Song of the Day 12/6: The Four Tops, “It’s the Same Old Song”

This might be the most aptly titled song in the Motown catalog. The Four Tops were a decade into their career and had been through four record companies before joining Motown in 1963, where the Holland-Dozier-Holland writing and production team furnished them with their first hit, “Baby I Need Your Loving,” the next year.

They hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 1965 with “I Can’t Help Myself,” which was pretty much a rewrite of the Supremes’ earlier “Where Did Our Love Go” – Lamont Holland admitted the title was a sly reference to his self-plagiarism. Its success led Columbia to order a re-release an old single by the group; when Motown chief Berry Gordy got wind of it, he demanded a quick follow-up song to head off the competition.

So Holland dipped into his own well again, reversing the bass line and changing some chords but essentially writing “the same old song.” He also gave lead singer Levi Stubbs, who hated the saccharine sweetness of “sugar pie, honey bunch,” some lyrics of lost love that better suited his baritone. (Stubbs got much of his strained passion from the team’s habit of writing in keys that forced him to sing at the top of his range.)

The song didn’t quite match the success of “I Can’t Help Myself,” topping out at No. 3, but it established the Tops as the label’s No. 2 male vocal group behind the Temptations; in the UK they were actually more popular than the Temps.

Oft-repeated legend has it that the Motown team wrote, recorded and printed acetates of the single in 24 hours, but that’s been called into question by the discovery of an earlier version recorded by the Supremes. Their relatively emotionless performance suggests that nobody but Levi Stubbs could have made it a hit.