But that album had mostly been "I don't want to break up" songs this one is solidly "I love you, sweetie" material, and it's even better. I'm Still In Love With You recapitulates the successful Let's Stay Together formula, right down to the unlikely six-and-a-half-minute cover- this time it's Kris Kristofferson's "For the Good Times".
(As with his entire pre-gospel career, Jesus turns up unexpectedly- this time in the middle of the otherwise secular groove "So You're Leaving".) The album's centerpiece is a six-minute-plus cover of the Bee Gees' ballad "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart", on which his vocal is so light and flexible it seems to be fluttering in the breeze coming off the drums. Green wasn't yet firing on all cylinders as a songwriter, but even the album's lesser songs get spectacular performances. Virtually everyone who's covered it has surrendered to the temptation to oversing it the genius of Green's performance is that he's murmuring it to the person on the next pillow, not declaiming it for the neighbors to bear witness. Surprise: it got there by being one of the best-sung hits of the 70s. The title track of Let's Stay Together is a karaoke standard and an "American Idol" joke. (Callow youth may know the Hodges brothers as those dudes who backed up Cat Power circa The Greatest.) And, while virtually every other soul marquee name of the era was recording with session dudes, he had a real band worthy of his gifts: guitarist Teenie Hodges, organist Charles Hodges, bassist Leroy Hodges, drummers Howard Grimes and Al Jackson, backup singers Rhodes, Chalmers and Rhodes, and producer Willie Mitchell, who'd had a string of instrumental hits of his own in the 60s and knew how to shape Green's expansive gifts into compact 210-second packages. He could articulate unbelievably delicate shades of feeling with his voice alone he had an astonishing sense of timing, of pitch, of emphasis, of drama. Other soul singers may have had more raw power or a wider stylistic range (although not many of them), but nobody else had Green's virtuosity or interpretive gifts. The first fruits of the unlikely deal are reissues of three of Hi's crown jewels: Al Green's fourth and fifth albums, and the magnificent greatest-hits collection that followed them a few years later. The catalogue of Hi Records- the magnificent Memphis label that cranked out hits from the 1950s to the 70s- has been in and out of print for the last few decades, and now it's been licensed by Fat Possum.
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