(1975, Hi Records)
I do not know how exactly I got into Al Green, because my folks’ soul explosion mostly was limited to Stevie Wonder vinyl and a few Rudy Ray Moore 8-tracks. But somewhere along the way, I ended up a huge fan of Al Green through this Greatest Hits LP, where the two halves of the record sleeve have long separated, been taped together with regular tape, masking tape, and finally blue painter’s tape. Even that has broken on two ends so that I can stuff the album back in on all but one side, slap it together like a sandwich, and stuff it between some other albums to keep it in one piece. Al Green brings to mind two memories for me.
One time, I hung out with some bald-headed chick, and we wandered the city wild, me drunk, her tolerant, and we went back to her place and she showed me her shotgun, left me in my boxers but we slept together, actual sleeping not sexing it up euphemisms. The next morning, my drunk was gone and I woke up and was like, “What the fuck?” Nice frilly bed, by myself. I pulled on my jeans, went downstairs, and the chick was frying potatoes up for breakfast with Al Green playing. At the time, I was a directionless, shiftless, drunken degenerate, but I knew I could love a woman like that. I did hold an infatuation for her for a while, but my real potato-frying, Al Green playing woman had a much better ass, long hair, and was a few years into my future still.
The second thing that comes to mind is this older black dude named Reggie I worked with at this veterinary clinic in Richmond. We were the two guys who cleaned up the shit, literally. It was fun becasue we’d spray the Jack Russell terriers with a hose to watch them jump like crackheads for ten minutes at a time. We became good friends, hiding joints for each other under the radio, especially if you had weekend clean-up when none of the authoritative types were around (or the chubby redneck lady anesthesiologist bitch, who acted like she was on her way to a Nobel prize for her veterinary assisting bullshit duties, thus someone to not be cool with, as she was a born snitch). Reggie was a solid dude, and his wife worked there too, and I kicked it at their crib a couple times, nice Northside upwardly mobile dual income middle-aged black family, but 420-friendly, it was like the Huxtables but for for-real folks. Anyways, one day me and Reggie were doing something or other, and an Al Green song came on the radio (he kept it on the urban jams station, usually back then it was called Power whatever the number was, but now is whatever the number is The Beat), and I was like, “Yeah man, I dig some Al Green.” Reggie tells me, and Reggie always talked kinda sideways through his eyes, to where you knew he was cool but there was a sketchiness there too, so don’t flash too much around him, whether that be big cash or a big-titted girlfriend. But he was talking sideways like that and told me, “Yeah Al Green was the shit back in the day. Everybody loved him. All the women loved him, and all the dudes thought he was a fag, so it was cool.
On the last Solaris Earth Pipeline CD we did, I had PSY/OPS use the horn start to “Tired of Being Alone” because that’s always been my favorite Al Green song, and it’s always, for some reason, sounded like all the bugs and cicadas and frogs and everything drumming up their summertime crescendo that builds up into a chaos of forest noise, then dies completely out, all at the same time. Then it builds back up. I’ve always wanted a beat that mimicked that, and the “Tired of Being Alone” sample is the closest I’ve ever heard. The song we did was pretty cool too, some crazy long-winded lyrics, but of course the ambiant producer extraordinaire had to weaken it down with some swirly ass flange bullshit on the chorus.
Haha, when I worked with Reggie and he kept it on Power Whatever the fuck, that “it’s just one of them thangs... a girl goes through” song by Monica or Adina or whoever was always getting played, and I was living with a stupid crazy secret biyotch bitch, so I’ve always loved that song. But that’s not Al Green.
Another time, when they were playing old Soul Trains on the television late on Saturday nights, before the stupid digital TV conversion, and there was an episode that was pretty much nothing but Al Green performing five songs and taking questions, and he had a broken arm with a cast from getting mobbed after a show. I think me and my wife - the potato frying Sunday morning queen of my life - had been getting dirt nasty on the living room floor, and were watching that with our wind-down beer, being like, “Damn, why can’t we have this to watch any time we want?” It made you think this was gonna be the best show ever, late night syndication style, but then the next week it was like from the ‘80s with Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam or some stupid weak ass shit.
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