SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2019
VOLUME SIX NUMBER THREE
ANTHONY BRAXTON
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
ISAAC HAYES
(December 29—January 4)
THOM BELL
(January 5-11)
THE STYLISTICS
(January 12-18)
THE O’JAYS
(January 19-25)
OTIS REDDING
(January 26-February 1)
BOOKER T. JONES
(February 2-8)
THE STAPLE SINGERS
(February 9-15)
OTIS RUSH
(February 16-22)
ERROLL GARNER
(February 23-March 1)
EARL HINES
(March 2-8)
JULIUS EASTMAN
(March 9–15)
BIG BILL BROONZY
(March 16–22)
Isaac Hayes
(1942-2008)
Artist Biography by Jason Ankeny
Few figures exerted greater influence over the music of the 1960s and 1970s than Isaac Hayes; after laying the groundwork for the Memphis soul sound through his work with Stax-Volt Records, Hayes began a highly successful solo career which predated not only the disco movement but also the evolution of rap.
Hayes
was born on August 20, 1942, in Covington, TN; his parents died during
his infancy, and he was raised by his grandparents. After making his
public debut singing in church at the age of five, he taught himself
piano, organ, and saxophone before moving to Memphis to perform on the
city's club circuit in a series of short-lived groups like Sir Isaac and the Doo-Dads, the Teen Tones,
and Sir Calvin and His Swinging Cats. In 1962, he began his recording
career, cutting sides for a variety of local labels.
Two years later, Hayes began playing sax with the Mar-Keys, which resulted in the beginning of his long association with Stax Records. After playing on several sessions for Otis Redding, Hayes was tapped to play keyboards in the Stax house band, and eventually established a partnership with songwriter David Porter. Under the name the Soul Children, the Hayes-Porter duo composed some 200 songs, reeling off a string of hits for Stax luminaries like Sam & Dave (the brilliant "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby," "Soul Man," and "Hold on, I'm Comin'"), Carla Thomas ("B-A-B-Y"), and Johnnie Taylor ("I Got to Love Somebody's Baby," "I Had a Dream").
In 1967, Hayes issued his debut solo LP Presenting Isaac Hayes,
a loose, jazz-flavored effort recorded in the early-morning hours
following a raucous Stax party. With the release of 1969's landmark Hot Buttered Soul,
he made his commercial breakthrough; the record's adventuresome
structure (comprising four lengthy songs), ornate arrangements, and
sensual grooves -- combined with the imposing figure cut by his shaven
head, omnipresent sunglasses, and fondness for gold jewelry -- made Hayes one of the most distinctive figures in music.
In 1995, fully enshrined as one of the forefathers of hip-hop and newly converted to Scientology, Hayes emerged with two concurrent releases, the vocal Branded and instrumental Raw and Refined. Under the official name Nene Katey Ocansey I,
he also served as a member of the royal family of the African nation of
Ghana while continuing simultaneous careers as an actor, composer, and
humanitarian. In 1997, Hayes
provided the voice of what was slated to be a one-time character on the
animated series South Park -- Jerome "Chef" McElroy, the main
characters' favorite school cafeteria worker. Hayes
was an instant hit, and Chef became a regular character on the show,
lending advice and, oftentimes, breaking into songs that gently sent up Hayes' image as one of R&B's ultimate love men.
South Park made Hayes
more visible than ever and cemented his status as an icon with a whole
new generation. He contributed the infamous "Chocolate Salty Balls" to
the South Park tie-in album Chef Aid,
and naturally appeared in the film South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut.
(He left the show only after an episode made fun of Scientology.) In
2000, Hayes
revisited his biggest triumph of the past by appearing in the remake of
Shaft starring Samuel L. Jackson. The following year, he supported Alicia Keys as a musician and arranger on her acclaimed debut, Songs in A Minor. Although he recorded little during the 2000s, he appeared in many films, including 2004's Hustle and Flow. Hayes
was in ill health on August 10, 2008, when he collapsed at his home in
Memphis and was pronounced dead later that day of a stroke due to high
blood pressure.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/feb/20/i-didnt-give-a-damn-if-it-didnt-sell-how-isaac-hayes-helped-create-psychedelic-soul
Hayes may have enjoyed interpreting other writers' music, but the truth is that he was a songwriter to the core – a talented and influential one. As a writer, he helped shape the innovative soul sound coming out of Memphis in the early 1960s, and he was a driving force behind the evolution of disco and rap. He crafted perfect hit singles, but he also moved beyond pop, composing award-winning movie scores.
The now-iconic tune hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won both a Grammy and an Oscar, making Hayes the first African-American to win an Academy Award for music. And on top of all that, it's blisteringly cool.
In other words: We might listen to Hayes's songs performed by others, or we might listen to Hayes himself performing someone else's songs. But in either case, we're hearing a true musical legend at work.
Released in 1971, ‘Black Moses’ was Isaac Hayes’ fifth album to be released in a little over two years, and is arguably his crowning achievement.
November 14, 2018
The opener, ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’, released in early 1971 by Jackson 5, who took it No.2 in the charts, was issued as the lead single from Black Moses in May 1971, six months before the album came out. In its original form it runs for over five minutes, but the single was cut back to three and a half minutes, which took away some of its magic; nevertheless, it still made No.22 on the Hot 100. Backed by The Bar-Kays, Ike, who plays Hammond organ and vibes on the record, takes the song at a much slower pace than the Jacksons, and in so many ways this version sets the template for the record.
Black Moses, like most of the music on Hayes’ first three solo albums, is made up of cover versions, among them Side One, Track Two, the monumental rendition of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s ‘(They Long to Be) Close To You’. The song had been Carpenters’ first No.1 record a year or so before, and, in typical Ike fashion, he takes it and turns it on its head.
Opening with female backing singers (credited as “Hot”, “Buttered” and “Soul” on the sleeve), and it’s not until two minutes in that Hayes himself makes his triumphal vocal entry – it’s one of the moments on any of his recordings, right up there with the vocal on Hot Buttered Soul’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’. The strings, guitars and Ike’s piano are just sublime: the epitome of soul music. It’s also the first of the nine-minute epics on Black Moses (though it’s slightly disappointing that Ike didn’t take it out longer).
‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, written by Philadelphia International’s Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, along with Jerry Butler, is surprising, since it opens with deceptively upbeat backing vocals and Gary Jones’ bongos, yet they give way to an aching Hayes vocal that speaks to his hurt. Like so much of Black Moses (and much of Ike’s music in general), the song tells of loves lost and men cheated and beaten, which is something that made Hayes’ music reverberate with Southern black males population: this was a man who spoke directly to them.
'I didn't give a damn if it didn't sell': how Isaac Hayes helped create psychedelic soul
The singer’s Hot Buttered Soul, released in 1969 and soon to be
reissued, ripped apart the rules and inspired many new waves of music
Fifty years ago, psychedelia met soul. The genres’ first flirtation came courtesy of The Chambers Brothers, whose 1968 chart hit Time Has Come Today used a fuzz-toned guitar, ominous tick-tock effects and echoing reverb to create a portentous, 11-minute trip into the unknown. Sly and his Family Stone extended the link between the genres the next April with their 13-minute soul jam Sex Machine, but only Isaac Hayes had the vision and moxie to create the first album-length marriage of soul’s roots and psychedelia’s ambition.
