ALBUM REVIEW
"The Belle Album" by Al Green

The Album Of The Year designation, whoever publishes them, always need to come with an asterisk attached unless the choice is so obvious in every conceivable way – commercially, artistically, influentially – that no other selection could possibly be made.

The more you veer away from those objective criteria, the more you risk making the designation itself all but meaningless, for if the chosen album reached only a few ears, but just happened to count yours among them, how can it possibly be designated the Album Of The Year?

Here's how.

When an artist is universally cherished for their singing, and to some extent their songwriting as well, and through a series of unconnected events starts pulling back from the spotlight, yet in that moment unleashes a brief but meaningful creative rebirth that ties together the artist we've all loved in the past and the artist he wants to be in the future and the resulting document marks that transition in a way that is so personal, so idiosyncratic and so delicately touching that anyone who appreciates that singer, or just cherishes music itself, can't help but feel overwhelmed when hearing it.

In 1977 few people heard Al Green's The Belle Album, the first LP released by the shining star of 1970's soul music without the production of the legendary Willie Mitchell and the vaunted Hi Rhythm Section which had backed him for a string of classic albums and hit singles that remain revered to this day.

But in going it alone he showed that as much as he leaned on them all for support, when it came right down to it Al Green needed nobody but himself to make beautiful music and in this case, some of the MOST beautiful ever put to wax by anyone.

The backstory here is vital to understanding the importance of The Belle Album and how it simultaneously marked the end of Al Green's commercial dominance and the start of his spiritual reckoning that would dominate the next two decades of his life in an increasingly dim public spotlight.

The singer had first emerged in 1968 with the left-field hit "Back Up Train", a good record but hardly a defining song in a year marked by classics from James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and countless other soul greats.

After that breakthrough he wandered, both musically and personally, until he quite literally caught a ride with Willie Mitchell, the vaunted trumpeter, bandleader, songwriter, producer and soon to be head of Hi Records in Memphis, after a gig they happened to share. The two bonded over music on their journey from Texas and Mitchell convinced the wayward singer to join him at Hi Records. He dropped him off and gave him some money to settle a few debts but as the days passed with no word from this flighty kid, Mitchell more or less forgot about him until six weeks later when Green showed up on his doorstep at six in the morning, ready to go to work.

With that the two men kicked off an unprecedented run of commercial highs – eight Top Ten Pop hits, 6 R&B chart toppers in a five year run during which six straight Al Green LP's topped the R&B Album Charts – by reimagining what soul music could be. For while Green had the requisite gospel background that music had been grounded in for over a decade, Mitchell forced him to sing soft rather than hard so he could better emphasize the exquisite melodies they created while surrounding him with strings and the ethereal backing vocals of Rhodes-Chalmers-Rhodes as the peerless Hi Rhythm Section held down the bottom.

Those were his salad days, an era when songs like "Tired Of Being Alone", "Look What You've Done For Me", "I'm Still In Love With You", "Call Me", "Here I Am (Come And Take Me)", "Livin' For You", "L-O-V-E" and the immortal "Let's Stay Together" served as an entire generation's background music for making babies.

But by the mid-1970's the formula was starting to show signs of strain, as Green's excellent uptempo instincts had been completely cast aside long ago and so when the early dance grooves of disco hit, he and Mitchell were unable – and unwilling – to adapt and gradually saw their fortunes slowly fade.

A commercial downturn was a minor problem however compared to what was about take place in Green's personal life, when in 1976 a woman he'd been seeing killed herself in his bedroom after scalding Al with hot grits in a fit of pique which left him permanently scarred, both physically and emotionally. Rumors that he'd actually killed her himself began to spread and, though probably untrue, were never convincingly refuted by the singer. Suddenly facing a mid-career crises of epic proportions, Green became an ordained minister and opened his own church in Memphis, trying to reconcile his faith with his sinful rock star lifestyle, an unlikely transformation that he subsequently never abandoned.

