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

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

Fakir died Monday of heart failure at his Detroit home, according to a family spokesman, with his wife and other loved ones at his side. Motown founder Berry Gordy said in a statement that Fakir helped embody the “showmanship, class and artistry” of Tops.

“Duke was the first tenor — smooth, elegant and always sharp,” Gordy said. “For 70 years, he kept the remarkable legacy of the Four Tops intact.”

The Four Tops were among Motown’s most popular and enduring acts, peaking in the 1960s. Between 1964 and 1967, they had 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 grief, included “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, came of age with the Detroit-based company Gordy founded in the late 1950s. But Fakir, lead 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 turned him down a few years earlier), and they already had a polished stage act and versatile singing style that could cover everything from country numbers to pop standards like “Paper Doll.”

At first they called themselves Four Aims, but soon changed their name to Four Tops to avoid confusion with the white harmony quartet Ames Brothers.

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

After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Tops had more sporadic success, with hits in subsequent years including “Still Water (Love)” and a pair of Top 10 numbers in the early 1970s 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 1980s, with the sentimental ballad “When She Was My Girl.”

Throughout their career, they remained a busy concert group, occasionally touring with later members of the Temptations, a friendly rivalry that began when the groups performed together on Motown’s 1983 all-star televised 25th anniversary concert. While the Temptations and other cohorts struggled with drug problems, dissensions, 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 like most about them is that they are very professional, they enjoy what they do, they are very loving and they have always been real gentlemen,” Wonder said of them when he helped induct them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

Fakir later toured as the Four Tops with lead singer Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNeir and Lawrence ‘Roquel’ Payton Jr., the son of Lawrence Payton.

“When each of them (the original members) passed away, a little bit of me stayed with them,” Fakir told UK Music Reviews in 2021. “When Levi left us, I didn’t know what to do from that point on, but after a while I realised that the name along with the legacy they left us had to go on, and judging by the reaction from the audience, it quickly became clear that I had done the right thing and I feel really good about that.”

In addition to the Rock Hall of Fame, their accolades include being elected to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and receiving a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. More recently, Fakir has been working on a planned Broadway musical based on their lives and completed the memoir I’ll Be There, due for release in 2022.

Fakir was married twice, the last 50 years to Piper Gibson, and had seven children. (Six survive him.) In the mid-1960s he was briefly engaged to Mary Wilson of the Supremes.

Fakir, a lifelong Detroit resident who remained at home even after Gordy moved the label to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, was of Ethiopian and Bangladeshi descent and grew up in a rough neighborhood where rival black and white gangs often fought. He had dreams of becoming a professional athlete early on, but was also a talented singer whose tenor brought him attention as a performer in his church choir. He was only a teenager when he befriended Stubbs, and the two first sang with Benson and Payton at a birthday party given by a local “girl group” that Fakir remembered as “high-class, very fine young ladies.”

“Singing was a byproduct of us going to the party to find the girls!” Fakir said in a 2016 interview with https://writewyattuk.com.

“We told Levi to just pick a song and sing lead. We would just back him up. Well, when he started, we all jumped in like we had been rehearsing the song for months! Our mix was incredible. We just looked at each other while we were singing, and right after that we were like, ‘Man, this is a group! This is a group!’ ”