The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  What’s remarkable isn’t that ’50s song structures were inadequate to those unfettered soul voices just then locating their force. What’s remarkable is how ’60s soul produced at black-run companies like Motown, Vee-Jay, and Stax created an entire language based on the confinement of such voices in inadequate or mock-inadequate vessels. This drama took its purest form in the vocal interplay developed in groups like the Soul Stirrers and the Five Royales, as well as in a thousand doo-wop stairwells—voices rattling in a cage of echoes, or shaking off a straitjacket of rhyme, or outrunning billows of harmony that threatened to engulf it.

  That’s where the Distinctions come in. The Philadelphia production style within which they cut their great records revived the smoothest of doo-wop harmonizing styles to suit a new sophistication of recording technique. Producers like Thom Bell and the team of Gamble and Huff raised this game of confinement to the next level, so testifyin’ singers like the Bluenotes’ Teddy Pendergrass and the O’Jays Eddie Levert had to find every possible way not only to shout, grunt, and plead their way out of the traps devised but to chortle and whisper in falsetto as well.

  In this game no one set traps like Deehorn and the Distinctions, and no one slipped them like Rude. Hear it first in the spring 1968 demo recordings which secured the Distinctions’ deal with Philly Grove: a sketch of their first chart hit, “Step Up and Love Me.” With Deehorn’s production scheme still incomplete, the nearly a cappella voices weave a nest for Rude’s whispery intro, then push it out into soaring flight. From the same sessions comes the previously unreleased debut of Rude’s songcraft, “So-Called Friends.”

  The new group was installed at Sigma Sound studios to record a full album. Rude, who’d been sleeping on Marv Brown’s couch, bought a house and sent for his wife and child, who’d been waiting in North Carolina. On the debut, the strings-drenched Have You Heard The Distinctions?, Deehorn’s warm, appealing love songs and his lush, aching productions dominate proceedings—here was the group worthy of his surefire hits. His arrangement of “Step Up and Love Me,” complete with flügelhorn and glockenspiel, established the group’s chart viability, smashing through to #1 on the R&B charts while attaining #8 pop. Rude was given a co-credit on the wrenching “Heart and Five Fingers,” though it’s hard to imagine his cajoling, sobbing outro was ever actually written down. When tour promoters at last began ringing the phone, the group was ready; they’d only been practicing their footwork for a decade.

  Apprenticeship was past. Atlantic Records purchased the smaller label’s contract and returned the team to Sigma to cut their first masterpiece, The Deceptively Simple Sounds of the Subtle Distinctions. The classic “(No Way to Help You) Ease Your Mind” inaugurated a brief songwriting partnership between Deehorn, Rude, and Brown. With “Happy Talk” and “Raining on a Sunny Day” also reaching the charts, if you owned a radio, Rude’s aching falsetto and the Distinctions’ rich, percolating harmonies dominated the summer of ’70. The album was a banquet of elegant contemporary moods, the group at the summit of their early form, best described by Dave Marsh in his Heart of Rock and Soul : “Pure déjà vu, seeming to call up nostalgia for a doo-wop soul that had never actually existed.” Though it may seem inevitable that the tone would darken, at the time it was easy to wish for summer to last forever—or for a hundred albums as lovely as Deceptively Simple Sounds. Instead we have just one.

  Taking a cue from Curtis Mayfield in “Move on Up” and Marvin Gaye in “What’s Going On,” the Subtle Distinctions recorded their socially conscious In Your Neighborhood in the fall of 1971. With a cover photo of the group in a vacant lot warming their hands over a oil-drum fire the album was rushed into stores before Christmas by an A&R office fearful the appetite for conscience might peter out. No fear— Superfly was right around the corner—but the look didn’t fit the group, and Neighborhood was no Christmas record. Rude delivered corruscating vocals on his own “Sucker Punches” (which reached #18 R&B while failing to dent the pop charts), “Jane on Tuesday,” and “ Bricks in the Yard,”but the album bombed. In the dubious tradition of 100-Proof (Aged in Soul)’s “I’d Rather Fight Than Switch,” Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” and other Madison Avenue–inspired tunes, Deehorn’s “Silly Girl (Love Is for Kids)” nudged to #11 R&B, #16 pop, providing some tonal—and chart—relief.

