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August 28-September 3, 2008
buzz@boulderweekly.com
Bling-nop bling-nop bang
With a hit new album, soul singer Al Green puts the R in Retro
by Ben Corbett
The sparrow sings solo
Mike Gordon of Phish strikes out on his own
by Dave Kirby
Bling-nop bling-nop bang
With a hit new album, soul singer Al Green puts the R in Retro
by Ben Corbett
I said, ‘It’s OK to have a little spark of love in your life, man,’” says the venerable Reverend Al Green. “And everybody at the church started clapping. And I said ‘Unless you want to call it the end, and don’t want to take a chance on people anymore. You’re just going to stay to yourself. Just cater yourself off. Well, then you cater yourself off from the blessing. So you just gotta stay open and take a chance. I know the last love affair you was in, it broke your heart. OK, fine. But everybody ain’t like that. You gotta trust God. Not trust the man — he may do anything. But if you trust the Word, then the man, he can’t do nothing but the right thing.’”
Al Green knows. Whether on the pulpit, on stage, even on the phone, his larger-than-life presence swoons like a fat swirl of rapture. When he’s talking, he’s talking God. When he’s singing, he’s singing life. And with a pocketful of melodies and an almost unnatural gift for rhythm, when he’s feeling it, you’re feeling it too.
For Green, life’s been a blessing. You can tell he’s been looking back over his life, the glory days of the early 1970s when the hits rolled out of the studio like gems from a jeweler’s scales. Seven top 10 hits in the space of four years, one great album after another. While it would seem futile to try recreating anything remotely comparable to the hit-making team of that era — the illustrious Willie Mitchell, Al Jackson and the Hodges brothers — the formidable Soul Master can only keep trying, getting as close as possible, and trusting “the man upstairs” as he says. But at the end of the day, whether it’s Green the soul musician, the gospel singer, or the poor boy from Michigan who got the calling for music back in seventh grade, it’s all about love.
In 2006 everybody was feeling it during a warm-up session for Green’s new album at Electric Lady Studios in New York. Green hadn’t worked with anyone in the studio before, and the idea was to knock around some rhythm, get acquainted, dig for the muse. For Blue Note Records execs, there had been a lot of planning about how to market and recast the 1970s R&B hit-maker, shaking it up, hopefully pulling out a new sound and shooting for a hit.
“We got together one afternoon to see if the vibes flowed,” says Green, the on-again-off-again preacher at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church of Memphis. “You know, just get together and say hello or something, have a cup of coffee and if you don’t want to do nothing, just go on back to the hotel. Spanky [Alford, guitarist] just started playing this stuff off the wall and I said ‘What is that?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know. Get a pencil and write something to it.’ But that’s the way we’ve always been doing it anyway. That’s the way we wrote [1972’s] ‘Let’s Stay Together.’ Willie was playing this bling-nop, bling-nop, bling-nop, bang, and I said, ‘What is that?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, write something to it.’ Bling-nop, bling-nop, bling-nop, and I wrote [Green singing into the phone] ‘I’mmmm sooooo in love with you.’ Willie said, ‘Yeah that’s it, boy. Dammit, yeah that’s it!’”
Green’s new album, Lay It Down, is it, too. Sometimes reinvention is a matter of doing what you do best, only better. The idea was to bring in some young blood and maybe throw a hip-hop or neo-soul twist into some vintage Memphis soul, using The Roots drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson and alt-hip-hop keyboardist James Poyser as producers. Ambitious and determined, ?uestlove’s goal was to create the follow-up of The Belle Album, Green’s 1978 non-secular obra maestra. An artistic, religious reaction to an incident that altered Green’s life (in 1974, a woman with unrequited affections for Green threw a pot of boiling grits on the singer, then took her own life in another room), The Belle Album reflects the deepest, rawest inner turmoil of Green, who stepped away from secular music and turned to Gospel. For ?uestlove, pairing up with Green on his next album was also a dream fulfilled. During a double-billed Roots tour with the White Stripes in 2004, Jack White was working on a side project producing Loretta Lynn’s Grammy-winning Van Lear Rose. ?uestlove was struck with the idea of also producing an old-school musician, soon leading to the Electric Lady sessions.
“We recorded eight songs on the first evening!” says Green. “It’s da bomb, babe. Everybody’s been sticking a match to the fuse. Blows right up on ya. Boom! (laughs) Short stem, baby. Short stem. Everybody at the church is always questioning me about it. A friend asked, ‘Hey Al, what’s this Lay It Down? I’m playing it in the car. It’s the bomb, but lay IT down. What’s IT? I said ‘Go get yourself a pad and pencil and you figure it out.’ But I think they like it. Because love covers a multitude of faults or sins or whatever. It overcomes.”
With additional production by Adam Blackstone and Spanky Alford, and including duets with Anthony Hamilton, plus contemporary soul singers John Legend and Corinne Bailey Rae, Lay It Down landed at #13 on the Billboard charts upon its June release. Following up Green’s last two albums, I Can’t Stop (2003) and Everything’s OK (2005) (both produced by Willie Mitchell, the alchemist of Green’s epic 1970s Hi Records sessions), the biggest challenge for a new Al Green album was in finding a counterpoint for Green to bounce off. The Dap-Kings Horns (known for their work with retro-soul divas Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones), laced together with Anthony Hamilton’s sinuous vocals, all laid against Green’s spoonful-of-honey falsetto, demonstrate the old-feeling, yet recycled-modern-polish of the entire record. While the hip-hop feel is there, the album is, ironically enough, pure retro-soul through and through, and some of the best music of Green’s career. Everybody’s smiling, but perhaps nobody more than Green. Some critics are calling Lay It Down Green’s return to his roots, and he couldn’t agree more.
