“Love (L-O-V-E)”:
Al Green met Mary Woodson in 1972, according to Ms. Woodson’s date book. It was backstage at a concert, either in New York City or upstate. “Mary was there with a lot of other visitors…”, Green later recalled. “The way she stared off in the distance like she was listening to someone else from very far away…added to the mystery.”
A separated mother of three, Woodson resided in Madison, New Jersey, working as a dental assistant. She was fond of wild nights in Newark.
In 1973 she was arrested for “aggravated assault with gun, threat to take own life.” She’d shot in the foot her philandering boyfriend and then nearly overdosed on sleeping pills. To the consternation of her worried family, Woodson told her sister, “If I ever kill myself, it’s going to be with a gun. And I’m going to put it in my mouth, ‘cause I want to make sure there are no mistakes.”
Mary Woodson
To call Woodson troubled is an understatement, and she had begun dogging Green. On an “unexpected” visit to Memphis, Woodson said that she had seen Green’s future and that the Lord would be quite pleased with the recently born-again singer. After a few days, when her presence began to grate, Green bought her a flight back to Jersey.
But Woodson stayed in Memphis. She took a room at the Admiral Benbow Inn, very close to Green’s office. She called repeatedly, begging him see her. He refused.
On October 14th, 1974, Woodson and Sue Franks, Green’s secretary, were busted for weed. The sheriff called Green and Green bailed them out. On October 16th, Woodson again overdosed on pills and had her stomach pumped. Green stated, “She took twelve pills at her hotel and took a scalpel and slit her wrist open.”
“Strong As Death, Sweet As Love”:
The evening of October 17th, Green was at Royal Studios, cutting a new song called “Strong As Death, Sweet As Love”. It was a prescient title. Woodson was invited to the studio. Charles Hodges remembers talking with her as she related that she’d left her husband and children to pursue Green.
“When she told me what she’d done, I said, ‘Why did you do that? Al Green is a star! Girls gonna be in Al’s face as long as he’s out here. Why would you leave your family?” Woodson began to weep, right there on the piano bench. When Green’s ex, fiery songstress Laura Lee, dropped by, a heated argument between Woodson and Lee ensued. The session was canceled. Woodson was again implored to return home.
Green later attested that Woodson “had no money and no place to go.” Green told her she could spend the night at her house- if she calmed down and stopped threatening suicide. Green gave her a ride back to his mansion. With them was Carlotta Williams, a young Delta stewardess Green was charming.
Back home, Green and Woodson talked. Green said Woodson asked to marry him, an offer he declined. She said that if she couldn’t have him, she’d take her own life. Green said he didn’t believe her, though she’d been hospitalized for just that only twenty-four hours prior.
They embraced, Green said, and he retired to his bathroom. Woodson was heating water on the stove. She told him, “I would never do anything to hurt you, Al.”
Green told the Memphis police that when the incident occurred, he was “just getting out of the tub.” Green was virtually naked when “all of a sudden here comes someone with a cooking pot, in a rage.” Woodson poured the boiling hot mixture (usually described as grits) down Green’s back and arms, then fled the room.
“I’m in total pain. And shock…I reach back and I got two fingers full of skin…I’ve got these big boils on my skin.”
Howling with pain, Green asked Williams for help. She led him to the shower, where the water promptly flayed the skin off his back.
“I’m screaming and the next thing I hear is a shot fired and someone hit the floor.” Green and Williams barricaded the door and cowered in terror for forty-five minutes. When they finally emerged, Green did so with a .38 in hand.
They found Woodson’s body in a bedroom, another .38 on the floor beside her. Al tossed the gun away and checked for a pulse. “I’m sayin’, ‘Oh, my God, what in the world…call the police- just call the police.”
At 3:57 AM, nearly two hours after Woodson’s body was first discovered, the Memphis Police were called to the scene. Green was admitted to Baptist Hospital with second-degree burns. There a sample was taken from his hands for a ballistic test. In a media-savvy move, Green called his publicist, David Gest, from the hospital. Gest was greeted by a gruesome sight.
