I was not exposed to too much soul music growing up, outside of white people standards like Stevie Wonder, but once in the college, where you are allowed to explore all those nasty, vile things your parents tried to hide from you, like music by black people, anal sex, and falafel, I started pumping the goddamned Al Green, most specifically his Greatest Hits LP. Mostly, that first track – “Tired of Being Alone” – is my all-time favorite, because I was living in a shitty house in RVA, sleeping on a part of a loft bed sitting on some milk crates that I ended up breaking fucking my girlfriend one day, and it’s just a great song to start an album out with, plus my copy has a bit of scuffed part at the beginning that makes it sound fuzzy for five seconds, and those goddamn Memphis horns, sounding like that sound the woods make in the south when it’s summertime, a symphony of frog croaks and bug chirps, building and building and building and building and then it’s silent as death.
Al Green had been my favorite for a few years when I worked in a veterinary clinic/hospital in Richmond, splitting kennel slop duties with a 40-something pussyhound black dude ex-con who was chill as hell. We would leave joints for each other behind the radio for after hours job duties. One day, an Al Green song came on the radio, and I said how I liked that shit. He was like, “Back in the day, everybody loved Al Green. Everybody. The women loved him because he was smooth as fuck, and all the men didn’t care because we thought he was a faggot.” That just made me love Al Green even more. Real life does that to you about things.
Anyways, a few months back I sawed a blog that had some O.V. Wright downloads, and I had no real inkling as to why I would download it, but I did. Oh man, holy fuck, it’s like alternative Al Green, with that same murky Memphis horns sound, but O.V. Wright sounds like he never got hot grits thrown on him. I don’t care to research the musical history, but the sound is exactly the same as classic Al Green, and there’s God shit galore in an O.V. Wright compilation, but it’s like somebody pitch shifted the voice down two scales. In other words, it’s the rock solid goods.
There’s a black Jesus station out of RVA nowadays, and it all sounds all big bandy (like a lot of people, not white dudes playing 14 different types of brass instruments) but with a four-pad drum machine underneath it. If Jesus really wanted me to pretend all that mythology was the best mythology, he’d have motherfuckers busting a sweat gland making some music like this O.V. Wright shit, not chanting at my ass. Never mind this song is about relationships meaning booty. Sex and Jesus go hand in hand because everybody with a dick just wants to poke it in as many women as they can, and that never stops until they are dead and gone. But we have minds and emotions and can trick ourselves into denying our animal instincts, so we can fall into line with some mythological moral system and deny our desire to dick-stab every halfway decent looking human with fleshy chests we pass, so as to keep our personal one-on-one relationship intact.
Kinda funny that that comes up, because that black ex-con dude from the veterinary hospital, I used to go play Spades with him and his wife in their ghetto ass neighborhood, and we’d get high on the back porch and watch RVA’s Northside sketch past us. But I saw that dude one time with someone, and I was like, “Hey Reggie, how’s Denise?” who was his wife, and he was all like shrugging his face and being like, “no no no no” through facial expressions, so I made up some shit about some other shit and it was all good. He caught me aside and was like, “She don’t know I’m married,” meaning the woman he was with, who looked like she would fight people for a pack of Newports. It was all really perfect because Reggie had a fuzzy and round happy growing old light-skinned black man face, and reminded me of a young Fred Sanford.
I wonder if Reggie is chasing Jesus or pussy at this point in his life? Hopefully pussy. Vagina is life, Jesus is death.
STEAL "I'd Rather Be Blind, Crippled and Crazy"
NEXT UP: An ugh.alt.country song that I have no recollection of why I got!
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