The Four Tops — “Look Out Your Window”: Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! — March 18, 2024

THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD

1,148) The Four Tops — “Look Out Your Window”

From the fab Four Tops’ ’69 album Soul Spin comes a song with “a fantastic, brooding, ominous and dark quality that was as far away from anything most would have expected from a Four Tops recording or a Motown recording for that matter”. (Motown Deep Cuts, PAMS Jingles & More with Tomovox, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euub3orKgj4)

“Windows” gives mattforte192 “chills everytime”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euub3orKgj4) Me too. It is one of the great pop “haves/have nots” songs, an angry song (unlike, say, Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”) but not mere agitprop. The words of writers H. Cleveland and Frank Wilson (the albums’s producer) sting:

“I am a man who cleans up your office when you say your last goodbye . . . . [Y]ou don’t want me to live like you live You merely want me to survive Then you’ll look in my face nearly every day Yet you’ll try to pretend I’m not even alive”

Motown Deep Cuts, PAMS Jingles & More with Tomovox writes:

“It’s a rather blunt indictment of a privileged man of the corporate world. The charges aren’t so much for his having wealth, but for the distance and indifference to the everday man that has come from his high position . . . . Just look out your window and take a good look at the people who make the world go around… The Four Tops are amazing messengers of this message and demonstrate that they were truy astounding when it came to versatillity. We’ve known them for the great Motown Sound hits, we’ve also heard them singing the jazz standards they started out with in their early pre-Motown days. Here, The Four Tops tackle some very serious social issues and prove to be equal to the task. Levi Stubbs’ voice was perfect for this sort of hard-charging material and combined with Obie Benson, Duke Fakir and Lawrence Payton, it was certain that none of the message would be lost on the listener.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euub3orKgj4

Here is Frank Wilson’s version:

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