No matter how old one becomes, there are some things in life you just refuse to forget: the first time your heart fluttered for the cute girl sitting across from you in the classroom; the first time you tasted the sweet lips of that adorable next-door neighbor; and the first time you ever heard the enchanting voice of Al Green floating out of the phonograph. On the other hand, in my case, from the mono speaker of a television set.
In 1971 I was eight years old. Every other Saturday morning, mommy dearest dragged me and baby brother with her to one of Harlem's finest salons, B. Beauty Lounge. Filled with chattering black women who were surrogate aunts (especially mom's beehive-wearing, cutie-pie hair stylist Jackie), we were usually the only kids playing in the front of the shop. Yet, come 11 o'clock we stopped what we were doing and sat down in the shop's hard plastic chairs. Anticipating this moment all week, it was time to "take the hippest trip in America". For the next hour, it was all about Soul Train.
While we usually had the black-n-white set to ourselves, once coolly stiff host Don Cornelius announced that the next guest was Al Green, the swoon of women being styled in the swivel chairs was a sound I had never heard before. In retrospect, I suppose the word orgasmic would be appropriate. Yet, having no idea who this Al Green person might be, I could have cared less; believe me, that would be the last time I made that mistake.
In a rare case of solidarity, all the soul sisters in the salon gathered in the waiting area, breathless as the former teenage gospel singer strutted his funky stuff across the small stage. Lip-synching to a sexy groove that had been laid down by Memphis musician/producer Willie Mitchell, the aural innovator behind the Hi-Records sound, brother Al, was no joke.
As Brit-crit Peter Shapiro points out in Soul: 100 Essential Albums, "Mitchell's Hi-Records had previously been known for some decent instrumentals and country records, but working with former Stax drummer Al Jackson Jr., Green and Mitchell created the composite portrait of the soulman: both funky and forlorn, assertive and acquiescent, greedy and generous."
Dressed like a hybrid of a blaxploition player and country bumpkin on the Soul Train stage, this son of former sharecroppers came on clad in Captain America boots, black vinyl hot pants, and a crimson fuzzy fedora. It was at that precise moment that Al Green would begin to define soul music for a new generation of post-civil rights ramblers. At a time when most of the Motown cats were still wearing tuxedos and memorizing Charlie Akins dance steps, Al Green was his own man.
Green freely admits in his 2000 autobiography Take Me to the River (co-written with Davin Seay) that he had been bucking authority from the time he was a small boy. Perhaps the most endearing anecdote in the entertaining (but far from in-depth) book is when Green recalls telling a teacher during career day that he wanted to be a performer: "The teacher quieted the class, then turned to me with an indulgent smile. 'Now, Albert, you're going to have to think about...being realistic.'"
Feisty as ever, young Al Greene (the way it's spelled on his birth certificate) snapped, "I don't want to be realistic; I want to be a singer." A bad boy years before Puff Daddy came on the scene, Green showed this sense of defiance to his religious daddy years later when he dared to jam the devil's music in the guise of Jackie Wilson's scorching 1963 hit "A Woman, a Lover, a Friend". Moments later, alongside a broken record player and a "pile of shattered 45s", big poppa bounced his oldest son into the streets.
Like many soul singers from Ike Turner and Sam Cooke to R. Kelly and D'angelo, walking the high wire between sanctified sounds and heathen harmonics can be simultaneously a gift and a curse that influences one to create great art while also dragging them to the brimstone; or, as in the case of Cooke and Marvin Gaye, violent deaths. Of course, it's not only church-boy singers who slip into the raging fires of temptation, but there's no denying that the mixture of salvation and sexuality sure sounds great streaming from our stereos.
Though I'd never know for certain, perhaps a few of the women craning their necks behind me and baby bro's blow-out afros that Saturday morning had remembered Green from his days as lead singer with the Soul Mates on the 1967 urban hit, "Back Up Train". Though the track stalled on the pop charts, the chocolate cities couldn't get enough. One night Green & the Soul Mates made Harlem history when they were called back nine times to sing "Back Up Train" onstage at the Apollo.
