Happenstance Part 1 (w/Apologies to The Trail-Off Groove)

My favorite ARC (Advance Reading Copy) grabbed during my bookseller years is a fat, cloth-sized QP of two novels by the crime fiction writer George Pelecanos, Soul Circus and Hell To Pay, packaged back-to-back in the old Ace paperback double (flip-over) style.

This was an expensive push by the publisher to encourage sales consummate with the author’s critical acclaim. (It’s still not happened, but Pelecanos produced and wrote for HBO’s The Wire for several seasons; I’m guessing he’s done okay.)


Soul Circus was his new hardcover for 2003; Hell To Pay was arriving in mass market. Pelecanos was wrapping up his third series of books by this time. I went back and picked up the first of his second series, King Suckerman – because of its irresistable title – and read sequentially through Hell To Pay before burning out on the author for a time.

Last month I finally read Soul Circus. It was easy to pick right back up with the character Derek Strange, a black PI in contemporary Washington, DC who drives around his native city listening to ‘70s soul music and lecturing any passenger he might have on what makes the era (especially “the Sound of Philadelphia”) a high-water mark for American music.

I was halfway through the book when some errands took me to the pharmacy, where I browsed a badly-maintained discount CD & DVD display and saw, amid the weird foreign-label best-of CDs of American recording artists with misspelled song titles, a copy of Al Green Gets Next To You, from 1971, with Al on the cover in that striking blue suit, for $3.99.

It’d been decades since I’d heard Al Green outside the confines of the super-smooth Greatest Hits package, an album that is as much of a disservice to him as Legend is to Bob Marley, so I snagged the discounted Hi Records disc, thinking I’d sing along with some soul on my way home to finish up Derek Strange’s adventures.


I wasn’t disappointed: Al Green Gets Next To You could easily be titled Al Green Takes Al Green’s Greatest Hits Out In The Alley And Fucks Its Shit Up.


After finishing Soul Circus, I flipped the ARC over and was paging through Hell To Pay when I came across this passage; Strange is driving, with his new teenaged stepson Lionel in the passenger seat:

…(Strange) and Lionel drove up Georgia toward Brightwood…Strange had an old tape, Al Green Gets Next To You, in the deck, and he was trying hard not to sing along.

“Sounds like gospel music,” said Lionel. “But he’s singing it to some girl, isn’t he?”
“’God Is Standing By,’” said Strange. “An old Johnny Taylor tune, and you’re right. This here was back when Al was struggling between the secular and the spiritual, if you know what I mean.”
“You mean, like, he loves Jesus but he loves to hit the pussy too.”
“I wasn’t quite gonna put it like that, young man.”
“Whateva.”


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