Heard this for the first time in decades - what a great sashaying groove! And Al making some marvelous moans and whoops!
Lines "taste the wine and sacred bread" make coitus into holy communion.
(But then again the Bible can get pretty raunchy. And how about the wedding vows from the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer - "with my body I thee worship".)
On the 1975 album that "Love Ritual" first appeared on, there's a track titled "The Love Sermon"!
The album Love Ritual (largely hitherto unreleased stuff) reviewed by me here in June 1989.
On the four-CD Al Green box set, there's a remix of "Love Ritual" - which seems to have come out as a single in 1989, where it was given this title (the Bwana subsequently stripped away).
The delirium of erotic blurts and mangled lingo sent me back to these tracks by Tim Buckley
"I talk in tongues, mama / oh when I love you" - Buckley working that sacralized sex / religion-as-sex-as-religion zone as deliriously as Reverend-to-be Al.
Those Buckley tunes precede the recording of "Love Ritual" by two or three years. Yet Al Green likely had been among the stuff Tim listened to and learned from for Greetings from LA, his big would-be mainstream R&B/soul/funk move (that didn't pan out commercially - too X-Rated? still too out-there vocally?) .
(I played these to my students in a class on vocal extremes, thinking they'd be blown away - but the reaction was surprising - it sounded grating to their ears, like Buckley was straining his vocal cords - "he doesn't have the right vocal support for that kind of singing" i.e. he ought've hauled his ass over to a voice coach.
More from me on the genius of Tim Buckley
Another thing that the groove of "Love Ritual" reminded me of a little is this
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