The voice came to Al Green from across a street corner in Baltimore. He was there on tour, taking a walk in his "incognito" get-up -- hat, glasses, oversize coat -- when from out of nowhere, the fifty-seven-year-old soul legend recalls, he heard a man shout, "Hey, Al, why don't you come with the damn music, man? You know we all waiting on the damn music."

The Rev. Green, of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church of Memphis, had heard the call before. Ever since he stopped recording secular music to devote his life to the church in 1978, people have pleaded with him to return to the sweet soul sound that made him one of the most popular artists of the 1970s. His producer, Willie Mitchell, who was involved in all of Green's early-Seventies smashes, says he nagged Green every chance he got. "He told me twenty years ago he wasn't going to make any more records," Mitchell recalls. "And then he told me he could come back any time he wanted."

For Green, who has recorded only one other nonreligious album since 1978, the time for that comeback is now. "You know how sometimes it takes somebody to shake you a little bit to get you to change?" Green says, sitting beneath a wall of gold records in the office of Mitchell's Royal Studios, in Memphis. "Well, I was shaken up in Baltimore. And when I got home, I came straight here." It wasn't long before he and Mitchell began work on I Can't Stop, their first soul album since Have a Good Time, in 1976. I Can't Stop will be released by Blue Note on November 18th.

"God brought us back together," Mitchell, 75, says, recalling what both describe as an emotional reunion. Mitchell spent seven months of 2002 in the hospital, battling diabetes. He was so weak that when Green first came to visit the studio in December, Mitchell couldn't get up from his office chair. But the producer made sure Green understood him. "I said, 'Let's don't do no gospel. Let's get it for real, or I'm goin' back home.' "

Mitchell says he insisted that Green not try to make a contemporary R&B record, either. Instead, he argued, the best way to return was to evoke the warm, silky atmosphere of such impeccably produced -- and devastatingly sung -- singles as "Tired of Being Alone," "Call Me" and "Let's Stay Together." I Can't Stop strives to rekindle the magic of those great soul benchmarks, sometimes hitting the target (the shooping title track) and sometimes veering too close to nostalgia. The twelve songs slither along, propelled by gentle, padding rhythms and Mitchell's signature horn jabs, and at every turn the instrumental textures support Green's suave, impulsive, bedroom-bound ad-libs. Mitchell says he was surprised by how well Green's voice had survived: a tad less fiery than in 1970, but just as persuasive. "It'll be fifty years before another singer like him comes along," says Mitchell.

Green looks much as he did then, maybe a bit thicker in the middle. He smiles constantly, rocks back and forth in his chair and alternates between his regular speaking tone and a cackle. "We said, 'Please let Al Green be Al Green, and Willie Mitchell be Willie Mitchell,' " Green says of the new album, "with just a little bit of 2004 in the tracks."

Green and Mitchell assembled many of the musicians who had contributed to the old records to play on the new album. They used the same RCA microphone, labeled "Number Nine," that was used on the Seventies hits, and because Mitchell kept the studio pretty much as it was, right down to the burlap covering the walls, everyone felt comfortable. When Green struggled with his lyrics, he paced the same hallway he did when he was writing "I'm Still in Love With You." When he sang, he stood in the same spot he did on all the classic sides, with his back to the control room.

"He came to sing," Mitchell says of Green. "Al will try to impress me. Because I'm hard to impress. He'll do some shit and look at me out of the corner of his eye, like, 'Hmm, I got him this time.' He'll do some things to you that'll mess your mind up."

Asked whether he expects to catch heat from his parishioners for straying from gospel, Green can barely control his laughter: "Am I gonna hear about it? Hell, yes! See, I'm a real preacher." Then he gets quiet. "For a long time, people would say, 'You can't sing "Love and Happiness" because that's not a gospel song.' And then I started to think, 'What's the second verse of "Love and Happiness"?' [Singing] 'Be good to me, and I'll be good to you/We'll be together to see each other walk away with victory.' Now, if we don't wanna see each other walk away with victory, something must be wrong."

Eventually, Green concluded that he wasn't being honest as a preacher or a performer if he avoided certain subjects. "How can the spiritual manifest itself without the natural?" he says. "Believe me, I wrote the songs about Sally, Michelle, Shirley -- let's be real. You know, 'Up in the Holiday Inn, baby, you blew my mind,' all that." But Green explains that over the years, as his songs have endured, he has come to recognize that what began as pure lust can resonate beyond the bedroom. "God says, 'I know why you wrote the songs and who you wrote them for. I gave you the songs. Now just aim the meaning in the right direction.' "

[From Issue 935 — November 13, 2003]