As well as including the original ninety minute documentary, the DVD also contains special features like a ninety minute audio interview with Al Green and extended cuts of him performing and preaching. You see Al wasn't just fooling around with his born again stuff, nor experimenting like Dylan. Al became a Baptist minister, bought himself a church, and began leading people in worship every Sunday. There's been plenty of folk who have graduated from the church to secular music, but it's a rare person who feels the calling so strong that they make the reverse journey.
While the movie includes interviews with Al's first producer, Willie Mitchell of Memphis Hi Records, and Al himself, that deal with how his career as a soul singer began and talks about the recording of his first albums, when it comes to the matter of Al's conversion we aren't given very much information. When Mugge asks Green about how it happened he simply says that he woke up in the middle of the night in a hotel room praising God. It sounds like he had some sort of miraculous conversion while asleep and avoids mention of any events in his personal life that might have influenced his decision.
In an article entitled "Scared Straight" Robert Brunner describes how in 1974 Green's girlfriend Mary Woodson burst into his bathroom while he was in the shower and dumped a pot of scalding grits on his back, burning him so badly he was in hospital for several months. She then ran to his bedroom where she took a pistol registered in Al's name and shot and killed herself. While Al's conversion had happened a year prior to those events, it was shortly after that he made the complete break from pop music and switched over entirely to gospel and two years later was ordained as a minister.
While it's understandable that Al Green would want to distance himself from those events, it's not for a documentary filmmaker to leave out information on his subject as significant as that. Yet, instead of researching his subject, or even checking out a few other sources or news reports, it seems like Mugge decided to rely on Green and his intimates as his only sources of information. The result is that what appears to be an intimate portrait is actually somewhat sanitized.
Article comments
1 - Tom
You'll never catch me saying Daryl Hall & John Oates are soul singers (well, except for Daryl's "Soul Alone" album), they're the best rock duo in history.