Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, last of the original Four Tops, dies at age 88

NEW YORK (AP) — Abdul “Duke” Fakir, the last surviving original member of the beloved Motown Four Tops known for hits reminiscent of “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” and “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” has died at age 88.

Fakir died Monday of heart failure at his Detroit home, in line with a family spokesman, surrounded by his wife and other family members. Motown founder Berry Gordy said in a press release that Fakir helped embody the Tops’ “glamour, class and artistry.”

“Duke was the premier tenor — smooth, polished and always sharp,” Gordy said. “He kept the extraordinary legacy of the Four Tops intact for 70 years.”

The Four Tops were one of Motown’s hottest and enduring bands, reaching their peak in the Nineteen Sixties. Between 1964 and 1967, they’d 11 Top 20 hits and two No. 1s: “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” and the operatic classic “Reach Out I’ll Be There”. Other songs, often sagas of romantic pain and mourning, include “Baby I Need Your Loving”, “Standing in the Shadows of Love”, “Bernadette”, and “Just Ask the Lonely”.

Many of Motown’s biggest stars, from the Supremes to Stevie Wonder, had grown up in the Detroit-based company Gordy founded in the late Nineteen Fifties. But Fakir, singer Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Lawrence Payton had been together for a decade when Gordy signed them in 1963 (after the group had rejected him several years earlier) and already had a honed stage presence and a flexible vocal style that allowed them to perform every part from country songs to pop standards like “Paper Doll.”

They were originally called the Four Aims, but soon modified their name to the Four Tops to avoid confusion with the white harmony quartet the Ames Brothers.

The Tops recorded for several labels, including Chicago’s famed Chess Records, with little business success. But Gordy and A&R man Mickey Stevenson paired them with the songwriter-production team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Brian Holland, and so they quickly caught on, combining tight, haunting harmonies with Stubbs’ urgent, sometimes desperate baritone.

After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Tops enjoyed more sporadic success, with hits over the next few years including “Still Water (Love)” and two Top 10 songs in the early Seventies for ABC/Dunhill Records, “Keeper of the Castle” and “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got).” They last reached the Top 20 in the early Eighties with the sentimental ballad “When She Was My Girl”.

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They remained lively throughout and infrequently toured with later members of the Temptations, a friendly rivalry that began when the groups performed together on a 1983 televised all-star concert celebrating Motown’s twenty fifth anniversary. (*88*) the Temptations and other contemporaries suffered through drug problems, discord, and personnel changes, the Four Tops remained united and intact until Payton’s death in 1997. (Benson died in 2005, and Stubbs in 2008.)

“What I love most about them is that they’re very professional, they have fun, they do what they love, they’re very lovely and they’ve always been gentlemen,” Wonder said of them when he helped induct them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

Fakir later toured under the name Four Tops with vocalist Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNeir, and Lawrence “Roquel” Payton Jr., Lawrence Payton’s son.

“When each of them (the original members) left, a part of me left with me,” Fakir told UK Music Reviews in 2021. “When Levi left, I was in a quandary about what to do from there, but after a while I realised that the name and the legacy they left us simply had to live on, and judging by the audience’s reaction, it quickly became clear that I had done the right thing and I feel really good about it.”

In addition to the Rock Hall of Fame, their accolades include being voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and receiving a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. Fakir recently worked on a planned Broadway musical based on their lives and accomplished a memoir, “I’ll Be There,” published in 2022.

Fakir was married twice, the last 50 years to Piper Gibson, and had seven children. (Six survived him.) In the mid-Nineteen Sixties, he was briefly engaged to Mary Wilson of the Supremes.

Fakir, a Detroit native who stayed home even after Gordy moved the label to Los Angeles in the early Seventies, was of Ethiopian and Bangladeshi descent and grew up in a rough neighborhood where rival black and white gangs often fought. He dreamed of becoming knowledgeable athlete early on, but he was also a talented singer whose tenor brought him attention as a performer in a church choir. He was a young person when he befriended Stubbs, and the two first sang with Benson and Payton at a celebration thrown by an area “girl” group, which Fakir remembers as “high-class, very pretty young ladies.”

“Singing was a side effect of going to parties looking for girls!” Fakir said in an interview with https://writewyattuk.com in 2016.

“We told Levi to only pick a song and sing the lead. We just backed him up. Well, when he began, all of us fell in like we would been practicing the song for months! Our connection was amazing. We just looked at one another while we sang, and right afterward we were like, ‘Man, it is a group! This is a bunch!’