“[He] had all these grist sticking to his back. I tried to pull some off and that pulled his skin off all the way to the bone.” Terrified and tormented, Green lost three layers of skin in the attack and eventually had pig skin grafted onto his back.
The news spread fast amongst colleagues, fans, and, of course, the press. The detectives on the case were initially somewhat suspicious, but Woodson’s death was officially ruled a suicide on November 4th.
The most devastating evidence of Green’s callous treatment of Woodson comes from the multiple suicide notes she left behind. The notes reveal a tormented woman consumed with darkness.
“The more I trust you the more you let me down. I can’t take it any more please forgive me I’m sorry…even my kids wasn’t enough because if I’m not happy I can’t make anyone else happy.”
“I love you and by the time you read this I will be dead.”
“Forgive me, but you don’t know what it’s like to love someone & I’m sorry I love you…I didn’t have the money to go & come back or stay and since you don’t want me any more this is easier for every one.”
Excerpts from these notes were made public, and this, along with the details of the investigation and the sinister air that had enveloped Green, contributed to a precipitous commercial decline. On November 14th, Green was booked at Memphis’ Mid-South Coliseum. It was a police benefit concert, which had drawn 10,000 in 1973. This time, less than a month past Woodson’s death, the crowd numbered less than 3,000.
“Al Green stopped bein’ popular for a long time with black people,” recalls Hi promo man Willie Bean. “They felt like he did it.”
It was under this terrible cloud that Green released Al Green Is Love in 1975, an incongruously slight and upbeat album- at least on its surface.
“I Gotta Be More (Take Me Higher)”:
Uptempo opener “Love (L-O-V-E)” (#1 R&B, #13 Pop) climbs to ebullient heights on Willie and James Mitchell’s staccato string arrangement and the funky pop of Hi Rhythm. “Love Ritual” is a multilayered, stomping boogie with dollops of Green’s verbal improvising deadening the impact somewhat. “The Love Sermon” is another epic sermon, a slow blues providing a bed for Green to lay on and spout bizarre musings such as “Love is the dimension between time and feeling/ Oh, the distance between heaven and Earth is close” or (my personal favorite) “I’m standing in a field of some diamonds.” Only a singer of Green’s genius could hope to put this across, and even he struggles at times.
Indeed, and as became standard practice for Green’s albums from the mid-seventies on, much of Al Green Is Love sounds half-finished. Even an agreeable song like “Could I Be The One”, for all its whispered intensity, generates a little heat but never quite catches fire. The same can be said of “I Didn’t Know” another long, minimally arranged ballad that never finds a throughline.
“Rhymes”:
However, Mitchell, Green and Hi Rhythm were operating at such a high level of creativity that, even in such dire straits, they could still conjure from thin air innovative funk songs like “I Gotta Be More (Take Me Higher)”. “Rhymes” also sounds like it was fabricated on the spot to meet demand: beginning with Green spitting nursery rhymes over a heady Hi groove, it ends in a twilit netherworld of Green’s regrets, with the Last of the Great Soul Singers barking, “Now it’s time for love again/ Pain is found and finally went/ Took everything I own.”
“Oh Me, Oh My (Dreams In My Arms)” (#7 R&B, #48 Pop) might be the perfect encapsulation of Al Green Is Love. The rhythm jumps and rumbles, hooks abound, and the singer is one of the best to ever do it. On Willie Mitchell’s “I Wish You Were Here”, Green sings beautifully of lonesomeness and memory in a keening falsetto, but the song doesn’t quite land; the old magic eludes the Royal crew.
In the wake of Mary Woodson’s tragic death, Green, who had been drifting back to the church of his raising, now began to run to it. He’d continue to record pop albums, but the references to the divine would become more numerous and overt. But desires of the flesh still persisted- as the title track of their next album, Full Of Fire, so delightfully proved.
“Oh Me, Oh My (Dreams In My Arms):