One of the greatest voices in American music history has been silenced. Levi Stubbs, lead singer of The Four Tops, passed away today at the age of 72.
While folks of a certain age might only know Stubbs as the voice of Audrey the man-eating plant in The Little Shop of Horrors and even younger fans might only know Levi’s voice from the song Are You Man Enough, which was featured in the film Superbad, most music lovers know him as one of the most powerful singers Motown ever produced.
I had no clue what I was going to use when I told GG I would take care of the Friday throwback in his absence. Hell, I was absolutely stunned to actually see this You Tube performance footage.
I go back and forth between Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Prince’s Sign O’ the Times as my favorite album of all time.
Innervisions was one of the first albums-maybe even THE first-that I ever owned. I played the grooves off of that record, even though I wasn’t able to appreciate the poetry of the songs-everything from Higher Ground to Golden Lady -until I was much older.
All in Love is Fair is by far my favorite song on Innervisions, and is one of the best written love songs in history.  I was stunned to see video footage of Stevie singing this that wasn’t taken from a recent concert or television performance. In the thirty-five years since Innervisions’ release, the song has become a standard, rerecorded by everyone from Cher to Streisand. I believe Sinatra may have taken a crack at it too. Still, no one tops the original.
I admit, it’s been hard for me to write about music the last few weeks because I’ve turned into a total campaign coverage zombie. So my apologies for dipping into the political on a music blog, but I feel compelled to share a moment from an article by Matt Bai from the forthcoming issue of the New York Times Magazine, in which he describes a rally in rural southwestern Virginia in which bluegrass great Ralph Stanley endorses Barack Obama for President. This is sort of surprising in itself. Stanley has always struck me as a sort of populist folk-hero whose music, while certainly having a social and cultural point of view, seemed to exist outside of vulgar politics. (Springsteen modeled himself this way for most of his career – never publicly supporting a presidential candidate until Kerry’s run in 2004. He also publicly supports Obama this year.) But endorsement aside, the best line of the article came after Obama thanked Stanley for his support:
“When the candidate met Stanley backstage, Obama told him that he had some of Stanley’s banjo music on his iPod. Stanley nodded appreciatively, but a few minutes later he turned to a friend and asked, ‘What’s an iPod?’”