When Hayes released Hot Buttered Soul in September of 1969, it ripped apart the rules for what kinds of music black artists could market. Comprised of just four sprawling tracks, the album liberated commercial black artists from the singles-driven mandate that had yoked them for so long. In the process, Hayes inspired a renaissance in black album-oriented releases from artists like Curtis Mayfield, George Clinton, Marvin Gaye, the Isley Brothers and more. Better, Hayes created a work seminal enough to be sampled by over 89 hip-hop stars decades down the line, including Tupac, Biggie Smalls and Wu-Tang Clan.
Now, a decade after Hayes’ death from a stroke at the age of 65, Hot
Buttered Soul is getting a fresh reissue via the historically minded
Craft Recordings. The new package, which arrives 23 February, will come
in sterling 180g vinyl form with remastered sound and handsome
packaging. Simultaneously, Craft will issue pristine versions of Hayes’
Theme from Shaft soundtrack, which made him one of the few black stars
of his day to win an Oscar, plus a remastered take on his double album
follow-up, Black Moses. That trio of re-releases follows a four CD set
of Hayes’ work which arrived last fall, tied to the 60th anniversary of
the label where he rose to prominence, Stax Records.
Hayes already held a vaunted place in music history well before he created his pivotal solo works. In the early 60s, he worked as a session piano player and staff producer at Stax, home to Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs, Sam and Dave and more. Besides playing on their records, Hayes, and his writing partner David Porter, penned such genre touchstones as Soul Man, When Something’s Wrong with My Baby, I Thank You, and Hold On, I’m Comin’, along with hits for Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, and others.
Fifty years ago this month, Stax issued Hayes’ first solo album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, a work which presaged the looseness and unconventionality of his more successful work, if hardly the focus or sweep. Hayes recorded the album at drunken sessions that paired his jazzy piano with Booker T’s rhythm section.
Unsurprisingly, the set of jams bombed. It did, however, feature a piano riff from Hayes in Precious, Precious, that sounds as if it could have inspired the classic one in Traffic’s Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. Hayes’ solo career might have suffered an early death right then had it not been for a roiling set of circumstances at Stax. In December of 1967, Redding, the label’s biggest star, died in a plane crash aged 26. Six months later, Stax lost its entire back catalogue after severing their distribution deal with Atlantic Records. To recover, label chief Al Bell instructed every artist on the imprint to record solo albums as soon as possible.
Hayes took that edict as a blank check. “I didn’t give a damn it if didn’t sell; I was going for the true, artistic side,” Hayes told Rob Bowman, author of Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records. “I had the opportunity to express myself, no holds barred. What I had to say there couldn’t be said in two minutes and 30 seconds.”
Instead, the songs on Hot Buttered included a near 19-minute take on Jimmy Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix, a 12-minute elaboration of the Bacharach-David hit Walk on By, and a 10-minute run at the album’s sole original piece, Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic. Hayes deconstructed his cover songs, using their melodies merely as suggestions to elongate and twist. Then, he shocked the tunes with the psychedelic guitar distortions of a then teenaged Michael Toles. Over these oceanic songs, Hayes treated his backup singers as either sirens or witnesses, luring and mirroring him in equal measure. He also employed plush orchestrations, in the process patenting a style that would become his signature – symphonic soul.
Hayes’ use of orchestrations, along with the repurposing of lounge-pop songs by Bacharach and Webb gave him a connection to the black bourgeoisie, while the fuzzy guitars of Toles (later sampled in Beyoncé’s 6 Inch) referenced acid-rock, and the slinky bass of James Alexander (borrowed by Biggie Smalls for his track Warning), fiddled with the undulations of funk. Hayes also presaged Barry White’s sex talk with long “rap” monologues that became another career motif. Together, the sound suggested the soulful/orchestral mystery later heard from 90s trip-hop artists like Portishead and Tricky. Hayes’ startling nexus resulted in a R&B album on Billboard that lingered on the chart for 69 weeks.
The resonance of Hot Buttered Soul inspired two sequel albums the next year: first, The Isaac Hayes Movement, which featured an 11-minute run at The Beatles’ Something, highlighted by a freaked-out fusion violin solo; second, … To Be Continued which offered a psychedelic soul rhythm guitar workout in The Look of Love. The next year, Hayes intensified his already voluminous output by issuing the two double albums which will soon be re-released – Shaft and Black Moses. Every wah-wah riff, booming bass line and slicing string arrangement in Shaft’s theme became conical, as did Hayes’ empathic vocal. Small wonder the album hit number one, while the theme made Hayes only the third black artist to that date to win an Oscar.
The sound Hayes started in 1969 directly influenced his black peers, inspiring such album-oriented classics as Curtis Mayfield’s Curtis, the self-titled debuts of both Parliament and Funkadelic, The Isley Brothers’ Get Into Something, Labelle’s Labelle and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On. By the mid-70s, Hayes’ psych-soul innovations sank into disco-era schmaltz. But, in 1995, he returned to his original template with two releases, Raw and Refined and Branded, the latter featuring a fresh take on Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic. Today, the essential sound Hayes pioneered isn’t only heard in endless samples. It recently received a brilliant new twist on Michael Kiwanuka’s No 1 album Love and Hate, which presented a whole new brand of symphonic psyche/soul. So, in answer to Shaft’s classic question “can you dig it?” – clearly yes, we can.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/10/AR2008081002549.html?noredirect=on
And when he cut the movie soundtrack for "Shaft," the Gordon Parks-directed movie that starred Richard Roundtree and garnered Hayes his Oscar, it seemed as if he had crashed through the strange and Byzantine gates of Hollywood and its racial history. It seemed as if John Shaft was Cagney and Bogart all rolled out from behind a sepia-tinged curtain. The soundtrack had such a propulsive and aggressive beat that it seemed like something ripped from both the urban and rural parts of the Earth -- domains that Isaac Hayes certainly came to know throughout his life.
Michael Toles, a guitarist and Memphis musician, first met Hayes in the 1960s and would later play concerts with him. He remembers the evolution of the chains. "The first few shows I did with him, he didn't wear the chains," Toles says.
Many of the musicians who knew Hayes were aware of how the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel in 1968 affected him. Toles goes on: "But then he started wearing them and I think it represented to him the coming freedom of the black man."
Manuel was aghast at the crowds that swooped around Hayes when he left the stage. "I remember we had been on the road and he came offstage and people were howling and grabbing for him. And one of the musicians said, 'Man, you are the black Moses. People will follow you anywhere.' It was really radical."
A whole generation came to know Hayes through his more recent role as the deep-voiced cartoon character on "South Park" and for his continued coast-to-coast live musical appearances. But to his musician friends in and around Tennessee, he remained the soulful cat from the 1960s who was always trying to help them get gigs and always looking forward to his next show.
Sometimes, Manuel says, he and Hayes would go fishing on the Mississippi. Matter of fact, they had a fishing outing scheduled for next week. "He used to hum all of his tunes first," Manuel says. "So everything you hear on his albums, he had hummed to himself first."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/isaac-hayes-seventies-soul-superstar-who-won-an-oscar-for-theme-from-shaft-891448.html
After years as a session player and songwriter at Stax Records, Hayes had broken through as a solo artist with the album Hot Buttered Soul the previous year. His extended, orchestrated versions of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Walk On By", delivered in his deep voice and relaxed style, had crossed over from the R&B to the pop charts and he repeated the trick in 1970 with covers of "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself", "Something" and "I Stand Accused" on The Isaac Hayes Movement and "The Look of Love" and "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" on To Be Continued. With both albums nestling in the US Top Ten, Hayes felt pretty confident.
