So is there any question that when the music trades rack up their year-end charts for 1972 (and you discover that some group you never even heard of mysteriously became Top New R&B Vocal Group), the number one Male Vocalist will be Al Green? I mean is there any doubt in your mind? 1972 is Al Green's year and he seemed to snatch it up almost effortlessly.
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With one hit single after another, all of them turning into a neat stack of gold if not platinum records, Green hardly lost his place on the charts, always seemed to have two or three slots on the jukebox, and now has his second album of the year.
All this would be of only passing interest if Al Green weren't so good, so very good. Is it going too far to say he's the only truly great male vocalist to come along since Otis Redding? He's certainly the only black singer since Redding to approach, and in some ways go beyond, Redding's wide popularity and appeal while developing a style at least as idiosyncratic and exciting (both Bill Withers and Curtis Mayfield are taking steps in these same directions but neither have that certain ego-driven Star Quality that would qualify them as top contenders for the long-vacant Otis Redding heavyweight spot). Whether Al Green is a better singer than Otis Redding is a question that doesn't interest me, although I prefer Green's iridescent falsetto to Redding's rougher, gruffer voice. To some extent, it's a choice between sweetness and funk, and yet these qualities were hardly mutually exclusive in Redding's work. Otis was sweet and funky; Al Green is, more and more, just sweet. The Copacabana takes its toll.
But I'm not really complaining. So let him specialize. Clearly Green drew from Redding (early Al Green picks up directly from "Dock of the Bay") and Sam Cooke, but whatever elements of style he might have taken from these and other influences have gradually lost their definition and become instead bits and pieces of the Al Green style. This has been refined with each new album to the point where it becomes, in I'm Still in Love with You, less a style than a stylization. The technique is brilliant—the incredibly mobile vocals, carrying the songs in an intricate ebb and flow, and especially the rise of the falsetto, thinning out to almost nothing for the delivery of a particularly delicious line—but, ironically, as it's perfected it seems more obtrusive as a technique and less acceptable as an inspiration. The first flash of lightning is always the most exciting; after that they just brighten up the landscape. Such are the problems of professionalism. Each successive Hi album has intensified and polished Green's unique approach while it narrowed his range of material. So the songs get better (or at least stay within a few points of "Tired of Being Alone" and "Let's Stay Together," which would be difficult to surpass) but they also get to be more and more the same.
But like I said, I'm not complaining. Or
Al Green's first four albums are the beginning of the truly sublime rhythm-and-blues story of the 1970s: It's a story about one of the most soulful voices in pop history - a rough yet refined tenor -- combined with a mystically tight Memphis studio band. For generations of inheritors (from Jodeci to U2) and lovers, Green, producer Willie Mitchell and the five-man Hi Records house band set the benchmark for soul.
"Al Green" means not only the artist but also a sound: a jazz-bred sparseness and life inside a wonderfully clean, accessible groove. 1970's Green Is Blues doesn't yet have all this legendary muscle together. It has killer moments: On the attractive ballad "One Woman" or the beachy, horn-warmed, up-tempo "Talk to Me," the ingredients of the mythic Green-Mitchell relationship exist, but they haven't fully jelled. A deliberate version of the Box Tops' "The Letter" is the album's highlight; avoiding their music's usual bounce, Green and Mitchell explore a slightly dangerous urban variant of older country blues.
On 1971's Gets Next to You and 1972's Let's Stay Together and I'm Still in Love With You, the Red Sea parts. Green's singing and the band's arrangements act in thrilling concert, offering a controlled abandon that you don't often hear this side of, say, Miles Davis and Gil Evans. The hits are well-known: the supernatural-sounding stretches and dissolves of "Tired of Being Alone" (from Gets Next to You); the unique French candy and Tennessee gospel of "Let's Stay Together"; the hard architecture and chiffon air of "I'm Still in Love With You." On non-hits such as Love With You's "I'm Glad You're Mine," both Green and his musicians sound like terrifically expressive bees buzzing around rhythmically inside some funky old box. More masterpieces would come in the years ahead -- 1973's Call Me, most quickly -- but all you need is right here.
JAMES HUNTER
(From RS 917, March 6, 2003)
