The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Ring safe in his pocket, Dylan suddenly heard his own song, the one he’d been humming to himself all summer, “Little Dylan’s Almost Gone.” He recalled his basic condition: Not In Jail, Just Visiting. Let Mingus lead him one more new place before he ejection-seated to Camden College, Camden, Vermont. He’d dropped acid, popped a quaalude in a bowling alley, mushroomed at Jones Beach, so what’s this hesitation? Arthur wasn’t here to witness, to call him on the bluff. He’d get away with taking a sniff of the cocaine. Only recall the routine, pretend it wasn’t your first time.

  Dylan moved the straw from the mirror to his nose and sucked like he’d seen.

  And Mingus Rude did a line.

  And Barrett Rude Junior did a line.

  And they all did another line and Dylan Ebdus was doing coke with Gus and Junior, just another summer afternoon on Dean Street, no biggie. It was like a visit to an alternate life, one where he’d never abandoned the block, never quit visiting this house. The drug rained through Dylan and streamlined the illusion, scoured away doubt.

  Your body could be cooled from inside, sweating like an iced glass.

  A bass line never sounded so profound as when Barrett Rude Junior dropped a needle on Bunny Sigler’s Let Me Party with You, and orange juice loosened the slushy trickle in the back of the throat surprisingly well.

  “You like that?” said Junior. His bearded skull spread in a smile. Dylan might be getting used to it.

  “Yeah,” said Dylan honestly, his eyes open.

  “That’s nice stuff, right?” said Mingus. His tone softened, as though he’d only wanted Dylan to join him all this time, only wanted his oldest and best friend to ratify him in the medium of cocaine.

  “Yeah,” said Dylan again.

  Maybe it was possible to be forgiven. Maybe you’d misunderstood and everything was actually completely cool. The ring was in your pocket now. You were hanging out with Mingus and Junior and you were also just weeks, days away from leaving for the most expensive college in the world. The two weren’t mutually exclusive, your fear was wrong.

  Maybe everything was perfect but even as you thought it Barrett Rude Senior came up the stairs and popped into the room, astonishing them all, no one more than himself.

  Despite the day he was in his black suit, his gold tie clip and cufflinks, white handkerchief.

  He smelled heavily of flowers, of roses.

  Mingus was the one caught with his face to the mirror. He dropped the straw and smoothed at his nose with a finger.

  “This what goes on any chance I’m out the door,” said Senior, his voice quavering. “Corrupting the morals of another neighbor child.”

  “Get downstairs, old man,” said Junior simply, not looking at his father.

  “Messing with the white folks’ child you’ll bring down cataclysm on this house.”

  Dylan failed to recognize himself or anything he knew about Gowanus or the world in this. It was suddenly so funny he almost guffawed. Mingus elbowed him.

  “Why you home early on a Sunday anyway?” said Junior. “Sister Pauletta finally kick you out for taking a pinch on one of her flower girls?”

  “Lord forgive the twisted soul who was formerly my little boy.”

  Barrett Rude Junior rose, pulled his robe tight, went past his father to the sink. “I came twisted, old man. The twist got handed down. So why don’t you take a load off, baby. Loosen your tie, day’s too hot. You want some blow, help yourself.”

  “I praise God every day your mother never lived to see it.”

  Barrett Rude Junior turned and said softly, “You praise God, is that right? Over the name of my mother ?”

  “I do.”

  “And what’s God say back to you, old man? When that name comes up?”

  Mingus said quietly, “Go to your room and pray, Granddaddy.”

  “Each day and night I pray beneath the feet of sinners,” said Senior. “One fine morning I’m coming out of my hiding to say what I’ve seen.”

  “Go now,” said Mingus, pleading.

  “I’ll cry it to the hills.”

  Dylan didn’t know how it was possible for Barrett Rude Junior to cross the room as quickly as he did, and gather his father’s suit lapels in his two fists to slam him back against the stairwell’s wall. A sigh came out of them both, Junior and Senior, seemingly one sound. Then Senior was gone, down the stairs, and Junior had again turned his back to the couch, was running water at the sink.

  Dylan bowed in guilty silence at seeing it. Mingus just shook his head and returned to the straw and the mirror.

  Dylan felt his pulse beating everywhere in his skin: the drug, probably.