Meanwhile, still attempting to continue his music career but wanting more control over his message, he abruptly left the safe cocoon Mitchell had long provided and camped out in his own studio while turning away from the romantic love themes that comprised virtually all of his Greatest Hits and headed towards something far more ambiguous in nature as a way of working through the trauma he'd endured.

It's hardly surprising that such a project would meet with a commercial shrug of the shoulders by the general public who'd moved on to more hedonistic music in the interim. But among the dwindling remaining loyalists, even the most devout Al Green fan would never have predicted the resulting album would arguably wind up being his most compelling musical statement in a career that lasted more than half a century.

Let's be upfront about this from the beginning... this is not something that should work. The very term "popular music" denotes music that has a more universal appeal than one person's relationship with a higher power and while a number of high profile acts have turned towards expressing such beliefs in music - usually at periods of commercial downturn – Bob Dylan, Dion DiMucci, Solomon Burke - it's generally seen as an indulgent sidetrack, no matter how sincere the efforts.

But for Al Green his abrupt move towards something more "meaningful" coincided with personal introspection in which he began to question his entire existence as a rock star. "Belle", which kicks off the album it's named after, is the epitome of this, as Green is torn between an earthly love and a spiritual love. Though he'd tackled straight gospel songs before on his albums, this song is different, for it sits uneasily between the sacred and secular, its conflict coming from his struggling with the choice as the slow woozy beat hooks you like a drug hitting the mainline and then never relents over nearly five minutes. With Ruben Fairfax Jr. playing a hypnotic bass line that rises like a corpse in a graveyard after midnight, synthetic strings adding a level of vague sci-fi trickery to the proceedings and anchored by the incredibly steady drumming of John Toney, the track matches the spookiness of the lyrics, achieving the kind of synthesis that producers dream of, yet rarely find no matter how great the artist may be.

Just who WAS the producer? None other than Al Green himself, showing that he'd learned the gift of musical subtlety well from Mitchell, as instruments mystically weave in and out of the arrangement, including Green's own guitar, finally getting a chance to show his chops as a musician on record. But as well as he plays it's still his voice with all of its identifiable quirks, from intermittent squeals to non-sequitur ad-libs, that defines his final charted single of his glory days, albeit one which stalled at a mere #83 in spite of its undeniable beauty, capped by a falsetto whine that makes the hairs on your neck stand at attention.

But an inspired singer/songwriter is always capable of delivering a great one-off single, even if it's one that fails to connect with all but the most devoted of followers. The real test of the record would be what else he could come up with, as even at their best the Mitchell produced albums always had relied far too much on Green's masterful vocal interpretations rather than enduring original material.

Here though that's not the case, as Green unleashes his long-dormant rhythmic instincts on "Loving You", a generic title masking a perfect marriage of the romantic pledges of his best ballads with a rousing chorus reminiscent of his 60's upbringing, while at the same time recommitting to the duality of love as it pertains to the physical and spiritual sides of his nature.

With his guitar out front, the tormented notes that open the track ringing out like a caged puppy's cries of help, the song starts off in a subdued way with lyrics that are much more straightforward than the opening cut, yet no less powerful as carnal desires balance uneasily with his devotion to God. Wrestling with good and evil is a foundational piece of all storytelling of course, but here the purported evil is far more tangibly good than the mythical promise of life everlasting and Green's vocals embody that struggle as realistically as possible. By the end he hasn't fully decided on his course of action, for while he may be on his knees it's perfectly clear to anyone listening that his fly is unzipped and his shirt is off, and as a result the listener is the one making the final decision as to which way he'll turn as the backing vocals of Margaret Foxworth and Harvey and Linda Jones seemingly taunt him by chanting the title at him as if they were in the process of unfastening his belt.

There needs to be a break in this tug-of-war for Green's soul and it comes via a typically off-kilter statement that is "Feels Like Summer", a brilliantly evocative mood-piece with seemingly muffed – or ad-hoc – lyrics that deviate too quickly from the steamier images to those of chillier darker days, as he interjects his "the snow will fall" coda line into the song about three minutes too soon to suit the narrative.

