R.I.P. Levi Stubbs

I'm really getting tired of writing obituaries, but I guess as time goes on, you're either writing them or reading them. And that's if you're lucky enough to live another day without having one written about you.

I don't know when it was that I realized I liked Motown. I think it started when first heard Elvis Costello's cover of Betty Everett's "Gettin' Mighty Crowded", never having heard the original. Or maybe it was when I saw The Blues Brothers and realized that what my ten-year-old ears had heard back in the 1960's as shrieking when Aretha Franklin sang "Think" came from a much deeper place:

Or maybe it was those Sunday mornings when I'd find myself watching Singsation because even though I was never a Christian and didn't want to be, there was something about the joyful place with the slight undercurrent of over a century of hardship and oppression that suffused the music. Or maybe it was when I'd catch snippets of WBGO's Rhythm Revue on Saturday mornings and hear the pre-Motown R&B tracks that Cousin Brucie didn't used to play to death. All I know is that at some point when I became an adult, Motown started sounding really, really good to me.

But even though I never appreciated Aretha Franklin when I was a kid, I always liked the Four Tops. I don't know why. Maybe it was because the beat was, as Jerry Garcia used to say, down where even white people could find it. Maybe it was that the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team was for the Motown label what the Brill Building was for white artists of that time. Or maybe it was just that even as a ten-year-old white Jewish kid from the suburbs, there was something about the voice of Levi Stubbs that transcended race and age and everything else. Because in addition to having the most soulful name in contemporary music history, Stubbs' voice was the perfect confluence of joy and grief. It was a voice that made your heart sing, but that also had a pervasive mournful undertown that was like the bitterest of weeping.

This song sounded great to me in 1966. It sounds great to me today. And three weeks ago, when I was listening to Rhythm Revue and Felix Hernandez played a version of the song that the Four Tops recorded in Italian because it seems Berry Gordy had his artists record in many languages since the Motown sound was big all over the world, I called in a pledge donation because where else are you going to hear the Four Tops singing in Italian? Certainly not on Uncle Floyd's Italian-American Serenade.

We hadn't heard much from Stubbs in recent years as his health deteriorated, first from cancer and then from a stroke. But even if you don't live in the New York area, you can stream the Rhythm Revue at WBGO's web site. I recommend tuning in at 10:00 AM Eastern Time tomorrow. I'm sure Felix Hernandez will do a nice tribute.

Side note: Last week I posted the video of a Maron v. Seder VODcast in which Marc Maron played a clip of an old gospel song in which the similarly soaring voice of Jackie Wilson breaks in and turns a conventional gospel number into something sublime. Turns out that Levi Stubbs and Jackie Wilson were cousins.

Another side note: I'm quite certain that Lower Manhattanite is going to write something about Stubbs that's so good I'll wonder why I even bothered. I'll link it up once he does.