Al Green, Greatest Hits
Featured Album
Everything here remains a milestone, and everything here still stops you in your tracks
I remember it the way you remember any milestone: first kiss, first apartment, first Al Green record. I was about 15, in the kitchen with my mother and a visiting aunt, when Mom put on a CD that stopped me in my tracks. An impossibly elegant southern R&B groove — light-fingered guitar, quick, strident horn bursts, assuredly laid-back hi-hats and snares. "What is THAT?" I asked, running to the stereo. The punch line is that "Tired of Being Alone" made me an Al Green fan before I heard him sing his first note.
"Tired," and Green's Greatest Hits, which it led off, grabbed me for good reason: the Hi Rhythm Section is arguably the greatest in-house band ever assembled by an R&B label, Memphis's Hi Records, run by producer Willie Mitchell. Three of them were siblings: guitarist Mabon "Teenie" Hodges, his brothers Charles on organ and Leroy on bass, and drummers Al Jackson Jr. (a former member of Booker T. & the MG's, who died in 1975) and Howard Grimes. Together these men, along with Stax regulars the Memphis Horns (Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love) and occasional string players, would perfectly calibrate the difference between charging '60s soul and the plummier '70s stuff that brought on disco. Mitchell and Hi Rhythm had as full and assured a command of light and shade as their contemporaries Led Zeppelin or Joni Mitchell; Barry White may have required a Hollywood orchestra to set the right candlelit mood, but on Al Green's records all you needed was a rim shot, organ jolt, or clipped horn riff to set the scene for a lifetime's worth of intimacy.
But it takes a singer to fill in that scene. Anyone who could carry a tune would be blessed to have Green's canniness for knowing when to stick to the melody and when to dissolve into breathy babble, or when to glide into falsetto and when to growl. But none of it would matter quite so much if Green didn't have the supplest, most generously elastic, most purely gorgeous male singing voice in R&B — ever. It allowed him to get away with singing "Look What You've Done for Me" as an almost abject plea: not only have you improved him immeasurably, he insists on showing the before-and-after pictures. If another '70s hyper-romantic, Jonathan Richman, had written this song, a restraining order would have been filed. When Al Green sings it, people semi-consciously plan weddings.
The worst thing you can say about the string of classic singles collected here is that they're over-familiar; the best thing may be that they're still revelatory. "Call Me": a breakup song so sweet you want to run back into his arms right now. "I'm Still in Love with You": sexy like breakfast in bed, sexy like a foot massage. "Let's Stay Together": that utter rarity, an unambiguously happy love song that's also totally bad-ass. "Love and Happiness": of course he became a preacher. Everything on Greatest Hits remains a milestone, and everything on it still stops you in your tracks.
