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

Duke Fakir of Four Tops performs at the All In Music & Arts Festival at the Indiana State Fairgrounds on Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022, in in Indianapolis. Fakir, the last of the original Four Tops, died Monday of heart failure at age 88. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)

NEW YORK — Abdul “Duke” Fakir, the last surviving original member of the beloved Motown group the Four Tops that was known for such hits as “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 home in Detroit, according to a family spokesperson, with his wife and other loved ones by his side. Motown founder Berry Gordy said in a statement that Fakir helped embody the Tops’ “showmanship, class and artistry.

“Duke was first tenor — smooth, suave, and always sharp,” Gordy said. “For 70 years, he kept the Four Tops’ remarkable legacy 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. 1’s: “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 bereavement, included “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” “Bernadette” and “Just Ask the Lonely.”

Many of Motown’s greatest stars, from the Supremes to Stevie Wonder, came of age at the Detroit-based company started by Gordy 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 up in 1963 (after the group had turned him down a few years earlier) and they already had a polished stage act and versatile vocal style that enabled them to perform anything from country songs to pop standards like “Paper Doll.”

They called themselves the Four Aims when they started out, but soon renamed themselves the Four Tops to avoid confusion with the white harmony quartet the Ames Brothers.

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The Tops had recorded for several labels, including the famed Chess Records in Chicago, 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’ urgent, sometimes desperate baritone.

After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Tops had more sporadic success, with hits over the next few years, including “Still Water (Love),” and a pair of top 10 songs in the early 1970s for ABC/Dunhill Records, “Keeper of the Castle” and “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got).” They reached the top 20 for the last time in the early 1980s, with the sentimental ballad “When She Was My Girl.”

Throughout, they remained a busy concert act and at times toured with latter day members of the Temptations, a friendly rivalry launched when the groups performed together at the all-star 1983 television concert marking Motown’s 25th anniversary. While the Temptations and other peers suffered from drug problems, dissension and personnel changes, the Four Tops remained united and intact until Payton died in 1997. (Benson died in 2005 and Stubbs in 2008).

“The things I love about them the most — they are very professional, they have fun with what they do, they are very loving, they have 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 as the Four Tops with lead vocalist Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNeir and Lawrence ‘Roquel’ Payton Jr., the son of Lawrence Payton.

“As each one of them (the original members) passed a little bit of me left with them,” Fakir told UK Music Reviews in 2021. “When Levi left us, I found myself in a quandary as to what I was going to do from that moment on but after a while I realized that the name together with the legacy that they had left us simply had to carry on, and judging by the audience reaction it soon became pretty evident that I did the right thing and I really do feel good about that.”

Besides the Rock Hall of Fame, their honors included being voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and receiving a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2009. More recently, Fakir had been working on a planned Broadway musical based on their lives and completed the memoir “I’ll Be There,” published in 2022.

Fakir was married twice, for 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.

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

“Singing was the by-product of us going to the party looking for the girls!” Fakir said in a 2016 interview with writewyattuk.

“We told Levi to just pick a song and sing the lead. We’d just back him up. Well, when he started, we all fell in like we’d been rehearsing the song for months! Our blend was incredible. We were just looking at each other as we were singing, and right after we said, ‘Man, this is a group! This is a group!'”