A few weeks later, the studio called to say Richard Roundtree had been cast as the lead. Hayes had to be content with a cameo as a bartender, but the soundtrack he composed and recorded for the film became a signature sound of the Seventies. In particular, the "Theme from Shaft" – driven by Charles "Skip" Pitts' wah-wah guitar, with the lyrics "who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?" and "They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother. . . Shut your mouth!" – captured the mood of the movie's dark yet resilient character beautifully and topped the charts around the world in 1971. The following year, Hayes won two Grammys and the Academy Award for Best Song, the first black composer to receive an Oscar.
"I dedicated my Oscar to my grandmother," he said later. "This was the height of my career. I grew up poor in Memphis. My mother passed when I was a year and a half and my father split, so she [my grandmother] was like a mama to me. When I was young, I prayed to let her live long enough to see me do something big."
The self-styled "Black Moses" – the title Hayes gave to a 1972 concept album inspired by the break-up of his first marriage – became a Seventies soul superstar, driving a gold-plated cadillac provided by his record label. Even if it subsequently became the butt of a thousand jokes, the striking look – shaven head, sunglasses, gold chains, chain vest even – he sported on the cover of Hot Buttered Soul proved as iconic as his music was groundbreaking.
Hayes showed the album format was a viable medium for African-American musicians to explore and paved the way for ambitious releases by Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. He also greatly influenced Barry White who picked up the symphonic soul baton with aplomb. In 1991, the singers duetted on the 10-minute long "Dark and Lovely (You Over There)".
But Hayes's career took in lows as well as highs. Despite scoring a run of 10 consecutive albums on the R&B and pop charts in the US between 1969 and 1976, he had to file for bankruptcy after the collapse of the Stax label. He successfully moved into acting and remained a musical presence throughout the disco and rap eras he had inaugurated. Much in demand for voice-overs, he also presented radio shows in New York and Memphis.
A new generation of fans discovered Hayes when he lent his rich baritone voice to Chef, the school cook and ladies man in the cult animated series South Park. As Chef, Hayes scored an unlikely UK No 1 in December 1998 with the innuendo-laden novelty single "Chocolate Salty Balls" – a knowing reference to Chocolate Chip, his 1975 album.
However, he fell out with the South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker after they made fun of Scientology and he left the show in 2006, though that decision may have had just as much to do with Hayes having suffered a stroke earlier in the year. He signed to the revived Stax label and returned to performing but was a shadow of his former self when he appeared at Womad and other European festivals in 2007.
Hayes grew up in abject poverty in Covington, and then Memphis, Tennessee. He would sing gospel and doo-wop while picking cotton with his friends and in his mid-teens won a talent contest in Memphis. "I was a raggedy kid with holes in his shoes up on stage singing the Nat King Cole song 'Looking Back'," he recalled. "All of a sudden, I win this contest and I'm signing autographs and the pretty girls are noticing me."
Hayes taught himself to play the piano, organ and saxophone and was offered several music scholarships when he graduated from high school. Instead, he got a job slaughtering pigs and cows with a meat packing company in Memphis. In parallel, he played with various small bands, including the Teen Tones, Sir Calvin and his Swinging Cats, and also backed Jeb Stuart with the Doo-Dads.
In 1962, he cut his first single, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round" with the producer Chips Moman, who had a brief association with Stax Records. The Memphis label had turned Hayes down several times when he had auditioned with his groups but, when the keyboard player Booker T. Jones left to attend college in 1963, the label's president Jim Stewart recruited him as staff musician in his stead.
"My first session was an Otis Redding album," recalled Hayes. "I was scared to death." He muddled through and became an integral part of the Stax set-up, arranging classics like Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness". He also co-wrote singles for Floyd Newman and the Mad Lads. By 1965, he had formed a songwriting partnership with the insurance salesman turned lyricist David Porter. Hayes remembered: "He said: 'Let's be a team like Holland-Dozier-Holland [the Motown songwriters] or Bacharach-David'. The first thing we wrote was 'How Do You Quit Someone You Love' for Carla Thomas."
Then they began a fruitful association with Sam and Dave, who had been sent to record in Memphis by their bosses at Atlantic Records, Stax's distributors at the time. Their first Sam and Dave single was "I Take What I Want", followed by "You Don't Know Like I Know", "Hold On, I'm Comin'", "When Something's Wrong With My Baby" and "Soul Man". "We had no idea how good we were," said Hayes. "We were just doing something we felt, and the stuff was catching on."
Still, Hayes was itching to record something of his own, altough Stewart kept telling him his voice was "too pretty". Eventually, in January 1968, Hayes and Al Bell, the head of promotion, drank two bottles of champagne and wound up in the studio:
Al says: "Let's cut a record right now." So we get a few of the guys together – Al Jackson on drums, Booker T played a little organ, me on piano – and we do an album. Well, we do "Misty", "Stormy Monday Blues", "Goin' to Chicago", "Rock Me Baby". We finish it, play it back and we go our separate ways.
Three weeks later, the musician was amazed to find himself having his photo taken wearing a tuxedo and holding a top hat for the cover of Introducing Isaac Hayes, his début album. Having formed his own group, the Isaac Hayes Movement, he worked on Shaft, his first soundtrack assignment, while touring. The composer aimed to reflect "a lot of what happened in the Sixties, the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam issues and so forth. Society was more liberal and having more fun at that time." He'd only been given a 16mm copy of three scenes but once he locked the funky wah-wah groove he had been toying with for months over the opening credits everything fell into place.
Hayes' use of dynamics reflected the movie's shifting moods and was nothing short of breathtaking. "There was a lot of freedom," he said.
You were disciplined because you had to match a lot of dramatic cues on the film. But you had creative freedom to interpret how you felt that should be played against the scene. Since I did not have formal training, I was not restricted in what I could hear, what I could imagine. That's why the sound is so unique. Almost everything that followed for almost a decade had that same kind of sound like Shaft.
For a while, he seemed unstoppable. Black Moses followed the Shaft soundtrack up the charts and Hayes took part in the Wattstax music festival – the "Black Woodstock" – at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1972. Yet, he was now the only major selling artist on Stax and, in 1974, had to resort to suing the label to collect royalties. Within a couple of years, the whole Stax operation collapsed. Hayes lost millions of dollars in past and future publishing income, as well as his home, and had to declare bankruptcy.
He picked himself up and signed to ABC and then Polydor, and scored a Top 10 hit in the UK with "Disco Connection" in 1976. He also issued duets albums with both Dionne Warwick (A Man and a Woman, 1977) and Millie Jackson (Royal Rappin', 1979) but his recordings increasingly relied on a well-worn formula. He had already appeared in Three Tough Guys and Truck Turner in 1974, and recorded soundtrack albums for both films, and he combined acting with music-making for the rest of his life. He appeared in various episodes of television series including The Rockford Files, Starsky and Hutch, The A-Team and Miami Vice, as well as John Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981).
Hayes attempted several comebacks and cut a wonderful version of the Sting composition "Fragile" on Branded, one of two albums he released in 1995. Four years later, he launched the Isaac Hayes Foundation in order to assist literacy and health programmes in the United States and Ghana.
In 2002 Hayes was inducted into the Rock 'n 'Roll Hall of Fame. He was comfortable with his status as soul legend and elder statesman of black music and often stressed the part luck had played in his success. "The rappers have gone in and created a lot of hit music based upon my influence," he said. "And they'll tell you if you ask. I knew nothing about the business, or trends and things like that. I think it was a matter of timing. I didn't know what was unfolding." He recently finished filming Soul Men, loosely based on the story of Sam and Dave, and featuring Samuel L. Jackson – who played John Shaft in the 2000 film remake – and Bernie Mac, who died on Saturday.