“I think it really is,” says the soul veteran. “That soul, that R&B, that’s where we started, so it’s kinda like being back home again. Like I was saying on stage the other night, ‘You’re all sending love from the balcony.’ Man, it was like thunder up there. And I said ‘You’re all sending some love from over here on the left, and you over on the right. I’m only one little man.’ And the audience cracked up, man. I said ‘In the center, you’re all sending so much love up here that you’re gonna kill me.’ These songs evoke that kind of stuff. That’s Willie Mitchell. That’s the Hodges brothers. As a girl said in Brooklyn the other night, ‘That’s what you do!’”
On the Bill
Al Green will perform with Otis Taylor at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 31, at Denver Botanic Gardens, 1005 York St., Denver, 1-866-586-4170.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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The sparrow sings solo
Mike Gordon of Phish strikes out on his own
by Dave Kirby
You don’t have to spend a long time chatting with Mike Gordon to pick up on the sense that the former Phish bassist is a pretty circumspect guy, not exactly a hyper-caffeinated Type A. This may be a personality trait, or a by-product of having plenty of time and wherewithal to pursue his various artistic projects — probably both — but either way, life after Phish seems to be working out pretty well so far.
And that’s a bit of a relief. After more than 20 years of anchoring the bottom end of the Vermont quartet’s frenetic excursions into jam rock, graduating into the biggest live concert act in the nation and the sine qua non of the post-Dead jamband scene, it’d be easy enough to expect that Gordon would torque every molecule and every waking moment establishing his own identity. That’s the kind of advice managers and agents usually give their gone-solo clients, and while Gordon remains heavily invested in his own thing these days, you don’t get the feeling that grabbing the reins of a new enterprise is something that Gordon was twitching to do.
Nonetheless, Gordon is touring behind his own five piece now, supporting his recent release, The Green Sparrow, being a bass player primarily and a bandleader seemingly only by reluctant default.
“The band is coming along very well,” he said. “For the amount of time we’ve been playing together, it’s really starting to gel, and we’re having more and more of those completely magical moments. The chemistry is starting to reveal itself. If anything, I’d say it’s happening faster than I thought it would.
“I think I’m pretty much a band guy; I’ve never been much of a dictator type. I make suggestions about how I think things should sound, but I can usually take it or leave it. I really never liked bands where it was all one guy calling the shots. It kind of makes things lopsided.
“I think a case in point would be the tune ‘Sound’ from the album. It’s a tune we haven’t really done live… but one day our drummer was just playing around with something during sound check, just this little groove thing, and I started playing the song on top of it, and we just looked at each other, because it seemed to fit the song in a completely different way than we played it on the album. You know, it just happened. So, yeah, there are other ways to do things, and you have to be flexible enough to let the songs become what they are through the input of the other guys in the band.”
The Green Sparrow is the end result of about a year where Gordon took himself out of circulation and just concentrated on songwriting. Lithe and a shade quirky, reflecting Gordon’s repute as the odd nut in the Phish stew, the CD rambles from chocky guitar rock (“Another Door”) to limber jamgrass (“Andelman’s Yard”) to low calorie funk (“Jaded”), a diverse if not altogether eclectic offering, not distantly removed from some of Phish’s latter studio efforts (and hardly surprising at that, since former bandmates Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell make guest cameos on a couple of tracks.)
Reports were that Gordon had written 60 songs and whittled them down to these 10.
“Well, I really intended to write enough material for three separate albums, and we’ll see what happens to the rest.
“After Phish, I kind of had to think about what I wanted to do — make films, play on other people’s CDs. After a while, I realized I just needed to write some songs, put a band together and go out and tour it. Start from the beginning and just do the whole thing. But this isn’t really an album cycle thing. I mean, I fully intend this to be a long-term project. This is what I’m doing now, and I’m fully committed to it. I really could see this lasting for years.”
Despite that, of course, Phish still casts a long shadow merely four years after the lights went out. Remarks in the press by guitarist Anastasio and keyboardist McConnell earlier this summer suggesting that a Phish reunion was drifting somewhere between “possible” and “being discussed” sent the faithful into fits of bandwidth-sucking cyber-hysteria. We couldn’t help but ask Gordon if all the buzz was an annoyance while he was concentrating on tweaking and tuning his own band and his own presence.
“‘Annoyance’ would probably be a good word for it. On the one hand, all the Phish talk is pretty irrelevant to what I’m doing right now, but on the other hand, Phish is the thing I did for 21 years. It completely informed and shaped my own musical and artistic character, so I’d be stupid to deny how important it is to who I am.
“The point is that you learn from every experience. If Phish were to play together again, it’d be an experience that I’d learn something from and add it to everything else I’ve learned. So it’s a way of accepting it as something new. It doesn’t have to be an annoyance.”
In the Box:
Mike Gordon will perform with Deleon at 9 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 29, at the Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder,
303-443-3399.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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