Al Green, pt. 1: Anthony's Album Guide

My handy dandy profoundly subjective numerical rating scheme is decoded here.

Back Up Train (1967) 5
Green Is Blues (1969) 6
Al Green Gets Next To You (1971) 9
Let’s Stay Together (1972) 6
I’m Still In Love With You (1972) 8
Call Me (1973) 8
Livin’ For You (1973) 8
Al Green Explores Your Mind (1974) 8
Al Green’s Greatest Hits (1975) 6
Al Green Is Love (1975) 9
Full Of Fire (1976) 8
Have A Good Time (1976) 5
Al Green’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (1977) 6
The Belle Album (1977) 9
Truth n’ Time (1978) 6

By the time Al Green (then Al Greene) recorded his first single, he’d already experienced both a strict, religious childhood, and an adolescence surrounded by drugs and prostitution. His father had kicked him out of their home for listening to Jackie Wilson, and an overriding love for music - particularly singing - was a deep throughline in his early life. Stuck in Grand Rapids, Michigan but blessed with enterprising friends like Curtis Rodgers & Palmer James (who wrote his music, recorded it, and founded a label to put it out), Al Greene & The Soul Mates somehow managed to just miss the Top 40 with “Back Up Train.” While the song is nothing on what would follow, there’s some novelty in hearing the future legend - already feeling his oats, vocally - over gawky faux-Motown and Stax arrangements on his debut album, named after the hit. “Stop And Check Myself” is lesser Marvin Gaye, “Don’t Hurt Me No More” is lesser Wilson Pickett, and “Guilty” was lesser Al Green enough to make the R&B Top 30 when reissued in 1972. I can’t tell for sure whether there’s actual strings on the album or some Chamberlin simulacrum, but with Green(e) only earning one writing credit (Rodgers & James writing “Train”), the album is an occasionally charming reminder that he came from a talented community, and didn’t spring from the head of God or Willie Mitchell.

Train and the follow-up singles stiffed anyway, so when successful bandleader/producer Mitchell asked Green to lose the “e” and sign to Hi Records in Memphis, he wasn’t that hard to convince. Their first collaboration, Green Is Blues, is more audibly Al Green as we know him. His purr has more bass in it, though he’s unafraid to shriek when the spirit moves. If anything, it’s Mitchell’s arrangements here that feel tentative; while Green is his familiar, crowing self on the “My Girl” cover, the blaring horns could be anyone’s. “What Am I Gonna Do With Myself” and the cover of “Get Back” are nice, but no singles charted and nothing’s missed on Greatest Hits (Blues did go Top 20 after a ’72 re-release).

There’s nothing tentative at all about Al Green Gets Next To You, where the Hi Rhythm Section earns its capitals, Green deftly gliding around the deep pocket established by the Hodges brothers (bassist Leroy, guitarist Teenie, organist Charlie) and drummers Al Jackson Jr and Howard Grimes. “God Is Standing By” reveals his gospel gifts, the Doors’ “Light My Fire” shows the audacity of his songbook, and those are my two least favorite songs on the album, distracting from the romantic ache (“Tired Of Being Alone,” “I Can’t Get Next To You”) and sly, sexual authority (“I’m A Ram,” “Driving Wheel”) that otherwise defines it. The previous albums are prologue if you want it, but Gets Next To You is where the elegant funk Al Green and company brought to the ‘70s truly roars forth. The album’s B-side may be the most playfully thunderous music of his career.

With “Tired Of Being Alone” a major breakthrough, it’s no surprise Let’s Stay Together lightens up on the fuck-funk. Though the percolation under the title track - Green’s sole pop chart-topper - is a big reason his concept of commitment feels so promising and unstatic. Where Green only wrote “Alone” and the three closing grooves on Gets Next To You, Together is all him except for covers of Eddie Floyd and The Bee Gees(!), and thinner for it. Rather than push minor highlights like the Floyd cover or the swooning “Judy” as a follow-up single, the label went right on to the next album, perhaps realizing this wasn’t a platter worth milking further. 

