"Just look over your shoulder"

I couldn't have been more than 10 or 11 when the' soulful voices of the Four Tops came blasting out of the transistor radio, and I knew right away that they were going to be part of a great awakening for me and the other kids. At the first high school dance I attended, the senior running the music played their single, "Reach Out (I'll Be There)," and man, all the big hitters in the letter sweaers were on the floor for that one. 

Young love was in bloom, and the Four Tops' records were a kind of instruction manual. As Springsteen put it many years later, "We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school." So long, Abdul, and thank you.

UPDATE, Tuesday morning: I should add that on a lot of the Tops' hits, there were female voices, too. The unsung heroines to whom these voices belonged were the Andantes.