Isaac Hayes, singer, songwriter, producer and instrumentalist: born Covington, Tennessee 20 August 1942; four times married (12 children); died Memphis, Tennessee 10 August 2008.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/isaac-hayes-stax-legacy-focus-of-spirit-of-memphis-box-set-112087/
Daniel Krep
Isaac Hayes in 1972.
Photograph:
Anthony Barboza/Getty Images
Anthony Barboza/Getty Images
Fifty years ago, psychedelia met soul. The genres’ first flirtation came courtesy of The Chambers Brothers, whose 1968 chart hit Time Has Come Today used a fuzz-toned guitar, ominous tick-tock effects and echoing reverb to create a portentous, 11-minute trip into the unknown. Sly and his Family Stone extended the link between the genres the next April with their 13-minute soul jam Sex Machine, but only Isaac Hayes had the vision and moxie to create the first album-length marriage of soul’s roots and psychedelia’s ambition.
When Hayes released Hot Buttered Soul in September of 1969, it ripped apart the rules for what kinds of music black artists could market. Comprised of just four sprawling tracks, the album liberated commercial black artists from the singles-driven mandate that had yoked them for so long. In the process, Hayes inspired a renaissance in black album-oriented releases from artists like Curtis Mayfield, George Clinton, Marvin Gaye, the Isley Brothers and more. Better, Hayes created a work seminal enough to be sampled by over 89 hip-hop stars decades down the line, including Tupac, Biggie Smalls and Wu-Tang Clan.
Hayes already held a vaunted place in music history well before he created his pivotal solo works. In the early 60s, he worked as a session piano player and staff producer at Stax, home to Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs, Sam and Dave and more. Besides playing on their records, Hayes, and his writing partner David Porter, penned such genre touchstones as Soul Man, When Something’s Wrong with My Baby, I Thank You, and Hold On, I’m Comin’, along with hits for Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, and others.
Fifty years ago this month, Stax issued Hayes’ first solo album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, a work which presaged the looseness and unconventionality of his more successful work, if hardly the focus or sweep. Hayes recorded the album at drunken sessions that paired his jazzy piano with Booker T’s rhythm section.
Unsurprisingly, the set of jams bombed. It did, however, feature a piano riff from Hayes in Precious, Precious, that sounds as if it could have inspired the classic one in Traffic’s Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. Hayes’ solo career might have suffered an early death right then had it not been for a roiling set of circumstances at Stax. In December of 1967, Redding, the label’s biggest star, died in a plane crash aged 26. Six months later, Stax lost its entire back catalogue after severing their distribution deal with Atlantic Records. To recover, label chief Al Bell instructed every artist on the imprint to record solo albums as soon as possible.
Hayes took that edict as a blank check. “I didn’t give a damn it if didn’t sell; I was going for the true, artistic side,” Hayes told Rob Bowman, author of Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records. “I had the opportunity to express myself, no holds barred. What I had to say there couldn’t be said in two minutes and 30 seconds.”
Instead, the songs on Hot Buttered included a near 19-minute take on Jimmy Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix, a 12-minute elaboration of the Bacharach-David hit Walk on By, and a 10-minute run at the album’s sole original piece, Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic. Hayes deconstructed his cover songs, using their melodies merely as suggestions to elongate and twist. Then, he shocked the tunes with the psychedelic guitar distortions of a then teenaged Michael Toles. Over these oceanic songs, Hayes treated his backup singers as either sirens or witnesses, luring and mirroring him in equal measure. He also employed plush orchestrations, in the process patenting a style that would become his signature – symphonic soul.
Hayes’ use of orchestrations, along with the repurposing of lounge-pop songs by Bacharach and Webb gave him a connection to the black bourgeoisie, while the fuzzy guitars of Toles (later sampled in Beyoncé’s 6 Inch) referenced acid-rock, and the slinky bass of James Alexander (borrowed by Biggie Smalls for his track Warning), fiddled with the undulations of funk. Hayes also presaged Barry White’s sex talk with long “rap” monologues that became another career motif. Together, the sound suggested the soulful/orchestral mystery later heard from 90s trip-hop artists like Portishead and Tricky. Hayes’ startling nexus resulted in a R&B album on Billboard that lingered on the chart for 69 weeks.
Isaac Hayes in 1970. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The resonance of Hot Buttered Soul inspired two sequel albums the next year: first, The Isaac Hayes Movement, which featured an 11-minute run at The Beatles’ Something, highlighted by a freaked-out fusion violin solo; second, … To Be Continued which offered a psychedelic soul rhythm guitar workout in The Look of Love. The next year, Hayes intensified his already voluminous output by issuing the two double albums which will soon be re-released – Shaft and Black Moses. Every wah-wah riff, booming bass line and slicing string arrangement in Shaft’s theme became conical, as did Hayes’ empathic vocal. Small wonder the album hit number one, while the theme made Hayes only the third black artist to that date to win an Oscar.
The sound Hayes started in 1969 directly influenced his black peers, inspiring such album-oriented classics as Curtis Mayfield’s Curtis, the self-titled debuts of both Parliament and Funkadelic, The Isley Brothers’ Get Into Something, Labelle’s Labelle and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On. By the mid-70s, Hayes’ psych-soul innovations sank into disco-era schmaltz. But, in 1995, he returned to his original template with two releases, Raw and Refined and Branded, the latter featuring a fresh take on Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic. Today, the essential sound Hayes pioneered isn’t only heard in endless samples. It recently received a brilliant new twist on Michael Kiwanuka’s No 1 album Love and Hate, which presented a whole new brand of symphonic psyche/soul. So, in answer to Shaft’s classic question “can you dig it?” – clearly yes, we can.
- Re-issues of Hot Buttered Soul, Black Moses and Shaft will be released on 23 February via Craft Recordings
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/10/AR2008081002549.html?noredirect=on
Isaac Hayes: Unshackled by History's Chains
by Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
August 11, 2008
Somehow, the little country boy grew up to rattle chains.
Isaac Hayes made music, of course, and plenty of it -- soulful and gritty ballads and that disco-heaving soundtrack "Shaft" -- but there was nothing like those chains. They adorned his chest onstage like thick jewels. He wouldn't run from history.
Hayes was a black man born in the South in 1942. And that, of course, is a birth and time period that gives a black man some extra challenges: He has to pick up things along the way; he has to look beyond the cotton fields and the Memphis docks and all the hauling of furniture that so many of his high school friends had to do.
Hayes, who died yesterday at 65, rolled himself out as a musical personification of black manhood. If the '60s shook the nation up -- musically and politically -- the '70s represented a deeper digging in. There were more black fashion models on Madison Avenue. There were more black actors on television. Black was beautiful and cool and defiant.
Music was everywhere and seemingly everything -- at least to the young minds trooping in and out of the record stores, watching "American Bandstand" and "Soul Train," listening to black radio and those convertible Mustangs.
If the north -- Detroit -- had Motown, the South -- Memphis -- had Stax Records, where a whole bevy of songwriters and artists, Otis Redding, David Porter, Isaac Hayes, were cats in the summer heat making their music. They'd write on sketch pads; they'd wolf down fried fish sandwiches between sessions; they'd roll over to the Lorraine Motel to see who was in town; they'd chat about women and love and heartache. And they'd watch that poor child, Isaac, now a man, hone his own image.
Elvis had white satin.
Isaac had those chains.
