Friday Night Videos

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Let’s get a little sappy for Valentine’s Day with Al Green’s “Love And Happiness” from his 1972 album, I’m Still In Love With You. If memory serves, the album sold eleventy bajillion copies and went Red Matter. If not, it should have because this is about as good as Soul gets.

I remember doing the car seat dance in the passenger side of mom’s car with this one playing loudly enough for me to complain about it. Now I’m the one who turns it up to 11 until my kids complain.

By 1980 I’d gone all New Wave (with the occasional side order of Punk) and Soul pretty much fell off my radar. Later, switching to Alt and Goth didn’t help to add any Al Green into the collection. Then Quentin Tarantino came along. I went with friends to see Pulp Fiction on the big screen, because I’d rented Reservoir Dogs the year before, for no reason other than it had Harvey Keitel on the cover holding a gun. This was back in the day that when you saw a picture of Keitel holding a gun, you rented the movie. Needless to say, Dogs turned me into a Tarantino fan right from the diner scene, so I wasn’t going to miss his new movie in the theater.

I took two things away from Pulp Fiction. The first was that I swore I’d never make fun of John Travolta again — this being years before Battlefield Earth. The second was, “Holy cow I’d forgotten all about Al Green!” Tarantino had used “Let’s Stay Together in the background in the scene where mobster Marcellus Wallis tells boxer Butch Coolidge when to throw the fight. Great scene, great song — reminded me I was once an Al Green fan.

But tonight’s pick seems more apropos for today’s holiday, and here’s the full version with the intro and the slow fade which usually get clipped off for radio play.

Enjoy.