Al Green - The Midnight Special, NBC Studios, Burbank, CA, 9-10-1974

It's very strange to me how little of Al Green's live material has been released. He's had a career about as long as James Brown's. There are at least 32 official James Brown live albums. Whereas there is only one official Al Green live album, and that one is marred by the fact that it was recorded at the height of the disco era. So there's nothing from him in his 1970s prime. Yet he performed very exciting concerts, often going well beyond just slavishly reproducing the studio versions.

I've tried to fix this by posting a 1973 concert he did for a TV show. You can find that here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/07/al-green-soul-wnet-studios-new-york.html

And now, I'm posting this one. Although it's only from one year later, Green had so many hits during that time that the song list is very different, with only three songs featured on both.

The bulk of this album comes from an appearance he made on "The Midnight Special," a popular US musical TV show in the 1970s. But I've augmented that with some songs he did for "Soul Train," another such TV show. The first song comes from a 1974 "Soul Train" appearance, and the last three come from a 1975 appearance.

One problem with these types of shows is that they don't want to waste any time. So the DJ typically talks right up until the start of a song, and then resumes immediately after the song ends. That happened here in almost every case. So I had to do some tricky editing to extend the audience applause after each song, instead of having the song come to total silence a couple of seconds after the last note was played.

But unfortunately some of the editing for the TV shows went further and cut the song off even before it finished. That happened for "Let's Get Married" and "Love and Happiness." So in those cases, I found proper endings from other live versions and patched them in. They don't work perfectly, but I figured it was better than just having the songs suddenly fade out.

There was a much bigger problem for the song "Sweet Sixteen." For the recording I had, the middle part of the song had numerous drop-outs, leaving gaps of silence up to five seconds long. Luckily, I found a different performance of the song on "Soul Train" that same year. So I patched in a minute or two of that. Again, it wasn't a perfect edit, but it's far better than having the endure all the drop outs.

Between this concert and the other Al Green one I've posted, just about all of his big 1970s hits are included. A year or two after this, he began getting much more religious with his music. A few years after that, he left the music industry altogether for a while to be a preacher. He's generally done a mix of religious and secular music ever since. So if you're not into his religious material, these two 1970s concerts are the only live recordings I know with good sound quality.

And by the way, the sound quality here isn't excellent, but it gets the job done. Clearly, the bootleg I had was recorded from the TV, so expect 1970s TV reception sound quality.

Like the other Al Green concert I've posted, this one is a little short of one hour long. If you only include the actual "Midnight Special" songs, it's 35 minutes long.

01 Livin' for You (Al Green)
02 Sweet Sixteen [Edit] (Al Green)
03 Tired of Being Alone (Al Green)
04 Here I Am [Come and Take Me] (Al Green)
05 Let's Get Married [Edit] (Al Green)
06 Love and Happiness [Edit] (Al Green)
07 Let's Stay Together (Al Green)
08 I'm Still in Love with You (Al Green)
09 Sha-La-La [Make Me Happy] (Al Green)
10 L-O-V-E [Love] (Al Green)
11 Take Me to the River (Al Green)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15293090/AlGren_1974_MdnightSpecialNBCStdiosBrbankCA__9-10-1974_atse.zip.html

At first, I thought this concert took place on October 4, 1974. But then I found a photo of him from September 10, 1974, said to be in Los Angeles (with Burbank a suburb of that), where he was wearing the exact same outfit. Furthermore, the background even appears to be the same. (You can find the whole show on YouTube.) So I figure the concert was recorded on September 10th and then broadcast later, as was the typical procedure in those days.