His "Black Moses" album, released in 1971, got alarming stares from plenty of folks -- especially whites -- but blacks considered it an instant revelation. It was, in one flourish, a kind of iconic art: a muscular black man in flowing robe. The religious merged with the political, all coming alive against a backdrop of thumping music. "People were probably saying to themselves, 'Here is Memphis, the buckle on the Bible Belt, and Isaac Hayes is coming out onstage dressed as black Moses,' " Jim Spake, a Memphis-based sax player who played with Hayes over the years, recalled yesterday. "If you notice, that album opened out [with flaps] kind of like a crucifix. That was seen as pretty heavy for those times. And that was the mystique about him, wearing those chains."
And when he cut the movie soundtrack for "Shaft," the Gordon Parks-directed movie that starred Richard Roundtree and garnered Hayes his Oscar, it seemed as if he had crashed through the strange and Byzantine gates of Hollywood and its racial history. It seemed as if John Shaft was Cagney and Bogart all rolled out from behind a sepia-tinged curtain. The soundtrack had such a propulsive and aggressive beat that it seemed like something ripped from both the urban and rural parts of the Earth -- domains that Isaac Hayes certainly came to know throughout his life.
Michael Toles, a guitarist and Memphis musician, first met Hayes in the 1960s and would later play concerts with him. He remembers the evolution of the chains. "The first few shows I did with him, he didn't wear the chains," Toles says.
Many of the musicians who knew Hayes were aware of how the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel in 1968 affected him. Toles goes on: "But then he started wearing them and I think it represented to him the coming freedom of the black man."
Hayes insisted on traveling with a large number of musicians. Bobby Manuel, also a guitarist, began traveling with Hayes in 1969. "His music represented an identity of what it meant to be black," he says. "It was exciting, in a kind of strength. Of course it all coincided with the civil rights movement. And for a musician, his was a different image, coming out there onstage with no shirt and those chains. Man, it was a whole other world."
Manuel was aghast at the crowds that swooped around Hayes when he left the stage. "I remember we had been on the road and he came offstage and people were howling and grabbing for him. And one of the musicians said, 'Man, you are the black Moses. People will follow you anywhere.' It was really radical."
A whole generation came to know Hayes through his more recent role as the deep-voiced cartoon character on "South Park" and for his continued coast-to-coast live musical appearances. But to his musician friends in and around Tennessee, he remained the soulful cat from the 1960s who was always trying to help them get gigs and always looking forward to his next show.
Sometimes, Manuel says, he and Hayes would go fishing on the Mississippi. Matter of fact, they had a fishing outing scheduled for next week. "He used to hum all of his tunes first," Manuel says. "So everything you hear on his albums, he had hummed to himself first."
And so, he was a musician who liked to fish, who wore chains, who was aware of the politics around him, and who also gave off a menacing image that those who knew him say was quite ironic. "He was such a sweet guy," says Manuel. "And I don't know if people quite realized what he really did."
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
Isaac Hayes: Seventies soul superstar who won an Oscar for 'Theme from Shaft'
by Pierre Perrone
Independent
12 August 2008
When the singer and musician Isaac Hayes met MGM executives in 1970, the conversation turned to the Ernest Tidyman novel Shaft, to which the studio had just acquired the film rights. Hayes thought he might be up for the lead role as the black private detective John Shaft, as the studio seemed keen to cash in on the emerging blaxploitation genre.After years as a session player and songwriter at Stax Records, Hayes had broken through as a solo artist with the album Hot Buttered Soul the previous year. His extended, orchestrated versions of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Walk On By", delivered in his deep voice and relaxed style, had crossed over from the R&B to the pop charts and he repeated the trick in 1970 with covers of "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself", "Something" and "I Stand Accused" on The Isaac Hayes Movement and "The Look of Love" and "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" on To Be Continued. With both albums nestling in the US Top Ten, Hayes felt pretty confident.
A few weeks later, the studio called to say Richard Roundtree had been cast as the lead. Hayes had to be content with a cameo as a bartender, but the soundtrack he composed and recorded for the film became a signature sound of the Seventies. In particular, the "Theme from Shaft" – driven by Charles "Skip" Pitts' wah-wah guitar, with the lyrics "who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?" and "They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother. . . Shut your mouth!" – captured the mood of the movie's dark yet resilient character beautifully and topped the charts around the world in 1971. The following year, Hayes won two Grammys and the Academy Award for Best Song, the first black composer to receive an Oscar.
"I dedicated my Oscar to my grandmother," he said later. "This was the height of my career. I grew up poor in Memphis. My mother passed when I was a year and a half and my father split, so she [my grandmother] was like a mama to me. When I was young, I prayed to let her live long enough to see me do something big."
The self-styled "Black Moses" – the title Hayes gave to a 1972 concept album inspired by the break-up of his first marriage – became a Seventies soul superstar, driving a gold-plated cadillac provided by his record label. Even if it subsequently became the butt of a thousand jokes, the striking look – shaven head, sunglasses, gold chains, chain vest even – he sported on the cover of Hot Buttered Soul proved as iconic as his music was groundbreaking.
Hayes showed the album format was a viable medium for African-American musicians to explore and paved the way for ambitious releases by Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. He also greatly influenced Barry White who picked up the symphonic soul baton with aplomb. In 1991, the singers duetted on the 10-minute long "Dark and Lovely (You Over There)".
But Hayes's career took in lows as well as highs. Despite scoring a run of 10 consecutive albums on the R&B and pop charts in the US between 1969 and 1976, he had to file for bankruptcy after the collapse of the Stax label. He successfully moved into acting and remained a musical presence throughout the disco and rap eras he had inaugurated. Much in demand for voice-overs, he also presented radio shows in New York and Memphis.
A new generation of fans discovered Hayes when he lent his rich baritone voice to Chef, the school cook and ladies man in the cult animated series South Park. As Chef, Hayes scored an unlikely UK No 1 in December 1998 with the innuendo-laden novelty single "Chocolate Salty Balls" – a knowing reference to Chocolate Chip, his 1975 album.
However, he fell out with the South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker after they made fun of Scientology and he left the show in 2006, though that decision may have had just as much to do with Hayes having suffered a stroke earlier in the year. He signed to the revived Stax label and returned to performing but was a shadow of his former self when he appeared at Womad and other European festivals in 2007.
Hayes grew up in abject poverty in Covington, and then Memphis, Tennessee. He would sing gospel and doo-wop while picking cotton with his friends and in his mid-teens won a talent contest in Memphis. "I was a raggedy kid with holes in his shoes up on stage singing the Nat King Cole song 'Looking Back'," he recalled. "All of a sudden, I win this contest and I'm signing autographs and the pretty girls are noticing me."
Hayes taught himself to play the piano, organ and saxophone and was offered several music scholarships when he graduated from high school. Instead, he got a job slaughtering pigs and cows with a meat packing company in Memphis. In parallel, he played with various small bands, including the Teen Tones, Sir Calvin and his Swinging Cats, and also backed Jeb Stuart with the Doo-Dads.
In 1962, he cut his first single, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round" with the producer Chips Moman, who had a brief association with Stax Records. The Memphis label had turned Hayes down several times when he had auditioned with his groups but, when the keyboard player Booker T. Jones left to attend college in 1963, the label's president Jim Stewart recruited him as staff musician in his stead.
"My first session was an Otis Redding album," recalled Hayes. "I was scared to death." He muddled through and became an integral part of the Stax set-up, arranging classics like Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness". He also co-wrote singles for Floyd Newman and the Mad Lads. By 1965, he had formed a songwriting partnership with the insurance salesman turned lyricist David Porter. Hayes remembered: "He said: 'Let's be a team like Holland-Dozier-Holland [the Motown songwriters] or Bacharach-David'. The first thing we wrote was 'How Do You Quit Someone You Love' for Carla Thomas."
