The
Four Tops
Chinook
Winds Casino, Lincoln City
Friday
and Saturday, May 12-13
"Through eternity, there will always be the Four Tops."
And before the last syllable of that statement finishes
echoing off the walls of the Chinook Winds Casino, there
they stand in front of me, dressed to prove it: the Four
Tops, resplendent in identical all-white silk suits and
pearly snakeskin loafers, a gang of four looking more like
a pack of angels than an aging croonsters' clique.
I came to this den of debauchery in Lincoln City expecting
to see the aging-croonster bit play out in full. The Four
Tops had their first hit way back in 1964 with the saccharine
"Baby I Need Your Lovin'" and have pretty much been touring
and performing since then. With the exception of Theo Peoples,
the young man replacing the recently deceased Lawrence Payton,
every member of the group would qualify for the honored-citizen
discount on Tri-Met, no problem. I expected them to have
the energy of funeral directors or, at best, a bunch of
terminal-stage Sinatras.
But damn--after 30-odd years of playing the same old songs,
the Four Tops still sing and dance as if they are entirely
turned on by their own music. The quartet shimmies back
and forth, over and between each other like excited 16-year-olds.
They let loose gravelly, sex-heavy voices. Between the Four,
there's enough electric charisma and high-watt sensuality
to power Reno, if not L.V. itself.
It's exciting enough to watch a bunch of 60-year-old men
move as if they had done nothing but choreograph their own
hip gyrations for the past three decades, but the whole
scenario proves strangely absorbing.
At some point in the last 30 years, songs like "Bernadette"
and "Ain't No Woman Like the One I Got" (both given sterling
renditions by the Four Tops in their commercial prime) stopped
being the sort of thing anyone wants to make hot love to.
Once highly potent music--the hormonal rhythms and filthy
guitar to which a whole generation of girls lost their maidenheads--became
a sort of sexless comfort food for the ears. Blame oldies
stations. Blame complacent nostalgia.
Nowhere is this transformation more evident than in the
pastel-drenched sterility of Chinook Winds. While the Four
Tops slip easily into the ecstasies of their '60s teen-idol
personae, audience members appear to have shelled out their
45 bucks in order to buy a warm seat in which to die.
Though the Tops twist and shake, though they lace their
voices with every shade of pathos, though they plead with
the audience to dance, to sing along, to do something, the
crowd, with few exceptions, refuses either to move or be
moved. It's as if there's an invisible wall between the
Tops and the masses of glassy-eyed gamblers gathered to
watch.
On one side, the band itself, shaking with spirit. On the
other, men and women who've heard these songs leak out of
car speakers hundreds of times but can't, for the life of
them, figure out what to do when faced with the people who
created the music in the first place.
Instead of attending a concert, most of these people are
mentally tuning in the radio. They're not really here. Numbing
drinks clasped tightly, butts pressed with fervent loyalty
into their seats, they simply lean back, smile timidly at
their spouses and pretend it's just another morning on the
way to the office. Despite being plenty drunk and, presumably,
having plenty of floor space back at home for dance practice,
these gamblers on holiday can't bring themselves to move,
or to harness the energy pouring off the stage.
In fairness, these folks are probably no deeper in coma
than most of their fellow Americans, who've been slipping
away for half a century.
Still, up on stage, there they are: The original messengers
of soul from the inner city, still cooking.
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 10,
2000
|
