooke , Lou Rawls, Jackie Wilson and a host of Black voices that punch and bawl their way through a song.

Dylan ? ” AH, come on, now “

Brian in Canada

I think the main difference between these songs for me is the strong sense that Miss Lonely once had something and that the person being sung to in “Reach Out” never had anything to begin with; she is already invisible and probably has things to conceal, although who knows? Maybe she’s beyond caring.

Once upon a time/I proofread so fine/but damn/I don’t now understood/what happened to my grammar.

I was surrounded by Miss Lonelys and aching for them.

But that was in 1970 at age 16, when I went back and discovered Dylan. Wasn’t listening to pop radio back in 1965.

Well, Holland-Dozier-Holland certainly didn’t “get” Dylan, or if they did they made the conscious decision to do something different, but not the polar opposite, exactly. For one thing, “happiness is just an illusion” is a Dylan touch right there - not your happiness, but happiness itself; something’s rotten in the state of happiness; though of course the line can and probably should be understood in a different way - “happiness seems unattainable,” for instance, and that’s probably how most listeners would have understood it. But the other reading is there for those who want it.

“Like A Rolling Stone” itself was understand in a lot of ways, which is one reason for its popularity. Mouse & the Traps thought that Dylan was just putting down some bitch, and gleefully did the same; the Young Rascals sing their cover version as if they’re also putting down some bitch. But I heard the song as absolutely and totally drenched in sentiment, way more than “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” and about 100 times more romantic to boot. I mean, I was surrounded by Miss Lonelys and aching for them. At the end Dylan, just like Levi, does tell Miss Lonely to reach out to him.

Of course, Dylan’s not telling Miss Lonely that happiness is an illusion, he’s telling her that she’s an illusion; and he’s not offering to rescue her from confusion, since it’s the confusion that rescues her from herself. And he’s not offering to take her home, he’s demanding that she hit the highway. But he’s sure offering to go with her, or at least offering her some Dylan lookalikes: the Mystery Tramp and Napoleon In Rags. So Napoleon Tramp and Miss Lonely can go off arm-in-arm in the moonlight, now that she’s had her false identity blasted from her. La di da.

(Of course then there’s “Memphis Blues Again,” but that’s later.)

“Reach Out” is just a strong man helping damsel in distress; “Like A Rolling Stone” is gamblers embracing the distress as a means to shed the bullshit and share the love on the wild highway.

(On the comics tip: I like Craig Thompson and Ho Che Anderson and if you put them together, it’s like this song, if not Marvel Comics.)

Probably Motown was consciously reaching for the white audience and reaching for a hipness that they never actually got but didn’t yet need, ’cause the hipsters would buy them anyway in 1966. It’s sung to Miss Lonely if you simplify her down to a lost girl in the scary city.

Scared me too, and I was 12. One reason was that it reminded me of the overture to Carmen; this overture would play at the start of an opera radio show my parents listened to back when I was 5; the show itself was some genial soft-spoken guy playing highlights from one or another deceased opera singer’s career. The show itself provoked no fear (except the fear of being bored): but the intro-overture was absolutely menacing. Now, Holland-Dozier-Holland weren’t using the Carmen riff, but what they came up with was even more menacing, maybe not to a 12-year-old’s ears, but to the 5-year-old memory feelings that the 12-year-old retained.

I didn’t like the song. But somehow I must have loved it even in the dislike, since when it resurfaced in my mid ’60s rediscovery days (c. 1972), the song thoroughly astounded me.

I’ve always wondered what went through the minds of Holland-Dozier-Holland when the time came, three months later, to write and produce the Tops’ next single. “How do we follow up THAT??”

wwolfe

KG