Then they began a fruitful association with Sam and Dave, who had been sent to record in Memphis by their bosses at Atlantic Records, Stax's distributors at the time. Their first Sam and Dave single was "I Take What I Want", followed by "You Don't Know Like I Know", "Hold On, I'm Comin'", "When Something's Wrong With My Baby" and "Soul Man". "We had no idea how good we were," said Hayes. "We were just doing something we felt, and the stuff was catching on."
Still, Hayes was itching to record something of his own, altough Stewart kept telling him his voice was "too pretty". Eventually, in January 1968, Hayes and Al Bell, the head of promotion, drank two bottles of champagne and wound up in the studio:
Al says: "Let's cut a record right now." So we get a few of the guys together – Al Jackson on drums, Booker T played a little organ, me on piano – and we do an album. Well, we do "Misty", "Stormy Monday Blues", "Goin' to Chicago", "Rock Me Baby". We finish it, play it back and we go our separate ways.
Three weeks later, the musician was amazed to find himself having his photo taken wearing a tuxedo and holding a top hat for the cover of Introducing Isaac Hayes, his début album. Having formed his own group, the Isaac Hayes Movement, he worked on Shaft, his first soundtrack assignment, while touring. The composer aimed to reflect "a lot of what happened in the Sixties, the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam issues and so forth. Society was more liberal and having more fun at that time." He'd only been given a 16mm copy of three scenes but once he locked the funky wah-wah groove he had been toying with for months over the opening credits everything fell into place.
Hayes' use of dynamics reflected the movie's shifting moods and was nothing short of breathtaking. "There was a lot of freedom," he said.
You were disciplined because you had to match a lot of dramatic cues on the film. But you had creative freedom to interpret how you felt that should be played against the scene. Since I did not have formal training, I was not restricted in what I could hear, what I could imagine. That's why the sound is so unique. Almost everything that followed for almost a decade had that same kind of sound like Shaft.
For a while, he seemed unstoppable. Black Moses followed the Shaft soundtrack up the charts and Hayes took part in the Wattstax music festival – the "Black Woodstock" – at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1972. Yet, he was now the only major selling artist on Stax and, in 1974, had to resort to suing the label to collect royalties. Within a couple of years, the whole Stax operation collapsed. Hayes lost millions of dollars in past and future publishing income, as well as his home, and had to declare bankruptcy.
He picked himself up and signed to ABC and then Polydor, and scored a Top 10 hit in the UK with "Disco Connection" in 1976. He also issued duets albums with both Dionne Warwick (A Man and a Woman, 1977) and Millie Jackson (Royal Rappin', 1979) but his recordings increasingly relied on a well-worn formula. He had already appeared in Three Tough Guys and Truck Turner in 1974, and recorded soundtrack albums for both films, and he combined acting with music-making for the rest of his life. He appeared in various episodes of television series including The Rockford Files, Starsky and Hutch, The A-Team and Miami Vice, as well as John Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981).
Hayes attempted several comebacks and cut a wonderful version of the Sting composition "Fragile" on Branded, one of two albums he released in 1995. Four years later, he launched the Isaac Hayes Foundation in order to assist literacy and health programmes in the United States and Ghana.
In 2002 Hayes was inducted into the Rock 'n 'Roll Hall of Fame. He was comfortable with his status as soul legend and elder statesman of black music and often stressed the part luck had played in his success. "The rappers have gone in and created a lot of hit music based upon my influence," he said. "And they'll tell you if you ask. I knew nothing about the business, or trends and things like that. I think it was a matter of timing. I didn't know what was unfolding." He recently finished filming Soul Men, loosely based on the story of Sam and Dave, and featuring Samuel L. Jackson – who played John Shaft in the 2000 film remake – and Bernie Mac, who died on Saturday.
Isaac Hayes, singer, songwriter, producer and instrumentalist: born Covington, Tennessee 20 August 1942; four times married (12 children); died Memphis, Tennessee 10 August 2008.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/isaac-hayes-stax-legacy-focus-of-spirit-of-memphis-box-set-112087/
Isaac Hayes’ Stax Legacy Focus of ‘Spirit of Memphis’ Box Set
Four-disc collection features previously unreleased recordings like ‘Shaft’ outtake “Black Militant’s Place” and more
August 26, 2017
Rolling Stone
Soul legend Isaac Hayes‘ career on the Stax label, from a young songwriter to “Black Moses” and Shaft, will be the focus of a new box set that’s tied to the label’s 60th anniversary.
Dubbed The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976), the collection features four discs of music spanning Hayes’ legacy at Stax.
The first disc boasts 26 tracks Hayes penned or produced for other artists, including Sam & Dave’s “Hold On! I’m a Comin'” and “Soul Man” and Carla Thomas’ “B-A-B-Y.”
The second disc focuses on 20 of Hayes’ own recordings like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Theme From ‘Shaft’,” plus a pair of radio ads. The third disc, “Cover Man,” features Hayes’ renditions of songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David as well as previously unreleased material like the studio version of “Windows of the World” and a recording of Hayes’ 1972 Chicago concert.
Finally, the fourth disc, “Jam Master,” is packed with Hayes jamming out in the studio with the Bar-Kays, including a 33-minute version of “Do Your Thing.” This disc also includes unreleased, in-progress versions of “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and “Ain’t No Sunshine” and a never-before-heard Shaft outtake, “Black Militant’s Place.”
The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976), out September 22nd and available to preorder now, also comes with a 60-page hardcover retrospective, essays, interviews with artists like Sam & Dave’s Sam Moore and compilation producer Joe McEwen. The set also houses a replica 7″ of Hayes’ 1964 single “Laura, We’re On Our Last Go-Round” and “C.C. Rider.”
