"Have A Good Time" by Al Green
In which Green and Hi Rhythm say goodbye to each other- and to one of their own.
“Have A Good Time”:
At 12:15 AM on October 1st, 1975, Memphis Police Sergeant JS Massey was driving home from work. As he passed 2885 Central Avenue, he saw a woman lying on her back on the sidewalk, her hands bound behind her. She was screaming something about her husband being in the house. She was screaming that he’d been shot.
Massey found Al Jackson, Jr. lying face down on the floor. Five rounds had been fired into his back. After Barbara Jackson was released from her bounds, she explained that she’d arrived home at 11 and was met by an armed intruder, who tied her to a chair with an iron cord and ransacked the house. When Al Jackson arrived, the intruder freed Barbara just long enough to open the front door, and then tied them both to chairs in the living room.
“There’s no money in the house except what I have on me,” Jackson told the intruder. “You can have anything in the house if you just won’t hurt us.”
The robber addressed Jackson by his first name and then instructed him to lie down on the floor. Barbara closed her eyes as the shots roared. The Memphis Police said later in a statement to the press: “Whoever killed him really wanted him dead.”
Jackson was the pulsing heart of the world-famous “Memphis Sound”. As a founding member of Booker T. and the MG’s, Jackson provided the rhythm for hits by Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, The Staple Singers, Johnnie Taylor- and Al Green. Along with the Hodges brothers and Willie Mitchell, he formed the nucleus of Hi Rhythm. He played the famous breakdown on Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine”. As a songwriter, he’d co-authored many hits of his own, including Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”, “Call Me”, and “I’m Still In Love With You”. Redding himself had once described Jackson as “the greatest drummer in the world”.
All that was finished now.
Unfortunately, this was not the first time that discord had descended on the Jackson household. On July 31st, 1975, Al followed Barbara out of the house, demanding to know where she was going. She cursed him. He knocked her onto the hood of the car, struck her several more times, took her by the hair and threw her into a flower bed. She fled into the house, where he again pursued her. She raised a .22 pistol and fired. The second round lodged in Al’s chest. He hit her again, taking the gun from her. He then retrieved a .38 from his bedroom and fired one round into the carpet. Shortly thereafter, police arrived to find Jackson sprawled across the floor. He was rushed to Baptist Hospital.
Despite all of this, the couple continued to cohabitate, though Jackson had rented an apartment and was planning to move out the first week of October, a move he was never to make.
Jackson’s lurid death was another victory for the creeping darkness that had been slowly drawing Memphis into its grip since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lorraine Motel on April 4th, 1968. Stax Records would file for bankruptcy in 1975, another nail pounded into the coffin. Taking a look around him, it must’ve seemed to Al Green that there was no better time to return to the shelter of the Lord.
“I had producers, promoters, record companies, booking agents, all these people saying, ‘Al has got WHAT? Religion? Eighteen million dollars invested in this boy and he’s got religion?’...Everyone around me was saying, ‘We don’t need God right now- tell him to come back later.’”
Green was increasingly attempting to serve two masters- and it was clear with which one his heart truly lay. Full Of Fire, despite its hit single, had underperformed, and Green, Mitchell and Hi Rhythm were getting backed into a corner, both stylistically and commercially. On Have A Good Time, they made an attempt to bust loose, with what reserves of energy they had left.
“I Tried To Tell Myself”:
Opener “Keep Me Crying” (#4 R&B, #37 Pop) is bright and sprightly, though marred by a very corny brass arrangement. Al Jackson’s replacement, Memphis stalwart Howard Grimes, updates Jackson’s patented rhythm, and even Willie Mitchell augments his trademark bottom end with a lighter, sparser mix. The vivacious, catchy “I Tried To Tell Myself” (#26 R&B) is a crystalline example of the balance they’d struck between old and new on Have A Good Time.
But here as nowhere else in Green’s golden period there is a distinct impression of talented individuals simply marking time. “Something”, with Mabon Hodges on electric sitar, aims to be the dark heart of the album, a bizarre epic like “Beware” or “Strong As Death, Sweet As Love”. Though one of the more interesting tracks here, it’s a song ultimately without purpose, and so whatever message it carries is lost.
Have A Good Time is a largely uptempo album, certainly more so than Full Of Fire, and the brisk pace helps mightily on slight tracks like the ersatz shuffle “The Truth Marches On” or the cloying pop of “Happy”. Green sounds animated and enthusiastic on the gospel-tinged title track like he does nowhere else on the album, except perhaps “Nothing Takes The Place Of You”, a tender elegy that, against all odds at this late date, manages to hold its own against Green masterpieces like “For The Good Times”- especially when Green calls out the rain on his windowpane.
“Nothing Takes The Place Of You”:
But however close they may have come to recapturing their rapidly dimming incandescence, it’s clear that Green’s heart was no longer in it. “At every concert, at every gateway, every doorway, every time a stage light would come on, I had trouble delivering a message that was not about the transformation in my life.”
It was a transformation borne of pain, of merciless triumph and cruel death. It was a better version of himself that Green was striving for- and in being born again, he’d be obliged to cast off all of his compatriots who’d brought him this far. His next release, The Belle Album, would be his very first without the guiding hand of Willie Mitchell and Hi Rhythm.
All quotations are taken from Jimmy McDonough’s “Soul Survivor: A Biography of Al Green”, Da Capo Press, 2017.