Gettin’ Next To Al Green

Hi Records producer Willie Mitchell found Al Green two years ago, doing a show, walking on tables, in Midland, Texas. It took a year for the results to be made public but right now, there’s probably not a bigger performer in all of soul music. Green has had three hits: “I Can’t Get Next to You,” a strange, funky, reworking of the Temptations’ number, “Tired of Being Alone,” and “Let’s Stay Together,” his current smash.

This has led Green’s record company to dub him “superstar,” and James Gant, Bill Withers’ drummer, to comment: “They’re grooming him to take Otis Redding’s spot as a star — where Otis would be now, if he hadn’t passed.”

“The studio down there at Hi,” Al said, his voice growing soft, for emphasis, “is one where you could stomp out a good rhythm, and a good soulful song. It made me feel good. The pace is relaxed, you can get yourself together.”

And what exactly had Al Green wanted to get together?

“My style; my singing. Getting to know myself was a problem. I got to know everyone else pretty well, but getting to know myself, my limitations, all about me — how do I handle this? — there were times when I would start a show and be backstage and sometimes I’d think I’d forgotten how to sing! You know, I’d be backstage, going through a mental thing — I wasn’t sure, you know what I mean? It’s weird, You been doing something five, six, seven years, and all of a sudden you’re not sure you can do that or not.” He laughed, a bit nervously.

Al has been singing since he was nine — first spirituals, then, when was sixteen, he turned to pop. He had a major R&B hit, “Back Up Train,” in 1968, then nothing until the current string of successes.

Seated in his Gorham Hotel suite, Al was at ease, dressed in a light lavender sweater and a black trench-coat-like bathrobe. It was early afternoon and sunlight peaked through the blinds as he drank a cup of tea.

“I didn’t have anything to follow up ‘Back Up Train’ immediately,” Al remembered. “We recorded it on the Hot Line Music Journal label of Grand Rapids, Michigan, after seven months of fooling around. It was their first record and my first record, too, and I didn’t think it would be a hit. It kind of struck me as a surprise. But I got a lot out of the first hit — nothing to follow it — then having to start all over again.

“I’d like to start from the very bottom, then work up a little at a time. Then, when you get way up to a high level, you have something under the bottom in case you fall. Well, if you have a hit right off the bat — on a high level — you don’t have anything to fall back on. All that space between you when the bubble bursts — whap! So, to start all over again is a harder struggle — ’cause people have heard of you and they think, ‘Well, I don’t know what could have happened to him, but here he is trying with another song; well, I don’t know . . . ’ This is the way people are. But if you gradually build it up, you’re in better shape; there’s always something left. Which is better . . . a lot better.”

“I was trying to get my sense of direction straight. “I Can’t Get Next to You” really got me back to the right kind of thinking because it was a good soulful funky jam.”

How had he come up with the arrangement, so different from that of the (psychedelic) Temptations?

“I was riding around in the car. A rainy night, I believe it was. I dug the words in the song, but I didn’t like the way they were running the song, doing it fast, singing it fast. I wanted to slow it down, ’cause they were singing it so fast that people didn’t really understand what they were saying.”

Here the cadence of Al’s voice slowed. “So I wanted to slow it down, do it slower, funkier, fuller, deep and refreshing in feeling and understanding. I slowed it down, put a groove to it, arid decided to do it like that, you see.

“I wanted to make it as free as possible — which I think is what my music is all about, free music. Nobody is instructed to play anything any specific way. You hear the idea, play what you think you should play, as long as it coincides with what you’re trying to do.”

The next record was a Roosevelt Sykes blues, “Driving Wheel.” I asked Al how and why he’d become involved with blues, since so few young R&B singers (Tyrone Davis is another) are at all interested in this kind of music.

“I think it more or less represented the way I felt. A way of life. The way things are. A frame of mind . . . and you can change that frame of mind” — he snapped his fingers — “Like that! And go into an un-blues direction, like ‘Let’s Stay Together.’ ”

‘No sense beating around the bush . . . I was lying on the floor with 15 girls on top of me."

Green says he discovered “Driving Wheel” through "my cousin, Jr. Parker . . . I didn’t know he was in the family, a distant cousin you might say, when I met him in Chicago. After he passed recently, I found out he was in the family, but no specifics had been brought up about it. We were on the same show — he was starring at the time — and when I came off stage, he’d say, ‘Green, you shouldn’t do an old man like that!’ I just said, ‘Thank you,’ and went right on about my business. If I had known he was in the family, I wouldn’t have treated him like a stranger. I’d probably have spent some time and talked with him.”

“Driving Wheel” suffered the unfortunate fate of being “killed.” It had been a slow, steady, seller, but just as Hi released “Tired Of Being Alone” as a single, “Driving Wheel” suddenly took off; it had to be one or the other, and “Tired Of Being Alone” was judged the stronger of the two. Green didn’t have any complaints; he’d written “Tired” himself.

The next single, "Let’s Stay Together” was written with Willie Mitchell, and Al Jackson (the ex-Booker T. and the MGs drummer).

