Soul men

Looking at that photo today, 20 years after the Intruders broke up, when even their biggest hit, "Cowboys to Girls," is a fading memory to most pop fans, I feel a little the way I do when "Ferry Across the Mersey" comes on the radio and I know that Gerry Marsden has had to live out the song and find what it means to have to return to a place it once seemed he was on his way out of. Or as I did at the end of Devil in a Blue Dress, when we see the black suburban utopia we know didn't last.

The Intruders don't have anything near the effortless perfection you hear in the Temptations or the Spinners. Little Sonny Brown's voice can sound as if it were on the verge of giving out as he reaches for a note, and once he hits it, you can hear the work he has to do to sustain it. He's surer in a lower register, like the sexy way he slides around the opening lines of "(We'll Be) United." But the heart and soul of the Intruders' music is in Little Sonny's reach. When he sings "We're gonna stay together . . . gonna work together," in "Together," it's not a celebration just of romance but of teamwork. You hear the work that's gone into the performance -- the way the other three Intruders' backing vocals smooth out Brown's rough spots and the way the production of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff recasts all four members in sophisticated, string-laden arrangements that manage to be dramatic, subtle, and elegant all at the same time.

This unheralded, one-disc collection turns out to be one of the reissue gems of the season. Cowboys to Girls comes with a fine essay by Carol Cooper, who makes a convincing case for the Intruders' musical and sociological importance. The Intruders were the group with whom Gamble and Huff developed their style before their pioneering work with the O'Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and others. Cooper notes that Philly soul's combination of gruff vocals and sophisticated arrangements bridged the smoothness of Motown and the roughness of Stax (and, she might have pointed out, the way from soul to disco).

There's a delicate, almost gentlemanly quality to the Intruders' approach. Listen to some of these titles: "A Nice Girl like You," "When We Get Married," "I'll Always Love My Mama" (one of the best numbers here, not a sob story but a genuinely affectionate recounting of a childhood). They might do a number called "Me Tarzan, You Jane," but they sound as if they were more intent on furnishing a treehouse paradise for their honeys than beating their chests and proclaiming themselves king.

But there's a gritty underside to the idealism of these pop utopias. "We'd be better off livin' in a jungle," Little Sonny sings in the first line of that song, and the soul-killing grind of urban life breaks through the surface just for a moment. It takes over completely in the group's (far superior) version of Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion," which is sung with a naked, wounded desire to return to a time when there was still a chance that someone could make everything all right.

The striving in Little Sonny Brown's voice, the tension between the gritty world he was singing from and the one he was trying to reach, can be more affecting than what you get from singers who can hit notes effortlessly. What is never far from the Intruders' music, no matter how slick the Gamble-Huff production, is the atmosphere of that barber shop the group was photographed in. The Intruders aimed not to leave that atmosphere behind but to marry it to the elegance that has always characterized the best romantic pop, to fulfill the familiar and idealistic and noble mission of changing the way the world looked through a three-minute record.