  The music went on playing and for a moment it was as if nothing had happened. One moment, then the room refilled with the scent of roses, Senior was at the top of the stairs again and it was instead as if he’d never gone and the moment of peace had been an eye blink. Except Senior had made a trip to the basement apartment: proof was in what he’d retrieved there and now displayed in his two hands. The left gripped a bouquet of twenties, which he immediately flung before him so they twirled to the carpet. The right was filled with a gun.

  From the speakers Bunny Sigler sang on, oblivious.

  “You don’t lay hands on your father,” said Barrett Rude Senior to his son. “It says so in the book. Now I got the evidence you been using children for your dealing ways. The boy’s room is full of your dirty money. You got no shame, I got to teach it to you, boy.”

  “Mingus has his own money,” said Junior quietly, watching the gun waver in his father’s hand.

  “You teach sinning ways and you got to pay for laying a hand on your own father.”

  “Lay down the gun, old man.”

  “Call me father, now. The gun’s to put some fear in you.”

  “You got to ad-mit, you an old man. ” It was another of Barry’s impromptu melodies, the last Dylan would hear.

  Mingus hurdled from the couch, and ran to his father’s doorway. He turned, before vanishing into the back, and shouted, “Go home, Dylan!” Protecting him still.

  Dylan Ebdus never would remember getting from the couch to the door, from door to stoop, stoop to gate, to the sidewalk. A part of him was still inside, beating like a pulse behind eyes staring at the faces, at the gun, at Mingus framed for an instant in the doorway before turning away, moving inside his father’s bedroom. Dylan Ebdus still heard the music and felt the scuff in his nostril, still puzzled at the missing gold records on the wall, the missing flesh in Barrett Rude Junior’s face. So the blazing day into which he’d been ejected made no impression. Still, he was outside. Mingus shouted at him to go and he’d gone and he was intact, ring in pocket, five hundred college dollars scattered from Barrett Rude Senior’s fist to the floor, mission accomplished. He wasn’t inside. He was on Dean Street, teetering on a square of slate, when he heard the shot.

  BOTHERED BLUE ONCE MORE:

  The Barrett Rude Jr. and the Distinctions Story

  NOTES BY D.EBDUS

  The singer’s role is deceptive; in identifying and exploring disintegration and other potentially destructive aspects of black American life he or she is performing an integrative function . . . the sense of identity is built not only into the performer-audience relationship . . . but into the very relationships between the sounds he or she makes—the musical techniques themselves.

  —CHRISTOPHER SMALL, MUSIC OF THE COMMON TONGUE

  People don’t recognize the importance of call-and-response. This is because most songs are now written by the people who plan to sing them, and for them the picture is normally complete when they’re in it. But a listener likes more than this. The backing vocals, the response, are the voices of society: whether gossiping (as in “Is she really going out with him?”) or affirming (as in “Amen!” and “Yeah, yeah, yeah”) . . . I would like to do a systematic study of hit songs over the last 30 years. I am sure that at least 80% of them have second vocals in some form or another. But I would bet that n
ot 30% of all recorded songs use backing vocals . . .

  —BRIAN ENO, A YEAR WITH SWOLLEN APPENDICES

  Voices in memory you can’t name, rich with unresolved yearning: a song you once leaned toward for an instant on the radio before finding it mawkish, embarrassing, overlush. Maybe the song knew something you didn’t yet, something you weren’t necessarily ready to learn from the radio. So, for you at least, the song is lost. By chance it goes unheard for 15 years, until the day when your own heartbreak unexpectedly finds its due date. This happens the moment the song takes you by surprise, trickling from some car radio, to retie the frayed laces of your years. Beguiled, you permit yourself to hear. But the disc jockey flubs the call list, never names the singer. Or maybe it happens in a movie theater, over a montage that relies on the old song. Afterward you scan the credits, but a dozen licensing permissions go by in a blur, hopeless.

  So you forget the song again. Or recall just the hook, a dumb central phrase which sours in memory. How could it ever have seemed bittersweet as your own lost youth? Of course, what’s missing in your recollection is the cushion of vocal harmony the lead voice floated in on, and the wash of strings, the fuzzy mumble of bass guitar, the groove, all so dated, so perfect. What’s missing as well is the story, the context, the space the song lived in. Not to mention any chance for you to make it your own, a chance to spend, say, $34.99 on a two-CD set. That’s okay. No one’s harmed if you never follow the trail. In an uncertain world it’s a reasonable certainty this forgotten song needs you even less than you need it.