“I went over to the studio, and Al Jackson and Willie Mitchell were in there going over some mellow changes — I thought at the time. Al was beating on the side of the wall, piano stools, everything else he can find to get a beat out of. I said, ‘What’s that you’re playing?’ They said, ‘We don’t know, just something we’re writing, just some changes.’

“I’m saying, ‘Well now, what is that?’ So I locked myself up in the studio recording chamber where all the machines are, and I wouldn’t answer the phone. They were calling back there — ‘Al, open up!’ But when I came out, I had ‘Let’s Stay Together’ down.”

Al’s the first to give credit to Willie Mitchell, his producer. “I’m crazy about him . . . one of the best cats in the business! He gets hung up in his music, singing down in the studio, playing something over and over and over again, until three or four in the morning. Then theman will call me on the phone and say, ‘Al, I think we can cut one now! -Three in the morning!” Al laughed, still incredulous.

“I’ll crawl out of bed. First think, I’ve got to have a cup of coffee. Got to have it! There’s only one thing that’s going to get me down there — a cup of coffee. So, I’ll fix a cup, take it in the car, drive down. By six or seven o’clock that morning, we’ll have it.

“Now, Willie, Al and I are getting together to produce me. We did ‘Tired Of Being Alone’ together. Willie did ‘Let’s Stay Together’ himself. On the next single, ‘Oh, Baby, Took What You’ve Done For Me,” we all did that.”

It seems like a long way from Al’s beginnings in Forrest City, Arkansas. Born there in 1946, his family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when he was nine. It was there that he began singing spirituals, with his brothers. They even toured a five state area, before Al decided he wanted to sing pop.

“I’ve always wanted to be a singer. Curtis Rogers and Palmer James (who later wrote “Back Up Train”) of my first group, the Creations, asked me to sing pop. They said, ‘Well, man, we’re going to play with a group in Battle Creek called Jr. Walker and the All Stars.’ This was before ‘Shotgun,’ so they weren’t important either, at. the time. I said, ‘How much money is in it?” They said, ‘Well the band is getting $30 a night, and you will get $40.’ I said, ‘You’re darn right!’

“I had to do it because it was financially important to me, but more than that — more than money, it was something I wanted to do. I dreamed about it a hundred times. I dream about it now!

“I dream that I’m always singing some place in front of thousands and thousands of people,” he laughed, as if embarassed by this confession. “In a big auditorium, but, in my dream, I never know where it is.”

Closer to the dream Al told about a recent appearance in Louisville, Kentucky. “I was on stage singing, ‘Let’s Stay Together’ in front of about 8,000 people and — no sense in beating around the bush — I had on some knit slacks with elastic in the waist, and they pulled my pants down! Like, the stage got crowded with people. Girls jumping on stage — and the stage was high!

“The police had to get me, ’cause I was lying on the floor with 15 girls on top of me. Larry Lee, my guitar player, he’s so tickled, he stops playing and just falls out laughing. I look around and I’m mad, ’cause I’m embarassed. But all I can say is, ‘Well . . . ’ ”

Green has an eight piece band, which features two guitars, which is most unusual for a soul band. “I like to have them alternating, collaborating with each other. If you’ve got one guitar, you’ve got gaps. But when you’ve got two guitars, both are kind of over-lapping, and you get a smooth constant thing. Then the horns can blow more or less on the upper parts of the song, the exciting parts, for a stronger effect.”

Al’s recent booking at the Apollo, his third, was for a week, co-headlining with the Staple Singers. He was held over for a second week, and still did fantastic business. I asked Honey Coles of the Apollo when the last time an artist had been held over there was, and he admitted he couldn’t remember, but that it must have been over five years ago.

I caught several of those shows, but one stands out particularly. The Apollo was packed. Aretha Franklin was in the audience. DJ Frankie Cocker and supertasteless MC Roger Water introduced Al in shouting bravado style. When the curtains opened, Al came on stage and shyly began to sing “Tired of Being Alone.”

As he reached the line, “Won’t you help me girl/Just as soon as you can?” a young girl walked up to the stage from the midst of the crowd and held up her hand. Dressed in a sky blue glen-plaid suit and vest (shades of Otis!), I watched Al relax into his song, letting the groove catch and carry him. An instamatic flashed.

As he sang he bounced with the beat, loose like a rag-doll, his body vibrating with the rhythm. Sometimes he smiled, then closed his eyes and moaned. The wail enveloped his audience.

Al Green has taken his falsetto and natural voice, interwoven them delicately, overlaying his note-bending improvisations until it’s one voice, making the listener almost unaware of the differences and giving him a unique range as well as sound. He has an extraordinarily fine sense of time, and his sense of dynamics is further heightened by a really fine microphenone technique which allows him to get just the same sound as on record. Watching him cry, plead, sometimes almost blurting out his emotions, you know he’s in complete command.

The presence owes much to his gospel roots. While Al relaxes into his music, he builds an intensity within himself. At the end of “Tired of Being Alone,” Al shed his jacket; he wore no shirt under his vest, and his shoulders and arms were revealed to his audience, to the delighted squeals of many of the girls.