“The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976) is an attempt to frame a career that doesn’t always fit neatly together. This box set is a little idiosyncratic, like its subject and the desire is to tell a story, put together in chapters,” McEwen writes in his Producer’s Note, “hopefully to give context to a visionary talent who came of age in Memphis, Tennessee among a generational eruption of musicians that moved mountains…”
The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976)
Track List:
DISC ONE
Soul Songwriter, Soul Producer
1. Floyd Newman – Sassy
2. David Porter – Can’t See You When I Want To
3. Carla Thomas – How Do You Quit (Someone You Love)
4. Booker T and the MGs – Boot-leg
5. The Astors – Candy
6. Danny White – Can’t Do Nothing Without You
7. Johnnie Taylor – I Had A Dream
8. Sam & Dave – Hold On! I’m A Comin’
9. Ruby Johnson – I’ll Run Your Hurt Away
10. Carla Thomas – Let Me Be Good To You
11. Mable John – Your Good Thing (Is About To End)
12. Homer Banks – Fighting To Win
13. Carla Thomas – B-A-B-Y
14. William Bell – Never Like This Before
15. The Mad Lads – Patch My Heart
16. Johnnie Taylor – Little Bluebird
17. Charlie Rich – When Something Is Wrong With My Baby
18. Charlie Rich – Love Is After Me
19. Judy Clay – You Can’t Run Away From Your Heart
20. Sam & Dave – Soul Man
21. The Charmels – As Long As I’ve Got You
22. Sam & Dave – I Thank You
23. The Soul Children – The Sweeter He Is (Parts I & II)
24. Billy Eckstine – Stormy
25. David Porter – Can’t See You When I Want To
26. The Emotions – Show Me How
DISC TWO
Volt & Enterprise Singles
1. Sir Isaac and The Do-Dads – The Big Dipper
2. Sir Isaac and The Do-Dads – Blue Groove
3. Isaac Hayes – Precious, Precious
4. Isaac Hayes – By The Time I Get To Phoenix
5. Isaac Hayes – The Mistletoe & Me
6. Isaac Hayes – Winter Snow
7. Isaac Hayes – I Stand Accused
8. Isaac Hayes – The Look Of Love
9. Isaac Hayes – Never Can Say Goodbye
10. Isaac Hayes – Theme From “Shaft”
11. Isaac Hayes – Do Your Thing
12. Isaac Hayes – Let’s Stay Together
13. Isaac Hayes and David Porter – Ain’t That Loving You
(For More Reasons Than One)
14. Isaac Hayes and David Porter – Baby I’m-A Want You
15. Isaac Hayes – Theme From “The Men”
16. Isaac Hayes – Rolling Down A Mountainside
17. Isaac Hayes – Joy (Part 1)
18. Isaac Hayes – Wonderful
19. Isaac Hayes – Someone Made You For Me
20. Isaac Hayes – Title Theme (From “Three Tough Guys”)
21. Radio Spot – “You Gotta Have It To Really Be In”
22. Radio Spot – “The Rapper Is Back”
DISC THREE
Cover Man
1. Isaac Hayes – When I Fall In Love
2. Isaac Hayes – Walk On By
3. Isaac Hayes – I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself
4. Isaac Hayes – Man’s Temptation
5. Isaac Hayes – Never Gonna Give You Up
6. Isaac Hayes – Windows Of The World*
Recorded Live at Operation PUSH Black Expo, International Amphitheatre, Chicago, IL – October 1, 1972:
7. Isaac Hayes – The Ten Commandments of Love*
8. Isaac Hayes – Just Want To Make Love To You / Rock Me Baby*
9. Isaac Hayes – Stormy Monday*
10. Isaac Hayes – I Stand Accused*
11. Isaac Hayes – If Loving You Is Wrong
12. Isaac Hayes – His Eye Is On The Sparrow
DISC FOUR
Jam Master
1. Isaac Hayes – Ike’s Mood I
2. Isaac Hayes – You’ve Made Me So Very Happy*
3. Isaac Hayes – Black Militant’s Place*
4. Isaac Hayes – Ain’t No Sunshine*
5. Isaac Hayes – Hung Up On My Baby* (Extended Jam)
6. Isaac Hayes – Groove-A-Thon* (Extended Jam)
7. Isaac Hayes – Do Your Thing (Extended Jam)
* Previously unreleased
Soul legend Isaac Hayes' career on the Stax label, from a young
songwriter to "Black Moses" and 'Shaft,' will be the focus of a new box
set.
Dubbed The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976), the collection features four discs of music spanning Hayes’ legacy at Stax.
The first disc boasts 26 tracks Hayes penned or produced for other artists, including Sam & Dave’s “Hold On! I’m a Comin'” and “Soul Man” and Carla Thomas’ “B-A-B-Y.”
The second disc focuses on 20 of Hayes’ own recordings like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Theme From ‘Shaft’,” plus a pair of radio ads. The third disc, “Cover Man,” features Hayes’ renditions of songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David as well as previously unreleased material like the studio version of “Windows of the World” and a recording of Hayes’ 1972 Chicago concert.
Finally, the fourth disc, “Jam Master,” is packed with Hayes jamming out in the studio with the Bar-Kays, including a 33-minute version of “Do Your Thing.” This disc also includes unreleased, in-progress versions of “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and “Ain’t No Sunshine” and a never-before-heard Shaft outtake, “Black Militant’s Place.”
The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976), out September 22nd and available to preorder now, also comes with a 60-page hardcover retrospective, essays, interviews with artists like Sam & Dave’s Sam Moore and compilation producer Joe McEwen. The set also houses a replica 7″ of Hayes’ 1964 single “Laura, We’re On Our Last Go-Round” and “C.C. Rider.”
“The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976) is an attempt to frame a career that doesn’t always fit neatly together. This box set is a little idiosyncratic, like its subject and the desire is to tell a story, put together in chapters,” McEwen writes in his Producer’s Note, “hopefully to give context to a visionary talent who came of age in Memphis, Tennessee among a generational eruption of musicians that moved mountains…”
The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976)
Track List:
DISC ONE
Soul Songwriter, Soul Producer
1. Floyd Newman – Sassy
2. David Porter – Can’t See You When I Want To
3. Carla Thomas – How Do You Quit (Someone You Love)
4. Booker T and the MGs – Boot-leg
5. The Astors – Candy
6. Danny White – Can’t Do Nothing Without You
7. Johnnie Taylor – I Had A Dream
8. Sam & Dave – Hold On! I’m A Comin’
9. Ruby Johnson – I’ll Run Your Hurt Away
10. Carla Thomas – Let Me Be Good To You
11. Mable John – Your Good Thing (Is About To End)
12. Homer Banks – Fighting To Win
13. Carla Thomas – B-A-B-Y
14. William Bell – Never Like This Before
15. The Mad Lads – Patch My Heart
16. Johnnie Taylor – Little Bluebird
17. Charlie Rich – When Something Is Wrong With My Baby
18. Charlie Rich – Love Is After Me
19. Judy Clay – You Can’t Run Away From Your Heart
20. Sam & Dave – Soul Man
21. The Charmels – As Long As I’ve Got You
22. Sam & Dave – I Thank You
23. The Soul Children – The Sweeter He Is (Parts I & II)
24. Billy Eckstine – Stormy
25. David Porter – Can’t See You When I Want To
26. The Emotions – Show Me How
DISC TWO
Volt & Enterprise Singles
1. Sir Isaac and The Do-Dads – The Big Dipper
2. Sir Isaac and The Do-Dads – Blue Groove
3. Isaac Hayes – Precious, Precious
4. Isaac Hayes – By The Time I Get To Phoenix
5. Isaac Hayes – The Mistletoe & Me
6. Isaac Hayes – Winter Snow
7. Isaac Hayes – I Stand Accused
8. Isaac Hayes – The Look Of Love
9. Isaac Hayes – Never Can Say Goodbye
10. Isaac Hayes – Theme From “Shaft”
11. Isaac Hayes – Do Your Thing
12. Isaac Hayes – Let’s Stay Together
13. Isaac Hayes and David Porter – Ain’t That Loving You
(For More Reasons Than One)
14. Isaac Hayes and David Porter – Baby I’m-A Want You
15. Isaac Hayes – Theme From “The Men”
16. Isaac Hayes – Rolling Down A Mountainside
17. Isaac Hayes – Joy (Part 1)
18. Isaac Hayes – Wonderful
19. Isaac Hayes – Someone Made You For Me
20. Isaac Hayes – Title Theme (From “Three Tough Guys”)
21. Radio Spot – “You Gotta Have It To Really Be In”
22. Radio Spot – “The Rapper Is Back”
DISC THREE
Cover Man
1. Isaac Hayes – When I Fall In Love
2. Isaac Hayes – Walk On By
3. Isaac Hayes – I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself
4. Isaac Hayes – Man’s Temptation
5. Isaac Hayes – Never Gonna Give You Up
6. Isaac Hayes – Windows Of The World*
Recorded Live at Operation PUSH Black Expo, International Amphitheatre, Chicago, IL – October 1, 1972:
7. Isaac Hayes – The Ten Commandments of Love*
8. Isaac Hayes – Just Want To Make Love To You / Rock Me Baby*
9. Isaac Hayes – Stormy Monday*
10. Isaac Hayes – I Stand Accused*
11. Isaac Hayes – If Loving You Is Wrong
12. Isaac Hayes – His Eye Is On The Sparrow
DISC FOUR
Jam Master
1. Isaac Hayes – Ike’s Mood I
2. Isaac Hayes – You’ve Made Me So Very Happy*
3. Isaac Hayes – Black Militant’s Place*
4. Isaac Hayes – Ain’t No Sunshine*
5. Isaac Hayes – Hung Up On My Baby* (Extended Jam)
6. Isaac Hayes – Groove-A-Thon* (Extended Jam)
7. Isaac Hayes – Do Your Thing (Extended Jam)
* Previously unreleased
The Songs of Isaac Hayes
Whether singing or writing, he was a musical legend
by Linnea Crowther
Article from 2013
Legacy
As a singer, Isaac Hayes
– who died Aug. 10, 2008 – achieved many of his greatest hits by
interpreting songs other people had written. "Walk on By" and "The Look
of Love," along with many other songs Hayes recorded, were written by
Burt Bacharach and Hal David.