  Right?

  Behind the uppermost pantheon of male soul vocalists—Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green (you add your names to those four, I’ll add mine)—lies another pantheon, a shadow pantheon, of those singers who fell just short. They gather, more or less, in two categories. The first are those denied by the vagaries of luck or temperament—Howard Tate and James Carr, say, maybe O. V. Wright. The singers who record for a few different labels, cut a classic side or two, then bag out, drift away. In the “great man” theory of soul, these are the also-rans. The second category is the singer disguised within the fame and achievement of a group. Ben E. King of the Drifters, David Ruffin of the Temptations, Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops, Philippe Wynne of the Spinners: all known by their peers as among the finest vocalists ever to step to the mike. The world knows them only by ear.

  Barrett Rude Jr. is one of the most elusive and singular figures in pop-music history. Though none with ears needs telling—if you’re reading the booklet, play the damn CDs already!—I’ll say it anyway: he’s also one of the greatest soul singers who ever lived, not merely one of the best who never got his due. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1938, Rude was the only child of a troubled marriage, his father an itinerant Pentecostalist preacher (and eventual convict), his mother dying in her late twenties (“of a broken heart” Rude told Cash Box magazine in 1972). His musical experience is frequently exaggerated: he sang in his father’s church, yes—but Rude’s father had his pastorship stripped from him before the future singer was 11 years old, and a year later was in prison. Raised by his aunt, Rude dropped out of high school and migrated from Raleigh to Memphis, where he worked as a janitor, a school-bus driver, then, briefly, as a night-owl disc jockey, specializing in blues and jazz, at a Memphis radio station. There he met Janey Kwarsh, the daughter of the station’s white owner, who’d been working as a secretary in her father’s offices. Rude and Kwarsh quickly married and had a child—unless it was the other way around.

  In 1967, at age 29, Rude recorded a pair of singles at Willie Mitchell’s Hi Records studio. No one recalls how he came to the studio’s attention—Rude always denied his father-in-law had arranged the opportunity. In 1967 Hi was still treading water with instrumentals and novelty cuts, while producer Mitchell, with singer O.V. Wright, had begun exploring the deep-bottomed groove he’d soon exploit so masterfully with Al Green. Maybe Rude could have stepped into Al Green’s shoes in advance, and altered pop history—the evidence is here in four cuts, including the horn-driven proto-funk of “Set a Place at Your Table,” which briefly touched the R&B charts in February of 1967, and the slowed-down, eerily sexy Hank Williams cover “I Saw the Light.” But it wasn’t to be. Gaining a reputation as a brooding eccentric, Rude was dismissed as intractable by the even-tempered Mitchell before his career had even begun.

  So Rude was seemingly on his way to the first kind of story—the handful of cult singles—until the day in February 1968, in a Philadelphia rehearsal studio, when a session guitarist named Marv Brown, who’d played at Hi Records a year before, suggested his name to a road-worn, journeyman vocal group known then as the Four Distinctions. The group had signed a management deal and were rehearsing under the hand of a young producer named Andre Deehorn. Deehorn had a sheaf of songs he imagined could be hits for a harmony-and-lead group. What he had in the Distinctions was harmony without the lead.

  Brown thought he knew the singer they were looking for, a fellow who’d bottomed out in Memphis and was driving a bus in Raleigh, North Carolina—where, with his young wife and child, Rude had retreated to live with his aunt. No matter that there might be a dozen unemployed singers in Philadelphia; they took Brown’s recommendation and made a call. Rude bought a Greyhound ticket and came in for an audition. Unknown at thirty, Rude might have seemed a dark horse for pop immortality. Indeed, demons were never far at bay in a career vexed by rages, whims, and disappearances from studio and stage dates. Safe guess that among his woes an unhappy interracial marriage was a formidable cross to bear in ’60s America. His recording career spans just a decade; Rude was silenced by drug abuse and domestic tragedy at the end of the ’70s.

