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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 Joh
In May 1961 the Four Distinctions paid a fifty-dollar entrance fee for the privilege of wi
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 Four Tops, the Temptations, and a host of other aspirants, the Distinctions found themselves singing backup and ru
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 pi
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 outru
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 Su