Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

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, “This 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.