Louis Lanzano, Associated Press Michael McDonald: MCI ad helped revive his career. Click photo for larger image. Michael McDonald/ Hall and Oates WITH: Average White Band. WHERE: Chevrolet Amphitheatre, Station Square. WHEN: 6:30 p.m. tomorrow. TICKETS: $47.50 to $57.50; 412-323-1919.

On his first "Motown" CD, Michael McDonald sang songs made famous by some formidable singers, including Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder.

On the follow-up, due out in late October, McDonald has taken on what may be an even tougher assignment: covering songs associated with the Four Tops' lead vocalist, Levi Stubbs. The new CD contains the Tops' "Reach Out I'll Be There," "Baby I Need Your Lovin' " and "Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever." Is this a mission impossible?

"The guy that I had the biggest challenge with was Levi Stubbs," McDonald says, speaking by phone during a rehearsal break in his adopted hometown of Nashville. "The emotion and the power that he sang with were so immense. And you can kind of mimic his phrasing, but there's a whole bunch of ingredients that will be missing unless you really, really throw yourself into it.

"With Stevie and Marvin, although they're phenomenally powerful singers, a lot of their style was finesse -- something that if you take the time, you can kind of get into the spirit of, even if you never do it as well as them. But with Levi, you had to get up and really do battle with the thing, to get into that energy range that he always sang in, which was 110 percent."

McDonald, now 52, has been singing Motown since he was a teenager in cover bands in St. Louis bars in the late '60s, turning heads with his big, soulful, bittersweet baritone. When he moved to Los Angeles in 1970 and got his break singing and playing keyboards with Steely Dan, the records of Wonder and Gaye, both arguably at their peaks, were often spinning on his turntable.

In 1975, when McDonald joined the Doobie Brothers, co-wrote "What a Fool Believes" and "Minute by Minute" and became a star, he also sang lead on the band's version of Gaye's "Little Darling (I Need You)." He was always a Motown fan, in other words, but now he's gained a deeper appreciation of what made the label tick. Motown may have been a hit factory, but it was one that valued innovation, or at least innovation that might prove commercially viable.

"All the writers had such distinct styles. It wasn't reliant on everybody being cut from the same mold. I think Berry Gordy, as the captain of the ship, that was always his motivation, to find someone new and different from his other artists, not just remake the same records over and over again with the same-sounding artists."

Changes in music industry

Today, McDonald says, the record business proceeds on the assumption "that all people want is the same thing over and over again. Something that's easy for them to manufacture and throw out there, repeating itself time and time again. The music industry seems not to be able to resist the urge to dictate to the public what it is they want to hear."

McDonald's "Motown" CDs actually bear the famous Motown label, although Gordy sold his company long ago, and it is now owned by the huge, multinational Vivendi Universal. Considering how the business has changed, if a young Marvin Gaye were just emerging today with "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," would he stand a chance of climbing the charts?

"I can only go by what I see in the audiences when we play," McDonald says. "We've been out touring with Hall and Oates, and at the end of the show we do an encore set with 'Since I Lost My Baby,' kind of the way the Temptations did it, and 'Hot Fun in the Summertime.' And the songs are great, and it's like Daryl Hall always says, they defy time and space, it's like they were written yesterday. And their impact on the audience seems to be just as great right here and right now, so I'm not so sure they wouldn't be hits today if they were on the radio."

In fact, McDonald says, Motown has a lot in common with hip-hop.

"We were cutting 'Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing' and I thought, well this would be a perfect candidate to kind of do a really cool hip-hop drum loop, kind of spruce it up, contemporize it. And we tried it, and it didn't have the slightest effect on the song. We kept listening to it, going, 'It doesn't make the song sound any different. It doesn't make it feel any better. It doesn't make it feel any more contemporary.'

"And we realized, that was the original hip-hop music. Those were the original hip-hop grooves on those records. That's why that's where all these guys are stealing their drum loops from."

'Black radio good to us'

Both soul and hip-hop, of course, are African-American creations, and you could say McDonald had two strikes against him doing Motown cover CDs -- first, the original hits were done to perfection, and second, they're being redone by a white guy (a very white guy, if you count his hair).

Does he have any handle on how African Americans, in particular, feel about the "Motown" CD?

"Well, I don't know that I really can gauge, and I wouldn't want to speak for the African-American audience, whether they like what we do or not. But black radio was always very good to us, and really got us on the airwaves in many cases [in his post-Doobies career], like with 'Sweet Freedom' and 'On My Own' and 'I Keep Forgetting.'

"We really didn't have much action at Top 40 radio with those, with the mainstream CHR radio. It was really R&B radio, urban radio -- it wasn't called urban radio so much then -- that broke those records. Now urban radio is a whole different thing, and it's more hip-hop, it's not so much of an open format as it used to be."

Impact of MCI ad

It wasn't radio that made "Motown" into a million-plus seller, reviving McDonald's career and giving him the opportunity, when he finishes this tour, to start recording a new CD of his jazzy, distinctive, sophisticated original material. What turned the trick, says McDonald, was the MCI commercial that featured a snippet of him singing one of the strongest tracks from the CD, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." Not only that, the MCI commercial even included information on how to buy the CD.

"That would be probably the main thing that broke it for us. 'Cause we weren't doing that well with radio and/or record sales. We would have been thrilled to hit 100,000 with the thing. But the MCI commercial really kicked it into gear for us, and we went from maybe 3,000 rec-ords a week to maybe 30,000 records a week. So it was definitely easy to track."

McDonald sounds sincerely modest when he talks about the "Motown" CDs.

The first disc takes some chances, especially with reworkings of "How Sweet It Is" and "Since I Lost My Baby," but he says frankly that part of his goal was imitation. "You get up there and you realize you're trying to emulate something of the original record and bring that, from a nostalgic point of view, to this performance. Some of the fun of it was trying to sound like the artist, kind of like in my old days in top 40 clubs."