“Take Me To The River”:
Albert Leornes Greene was born in Arkansas, but the Al Green story really begins in Midland,Texas, back in 1968. That’s where and when the young singer first crossed paths with Willie Mitchell. Mitchell was a trumpet player and a Mempis institution, his band’s local hits and long residency at the Plantation Inn an inspiration to an entire generation of musicians, musicians like Steve Cropper and Isaac Hayes.
“He called for ‘Back Up Train’”, Mitchell recalls. “I said, ‘Really? I didn’t know you had done that. How old is that record?’” He said, ‘Well the record is about two years old now, and I ain’t really had anything since.’...So he began singing ‘Back Up Train’ and I’m listening, and God, he was singing soft, and I said, ‘This guy has got the style, he got the sound to really be something.’”.
“Back Up Train”:
After borrowing $1500 cash from Mitchell and promptly disappearing, Green appeared on Mitchell’s doorstep at six o’clock in the morning, a full six weeks later. He grinned and queried a bewildered Mitchell, “Don’t you remember me? I’m Al Greene.”
Mitchell mentored Green and helped form the style and approach that conquered the world and soundtracked a million conceptions. They did this through the unimpeachable musicianship of the Hodges Brothers - Leroy on bass, Charles on keyboards, and Mabon, or “Teenie”, who was guitarist and one of Hi’s most reliable songwriters. The main drummer on Hi recordings was Al Jackson, Jr., of Stax fame. After Jackson’s matricide in 1975, Howard Grimes handled the drums. Collectively they were known as Hi Rhythm.
Their collaboration first bore significant fruit in 1971 with “Tired Of Being Alone” (#7 R&B, #11 Pop), and then hit its brilliant stride with “Let’s Stay Together” (#1 Pop & R&B), a song that set the tone and standard for all the masterworks to come: a loud, distinctive bass line, doubled by a rich, driving beat that favors floor toms over cymbals; the warm, buttery organ cascades, the clipped, fluid guitar flourishes.
They repeatedly compounded their success, first with 1972’s I’m Still In Love With You, then Call Me and Livin’ For You in 1973. Each album featured multiple Top 10 singles which remain vaunted classics of the form. These are the albums which cemented Green’s reputation as the last of the great soul singers, the final heir to Sam Cooke.
So it was at the very height of his fame that Green released Explores Your Mind, a distracted, erratic album that reflects the mood of its main architect. Mitchell and Hi Rhythm conjure a miracle on “Take Me To The River”, a spellbinding climb up the winding stair of Green’s joyful laments. It might be the most transcendent thing this peerless group ever recorded, and it was never released as a single. Such was the tenor of those wild days.
“Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy)”:
“Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy)” (#2 R&B, #7 Pop) is another pop-soul classic in the familiar Hi style, draped in strings and organ, with a Guiro high in the mix for texture. “God Blessed Our Love” is expertly written and arranged in the old Stax/Volt ballad style, and Green contributes a typically masterful vocal, as he does on “School Days”, the wistful finale. Green recalls childhood with the weary gaze of the triumphant as the music alternately swells and recedes behind him.
“One Night Stand” is Al Green at his most lascivious, while Hi Rhythm, all strut and preen, make mountains of a somewhat tired rhythm. “I’m Hooked On You” and “Stay With Me Forever” are mediocre works best remembered for their inventive arrangements. “Hangin’ On”, however, might be the second-best vocal performance on Explores Your Mind, with Green building an entire song around his indelible falsetto hook.
“Hangin’ On”:
Explores Your Mind is the first album to break Green’s early-70s run of masterpieces. It’s an inessential album, but a fascinating one: Green and the Hi crew knew by now that they’d painted themselves into a corner: from here the pace of releases would slow, the hits would get fewer, and a sad parting of the ways would become inevitable. But first, Al Green would experience a different kind of parting of the ways, and this one would scar him permanently.
All quotations taken from Peter Guralnick’s “Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom”, Penguin Books, 1986.