He spoke softly, as though oblivious of the sensation he had just created and told of a man who had a good woman but didn’t appreciate her. I, was seated next to an older couple, probably in their early fifties. As Al began to sing“Back Up Train,” the woman could not contain herself and let out a delighted, “Oh!” and then softly began to sing along.

Eyes closed, brow furrowed, Al squeezed out the notes as if in pain. Suddenly he could not stand the intensity. The release was to step back from the mike, spin around and then skip across the stage (known in gospel as “shouting”), before step-hopping and striding back to the mike. A guy on my right exclaimed, “He’s great!”

Now girls crowded to the stage. Al blended in a line of Smokey’s “I’ll Try Something New:”

“I will build you a castle with a tower so high”

and a bit of Jerry Butler’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” before taking his song to its climax.

“It’s hard to get what you want,” Green said, beginning an intro into the next song. “But sometimes you can be satisfied with what you need,” He began to sing, “We’ve Only Just Begun.” He sang in full no-style, natural voice, singing an entire verse before he slid into his sound and song, "Let’s Stay Together.”

This time the older lady on my left really squealed out her “OH!” and suddenly the entire audience was accompanying Al, like a sanctified choir. The message was sent, received, and people crowded to the stage, reaching up to touch. The Apollo, caught unawares, turned on the houselights.

Naturally, an audience’s greatest thrill is to be able to turn on an audience, but things always seem to happen in extremes. “No one wants to just be slaughtered,” Al said. “You want to maintain the aspects of being welldressed, together, cool and I suppose you want your people that way, too. Although you do have a tendency to understand how it is sometimes,” he laughed.

“You have to kind of watch out, keep back. See, little girls, some of ’em just want to hold your hand, but some of them are out to rip you off — your watches, rings, little goodies like that.

“But the excitement . . . I don’t know. I think it’s a building, a point of your cup running over. You just get filled up with a good feeling and your cup runs over. You just have to go and do something to let it out. The point of excitement is beyond sitting down. You get to the point where you don’t know if you’re standing up or not. I experience that myself right there on stage — I just walk away from the mike for a minute, whew!, get myself together, then come back and try it again. It’s weird. When I get done with a show, I’m exhausted. I’m soaking wet and I’ve given everything there is to give.”

Al recently toured England, and although he liked the acclaim he received, he was not too happy with a pair of British traits he came across: an antiAmerican attitude (“They don’t mind telling you in a minute that Americans are just crazy.”) and a habit to compare him with Otis Redding.

“They have that bad in England. Sometimes, I don’t believe they have as keen an ear on different types of soul singing. When they hear some soul singing and if it’s extremely soulful, they’ll say, ‘Well that sounds like Otis Redding’ — you know what I mean. I don’t think they’ll tune in quite as tight in distinguishing between artists. So they had it bad that I sounded like him — which is a compliment to me, I thought he was fantastic.

“But I never knew Otis. I saw him once in Chicago, at the Regal, years ago.

I was a little kid, and I snuck into the theatre.

“Sam Cooke was my favorite artist. I dug his spiritual line of work, but I liked his pop line of work too. But you can figure out my style if you know who my favorite people are: Sam, Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones — he’s so bad to me! He’s really outasight! — I admire Jackie Wilson and I like James Brown. There it is. The whole thing in a nutshell. Stir it up, mix it up, it comes out Al Green.”

Although Al digs R&B, he admitted his feeling for singing spirituals has not changed. “My parents didn’t like it when I started singing pop. I did spirituals for five years, and had a group with my four brothers. I like spirituals better than pop, because the feeling is better. You got a lot more communications. You have a lot more to communicate. You have a lot more to be serious about in communication.

“WhenI was home last week, I just went right up there and sang with my brothers in church. All the poople said, “Isn’t that Al Green? He sings pop music! He sings blues! He’s not supposed to be up here singing!’ They thought I was crazy. I was just up there singing. It was fine to me.” He laughs.

I asked him why he had cut a spiritual on his first album. “In church when I was a little kid, Johnnie Taylor’s ‘God Is Standing By’ was my favorite song. And I said, when I get big, I’m going to record that song. When I was cutting the album, I decided to put it in there. It’s kind of a reverse thing. You cut a good funky soul album and put something in it like ‘God Is Standing By.’ I think it’s going backwards. Which is what I wanted to do, go backwards for a minute, so I can catch my breath for going forward. I like the idea. Maybe during Christmas season, they could put out a single on it... ”

The sun had disappeared behind a building and I suddenly realized how quickly time had gone by. Al had to get ready for his afternoon show at the Apollo. I decided on one last question. It was a trivial one, but I had been truly surprised to see his name written as Al Greene with an “e” on the end of it on a Cash Box cover.

“I dropped the “e” because “Greene” with an “e” on the end stands for somebody’s name, like James Greene. But Green, without an “e” on the end, just “g-r-e-e-n” is a color. And I like the color. I’d rather be a color.”