Picture this. Al Green is in New Jersey, performing in one of those vast, pricey, Vegas-style club/dinner theaters. The place is a favorite with local players, a haunt for drug dealers, gamblers, and other nocturnal entrepreneurs. They have all paid top dollar to hear the sexiest man in show business sing all those unforgettable make-out grooves. But Al Green has a different idea. Instead of "Love and Happiness," Al has chosen for tonight's entertainment a reading from the new testament - a long reading. A very long reading. In fact, the entire show is taken up with that reading. If the crowd is disappointed, or even furious, Al doesn't much care. He has stopped worrying about what people want him to sing, say or do. As Green puts it to me when we finally have a chance to sit together, "The Lord said to me, 'I want you to do one thing: Obey my voice.' "

"His voice?" I want to say. "What about your voice?" That's what people want, that's what we miss, that voice - magical, singular, profoundly beautiful. Al Green is the greatest popular singer of all time. In his most prolific and commercially successful years - from 1971 to 1977 - he made a string of hits that remain not only strong sellers but are unsurpassed in their subtlety, grace, intimacy and invention.

Ezra Pound once wrote, "Art is news that stays news," and Al Green's work in the Seventies, which he made in collaboration with the great Memphis producer Willie Mitchell, still generates so much internal heat that, if you did not know better, you'd think the songs were recorded last week. From "Tired of Being Alone" to "Let's Stay Together," "I'm Still in Love With You," "Call Me," "Here I Am" to "Love and Happiness" and "Belle," Green's most famous records remain undiminished sources of the purest kind of musical joy. In a short list of the greatest popular singers - a list that includes Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke and Billie Holiday - Al Green's style, soulfulness and musical intelligence place him at the pinnacle of the American style.

In spite of the magnitude of his success, Al Green chose to walk away from secular music - and, in fact, secular life - before the Seventies had ended. Every now and then, he surfaces in his old guise - a duet with Lyle Lovett here, a bit on Ally McBeal there - but for the most part, Green's life since his religious awakening has been one of renunciation. As Green explains to me one day, talking about his born-again experience, "God said to me, 'I want you to be priceless. The love of God cannot be bought.' God told me I could have more clothes than I could ever possibly wear, and more food than I could ever eat, and more cars than I could ever drive, and all that money. And then he said to me, 'I kept my side of the bargain - what about you?' "

Now Al Green is keeping his side of the bargain - with a gesture toward God every bit as large as his talent. Gone are the Number One records. Gone are the drugs and the girls. It's the Reverend Al Green now, and it has been for more than twenty years. The title is much more than honorary. He has a church where he preaches, and he has a congregation that looks to him for spiritual guidance and daily succor. Yet every once in a while, almost as if he is testing himself, seeing if he can still bring an audience screaming to its feet, Al Green gets the band together and hits the road.

It's a cultural occasion of the highest magnitude when Green comes to town, and tonight - standing in front of a wildly cheering crowd in New York's Central Park, dressed in a white suit that somehow straddles the sartorial line between preacher and make-out king - he opens his arms wide to take in the love of the audience. Then, drawing from a seemingly endless supply of long-stemmed roses, Green begins to throw flowers toward the hundreds of outstretched hands. "Hello, New York. I bring you love from the people of Los Angeles," he calls out in his sly yet earnest voice. That voice is an instrument of pure longing and desire; it is the musical equivalent of the secret things that pass between lovers, and it has running through it a little iridescent thread of humor that prevents all those love songs from ever getting murky and from ever, ever growing old. In fact, compilations of Green's hits - some of the songs more than thirty years old now - still sell in the hundreds of thousands every year. He is in virtual retirement, and his reissues are going gold.

After bringing greetings and love to New York from the various venues where he has recently performed, Green declares to the crowd, "You know, we grew up together." Well . . . yes. His first big hit - "Tired of Being Alone" - came out twenty-nine years ago, and in those years some of his fans have become not only parents but grandparents. But the crowd is, for the most part, young. Tonight, Rev. Green apparently has the heavenly go-ahead to do an almost entirely secular show. ("God says the old songs are fine. 'I gave you the songs, Al. You can sing them if you want to.' ") Not only is he singing the hell out of his own hits, but he's throwing in covers of hits from Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke.