But that confusion only adds to the experience, never letting you get your feet steady beneath you as Green and Fairfax put together a truly magical backing track for this as Al's guitar anchors the rhythm and Toney's constantly shifting, frequently skittering, drum pattern injects it with life-affirming buoyancy. It may not always make thematic sense, but it's addicting just the same.

When discussing his favorite songs of all time, Lou Reed frequently mentioned the otherwise obscure fourth track of The Belle Album, one that aside from Fairfax's dominant bass line would seemingly have little relevance to someone from Reed's neck of the woods. Yet as Green himself states in the lyrics, "Just because I'm thinking about New York City... it don't mean I ain't thinkin' of Georgia too".

The message of "Georgia Boy" though is less about the particulars of location and more about feeling, as this is a seven minute transitional track of the album that carries over the general loose-knit musical spirit he's aiming for, starting with the slyly somewhat garbled spoken intro and carried along to the extended instrumental fade featuring his own gnarled and twisted guitar lines amidst otherworldly electronic bells and whistles as the pace picks up down the stretch taking us into the metaphorical woods where we'll happily get lost for awhile longer.

The second side of the original LP kicks off in grand fashion with "I Feel Fine", the most uptempo - and disco influenced - track of the album. Yet even disco haters can't legitimately complain about the mechanical boogie underpinning the song, especially when everything else is far more organic, including a great horn-led middle eight that can stand with anything from soul music's glory days.

That amalgamation of old and new musical textures is pulled off with remarkable skill and dexterity and as a result you never get the sense that Green is consciously aiming for a dance-floor hit, yet had it managed to achieve that goal you'd be won over completely by Al's own personality and the euphoric chorus. But what it really shows you is how Willie Mitchell, for all his genius, too often failed to take advantage of Al Green's versatility when it came to creating different arrangements to showcase every aspect of his complex persona.

Smartly the mood shifts downward again with "All 'N All", a mid-tempo cut featuring Green's acoustic guitar and the Fender Rhodes of Fred Jordan, interspersed with tight riffing horns and handclaps augmenting the drums. Thematically it's another moral quagmire as Al is back to preaching, yet even with overt references to God, Jesus and other figments of imagination found in a certain popular book, the joyousness of the music and performances never lets up and so by the end, as the tempo accelerates, he may even perform his own miracle by converting a few steadfast non-believers.

The one knock against albums by black rock acts during the late 1960's and 1970's was that all of the material stuck too close to the general motif of their singles. Certainly this was true for Green under Mitchell's guidance, as the same lurching tempo, dreamy vocals and technically precise arrangements were hallmarks of his catalog.

But with The Belle Album that hallmark was the first thing Green did away with as his own producer, giving the playlist a variety of sounds and tempos, sometimes even within the same song, such as with "Chariots Of Fire", the penultimate track which takes a Biblical reference as its starting point and expands on it well beyond what's expected.

It kicks off with a mélange of sounds, cymbals emerging from a cauldron of instruments bubbling underneath before locking into a groove that seemingly comes from somewhere else entirely, as this is Al Green the funkateer. As such, vocally he's practically spitting out the lyrics at times over cascading horns and pile-driving drums, before shifting to an absolutely soaring melodic chorus consisting mostly of the title itself, stretching the word "Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire" to the breaking point before dropping back to his off-handed funky delivery for the verses.

The heavenly message of the lyrics assured that it'd surely get no airplay alongside the likes of Parliament-Funkadelic or Graham Central Station, but it shows that if he'd wanted to, Al Green was perfectly capable of handling this style as well and exhibits the album's vibrant heartbeat leading into the subdued finale of "Dream", which may just well come closer to embodying the overall detached feel of the title itself better than any record you'll find.