  Redemption was sweet indeed: Nobody and His Brother was less a retreat than a recasting of the darkness of Neighborhood in deeper, more personal terms, made possible by Rude’s assertion of songwriting leadership. “Bothered Blue” was an immediate #1, topping both charts in October 1972, and if it’s the only song you were certain you knew when you purchased this set, you’re forgiven. Listen again. The song is better, more heartrending and true with each passing year, one of the most grown-up testaments of ambivalence and ennui ever to be made the backdrop for a Volkswagen commercial. Album tracks like “The Lisa Story,” “If You Held the Key,” and “So Stupid Minded” form a war for the band’s allegiance with co-writer Deehorn—Rude’s voice and lyrics raging against the tame formats Deehorn throws in his path, while Maddox, Longham, Macy, and Bicycle try to play peacemakers, to give harmonic soothing to the voice burning in the foreground. When Rude flies they offer a landing pad, when he stumbles they pull him to his feet, when at last he needs to sleep they tuck him in. Only “Bothered Blue” charted, but that was all it took for the album to find its place, and become their number-one seller.

  Rude quit the group with the song still on the charts. The Distinctions’ last album, Love You More!, is a retroactive shambles, Deehorn’s weaving together of rehearsal tapes Rude left in his wake. The catchy, understated “Painting of a Fool” was a brief R&B hit in June 1973, but the album fooled no one. The Distinctions were dropped from Atlantic, and quickly parted ways with Deehorn, who had some disco fish to fry. The group slipped quickly and easily into an afterlife on the dinner-club oldies circuit, seemingly as reluctant to completely retire the name as they were to sully it by recording without Rude up front. Few retire as gracefully.

  As for the departure of the irreplaceable, erratic, and beloved Rude, no one was surprised. His studio battles with Deehorn were a legend, and for good reason. Black pop was headed in another direction, “Bothered Blue” nonwithstanding. Deehorn would produce many hits in the next years, but the place of a Barrett Rude Jr. was far from certain. For every soul-shouter like Johnny Taylor, who, with “Disco Lady,” found career revival, were dozens who’d come to the end of the road. But if the slick rhythm of the up-tempo Philly numbers anticipated (and helped create) disco, that only adds a poignance to what became—in the sound of the Spinners, Manhattans, Bluenotes, Delphonics, Stylistics, and Subtle Distinctions—classic soul’s last burst.

  It’s hard to describe what changed in Stevie Wonder’s records once he began playing all the instruments, except that it doesn’t feel like soul—more like the most humane pop-funk ever recorded. By bringing the music into full accord, Wonder outgrew the parodoxes. Similarly, Al Green’s late-’70s gospel is fine stuff, but once he abandoned Willie Mitchell and the house band at Hi, the music no longer teetered between worlds. The counterexample is Marvin Gaye, who, when he began arranging his own material, waded even deeper into the unresolvable mire. Gaye is soul’s paradigmatic figure, carrying his confinements anywhere, embedded in voice itself.

  Could Barrett Rude Jr. have carried on with something like Gaye’s force through the ’70s? Maybe. He tried. He failed. Rude was never a confident songwriter—all but two of his Distinctions songs carry Deehorn’s or Brown’s name as collaborator. Record buyers and radio programmers knew his voice but not his name: he might sing “Bothered Blue” on stage until he was bothered gray, but he couldn’t record it again. At 34, he was starting over. On His Own (1972) shouldn’t have been a bad start: with Marv Brown in tow as arranger, Rude recorded a dreamy suite of love songs as intimate as notebook jottings. Unbilled, the Distinctions sang backup on two numbers, “Thi
s Eagle’s Flown” and the sole hit, “As I Quietly Walk,” which lodged comfortably at #12 on the R&B charts but couldn’t rescue the album from public indifference.

  Our hearts tend to turn away when ballplayers sign with new teams, when child actors grow older, when groups break up and go solo. Still, in Rude’s view the Distinctions represented a kind of infancy, and the solo career his long-delayed adulthood. The non-reception of On His Own was bitter. Increasingly isolated from the advice of friends, Rude divorced Junie Kwarsh and moved to New York. His last album, Take It, Baby, treats the split with agonized specificity—the million-dollar contract he’d negotiated on leaving the Distinctions had been turned over in a settlement. Eschewing Atlantic’s resources, and leaving behind even Marv Brown, Rude recorded at the New Jersey studios of Sylvia Robinson, later the godmother of the Sugarhill Gang. The result is a tour de force of unleashed resentment, and nearly unlistenable by the standards the Distinctions’ audience had come to expect. “Lover of Women” and “Careless” briefly visited the R&B charts. “A Boy Is Crying” alludes to a custody battle, but from the sound might be a battle between Rude’s two or three selves, among which there are only losers.

