Serene Dominic presents…The 4 Sublevels!

A regionally ignored Motor City knockoff of The Four Tops, this Auburn Hills quartet’s lead singer LaFonte Dupree credits his partial blindness for giving him the urgency in his voice that would later be known as “soul” but at the time he began singing was usually referred to as excessive pleading or its more polite form, favor asking.

“I was constantly needing people to drive me around, like, to the barber shop or to the candy store,” he remembers. “Pretty soon I became known around Detroit as a guy with a whole lot of soul.” Actually, he was more widely known as a guy who asked a whole lot of favors.

When he pressed songwriter and local record producer Dutch Dreamwell to give him a song that might get The 4 Sublevels noticed, it was the ridiculous “Girl, You’re a Girl” on the Auburn record label. Despite the song’s unrelenting banality (the word “girl” is repeated 106 times), Dreamwell was able to capture the sound of the Motown house band so uncannily that several of the Motown session players were personally fined $100 by Berry Gordy for “moonlighting.” The followup 4-Sublevels single actually got a few fired.

On “My Secret Life,” Dreamwell took the tried and true Holland-Dozier-Holland formula that worked so well for Levi Stubbs Jr & company (singing about how a girl is making a fool of a man in front of the neighbors) and turned it on its ear, so that it is the singer who is well-adjusted about a recent breakup while the neighbors are desperate for him to get her back because they can’t survive without ogling her over the back fence. It was a tweak that didn’t win the 4 Sublevels too many fans when they hit the road to promote the song. Says Dreamwell today, “No one likes a soul man who refuses to ruin the knees of his new suit to beg unashamedly. Not even one who asks a lot of favors.”