And now he's taking a break from tossing roses at the audience, and he's whipping off his white jacket, letting the ladies feast their eyes. Yet even as the cheers rise up, Green cannot resist sneaking a peek at his watch. Three more songs and he's out of here, two more, one - and then the encore of "Take Me to the River," and then into the limo and back to the hotel for a good night's sleep. Then on to Connecticut for a night in front of God knows who in some loophole of a gambling casino, and then, thank you, Jesus, back to Memphis.

Memphis. here's where they opened the first Holiday Inn, where Federal Express was born. Downtown, Beale Street was once a major source of employment for blues and rhythm & blues artists. Memphis is the home of Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley made his first records. It was the home of Stax/Volt, where Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, and Booker T. and the MG's first recorded. It is also the site of one of the most profound American tragedies - the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Memphis is a Mississippi River town; its poverty is manifest and widespread. And it is a deeply, almost aggressively devout city. Christianity's presence in Memphis dwarfs Communism's in Havana. Churches are everywhere, from huge cathedrals to storefronts; billboards with religious slogans seem as plentiful as Coca-Cola signs. I have come to Memphis to talk to Al Green, and I arrive with a persistent question in the back of my mind: What would it take to get him into a full-time blues, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll career again? How can a man with his fantastic gift hide out in semi-obscurity?

I have come to Memphis with one other thing nagging at me - a wildly searing pain in my lower back, burning a hellish canal of discomfort over my hindquarters and straight down my right leg. I am continually needing to sit and relieve the pressure on my sciatic nerve, and I am taking a little more than my share of Vioxx and codeine. Nothing makes me believe less in God than my own physical pain.

Al Green lives with his wife and their young children on a farm about an hour north of Memphis, but most days are spent at the Full Gospel Tabernacle, which is outside of downtown Memphis, just off Elvis Presley Boulevard. The church is a modern structure at the end of a winding road in a pleasant neighborhood of simple houses and stately oaks. Though he is in the process of building a recording studio on the grounds, and his office has a few posters from the heyday of his pop stardom, most of Green's daily work here revolves around his pastoral duties. Sipping a Coke, he sits behind a glass-topped table covered with telephone messages and one scented candle. He wears a pinkie ring with a diamond the size of a Nicorette, and, after a moment of silent prayer with his hands pressed together, his long, graceful fingers touching his chin, he opens his eyes and glances for a moment at a photograph of his young, shirtless self. "I don't even know who that guy is," he says.

Then, suddenly, he turns to his messages. As minister to his congregation, Green's duties extend beyond his Sunday sermons. He has a flock, and he hovers over it, dispensing encouragement and advice and visiting people in their homes, in hospitals, in prison. "Here's a call from a lady whose baby was locked up in her car," Green says. His eyes narrow, and then that completely charming, expensive-looking smile crosses his face. "The firemen came," he says, putting the pink message slip down. Case closed. He rifles through a few more messages, and then, suddenly, Rev. Green becomes pensive.

"My life is a revelation," he says. "God has revealed different things to me. He has revealed what I should do, what I am capable of." His eyes are fixed on me, but I realize that he is beginning to look right through me - not in a rude way but in that possessed, practically Dostoevskian way of a man whose most profound passions are spiritual. It's the Pentecostal stare, the look of a man who makes you wonder if he sees Jesus standing right behind you. "You see, this thing is eating him up," he says, suddenly switching into the third person, as if he were channeling the voice of an angel who has come into Al Green's body to use Al Green's voice in order to explain Al Green to me. "He's got a hold of something, and it won't turn him loose."Then, just as suddenly, Al Green is back, speaking in the first person again. "The Lord lifted me. I'd run so fast and for so long, and I was so tired." He takes in a deep breath, and then, with a surge of energy, he rises from his chair. "Thanks be to God. Thanks be my lucky ass!!" The laugh that follows is as paradoxical as Green himself: both knowing and guileless, saved and savvy.

