I met Joe McEwen (a/k/a Mr. C) in 1970 when Jake and Alexandra and I were selling tickets to a Lightnin’ Hopkins concert at the door. Jake was 2, and Joe was 18 or 19. “Did you mean what you said in that Solomon Burke article you wrote in Rolling Stone?” Joe said, without bothering to introduce himself. “Yes,” I said. We’ve been friends ever since.
Recently Joe came across this amazing Al Green clip and dropped by to tell us about it.
– PG
Mr C:
Al Green didn’t share peanut butter sandwiches with his grade school classmates. “I’ve always been a loner,” he tells interviewer Ellis Haizlip.
“I was always the fellow that was alone, by myself.”
This little bit of revelation is spoken without irony or pretense. In this remarkable performance/interview on the Soul! TV show aired on January 3, 1973, Al Green seems unburdened by the crush of success that has suddenly thrust this once lonely schoolboy into the guy that now everybody wants to know. He talks, but mostly sings, with full band and by himself, guitar in hand. Despite his owndisclaimer, Al is in great voice and fully engaged, seeming to enjoy Soul!’s inviting setting. For an hour, we’re absorbed by the full flowering of the mercurial Al Green.
Soul! was a PBS black culture hour, the brain child of Manhattan sophisticate Haizlip. It aired from September of 1968 to March of 1973, a Thursday night show that originally featured King Curtis as house bandleader. Guests ranged from Apollo stars like Joe Tex, Jerry Butler, and the Manhattans, to an array of such political and literary lights of the era as James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Shirley Chisholm, and Julius Lester among others. It was ambitious and understated, a television show that succeeded without the flash of the moment. A small audience sat, café-style, at small tables, while Ellis Haizlip directed our attention. Looking at Soul! 40 years later, it’s wondrous that something as special and well-crafted as this managed to exist.
Like a future album title, Al Green Explores Your Mind, on this January evening it was more a case of Al Green Exploring His Own Mind. And we get to ride along.