Reach Out by The Four Tops

Reach Out, the Four Tops' fifth album, arrived on Motown in July 1967 and turned out to be the biggest seller of all their studio records. It's stacked: "Reach Out I'll Be There", a number one on both sides of the Atlantic, sits alongside "Standing in the Shadows of Love", "Bernadette" and "7-Rooms of Gloom", and it was the group's last album with Holland-Dozier-Holland. Berry Gordy also picked out some current pop hits for them to cover, "Walk Away Renée" and "If I Were a Carpenter" among them, while Holland and Dozier, Smokey Robinson and Clarence Paul split the production.

The secret is still Levi Stubbs, a baritone out front where other groups put a tenor, pleading like a man pounding on a locked door, with Abdul "Duke" Fakir, Renaldo "Obie" Benson and Lawrence Payton catching him every time. It reached No. 11 on Billboard's album chart and No. 3 on the R&B list, and in 2020 Rolling Stone placed it at 429 among the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.