Singer Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, final surviving unique member of Motown’s the 4 Tops, dies at 88

NEW YORK — Abdul “Duke” Fakir, the final surviving unique member of the beloved Motown group the 4 Tops that was recognized for such hits as “Attain Out, I am going to Be There” and “Standing within the Shadows of Love,” has died at age 88.

Fakir died Monday of coronary heart failure at his house in Detroit, in keeping with a household spokesperson, together with his spouse and different family members by his aspect.

Motown founder Berry Gordy mentioned in an announcement that Fakir helped embody the Tops’ “showmanship, class and artistry.”

“Duke was first tenor – clean, suave, and all the time sharp,” Gordy mentioned. “For 70 years, he stored the 4 Tops’ outstanding legacy intact.”

The 4 Tops have been amongst Motown’s hottest and enduring acts, peaking within the Nineteen Sixties. Between 1964 and 1967, they’d 11 high 20 hits and two No. 1’s: “I Cannot Assist Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” and the operatic traditional “Attain Out I am going to Be There.” Different songs, typically sagas of romantic ache and bereavement, included “Child I Want Your Loving,” “Standing within the Shadows of Love,” “Bernadette” and “Simply Ask the Lonely.”

A lot of Motown’s biggest stars, from the Supremes to Stevie Surprise, got here of age on the Detroit-based firm began by Gordy within the late Fifties. However Fakir, lead singer Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Lawrence Payton had been collectively for a decade when Gordy signed them up in 1963 (after the group had turned him down a couple of years earlier) and so they already had a cultured stage act and versatile vocal fashion that enabled them to carry out something from nation songs to pop requirements like “Paper Doll.”

They referred to as themselves the 4 Goals after they began out, however quickly renamed themselves the 4 Tops to keep away from confusion with the white concord quartet the Ames Brothers.

The Tops had recorded for a number of labels, together with the famed Chess Information in Chicago, with little business success. However Gordy and A&R man Mickey Stevenson paired them with the songwriting-production workforce of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland and so they rapidly caught on, mixing tight, haunting harmonies behind Stubbs’ pressing, generally determined baritone.

After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Tops had extra sporadic success, with hits over the following few years together with “Nonetheless Water (Love),” and a pair of high 10 songs within the early Seventies for ABC/Dunhill Information, “Keeper of the Fortress” and “Ain’t No Girl (Just like the One I’ve Bought).” They reached the highest 20 for the final time within the early Nineteen Eighties, with the sentimental ballad “When She Was My Lady.”

All through, they remained a busy live performance act and at instances toured with latter day members of the Temptations, a pleasant rivalry launched when the teams carried out collectively on the all-star 1983 tv live performance marking Motown’s twenty fifth anniversary. Whereas the Temptations and different friends suffered from drug issues, dissension and personnel adjustments, the 4 Tops remained united and intact till Payton died in 1997. (Benson died in 2005 and Stubbs in 2008).

“The issues I really like about them probably the most – they’re very skilled, they’ve enjoyable with what they do, they’re very loving, they’ve all the time been gents,” Surprise mentioned of them when he helped induct them into the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame in 1990.

Fakir later toured because the 4 Tops with lead vocalist Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNeir and Lawrence ‘Roquel’ Payton Jr., the son of Lawrence Payton.

“As every considered one of them (the unique members) handed a little bit little bit of me left with them,” Fakir instructed UK Music Evaluations in 2021. “When Levi left us, I discovered myself in a quandary as to what I used to be going to do from that second on however after some time I noticed that the title along with the legacy that they’d left us merely needed to stick with it, and judging by the viewers response it quickly grew to become fairly evident that I did the suitable factor and I actually do be ok with that.”

Moreover the Rock Corridor of Fame, their honors included being voted into the Grammy Corridor of Fame in 1998 and receiving a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2009. Extra lately, Fakir had been engaged on a deliberate Broadway musical based mostly on their lives and accomplished the memoir “I am going to Be There,” revealed in 2022.

Fakir was married twice, for the final 50 years to Piper Gibson, and had seven kids. (Six survive him). Within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, he was briefly engaged to Mary Wilson of the Supremes.

A lifelong Detroit resident who stayed house even after Gordy moved the label to Los Angeles in early Seventies, Fakir was of Ethiopian and Bangladeshi descent and grew up in a tough neighborhood the place rival Black and white gangs fought typically. He had early desires of being knowledgeable athlete, however was additionally a proficient singer whose tenor introduced him consideration as a performer in his church choir. He was in his teenagers when he befriended Stubbs, and the 2 first sang with Benson and Payton at a birthday celebration thrown by a neighborhood “lady” group whom Fakir remembered as “high-class, very effective younger girls.”

“Singing was the by-product of us going to the get together searching for the ladies!” Fakir mentioned in a 2016 interview.

“We instructed Levi to only choose a track and sing the lead. We would simply again him up. Effectively, when he began, all of us fell in like we might been rehearsing the track for months! Our mix was unimaginable. We have been simply taking a look at one another as we have been singing, and proper after we mentioned, ‘Man, this can be a group! This can be a group!'”