“Something that can make you do wrong, make you do right.” It doesn’t get much better than this. Al Green and his guitarist Teenie Hodges wrote this for his 1972 album I’m Still In Love with You. In his earlier years, the now Reverend Al Green was something of a heartthrob lothario until a girlfriend, Mary Woodson White, assaulted him before killing herself at his Memphis home in 1974, and here this song describes a fraught scenario of a telephone call at 3am. This song captures the fragility of happiness and love, and the ingredients, with Hammond organ, guitar, that driving, simple beat, horn section and of course Green’s expressive voice all cook up one of the great soul songs. As the man himself described the recording process: “The result was like a slow fever, building on the beat, pushing up the temperature with each breath of the staccato horns and pushing through to delirium as we came up on the fade.”
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