Per the standard text, Ray Charles is soul’s prime architect, first fusing the gospel of his youth with the blues he loved, and then demonstrating his creation’s remarkable flexibility and breadth — a form conversant not only with its cousin R&B, but with country, standards, pop and, well, schlock. Though Al Green shares little with Charles stylistically, he may be Ray’s truest and greatest inheritor. Green’s recordings embrace the music’s rich history from its beginnings, and his patent formula, though tight and compact, nonetheless encompasses the entire rock spectrum (covers as radically diverse as “I Can’t Get Next To You” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” prove definitive).
Obviously, central to this achievement is a voice that ranks among the pop era’s most distinctive and enduring signatures. His warm timbre and jaw-dropping falsetto; his leaps, flights and slurs; his practiced asides and knowing chuckle — all bespeak a palpable, frankly beautiful physical presence whose greatest attribute may well be its unaffected ease, an ease notably touched by grace. Green’s instrument is the very embodiment of soul’s essential duality, the sacred and profane inextricably wed in a single human voice. Producer and chief collaborator Willie Mitchell, informed by his Memphis R&B background, fashioned a luxurious bed of sound for this jewel: a complex, shifting bottom, an unusually responsive bassline, horn charts as characteristic as a fingerprint, and strings that color and punctuate the singer’s every nuance.
So some Green is a necessity; the real question is how much? With countless collections already extant, including 1997’s ubiquitous “career defining” box The Anthology, this new multi-disc set must be a redundancy, exploitation or worse. Well, true to the artist’s conflicted nature, yes and no. The package is rooted firmly in Green’s official product — ultimately a plus, as the essential looseness of the interview snippets and rare live recordings on Anthology is often at odds with Green and Mitchell’s studio perfection. But this set’s completist approach is almost too generous, borrowing heavily from several already essential albums.
To wit, the first disc excerpts and resequences nine of ten tracks from Gets Next To You; yet despite the added scope and sweep here, the 1970 release provides a stronger, more coherent document of the singer’s transition from R&B hopeful to soul-pop breakthrough, before Green and Mitchell had fully realized their trademark sound. That said, disc two is a joyous, if utterly unnecessary, distillation of the resultant formula, surrounding a compressed Call Me, his consensus peak, with choice selections from Let’s Stay Together and Livin’ For You and then closing with an extended “Beware”, fifteen minutes of slow grind that foregrounds the grit and grease underpinning the singer’s manufactured polish.
What ultimately tips the scales, at least for the converted, are the final discs. Green’s classic phase may have ended with Livin’ For You, but his genius rarely flagged, and central to that genius was an intrinsic eccentricity, which was never less guarded than on his late-’70s releases. Following a much-publicized domestic tragedy that ended in a young woman’s suicide, the artist’s well-manicured persona began to fracture and fissure. His carefully crafted sound splintered into its component elements (near-formless vamps, straight pop, hard R&B); his religious exhortations became more overt and idiosyncratic; and his once deft lyrics served increasingly as little more than vocal scaffolding.
Disc three performs a minor miracle, reclaiming six well-chosen tracks from Al Green Is Love, his most diffuse album of the period, preceded by a solid sampling from Al Green Explores Your Mind and augmented by a handful of non-LP ringers. Immortal Soul producer Colin Escott achieves what was likely always intended: a long, slow, self-tortured seduction.
And though its accomplishments are less revelatory, disc four proves just as striking, documenting the gradual emergence of a stronger, more confident artist. After several fascinating, often inspired attempts to reconcile his ever-deepening faith with Mitchell’s hit-making structures, Green shed his former sound like an ill-fitting skin, inadvertently reinventing soul once again. The set’s five selections from the self-produced Belle Album are loose, rangy and deeply country; suffused in a palpable sense of well-being; as immersed in nature’s wonder as in God’s redemptive promise. His task completed, Green took a final pop bow with Truth N’ Time before finally committing to his higher calling.