  Rude’s last, stray single, “Who’s Callin’ Me?”, recorded and released in 1975, is a confession of paranoiac retreat. It takes the form of a string of guesses at the identity of a caller; a ringing telephone is audible through the seething funk. “A bill collector? ” Rude wonders. “Can’t be my brother, my brother never calls.” After considering “A wrong number/Some unwed mother/my last producer/a slick seducer/a mob enforcer” and others, just barely heard on the fadeout is a last, anguished possibility: “Is it my mean old father, callin’ me? ” In light of later events the coincidence is jarring.

  Rude’s last visit to the recording studio was in 1978 as a guest vocalist on Doofus Funkstrong’s “(Did You Press Your) Bump Suit” (single edit), a twenty-minute funk workout boiled down for release as a single. It touched the charts, but didn’t stick. Rude’s vocal aeronautics never sounded better and—unmoored from sense by goonish lyrics—never meant less. An even odder epilogue is provided by two examples of privately recorded four-track demos, circa 1977–79. “Smile Around Your Cigarette” and “It’s Raining Teeth” are each haunting and disjointed compositions, and each beautifully if lazily sung, suggesting the influence of Sly Stone. Rude was smashed on cocaine at the time.

  I promised a story, and stories have endings. Andre Deehorn produced a variety of acts in Philadelphia and later in Los Angeles, scoring on the dance charts with Sophistifunction and Fool’s Gold, among others. He now works as a personal manager in Los Angeles. Rudy Bicycle and Alfred Maddox remain lifelong friends, each living with their families in Dearborn, Michigan, and working in the industry which has supported them all their lives, Bicycle booking musical acts at casinos in nearby Windsor, Ontario, and Maddox as a publicist for the Motown museum. Denny Longham never lost his interest in hair; after the Distinctions disbanded in 1977 he opened King’s Hair Throne, a clip shop in South Philly, and was a neighborhood fixture until his death from pneumonia in 1985. He was 44. In 1977 James Macy followed Andre Deehorn to Los Angeles, and struggled for years to find a hit on a variety of distaff labels. He and two companions were killed by shotgun blasts by unknown assailants while sitting in a car at a traffic light in Culver City on September 25, 1988. He was 47. Marv Brown never again found a musical partnership as satisfying as that which began at the Hi Studio in 1967. He worked with the house band at Sigma for a year, then vanished, and later took his own life by hanging in a Patterson, New Jersey, flophouse in 1994. He was 56.

  After winning custody of his son, Barrett Rude Jr. moved to Brooklyn, and there sank gradually into a cocaine-fueled desolation. Rude’s father joined the household after his release from prison in 1977; his relationship with Rude was uneasy at best. The atmosphere was volatile, a bad blend of Rude’s hedonism and his father’s quirky brand of Pentecostalism, with its moral fervor, its love-hate fascination with music and sensuality, its arcane Sabbathdays. (It’s odd to consider that Marvin Gaye, Philippe Wynne, and Barrett Rude Jr. were all, by choice or upbringing, weird black jews.) On August 16, 1981, during a family dispute, Barrett Rude Senior aimed a pistol at his son and grandson. Whether he intended to use it can’t be known. Another gun appeared, and grandson shot grandfather to death. Rude’s son, who’d turned eighteen two months earlier, was convicted as an adult, of involuntary manslaughter. Though Rude was uninjured, the gunshot ended what remained of his public life. His silence since that time is complete. For what it’s worth, the man is still alive.

  That’s the story. But what matters is a story in song. The music in this collection tells a tale—of beauty, inspiration, and pain—in voices out of the ghetto and the suburb, the church and the schoolyard, voices of celebration and mourning, sometimes voices of pensiveness and heartache so profound they feel unsustainable in the medium of pop. The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or introspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind.

  And that’s what you need, what you needed all along. Like the song says: sometimes we all must get bothered blue.

