Al Green-Livin For You - Appreciation Post.
batmon
27,574 Posts
This hasnt left my CD changer all month. Last night I realized how really incredible this is.Beware = 
Ive had it for many years and always returned to it but recently it has "touched me".
Comments
I liked how it was used in the American Pimp movie......
You sound homeless.
*I know some people are holding onto CDs, for some strange reason. But a CD changer? What is it? A five disc carousel. LOL.
For a major-label release, Livin' For You had the most ghetto, low-budget-looking album cover ever. Looks like it oughta be a mural on the wall at Popeye's Fried Chicken.
I am beyond this level. I am still working with a jenky-as-can-be CD player hooked up to the tape deck of my car, along with my 50 or so, burned CDs stacked carelessly inside my driver seat compartment.
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/seconds/al-green-beware.htm
At 8:12, ???Beware??? is one of Green???s longest tunes???an expansion of what was by 1973 a seasoned craftsman???s obsessions. If ???Let???s Stay Together??? and ???Call Me??? rendered Green as the star in his own billowy romantic fantasies, and ???Here I Am (Come & Take Me)??? was the PG-rated simulacrum of ???Tired of Being Alone??????s hard-dicked impatience, ???Beware??? subsumes them in a groove whose predictability, borne of equal parts confidence and mercenary instincts, doesn???t mitigate Green???s determination to show how finely shaded the Love Man pose was if you were staring hard enough (imagine if Bryan Ferry had fused ???If There Is Something??? and ???Just Another High???!). It???s the work of an artist with an uncanny grasp of how he stood in relation to his audience. Compared with sonic cousin ???Your Love Is the Morning Sun,??? the drawled hush in which Green sings ???Beware??? signifies a rapture as besotted with its own ability to provoke rapture as the earlier tune was at delineating the afterglow of one monstrous night of passion.
A chunk of ???Beware??? maintains a pace as unhurried as ??????Morning Sun,??? even with Leroy Hodges plucking a bass line as quietly propulsive as a finger thrust up a skirt. Over electric piano and Al Jackson???s as-ever metronomic drumming, Green sings:
The way people smile and say
Using me in every way
It???s all okay
Tired of changin???
Life is upside down
No reason to cry loud