Green's recently published autobiography, Take Me to the River, is a compelling description of his impoverished youth as well as a rueful, humorous confession of the dangers he faced and the dangers he courted. Just as the complex pull of Eros is rarely absent in Green's singing, it is rarely absent in his retelling of his story. Similarly, the earthly battle between good and evil, between God and the devil, is everywhere in Green's sense of himself and his life. And just as the crucified Jesus entered hell to proclaim his victory over Satan, Green sees his own life as a continual struggle not only to witness but to personify the power of God.

Perhaps the most hellish incident in Green's life is the often-reported night in 1974 when a girlfriend poured a pot of steaming grits onto his half-naked body while he was brushing his teeth. Tragically, the woman soon after that took her own life, and Al, meanwhile, was wading deeper and deeper into spiritual chaos. He was raised by churchgoing parents, and the call of the religious life was always near. But as a young man adored by millions, with every pleasure and every vice at his fingertips, and with the money rolling in, there were simply too many reasons to keep what he had. Yet the pull of the Spirit would not release him. "The thing was eating me up. It would not turn me loose," he says.

"And then one day in California - it got me. I was playing the Cow Palace in San Francisco, sharing the bill with Smokey Robinson. Disney sent a plane for me, to bring me to Anaheim for my next show. I was feeling so cocky. He checked into his suite, went to sleep, and the next morning . . . everything was different. He was born again."

Here he looks at me with plaintive, almost wounded eyes and murmurs, "I didn't want to explain it to you."I'm not sure if he's talking to me. As much as my back will allow, I look behind me, to see if someone else has entered the room. But it's just the two of us. I wonder if Green senses I've come here with more than a modicum of skepticism. But a moment later he continues the story of salvation. "He was laughing and crying. He went into the bathroom and put a towel over his mouth so he wouldn't wake people up. And then I called to my daddy and my mama, and we rejoiced. We cried, and we rejoiced."

That was in 1973. Green could not fully accept the change that had come over him. "I ran for three years. I went away. I did me some fasting and praying. I rented a cabin next to a stream. No phone, no TV, no Coca-Cola. I didn't eat for forty days. 'Lord, what are you trying to do to me?' And then I bought me a church, and I started the ministry, in 1976."

There is no final count of how many artists rock & roll has lost to drugs and dissipation, and Green makes it clear that he would surely have been among the lost had he not given his life over to God. In his autobiography, he writes about the time he spent, as a very young man, with Juanita, a hooker who came into his life in Michigan.

"My family, the church and most of the time even the light of day became a memory as she and I prowled the streets after dark, working the clubs and dark alleys where Juanita plied her trade. . . . I could tell you the going price for a bag of weed just by smelling it, or how your cocaine had been cut with a taste on the tip of my pinkie. I knew the best techniques for snorting, skin popping and mainlining, could show you how to raise a vein and keep your kit clean. And if you couldn't afford the good stuff, I knew every cheap high under the sun, from rug lacquer to airplane glue. . . . I could tell you the sexual preference of each regular customer, which prosperous white businessman liked to dress up in woman's underwear and which one liked to be tied up while Juanita talked sass and dropped cigarette ashes on his head."

Now the Rev. Al Green is miming his old self. He is bent over his desk with a maniacal look on his face, pretending to chop coke and scrape it into lines. But before he can pretend to snort it up, he takes the imaginary stash and mimes tossing it out the window.

"I got clean. No rehab got you into it, Al, and no rehab's gonna get you out. I have sought deliverance with all my heart. I want to be safe. The word of God is a strong tower; the righteous run into it and are safe. My problem is and always was overcoming Al. I can get over the world. I can get over my backsliding, my forwardness of mind. But there's always Al, I gotta deal with Al."

