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Thursday, January 08, 2004

I Can’t Stop

Somewhere in Scott Rettberg’s fascinating and protean hypertext novel The Unknown, there’s a character named Michael Bérubé who feeds a jukebox full of Motown tunes.  I just want to set the record straight on this.  I know it’s “fiction” and all, but Scott and I were not in the Bread Company in Urbana, Illinois, we were in a bar in downtown Cincinnati; and I was not playing Motown, I was playing a series of Al Green’s early-70s hits (this was in 1996, and you couldn’t find things like “Love and Happiness” and “You Ought to Be with Me” on just any old jukebox), and of course the Reverend made his recordings somewhat further to the south.

Everything else in The Unknown is true, however.

Anyway, for Xmas Janet got (among other things) Mr. Green’s latest, I Can’t Stop, and I’ve been listening to it these past few days, and it’s just great.  Kind of eerie, really, in that the whole thing is so thoroughly neo-70s, from the cover art to the last details of the mixing and recording.  But then, I also enjoyed more than half of Al Green’s other post-70s reappearance in pop, 1995’s Your Heart’s In Good Hands, especially “What Does It Take” (a great and still underappreciated groove).

Posted by Michael on 01/08 at 05:53 AM
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