James Taylor - Gorilla, 1975

Uooh Uooh Uooh Uooh Uooh Uooh, Uooh

I’ve listened to this 2013 remastered album twice this week on my mp3 player whilst out walking. I kept thinking it was one of his latter ‘great’ albums, perhaps right on the edge of his best, but I now know it was actually his sixth, directly after Walking Man. Neither here nor there, but that surprised me. It is certainly consummate James Taylor: gentle and even genteel; peaceful and pleasant; distinctive laid-back vocal.

Opener Mexico is Taylor with signature guitar work – folkpop perfection with sweet harmonies. Second Music is the same with a happy narrative too. And then third is the wonderful cover of the Holland-Dozier-Holland How Sweet It Is [To Be Loved By You], a song Taylor has given increasing funk over the years when played live. Here it is suitably upbeat and jaunty, the saxophone solo one of two such great interjections on the album – not credited on the album cover, but David Sanborn playing - and wife Carly Simon adds her vocal here as elsewhere. Indeed, next Wandering is a beautiful version of this traditional song, the close harmonies quite exquisite, Carly Simon again. Fifth, title track Gorilla, is the joker – a song sung for smiles, the ape-sounds almost cool. Almost. It’s a long way from fourth album One Man Dog where James sang about taking drugs [Mescalito] as a positive experience – has opened up my mind - which required a printed disclaimer on an inner sleeve stating The opinions expressed in this song are not necessarily those of the supporting musicians and background vocalists.

Sixth is the brilliantly melodramatic You Make It Easy, a song in inimitable Taylor style - gosh almighty baby; yes indeed - and yet obviously a Country lyric: a song of temptation and lust and then male redemption in the rejection of those former two, I think – we assume he isn’t in the end adulterous. It’s all very un-pc when judged by today’s moral barometer as the tale of male vulnerability pitted against an enticing female sexuality places the blame firmly with the domineering, manipulative gender: hers. It does produce one of the great lyrical lines in you supply the satisfy and I’ll supply the need: such a powerful symmetry. With the saccharine strings and the unravelling storyline of a guy in a bar momentarily without the corrective restraint of his wife’s presence, it is the most wonderful musical soap opera. And there is the second superb sax solo on the album where the rising stabs of noise provide the orgasm the persona never, presumably, achieves – whether by decision or missed opportunity. There is this ambiguity, but the tease has been palpable. I think it is terrific.

This is followed with I Was A Fool To Care, a love song less theatrical but supplying another narrative paradox plotting the complexity of being in love: I was a fool to care but I don’t care even if I was a fool. Those sweeping strings are still there, but Taylor’s plucked guitar is back on comfortable territory, and the song rides out on soothing harmonies. Soaring harmonies inform next Lighthouse, this time by Graham Nash and David Crosby, and Randy Newman is on hornorgan. Ninth Angry Blues is blues and funk played with the sweet sass Taylor has made his own, especially as I’ve already said when playing live over the years, and the Dixie lilt is supplied by the great Lowell George on guitar, with him and Valerie Carter supplying further vocal support.

Penultimate is Love Songs, the lengthy oboe opening an oddity and the song itself the least memorable on the album, though the line I must just be an old softy ‘cause I still believe in love provides a neat summation of Taylor’s state of mind and perhaps the gentility of the songs as a whole. Closer Sarah Maria, a song about his daughter Sally, sweetly wraps up the sweetness of an album I have so enjoyed re-visiting, twice and throughout the writing of this review. 

Al Green - Greatest Hits, 1975 - Top Fifty

The Reverend 

Released in 1975, this is the album that consolidated my appreciation of the brilliance of Al Green. I will have been aware of his genius during the early 70s with his string of hits, but this record collected the majority of those songs by which his distinctive silky soul funk has been defined.

As well as loving my poles of pretty folk/Americana and heavy rock, I have always also loved soul music [which is hardly an astonishing range]. I’ve written elsewhere that the first albums I bought were in fact Wilson Pickett, The Four Tops and an Atlantic soul selection, albums I threw/gave away after buying and feeling I had to adhere wholly, and ridiculously, to Hendrix and similar psychedelic, underground music – and those soul albums have subsequently been replaced. But I bought and kept the Green after that late 60s, teenage nonsense.

Whilst I haven't seen Al Green live, nor a great range of soul artists, I feel privileged that I did get to see The Stylistics, The Detroit Spinners, Sister Sledge and  Jimmy Ruffin, as well as Hot Chocolate [different soul skew, I know] a little later, and then the great The Isley Brothers, but much later in their career.

This preamble is probably somewhat of a filler as it is hard to describe at any illuminating length Al Green’s soul sound: it is so distinct and famous that the attempt does seem more superfluous than usual when writing about a genuinely great talent [Rolling Stone place him at 66 in their list 100 Greatest Artists Of All Time, but I’m sure I’d have him higher]. The relevance of the history of my love of soul is in how Green epitomised its spirit in those measured but funky grooves, the lyrics about enduring love, and the stunning expressive sweetness of his vocal.

It is that voice of course – quite restrained in terms of volume, but gliding around and around at his falsetto with such soulful feeling – yet those arrangements too: the funky female chorus interjections, stabs of horns, the rolling organ grooves. Movement encapsulated in music. Obviously it’s sexual.

The opening track Tired of Being Alone introduced those distinctive horn hits. Green groans and squeals as if he is right there in that moment, stuttering as he conveys his urge and need and the seduction of it all. Third I’m Still in Love With You lets the horns introduce again, then he almost whispers the premise of his singing – female vocal support echoing bits of the message – and there he goes again, emoting with such genuine yearning and persuasion, all wrapped up in the love.

Then there’s fifth How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. So slow, so pained, so glorious. The organ pumps brooding empathy in the background, strings layering their own pain, then menace [even a quick mimetic ‘breeze’]. And throughout, Green’s voice is all questioning and despair for mending, the repetition rising in an agonising rhetorical climb. Sixth Let’s Stay Together – here we go: horn jabs, organ wisps and rolls, a funkier rhythm, chorus supporting with together, good or bad, happy or sad, such reasoning in his declaration of that enduring love already mentioned as a key theme. 

The coolest picture there is of Green, so here it is again

I’ve purposefully focused on those slow, sensitive numbers. There are upbeat tracks, like the wonderful Here I Am [Come and Take Me] where the horns are more active and strutting throughout, the rhythm chugging within the familiar organ’s increased huff and puff, so an honourable mention here as well to Green’s musical collaborator/engineer/arranger Willie Mitchell.

All of this nostalgic revisiting of Green’s music during the soul 70s, and listening as I write this,  reminds me of how much I lived it then. As a longhair who headbanged to so much heavy rock of the time I also had my soul/disco alter-ego where I’d don a three-piece suit or velvet jacket and go to the local nightclub to dance so-smooth all night to those cool grooves. I’m sure it was smooth – even if in this picture I look rather foppish. I’m certain it is just an aberrant stance. And I don’t think those background flowers help.....