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 Four 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.

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.