It's a lullaby exquisitely delivered by a rock minded soul, as Green sings in hushed full voice rather than falsetto while the drums and bass throb under the covers. With the synthetic strings and the backing vocals chanting "Make it last forever" appearing like shadows from the moonlight on your bedroom wall, this is a song that should be used for eternity to send you off to a restful slumber. Over the course of seven and a half minutes your eyes reflexively close, not out of boredom but rather a feeling of being completely enveloped in a peaceful embrace, and the fade pulls everything back even further until you're in an hypnotic trance you never want to leave.

Though that spell it put you under didn't equate to sales, it did result in lasting admiration from those in the know and the growing belief that The Belle Album is Al Green's definitive album statement.

It's become cliché to say that great artists leave as many great tracks on the shelf as they wind up releasing at a given time, a claim that rarely if ever bears itself out when exhuming the vaults, but in the case of Al Green's creative revival of 1977, it's far from hyperbole, something which the 2006 Expanded Edition of The Belle Album plainly shows with three recovered songs cut at the same sessions.

The first of which, "Right On Time", is another uptempo cut with electric piano adding a distinctive texture on a song which would've made for a killer single three years earlier in the midst of one love ballad after another. The track jumps with a steady backbeat and air-raid horn breaks while Green sounds positively ebullient throughout.

It's followed by "No, No (You'll Never Hurt Me Again)" which on the surface seems like the most generic late 1970's song he could come up with. In fact it's kind of hard to argue the point with its pulsing rhythm, mid-tempo melody and lyrics that merely state the basic premise without exploring it further over four plus minutes. Yet considering the album itself as released had absolutely no filler, its absence makes clear that even on undeniable filler material the voice of Al Green should always be cherished.

But you knew that already… and so we, as well as they and he, saved the best for last with "Running Out Of Time"... and I mean the arguably best EVER… as in the best song Al Green has ever cut. Yes, including THAT one!

For starters it's got one of the most gorgeous melodic bass lines ever laid to wax, over which Green's guitar, along with drums and various keyboards, drench it in vibrant musical colors while never deviating from the main groove.

The message within may be fairly broad and even somewhat nondescript, but the meaning behind it is delivered emphatically – "Life can be short, better liv-liv-liv-liv-liv-live it before it starts" - as the track unfolds like a prolonged sunset over a calm ocean. It's that hazy semi-drunk tranquility that captivates you here, making you all too content to watch your life wasting away on distant shores. When added with the other two bonus tracks on the Expanded Edition this takes on an added poignancy, as we know that with this Al Green's time as a superstar was officially over.

He'd go on to release one more secular album in the Seventies before turning to gospel exclusively and though when he returned from his decade long sabbatical and started cutting mainstream music again, he may have still sung with the same voice of pure grace, amazingly untouched by the passing years, it was clear to all that the stage had shrunk, the spotlight had dimmed and the context had changed. He'd score some small hits, reunite with Willie Mitchell – and then turn to younger producers like Questlove – for rightfully acclaimed new albums in the new century, but he was never quite vital again.

Commercially his vitality ended just before The Belle Album came out, but creatively this was Al Green's pinnacle… the best album of his career and the best album of 1977 by any rock artist. No, not on the charts, certainly not in its influence - which was negligible – or its impact in any way, shape or form, but rather it's the best when judging purely by your senses. It takes you to the crossroads of life without forcing you to choose which direction you ultimately follow and does so by letting you look at an artist through the crosshairs of a target he put on his back himself.

Artistry at its best is uncompromising, particularly when it's reflective of the performer's own situation in life as they struggle to lay bare their inner most thoughts, hopes and doubts. Few have ever done so as fearlessly as Green does here, and in spite of – or maybe because of – that reckless lack of concern for its commercial and critical response, arguably none have done so with more musical grace, whimsy and sheer beauty than Al Green, making The Belle Album not only his most poignant personal statement but also the greatest album released by any rock artist in 1977, proving that tormented internal conflict is perhaps the most essential artistic virtue after all.

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