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The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 24, 2008

When the world falls apart some things stay in place/Levi Stubbs' tears run down her face.

- Billy Bragg, "Levi Stubbs' Tears"

The problem with heartbreak is it's never as thrillingly dramatic as it sounds in song. You feel empty but you have to go to work, school, pay the bills. Friends refuse to let you wallow. Eventually, it heals.

When Levi Stubbs sang "Bernadette" or "7 Rooms of Gloom," that heartache was never going away.

Stubbs' mighty voice was stilled Oct. 17. He was 72.

Like heartache, life and death sometimes seem impossibly mundane. The man who sang so powerfully of broken love and desperation was married to the same woman for about 50 years.

No cause of death has been disclosed, but he had suffered a series of strokes that forced his retirement from touring in 2000. By all rights, he should have died of heartbreak, pleading his case on stage with The Four Tops.

"Some say it's a sign of weakness for a man to beg," goes the lyric to the Tops' "Baby I Need Your Loving," but who would dare call Stubbs weak no matter how much he pleaded?

Stubbs had the voice of a full-grown man. When he sang "Reach Out I'll Be There," he didn't sound so much like a friend in need as he did like Superman.

And when he begged, when he cried, when he sounded like he couldn't go on anymore, he was nothing short of apocalyptic.

Now, you tell me who sounds more like a man: Stubbs begging for his baby and, by extension, his life; or the callow misogynists and dime-store lotharios who boast about what unfeeling bastards they are.

It takes strength to feel. That, I think, is why Billy Bragg chose Stubbs for the song of desperate loneliness quoted above. To misquote Dylan, it takes a lot to laugh, it takes a man to cry.

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