Summer 2020 Album Diary: "The Belle Album," Al Green (1977)

When Greil Marcus reviewed The Belle Album for Rolling Stone in late 1977, he wrote "...we may someday look back on The Belle Album as Al Green's best..."  After more than half a decade of hit singles (and outstanding albums) that one could rightly call "legendary" without engaging in hyperbole, that was a heady claim to make.  There were no hit singles from this one, and I honestly don't recall ever having heard any of the album's songs over the course of the 40+ years since its release.

The shocks I felt when listening to the album for the first time were all happy ones.  At first, it felt a little disorienting to hear synthesizer and clavinet on an Al Green record - this was the first album he recorded without longtime producer Willie Mitchell at the helm, and the first without the fantastic crew of Memphis musicians (Al Jackson Jr., Wayne Jackson, several others) who came to represent the "Al Green sound."  And then, lo and behold, there's Al Green himself playing a quite mean acoustic guitar!

And when the album's fourth song, "Georgia Boy," rolled around I realized that it was simply foolish to have waited so long to dive into this one.  This certainly fits my definition of a great album.  Whether it's his best, as Marcus speculated might be the case in 1977, is a question worth contemplating.