Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch..

The magnificent Levi Stubbs has moved on. Life ends, as Ernest Withers put it. My fascination with R and B music would earn me a cuff to the head and an admonition about "crazy ni**er music" as a child. It didn't stop me from listening, not by any means. I had written Motown off as silly plastic sounds made to sell to white kids. Stax and Atlantic were the dual standards of the epitome of fabulous. That Motown bunch vs. Booker T and the MGs and the Memphis Horns..kiss my ass. even a white middle class teenager from Boston knew that Duck Dunn could move the Earth...However, when I heard "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) bust out of my Motorola's small speaker....it wiped even the Beatles from my world. I still play it a lot....a sad break up song..but sung with such power and confidence. In the pic, from top left, Obie Benson, Abul Fakir, Lawrence Payton and they call him......Levi Stubbs. I can't help myself.....