Duke Fakir, last original Four Tops singer, dead at 88

Abdul (Duke) Fakir, the last surviving original member of the beloved Motown group the Four Tops that was known for such hits as I Can’t Help Myself, 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.

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 founded by Berry Gordy in the late 1950s. But Fakir, lead singer Levi Stubbs, Renaldo (Obie) Benson and Lawrence Payton had been together for a decade, including a stint at Chicago’s famed Chess Records, when Gordy signed them up in 1963.

“A significant secret to our survival as well as our success was our shared belief that the sum was greater than the parts, and that time would be on our side,” Fakir wrote in I’ll Be There, his 2022 autobiography. “We were four totally different guys, but we had a love for the same thing, and that’s basically the whole story,”

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 — with Fakir as lead tenor — behind Stubbs’s urgent, sometimes desperate baritone.

Hit songs into the 1980s

After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Tops had less consistent 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, Are You Man Enough 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.

“Duke — I really hate to have to say goodbye but you’ve been called home by The Father to once again join Lawrence, Obie and Levi and make more of the heavenly music you guys made while here,” Motown legend Smokey Robinson said in a social media post. “I’m gonna miss you my brother.”

A lifelong Detroit resident who stayed home even after Gordy moved the label to Los Angeles in early 1970s, Fakir was born to a father who was from what is now Bangladesh. His father eventually caught a ship that took him to Windsor, Ont., settling in Detroit and meeting Fakir’s mother, whose family had moved north to Michigan from Sparta, Ga.

“I’m a devout Christian, but I am a product of my father’s Islamic religion, too,” he said in his memoir. “The two religions are inside of me.”

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.

‘Our blend was incredible’

He was in his teens when he befriended Stubbs, and the two first sang with Benson and Payton at a birthday party.

“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.”

The Tops 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, internal 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 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.”

In the mid-1960s, Fakir was briefly engaged to Mary Wilson of the Supremes. Fakir was married twice, for the last 50 years to Piper Gibson, with seven children, six who survive him.

At the height of the group’s success, in the late 1960s, Fakir admitted to drinking excessively. He credited his wife for helping him to find the path to sobriety.

Besides the Rock Hall of Fame, their honours included being voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and receiving a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2009.