429. The Four Tops, "Reach Out"

 


There's a fascinating thing with older albums that you don't see that much anymore, and that's the Instant Cover.  By that I mean artists covering really popular songs that were only, like, a year old.  This record contains, of course, three lock-solid All Time Greatest songs that are all Four Tops originals, "Reach Out I'll Be There," "Standing in the Shadows of Love," and "Bernadette" (all three written and produced by H-D-H, the absolutely DEADLY songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland, more on which below).  These songs are all canonical and cannot be questioned.

But then there are a slew of covers, including not one but TWO Monkees covers, "Last Train to Clarksville" and "I'm a Believer."  Crazy, right?  It's like if Kendrick said "OK, I've got another stone classic album, lemme just throw on two Bieber covers to round it out."  I mean, the Tops are of course amazing singers and do great renditions of the songs, but it's just weird to today's ears.  

There's also a cover of "Walk Away Renee," by the Left Banke, one of the best pop songs ever written but again, weird.  And these aren't covers of old songs that are due for a revival!  At the time this album came out, all of these songs were about a year old.  The music business was just different back then I guess.  This kind of thing happened all the time.  

H-D-H was Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland, a songwriting/production team that worked at Motown from 1962 to 1967.  Aside from the Tops songs on this album, they wrote much of the backbone of American popular music, cranking out little songs like "Stop! In the Name of Love," "Heat Wave," "How Sweet It Is," and on and on and on.  Imagine getting home from work and your spouse says "What'd you do at work today honey?" and you say "I wrote motherfucking "You Can't Hurry Love," that's about it."

There's also a cover of "If I Were a Carpenter" on this record that will do the amazingly heavy lift of making you like that song again.  Is there nothing the Four Tops couldn't do?

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