One of Motown's most consistent hitmakers and longest-lived original lineups, the Four Tops charted with scores of upbeat love songs featuring Levi Stubbs' rough-hewn lead vocals on an array of classic R&B chart-toppers, including "Baby I Need Your Loving," "Same Old Song," and "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)," "Bernadette" and "Ain't No Woman Like the One I've Got." In 1994 The Four Tops celebrated four decades together without a single personnel change.

The Four…

Driven by Martha Reeves' soulful, brassy lead vocals, the Vandellas became Motown's earthier, more aggressive "girl group" alternative to the Supremes. The Vandellas' biggest hits, like "Dancing in the Street" and "Heat Wave," are among the most popular dance records of the '60s.

Reeves, Beard, and Ashford sang as the Del-Phis in high school and cut one single on Check-Mate Records, a subsidiary of Chess. Reeves had also sung professionally under the stage name Martha LaVaille. In…

Steve Perry knows "it's been a long time, for sure" -- since 1998, actually -- since the world's heard any new music from the former Journey lead singer.

But after "navigating" Journey's new  "Greatest Hits Vol. 2" and a vinyl reissue of his 1984 solo album "Street  Talk," Perry tells Billboard.com he's planning to get to work in earnest in a studio he's just finishing in his southern California home just north of San Diego, which he says will have a control room and "a tracking room…

By James C. McKinley, Jr.

Peter Frampton has been reunited with the Gibson electric guitar he played on “Frampton Comes Alive,” three decades after it was presumed destroyed in a plane crash.

It turns out the guitar did not burn up in November 1980 when a cargo plane crashed on takeoff in…