The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh

37 BERNADETTE, The Four Tops Produced by Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier; written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland Motown 1104 1967 Billboard: #4

Phil Spector called "Bernadette" "a black man singing Bob Dylan," and indeed, when Levi Stubbs sings "They pretend to be my friend," his cadence is as unmistakably Dylanesque as anything that ever came from the mouths of the Byrds or Manfred Mann. As the final leg of Holland-Dozier-Holland's great Four Tops trilogy . "Bernadette" is wreathed in the same dark, foreboding atmosphere as "Reach Out I'll Be There" and "Standing in the Shadows of Love." Levi Stubbs struggles his way out of a similar sea of contrasting melodies, pushed and prodded by the bass, provoked into near panic by sharp, keening flute and organ. All the while, he fights to tell one of the most scarifying tales in the history of rock and romance. Bernadette is not only Levi's lover, she's a mystical symbol of what men spend their lives battling to discover. Stubbs sings from within a tumultuous emotional whirlpool, boasting of Bernadette's charms and bitterly mocking other men's attempts to win her. Telling this part of the story, Stubbs becomes virtually paranoiac, claiming not only that everyone else is looking for what this charmed couple has found (and that most of them never will locate it), but that every friend he has really only wants to steal her away. *They'd give the world and all they own / For just one moment we have known." The source of his paranoia comes clear soon enough. He's not a healthy Love Man (like Otis Redding) but a desperate Love Addict. And Bernadette is not his lover but a definition of self, their relationship not nurturing but perpetually inflammatory. Even his praise for Bernadette smacks of a junkie's self-justification. And so, when his voice breaks close to a sob as he implores his beloved to "keep on lovin' me, " Stubbs speaks as nothing more than a guy craving a fix. Other men just want Bernadette; Stubbs needs her "to live," Engulfed and trapped by the power of his own passions, needing what even Bernadette cannot ultimately provide (the very peace of mind he claims to have found yet sings as if he would never recognize if it showed up), Levi Stubbs becomes a symbol of every guy who tried to find outside himself what can only grow internally. If the potency of his embroilment at first seems seductive, what echoes is the final line, the truth he can't keep from expressing: "And Bernadette, you mean more to me / Than a woman was ever meant to mean." The man reaching out just two hits before has now succumbed to the dark side of what lurks in the shadows of love.

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