A year after the Soul Train takeover in '71, Al Green was back in the tacky studios in Memphis recording his next masterpiece I'm Still in Love With You. Listed in the top-four of my favorite iconic images of the '70s (right next to chocolate cinematic hero John Shaft swinging through a tenement window, pale-faced chick Patty Hearst robbing a bank, and big-headed Nixon proclaiming his innocence) was Al's majestic album cover photo.
Lounging in an ivory wicker chair and dressed in an angelic white suit and black socks, he looked cool as a ghetto snowman; ironic, considering how much heat could be heard in his voice. A lanky teenager named Betty who lived next door had no problem blasting this aural masterpiece at all hours of the night as though the black ice of his voice would manifest into her dreams.
Essayist Magnus Larrson wrote in his impressive "Chase Away the Blues: The Al Green Story", published in Merge magazine, "Al Green's voice is sexual healing. It is a natural beauty comparable only to the sound of a sunset, or binary stars imploding into each other." What makes Green a true legend 34 years later is the fact that his music is still putting a mojo on young women's minds and making men strut like pimped-out peacocks.
Moreover, my boogie-down Bronx-born BFF Jana, born a year after the disc was released, swears that the masterful yet minimalist ballad "Simply Beautiful" was one of the best songs ever written. Without a doubt, it was this track that encouraged badass Prince to throw that soft alto like Thor's mighty hammer.
"Just listen to that voice", she said as Green's fragile falsetto gushed from her Sony speakers like a groove-laced spiritual symphony. While the beauty of Green's voice is a given, Mitchell's production was the rhythmic bedrock that helped Al reach soul nirvana. "Willie helped me find my identity," Green has said of Mitchell, with whom he recorded 10 classic albums and dozens of unforgettable tracks between 1969 and 1976. "The vibes between us were perfect."
Like most of the tragic men populating Planet Soul, when things start going good, that is when it is time to fuck it all up. You know, like R. Kelly's alleged pee-pee incidents, Teddy Pendergrass in the ride with a tranny the night of his paralyzing car accident, D'Angelo kickboxing with Jesus while sniffing the devil's dandruff, and Gaye being murdered by pop duke, soul bros often get themselves involved in shit that threatens to mar their musical legacies. In Green's case, it all began with a pot of grits.
In his wonderfully written Oxford American essay "The High Lonesome Gospel of Al Green" (2005), author Jeff Sharlet described the fall of Green with the keen eye of a poetic crime writer. "[Former lover] Mary Woodson snuck into his Memphis split-level and found some grits boiling or boiled them herself while he washed and she came up on him just as he was getting out of the tub and dumped the whole pan on his skinny bones, that slinky S of biceps and pects and stomach later pictured on the 'Greatest Hits' album beneath his strange, ugly-beautiful mug, the hangdog eyes and the missing chin and the teenage boy's beard and the earnest, love-me smile so at odds with the seduction of his bare-chested glory. She scalded it all. Shoulders, back, belly. Burning grits probably dripped down into the crack of his ass. He must have bellowed, raw and deep, no falsetto when your skin is sizzling off of you. Mary Woodson had done what she'd come to Memphis do and so she went into the bedroom and retrieved Al Green's .38, and tried to shoot herself. She missed twice and got lucky the third time. The police found in her purse a note declaring her intentions and her reasons. 'The more I trust you,' she'd written, 'the more you let me down.'"
In those two-plus decades since that night, Green broke away from the Hi sound (including both Mitchell and the famed Hi Rhythm Section, which had previously played a large part in defining Green's distinctive musical style) and recorded The Belle Album in 1977. Afterwards, Green hit an emotional rock bottom that wasn't rectified in his mind until he became a minister, stopped singing soul, and released a slew of gospel albums. It wasn't until the early '90s that he felt comfortable enough to include secular songs into his set.
After a 27-year break, Al Green, 58 and Willie Mitchell, 77, reunited in 2003 on the stunning disc I Can't Stop. One listen to the gutbucket moonshine shot that was the title track and the tragic beauty of "Rainin' in My Heart" and it was obvious that Green had remained rebelliously true to himself. In this world of plastic grooves and fake funk, what more can one ask for?
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