I’m Still In Love With You is basically Let’s Still Stay Together, with two Top 5 singles reaffirming Green’s falsetto fidelity. But, within the confines of this commercial persona, Mitchell and the band re-up the funk, most notably on “Love And Happiness,” a lithe meditation on the muse that wasn’t released as a US single until 1977, but definitive enough to close the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Green also experiments with almost eerily quiet, epic post-gospel balladry, reducing himself to squeals on “Simply Beautiful” and milking the Kris Kristofferson country staple “For The Good Times” for over six minutes. If it doesn’t give you the giggles when he coos Roy Orbison (and, to be fair, he doesn’t growl or say “mercy”), Still might be his best sex soundtrack. And that “Pretty Woman” cover is on the B, anyway.

Call Me is frequently hailed as the All-Time Al Green LP, as it hits all his most popular modes. There’s falsetto pleading (“Have You Been Making Out O.K.”), there’s sexual assertiveness (“Here I Am”), there’s two country covers (Hank AND Willie!), there’s black humanist pride (“Stand Up”), and there’s overt gospel (“Jesus Is Waiting”). All of it is expertly made, and if you want an album that proves the breadth of Green’s musical accomplishment, Call Me is it. But when you own a bunch of Al Green albums, and you’re not trying to prove anything, Call Me is very good, rather than a cut above. The country covers are too familiar and respectful to be transcendent, and, for this agnostic, “Jesus Is Waiting” might as well be a telethon outtake. Though Google believes Green asks the band for some “reggae” on that one, he’s actually saying “bring it down.” Sorry.

Though he was still ruling the R&B charts, Livin’ For You - his fourth album in two years - saw Green’s pop stature diminish. The admirably feisty “Let’s Get Married” didn’t even make the Top 20, despite or because of its more specific promise of togetherhood. Superficially, the album comes off like Let’s Still Stay Together Again, but the messaging is woolier than before. The lockdown groove of “Let’s Get Married” is immediately preceded by a celebration of freedom via Jesus, and the B-Side goes “Hooray For Jailbait”/“Unchained Melody”/“Hooray For God”/“Boo Gossip,” the boo longer than the two hoorays combined. 

The gossip wasn’t unfounded, with Green accused of assaulting his secretary over back wages before the release of Explores Your Mind. On Mind, Willie Mitchell and the Hi Rhythm Section keep on grooving, jauntier than ever, while Green starts to blur his interests in sex & salvation, most famously on “Take Me To The River” (though it was notably a Top 40 hit for the Talking Heads instead of him). The co-existence of “One Nite Stand” and “Stay With Me Forever” underscores the confused subtext (even if the former refers to a live gig), and “School Days” reveals he wishes he was as young as the women he sang about. Around the time of the album’s release, a girlfriend threw boiling grits on him before killing herself. Soon after leaving the hospital, a second cousin held him at gunpoint while he did payroll, claiming Green owed her money. 

Proof the world was a very different place 50 years ago: Green’s next move after these nightmarish headlines was Greatest Hits. The compilation is a staggeringly smooth accomplishment, a triumphant strut through his ten biggest hits (especially once “Love And Happiness” replaced the Bee Gees cover on reissue). With Green and the Hi guys providing such assured nuance and detail, the pleading and pride is anything but monochromatic, instead accruing strength through repetition. I’m giving it a “6” because “Let’s Stay Together” is the only track from an original LP I wouldn’t keep in full. But if you only have one Green album, there’s no shame in it being this.

Any reflection inspired by the chaos of his private life wasn’t initially evident on Al Green Is Love, which features the songs “L-O-V-E (Love),” “The Love Sermon,” “There Is Love” and “Love Ritual.” Dismissed as more of the same upon release (and who could blame people?), the album is increasingly seen as one of his best. I’m among those retrospective enthusiasts, appreciative of such bizarre highlights as “Rhymes” (which appears to give those payroll stand-offs a “c’est la vie!”), the polyrhythmic exercise “Love Ritual,” and “I Didn’t Know,” a nearly eight-minute expression of regret so wandering, so close to incoherence, that it’s a miracle the band didn’t get lost. Where Call Me is the Al Green album to impress others with, Al Green Is Love is where fans can enjoy him at his most singular and idiosyncratic. 