Dealing with Al is a full-time job, not just for Al himself but for the people who help run his ministry and who manage his career. But of all the people who are trying to deal with Al, the one who is perhaps in the most difficult position is his old producer, Willie Mitchell, who for two decades has waited for Al to come back into the studio and make another secular album - waited with the longing that a virtuoso violinist feels for a Stradivarius that is just out of reach.

Mitchell hooked up with Green in 1968. At the time, Mitchell was touring with his biggest hit as a recording artist, a funky instrumental called "Soul Serenade." Al had had one commercial success - "Back-Up Train," a competent but hardly groundbreaking dance track. Though barely past twenty, Green felt his career was going nowhere, but Mitchell immediately responded to Al's style. Here was the singer who, Mitchell believed, could realize his vision of musical perfection - a blend of soul, gospel and pop, a voice of astonishing resilience and beauty, able to rise above Mitchell's heavy-bottomed sound with thrilling falsetto.

Both Green and Mitchell were in Texas at the time of their first meeting. Green was broke and trying to get back to Michigan, where his parents had settled after leaving Arkansas. He hitched a ride on Mitchell's tour bus as far as Memphis, figuring that at least he would be seven hundred miles closer to home. During the drive, Green and Mitchell got to know each other; Al said he'd return to Memphis if he could get $1,500 to settle his debts. Mitchell fronted him the money, and two months later Al showed up at Willie's door, ready to work. Not long after, Al wrote "Tired of Being Alone," which went to Number One on both the R&B and pop charts. In the next five years, Al and Willie made fifteen Top Ten records together.

When Mitchell and I sit to talk, his first question is, "Did Al mention anything to you about doing a secular album?" We are in Mitchell's office at his Royal Recording Studio, in a residential neighborhood in Memphis. It looks more like the office of an auto-supply wholesaler than the administrative core of one of pop music's most prolific studios, a place where Mitchell has overseen the recording of 134 gold and platinum albums in the past twenty-five years. The floor is covered with a worn, rust-colored carpet. There's a mini-refrigerator with an old Kenwood tape player on top of it. There are makeshift shelves, stacked with manila envelopes and big Ampex tapes. The walls are decorated with gold and platinum records, most of them done with Al; dozens of others are still in their cardboard boxes and bubble wrap, heaped in a corner.

Mitchell himself is ultracool, lanky, lithe, with a deep, knowing laugh and the same sixteenth-of-an-inch-wide mustache that has been hugging the contour of his upper lip since the Sixties. "I love Al like a son," he says. "He's still the greatest singer I've ever heard. Everybody's waiting for him to cut a real album. He's got so many tools. He's a singer, a writer. He's the Michael Jordan of the music business."I still feel Al, and I want him to do a real album," Mitchell adds. "I don't want to cut another gospel album. I don't feel that music. I like the Lord" - and here he breaks into his sultry baritone laugh - "but let's cut a good album, one that means something."

Green himself is hardly unaware that his producer has been waiting for him, day after day, year after year. "I'd like to make another CD," he tells me. "Secular, nonsecular. I don't know. I won't know until I get the Word about what to do.

"I'd like to cut music for the people who grew up listening to me. The people who got married to 'Let's Stay Together.' I want to make music that means something. I want it to be food for thought about where we are, what we're doing, what we have and how to make use of what we have. But I'm not making 'baby baby baby.' That's for sure. Al can't fool Al - I know why I wrote those old songs. I was a fornicator, an adulterer. The celestial will not mix with the terrestrial."

Finally Sunday rolls around, and all over Memphis, people are filing into churches: places with names like All People Fellowship Church and Christ United, houses of worship that stand next to liquor stores, Tiger Marts and watermelon stands. It's eleven in the hot Southern morning, and out on Hale Road the devout and the curious are making their way to the Full Gospel Tabernacle, where Rev. Green will preach. The church is a geodesic dome with gold-and-blue stained glass. There are two murals displayed. One shows wrecks on the highway - trucks and cars overturned, a jet crashing into the top of a building - and the souls of the departed zooming up to the sky, where a white Jesus awaits them. The other shows an African-looking Jesus walking on water. Like the depictions of Jesus - and like the vast audience for Al's music - the congregation is an easygoing mix of races.

