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MUSIC

Al Green remains one righteous musician
Jim Abbott
Sentinel Pop Music Critic

June 30, 2006

Al Green might miss church on Sunday, to sing at House of Blues in Orlando, but the spirit still will be in his heart.

"That keeps Al alive," Green says by phone from his home in Memphis, Tenn., where he's in the pulpit most Sundays at the Full Gospel Tabernacle, which he established in 1976. "If I couldn't do that, then I would simply die.

"That is the eternal, everlasting gospel, the eternal word of God. I want my soul fed, and I don't mean like food from the fast-food place."

Green will indulge his other obsession on Sunday at House of Blues. Even in a short phone conversation, singing comes as naturally to him as breathing -- and almost as often.

Out of nowhere, he's belting out "Pretty Woman,'' explaining that he can't purr "Ohhh, mercy," like Roy Orbison but still managed to make the song his own on 1972's I'm Still in Love With You.

More than three decades later, he conjures the same magic on "You Are So Beautiful," the Billy Preston song recorded so memorably by Joe Cocker. It's included on Green's latest album, Everything's OK.

"I had heard Joe sing it, and he sings it just perfect, even up on the last note," says Green, imitating Cocker's tremulous falsetto. "I think that's perfect, and I wouldn't have changed it for nothing in the world. That shows a certain compassion. It's like, 'I'm trying to hit the note, but even if I don't hit it real good, you know what I'm trying to say.' ''

A completion

Green's version is silkier, a definitive moment in a collection of songs that is a return to the singer's classic Hi Records period in the early 1970s. The new album was recorded at Royal Recording Studios in Memphis with producer and arranger Willie Mitchell, the man behind such classics as "Let's Stay Together'' and "Love and Happiness.''

Green, 60, had limited himself to gospel music since the mid-1970s, after life in the fast lane inspired a spiritual conversion. Everything's OK is the follow-up to 2003's return-to-form I Can't Stop.

Why the reunion now?

"We started a fabulous, wonderful, great oil painting --myself, Willie and [the late drummer] Al Jackson,'' Green says.

"So we gotta finish it. You gotta write your name on it. You gotta be proud of it. That's what Willie and I are trying to do is finish the painting that we started.''

With its big, sweeping ballads and funky upbeat numbers, Everything's OK is being heralded as more impressive than I Can't Stop.

Rolling Stone calls it "one more righteous, red-hot reason to treasure this surviving genius of soul.'' People observed that Green attacked the songs "as if his very salvation depended on it.''

For Green, it's more like something he can't help but do.

"It was like a family reunion or something,'' he said of sessions that included bassist Leroy "Flick'' Hodges and other old friends. "The creativeness, once it starts, you can't stop it. Once you get the juices flowing, it don't wanna stop.

"That sounds kinda romantic there, doesn't it?,'' says Green, launching into that line about the room spinning harder in Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale.''

Responding to the calling

On the road, Green is touring with a 14-member ensemble that includes four horn players, three dancers and three singers. He did more than 140 dates last year and only missed four Sundays in the pulpit in Memphis.

Can't he just delegate that duty to someone else?

Green responds incredulously, with the exaggerated expression that he obviously reserves for simpletons who don't get it.

"Where have you been?'' he booms. "God didn't call me to get somebody to do it for me. He said, 'You, Al, you do it. I pulled your little behind out of the fire.' ''


Copyright © 2006, Orlando Sentinel

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CONCERT REVIEW

Al Green moves crowd in transcendent performance
Jim Abbott
Sentinel Pop Music Critic

July 3, 2006

Al Green has gone "secular" again on his most recent albums, but there's always something spiritual about his music whether he's singing about love or the Lord.

The soul icon did a bit of both in an energetic and musically precise 65-minute set on Sunday at House of Blues. One might have expected at least one encore (there wasn't one), but the time that Green spent on stage was transcendent.

"Let the reverend preach to you a little," he told the crowd in the early going. He called for champagne from the bar, "the good stuff, not the cheap stuff," then launched into a moving rendition of "Amazing Grace."

That segue would be incongruous for almost anyone but Green, who exudes such sincere joy that it's impossible not to be swept along with it.

Nor did it hurt that his backing band, a dozen strong including a pair of male dancers, delivered his soul classics so accurately that it was as if someone had dropped a needle on a record. When the horns, voices, big Hammond B-3 organ and rhythm section started cooking, it was hot.

Although he has new material to promote, the solid Everything's OK, Green, 60, spent a good deal of time on memory lane: "Let's Get Married," "Tired of Being Alone" and the signature "Let's Stay Together" remain timeless.

Dressed sharply in a black suit and shiny shoes, Green tossed roses to the crowd, shimmied to the beat and dropped to his knees when the spirit moved him. Most important, his distinctive tenor was strong and flexible, especially when it soared to the heights of his falsetto.

Although Green was charismatic, he was nearly matched by Eugene Snowden and the Legendary JCs, which opened the show with 40 minutes of swaggering roadhouse R&B. The Orlando band, with Anthony Cole sitting in on drums, was a perfect mood-setter, with Snowden doing his acrobatic splits and turning songs such as "Memphis" into spiritual statements of his own.

Otis Redding would have been proud.

He also would have liked Green's version of "I've Been Loving You Too Long," slipped into a medley of hits by the Temptations, Four Tops and Marvin Gaye. On "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?" Green took the Bee Gees song and pumped it full of Memphis soul.

There also was plenty of that in the closing "Love and Happiness," a slinky, sensuous song that has aged like fine wine.

"I'm so glad that Jesus made wine," Green told the crowd at one point.

It's worth giving thanks for Al Green, too.

Jim Abbott can be reached at [email protected] or 407-420-6213.

Copyright © 2006, Orlando Sentinel