  Disc 1: 1–2: The Four Distinctions, singles on Tallhat 1961, “Hello,” “Baby on the Moon.” 3–4: The Four Distinctions, canceled Tamla single , 1965, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” b/w “Rolling Downhill.” 5–8: BRJ singles on Hi , 1967: “Set a Place at Your Table” (R&B #49), “Love in Time,” “Rule of Three,” “I Saw the Light,” 9–10 Unreleased demos , 1968: “Step Up and Love Me,” “So-Called Friends.” 11–14: From Have You Heard the Distinctions?, Philly Groove, 1969: “Step Up and Love Me” (R&B #1, pop #8), “Eye of the Beholder,” “Heart and Five Fingers,” “Lonely and Alone.” 15–19: From The Deceptively Simple Sounds of the Subtle Distinctions, Atco, 1970: “(No Way to Help You) Ease Your Mind” (R&B #1, pop #2), “Far More the Man,” “Raining on a Sunny Day” (R&B #7, pop #88), “Happy Talk” (R&B #20, pop #34), “Just in Case (You Turn Around).” Disc 2: 1–4: From The Distinctions in Your Neighborhood, Atco, 1971: “Sucker Punches” (R&B #18, pop, did not chart), “Silly Girl (Love Is for Kids)” (R&B #11, pop #16), “Jane on Tuesday,” “Bricks in the Yard.” 5–9: From Nobody and His Brother, Atco 1972: “Bothered Blue” (R&B #1, pop #1), “Finding It Out,” “So Stupid Minded,” “If You Held the Key,” “The Lisa Story,” 10: From The Subtle Distinctions Love You More!, Atco, 1973: “Painting of a Fool” (R&B #18). 11–13: from On His Own (BRJ solo) , Atco, 1972: “As I Quietly Walk” (R&B #12, pop # 48), “It Matters More,” “This Eagle’s Flown.” 14–16: From Take It, Baby (BRJ solo), Atco, 1973: “Careless” (R&B #24), “Lover of Women,” “A Boy Is Crying.” 17–18: BRJ solo single , Fantasy 1975: “Who’s Callin’ Me?” (R&B #63) b/w “ Crib Jam.” 19: Casablanca, 1978: BRJ guest appearance on Doofus Funkstrong’s “(Did You Press Your) Bump Suit” (R&B #84, pop #100). 20–21: Unreleased BRJ demos : “Smile Around Your Cigarette,” “It’s Raining Teeth.”

  chapter 1

  In the attic room I called my office sat a daybed that was usually spread with paper, the press packets which accompanied promotional copies of CDs and the torn bubble wrap and padded mailers the CDs arrived in. This morning, though, the bedspread, bathed in sideways seven A.M. September light, Indian summer light, was clear of packaging husks, clear of publicity. Instead the daybed held two things: a CD wallet, with plastic sleeves to hold twenty-four discs, and Abigale Ponders, in threadbare Meat Puppets T-shirt (mine) and Calvin Klein men’s underwear (not mine, she bought her own), her limbs bent in sleepily elegant disarray. Only one of the two would be joining me on the nine-thirty flight to Los Angeles. Discman and headphones were already packed, along with a single change of clothes, in a small overnight satchel waiting at the door downstair
s.

  It wasn’t usual to see Abby in my attic office. In truth, I was peevish to have her there. I’d been hoping to slip from the house while she was still asleep in the room below. Instead she’d trotted upstairs after me. There, in slanted light, her white shorts glowing against her skin and the maroon bedspread, she made a picture—one suitable, if you discounted the Meat Puppets emblem on the thin-stretched white shirt, for the jacket art on an old Blue Note jazz LP. She resembled a brown puppet herself, akimbo, head propped angled, mouth parted, lids druggy. I would have had to be a scowling Miles Davis to feel worthy of stepping into the frame. Or, at least, Chet Baker. Abby’s whole being was a reproach to me. I loved having a black girlfriend, and I loved Abby, but I was no trumpet player.

  Shopping at my wall of CDs, I opened a jewel case and dropped Ron Sexsmith’s Whereabouts onto the spread beside the wallet.

  She yawned. “Why are you staying overnight, anyway?” Abby counted on groggy insouciance to break the stalemate of the night before. We’d been in a silent war, worse than ever. This was worth a try—I rooted for her, even if I couldn’t cooperate.

  “I told you I’ve got a friend to see.”

  “Are you going on a date ?”