One congregant stands in front of the church before the service and says, "Visitors, please stand." A scattered crew of Japanese, French, German and out-of-town Americans stands up. "We welcome you," the woman says. "We love you. And may God bless you."

The choir is already singing "There's Something About King Jesus." There isn't a weak voice among them; the power of their song fills the room like a perfect machine built to shout: "God." And now Rev. Green takes the pulpit, dressed in a long, tan robe. The first thing he sees is his mother, referred to in these parts as Mother Green - a large, authoritative woman in an indigo dress and a small cobalt blue hat. Then Al puts on a pair of brilliant white gloves, as if to purify his hands. The choir is still singing "There's Something About King Jesus," going at it in a medium-tempo stroll, their voices muted but jubilant. "Stop, stop, stop!" Al cries out to them. "Stop playing that or I won't get anything done." He looks out at the pews and proclaims, in a voice halfway between speaking and singing, "Something happened to me, and I can't get over it." He pauses again. "It isn't about singing. If it was, Jesus would have sung his way to the cross." There is some laughter, a few amens. "If you didn't want to come to a sanctified church, then you shouldn't have come," Al says to the visitors in general, though I can't help feeling he is looking straight at me. "You can't expect to come to the deep South and not expect people to have some good things to say about the Lord."

Today Rev. Green is preaching from Psalm 91. Today the choir is lifting their voices. Today Marie Eppinette and Lemon Dye and Ira Farris Jr. and the Rev. George Valentine are on the church's prayer list. Today special prayers are going out to Marie Lomax because her beloved nephew has died. Today, Al's co-preacher, a tall, rural-looking white man called Rev. Sisk, is standing in front of the congregation and telling us that no matter what we've heard, he is not moving out on his wife and their two children. "She has thrown me out, but I am taking back what is mine," he fairly shouts, and one of the voices giving him an amen is my own.

And now we return to my aching back. Somewhere between Rev. Green and Rev. Sisk, I feel the shooting nerve pain suddenly switch from my right leg to my left, and somewhere in the agony's transit it has somehow diminished. Is it the preaching? The music? The feeling I have of sheer luck, being in this little church that is so filled with energy and hope? How many times have you truly felt that there is nowhere else in the world you'd rather be than the place you are right now?

And then I ask myself: Who wouldn't give up a life of Disney jets and hotel suites for the life of this room? Nearly all of Green's contemporaries are either dead or washed up or drearily playing the oldies circuit, while he drinks deeply from the well of his own salvation.

After the service I see Green, and I can tell by his appraising glance that he's trying to guess how the service struck me. I want to tell him that I finally do understand why he jettisoned his big, shiny career for the life of a neighborhood pastor, but I never told him in the first place that I had doubts. All I can say comes in the form of a request.

"I wonder, Reverend," I say. "I've been having quite a bit of trouble, back pain. It's been driving me crazy. I wonder how you'd feel about maybe laying some hands on me and taking it all away."

He smiles. He knows he has me. In the palm of his white-gloved hand.

"You want some healing done?" he asks.

"That's right. Take me to the river."

"Now that's some powerful magic you're talking about," he says. "That's not something you do lightly, you understand?"

Yes, I do, I do, I really do. But before I can cajole him further, his attention is diverted as Mother Green comes over to tell him something. "Some people were over in Arkansas yesterday," she says. "They were at the historical museum in Forrest City, and they've got a doctor's table in there with a sign that says, this is the table where al green was born." She smiles, shakes her head. "I just had to tell them, 'Child, I don't know about that museum, but I had that boy on the floor.' " She laughs, and her devoted son laughs with her, and the next thing I know he's talking to someone else, and then someone else after that, and then he opens a door to a private room, closes it, and he's gone.

[From Issue 850 — September 28, 2000]