The art inspired theme is fantastic and I’d love to see more of this. My overall event thoughts: I’m personally more interested in unique concepts than I am versatility at this point, so I love this suit. It unveils the notion of using a soggy tom-tom to carry the slinky rhythm and the general air of laconic understatement conjured by the Hodges brothers – Charles on keyboards, Teenie on guitar and Leroy on bass – with the great Al Jackson Jr on drums (sometimes replaced by Howard Grimes) and the dry-toned Memphis Horns, led by the saxophonist Andrew Love and the trumpeter Wayne Jackson.I saw a lot of comments about how odd and maybe unusable the bg items of this event are, but I thought the carpet might still work well because we also have poses with interesting perspectives too.Īfter trying it out, I think it’s a great item for a variety of sitting poses that are a lot more floaty or awkward on typical chairs, and it seems to work well with any Nikki pose that looks more like she’s leaning back or laying down. The first album opens with its title track, reminding us that “ Let’s Stay Together” – an R&B chart-topper in the US for 10 straight weeks - is where the sound came together. Green himself seems to merge with the song, the sound of his falsetto getting thinner as he gives the impression of being overwhelmed by sheer ardour, until it almost disappears in a series of ecstatic hums and gasps, leaving just the memory of languid rapture hanging in the air. It’s built on an acoustic guitar accompaniment, with a bass guitar and kick-drum and hi-hat, a floating B3 and the occasional intervention of gentle strings. The best place to hear that phenomenon in action has always been “ Simply Beautiful”, a track on the second of these albums. With Green’s first two Hi albums, Mitchell had edged gradually closer to what became the trademark approach of an almost obsessive minimalism in arrangement and production, moving towards the setting most suited to the singer’s unique characteristic: the quieter he sang, the more powerfully intense his performance became. Together, Mitchell and Green would make the little regional label synonymous with the second coming of Memphis soul, and no finer evidence exists than the music on these two albums. Mitchell owned the Royal studio and was a vice-president and A&R chief of the locally based Hi Records, whose only real claim to fame at that point was a pair of instrumental hits by musicians better known for playing on other people’s records: Bill Black’s “Smokie Pt 2” and Ace Cannon’s “Tuff”. Green was 23 years old when he met the trumpeter, songwriter, arranger and record producer Willie Mitchell in 1969. Barely a mile apart, the two locations were linked by a highly evolved understanding of one of the last genres of American pop music whose exponents only had to open their mouths or pluck a string to betray their geographical location. The direct link between Redding and Green was Memphis and the durable formula of southern soul, whether recorded at the old Stax studio on East McLemore or Royal Recording on South Lauderdale. Although hardly unsophisticated, Green’s music still sounded as though it was aimed at an audience of people whose diet included cornbread and grits. At the time it seemed as though Green represented the eagerly awaited successor to Otis Redding: a new figurehead for the kind of soul music that retained an explicit connection with its blues and gospel roots, disdaining the experiments with the language of rock that could be heard in the music of his contemporaries. “1972 is Al Green’s year and he seemed to snatch it up almost effortlessly,” Vince Aletti wrote in Rolling Stone that November.
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