  Nevertheless, from the moment he walked into the Philadelphia studio, Barrett Rude Jr. was destined to be a singer of the second type: the secret, soaring voice contained within a famous harmony group. Rude had in the Distinctions found the context within which he could tell the story he had to tell, a place to do the one thing a human being can hope to do—matter for a while. If he regarded it as something like a prison, we can only respectfully disagree, and be grateful that his was an art built on dramas of confinement and escape.

  But who were these four men that I’m selling to you here as a context and a containment for Barrett Rude Jr.? The Distinctions began as friends, working-class black teenagers in the era of Johnny Ace and Jackie Robinson, growing up in the industrial suburb of Inkster, Michigan (also home to the Marvelettes). James Macy, Dennis Longham, Rudolph Bicycle, and Alfred Maddox were a quartet before they were a singing group, forming the all-black infield of the Dearborn-Inkster Chryslers, an early integrated high-school baseball team which won a controversial state championship in 1958. That after they switched from ball to doo-wop it was the shortstop, Jimmy Macy, who sang bass and the first baseman, Rudy Bicycle, who handled the tenor leads, stands only as further evidence pop truth is stranger than fiction. Baritones Fred Maddox and Denny Longham ranged between Macy’s lows and Bicycle’s highs. The Chrystones, as they were first known, were a resolutely secular group, and it was only a year later that Longham pointed out to the others the misleading resonance of their name, and suggested an alternative: The Four Distinctions. Under that name the teenage group would go on to play school dances, state fairs, and, yes, baseball games.

  In May 1961 the Four Distinctions paid a fifty-dollar entrance fee for the privilege of winning a sing-off sponsored by Jerry Baltwood’s notorious Tallhat label. Their prize was a pair of sessions. Who penned the four numbers cut in Tallhat’s storefront studio that June? It’s likely the Distinctions walked in with the songs, but Baltwood took the songwriter credit. Included here are “Hello” and “Baby on the Moon,” the first a lovely doo-wop plaint, the latter a Five Royales–style vamp. Neither charted, on this world or the moon.

  In 1965 Tallhat’s stable was bought out by Motown, but at the bigger company the group met with only frustration. Fourth or fifth in line for songs behind the Fo
ur Tops, the Temptations, and a host of other aspirants, the Distinctions found themselves singing backup and running errands, answering telephones, and fetching star acts from the airport. Denny Longham learned to cut and process hair; he was said by Martha Reeves to give “the best conk in town.” They did, however, come as near to glory as “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” the same Norman Whitfield production the Temptations would soon ride to the Top 10. Rudy Bicycle’s lighter-than-air falsetto version was suppressed in favor of the senior group, but not before a B side was prepared. “Rolling Downhill” might have seemed to described the group’s plight in Berry Gordy’s organization; in fact it’s a lost gem of a Holland-Dozier-Holland ballad. It would be three more years before career rescue, and before Andre Deehorn added “Subtle” to their moniker. But the Motown tracks are all the proof needed that the Distinctions before Rude were subtle, and polished, with a habit of making the hard plays look easy.

  From Gerald Early’s One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture : “The three major early groups of the company—the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Miracles—were put together and rehearsed at their high schools. They were not church groups . . . and in various autobiographies there is little talk about the influence of the black church in their music . . .” This is a useful correction, but stops a little short. The sound which defines soul is epitomized by the configuration the Subtle Distinctions fell into once Barrett Rude Jr. signed on: a Detroit- or “Northern”-style high-school harmony group fronted by a rougher, churchified, “Southern”-style lead. This collision of grit and elegance, of raw R&B lust and repentance with polished, crossover-seeking pop is also the crossroads where sufferation and exile briefly joins hands with new-glimpsed possibilities of middle-class striving and conformity.

  Take for example the Drifters 1959 “There Goes My Baby,” seen by some as the definitive moment when R&B turned to the possibility of another music called soul. Lead singer Ben E. King’s strangled, despairing vocal is pinned between a vaguely Latin beat and mock-classical strings. The results at the time not only horrified the record label, which nearly refused to release it, but puzzled the song’s producer, Jerry Leiber, who said, “I’d be listening to the radio sometimes and hear it and I was convinced it sounded like two stations playing one thing.” This drama was reenacted in James Brown’s strings-and-shrieks ballads like “Bewildered” and “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” as well as in the treacly arrangements which dogged the recording careers of moaner-shouters like Jackie Wilson and Solomon Burke.