The 1976 albums are where accusations of churning out product start to hold water. Full Of Fire is great product, crackling with pre-ministerial spirit (there’s more than one funky Jesus metaphor) and disco-adjacency (Green’s a little regretful about the title track’s chug, but I’m not). Have A Good Time is a heartbreaker, though, with what sounds like commercial desperation rendering Mitchell’s backdrops utterly anonymous. It would be Green’s last album with the producer for almost a decade, this merely professional ‘70s swank (the highlight is a faithful Toussaint McCall cover) mostly serving to explain why. 

(Half of Al Green’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II was attached to the CD of the first volume in 1995, serving as a merited digital encore to the LP’s original 10. I get why “Rhymes” and “Take Me To The River” weren’t among those tracks - they weren’t singles! - but I tip my hat for their inclusion on II.)

The Belle Album, with its famous claim “it’s you I want, but him that I need,” is often seen as the glorious coda of Green’s secular music career. Producing himself for the first time, and no longer employing the Hodges brothers, the sound is both familiar and fresh compared to his earlier albums, incorporating synth and Green’s own guitar playing without forgoing that prominent pocket. It’s this musical self-discovery, a sound so intimate Belle could be R&B’s Tusk, that stands out far more than any spiritual reckoning. Indeed, while he had been ordained as a minister in 1976, founding the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, it would be another few years before he moved on to gospel music.

Truth’n’Time, Green’s (often forgotten) last album before going gospel, mixes Belle’s endearing warmth with the workmanlike tepidity of Have A Good Time. Clocking in at under 30 minutes, it’s practically an EP. Only three of the songs are penned by Green, and only one of them is longer than the “To Sir With Love” cover.  It took plummeting sales, and falling off a stage in Cincinnati, for Green to finally commit to the ministry in 1979. 

Despite the frequent veneration of this career segue, Green’s private life was still full of conflict and violence. I almost couldn’t write this piece after discovering his ex-wife’s account of their terrifying, abusive relationship, which continued into the early ‘80s. While I’m embarrassed how little knowledge of Green’s crimes informs his public appreciation (I usually see that grits attack treated as a scorned woman’s unearned fury, rather than comparable to how he treated women), enjoying Green’s ‘70s music doesn’t necessarily require a blind eye. As with Richard Pryor and other figures of the era with similarly troubled pasts and later demons, Green’s public persona was that of a seeker, eager for communion, spiritual and romantic, but fraught, and complicit in his personal dissatisfaction. 

Jimmy McDonough’s biography Soul Survivor is reportedly a good place to learn more about the Hi Records scene (I’m woefully ignorant about fellow label artists like Ann Peebles and O.V. Wright) and to get a sympathetic but unsparing look at Green’s life. Already not much for gospel even when the singer earns their piety, I’m not in a rush to dig deep into Green’s Myrrh catalog, or the secular comebacks that followed. But - once the shock of discovering his victimization of others wore off - I was surprised how much I still enjoyed listening to the classics. Even when playing an idealized romantic self over the funkiest music he and Willie Mitchell could conceive, that self was fallible, sensitive and human. His actions give me pause when it comes to celebrating the man, but I still feel comfortable celebrating the sound, and what that sound celebrated.

Al Green Is Love, Al Green Gets Next To You and The Belle Album are at 104, 134 and 201, respectively, on my Top 300 Albums of All Time. I'm telling you this because I've found people are more inclined to discuss and share reviews if there's a quantitative element at the top or bottom they can easily debate. Prove me right! Direct correspondence can be shipped off to anthonyisright at gmail dot com.