"Let's Stay Together" was first made famous by its songwriter, Al
Green. Clifton Davis's "Never Can Say Goodbye" was recorded by The Jackson 5 before Isaac Hayes took it on.
Hayes
always put his mark on these songs, making them something very
different from the original recordings – but anyone who didn't know
better might form the mistaken idea that the singer wasn't also a
songwriter himself.
Hayes may have enjoyed interpreting other writers' music, but the truth is that he was a songwriter to the core – a talented and influential one. As a writer, he helped shape the innovative soul sound coming out of Memphis in the early 1960s, and he was a driving force behind the evolution of disco and rap. He crafted perfect hit singles, but he also moved beyond pop, composing award-winning movie scores.
Hayes's most frequent songwriting customers were Stax Records stars Sam & Dave.
Early in Hayes's career, he became a session musician for Stax, a gig
that evolved into an influential role writing songs for a variety of the
label's artists. With his compositions for Sam & Dave, he defined
the duo's hit-making career. Their hottest singles were almost
exclusively the creations of Hayes and his songwriting partner, David
Porter:
Soul Man
When Something Is Wrong With My Baby
Hold On, I'm Comin
Hayes wrote hits for others as well, like Stax recording artist Carla Thomas, the "Queen of Memphis Soul"…
And Lou Rawls, who had a hit with "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)", originally performed by Mabel John…
Not to mention Dionne Warwick, who won a Grammy for her performance of "Déjà Vu."
Hayes
may have given some of his greatest compositions to other artists, and
maybe he often preferred to take on other songwriters' material when he
sang himself. But there were times when his two talents came together –
and when they did, the result was something very special. The proof is
in his score for the movie Shaft. Its theme song, written and performed by Hayes, is one of the most enduring funk songs of the 1970s.
The now-iconic tune hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won both a Grammy and an Oscar, making Hayes the first African-American to win an Academy Award for music. And on top of all that, it's blisteringly cool.
In other words: We might listen to Hayes's songs performed by others, or we might listen to Hayes himself performing someone else's songs. But in either case, we're hearing a true musical legend at work.
‘Black Moses’: Why You Should Devote Yourself To Isaac Hayes’ Classic Album
Released in 1971, ‘Black Moses’ was Isaac Hayes’ fifth album to be released in a little over two years, and is arguably his crowning achievement.
November 14, 2018
In the space of just 28 months, between early summer 1969 and November 1971, Isaac Hayes released five albums, of which two were double-LPs. All five records were huge hits that topped the US R&B charts, with one, Shaft, making No.1 on the US album charts. Three others entered the main Top 10, while the lowest placed ranked just outside, at No.11; four of them even topped the US Jazz chart, while the last released, Black Moses, made it to No.2. This was success on a grand scale.
Black Moses was released as a double-album in late November 1971, and by early December it was climbing the Billboard chart to its No.10 peak. And yet it remains somewhat overlooked today, perhaps suffering for following his brilliant first three solo albums for Stax Records, Hot Buttered Soul, The Isaac Hayes Movement and … To Be Continued – and not forgetting his groundbreaking Blaxploitation soundtrack for Shaft.
Black Moses was recorded between March and October 1971, in the middle of the period when Hayes recorded the Shaft soundtrack. But who came up with the idea of naming the album? According to Isaac Hayes it was Dino Woodard, one of his inner circle: “Dino said, ‘Man, look at these people out there. Do you know what you’re bringing into their lives? Look at these guys from Vietnam, man. How they’re crying when they see you, how you helped them through when they was out there in the jungle and they stuck to your music. You like a Moses, man. You just like Black Moses, you the modern-day Moses!’” Woodard, a former boxer and sparing partner of Sugar Ray Robinson, later became a Baptist minister; he passed away in 2014.
At a gig at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, Hayes was even introduced to the audience as “Black Moses”, and while he found the term somewhat sacrilegious to begin with, he eventually came to embrace it following its use in an article in Jet magazine; Stax executive Larry Shaw had the savvy to capitalise on it and call the double album, Black Moses.
Going this route – saying, in effect, that he was the most important black artist in America – became something of a burden for Hayes. It’s worth remembering that, six months before he released Black Moses, Marvin Gaye put out the game-changing What’s Going On – this really was a time of intense creativity for soul music. Add to this the fact that Black Moses was released just a week or so after Shaft had topped the album charts… Hayes was in danger of overload.
Shaw, who was in charge of Stax’s art department, had made great strides in improving the label’s album cover art, but nothing he did before – or after – can compare with the artwork for Black Moses. It has been cited as one of the greatest album covers ever, including by us here at uDiscover Music. Shaw dressed Hayes in robes and went for Moses-lookalike overkill when the photograph was shot. But what makes this cover so amazing is not simply the image, it is the fact that the two records were encased in a sleeve that folded out into the shape of a four-foot-high, three-foot-wide cross. For some, Hayes really was Moses!
All this is all well and good, but what about the music? The album’s 14 tracks were spread over all four sides of the two LPs, with every track running way longer than an average for the time – the shortest was a few seconds under five minutes, and four songs were over nine minutes in length.
The opener, ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’, released in early 1971 by Jackson 5, who took it No.2 in the charts, was issued as the lead single from Black Moses in May 1971, six months before the album came out. In its original form it runs for over five minutes, but the single was cut back to three and a half minutes, which took away some of its magic; nevertheless, it still made No.22 on the Hot 100. Backed by The Bar-Kays, Ike, who plays Hammond organ and vibes on the record, takes the song at a much slower pace than the Jacksons, and in so many ways this version sets the template for the record.
Black Moses, like most of the music on Hayes’ first three solo albums, is made up of cover versions, among them Side One, Track Two, the monumental rendition of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s ‘(They Long to Be) Close To You’. The song had been Carpenters’ first No.1 record a year or so before, and, in typical Ike fashion, he takes it and turns it on its head.
Opening with female backing singers (credited as “Hot”, “Buttered” and “Soul” on the sleeve), and it’s not until two minutes in that Hayes himself makes his triumphal vocal entry – it’s one of the moments on any of his recordings, right up there with the vocal on Hot Buttered Soul’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’. The strings, guitars and Ike’s piano are just sublime: the epitome of soul music. It’s also the first of the nine-minute epics on Black Moses (though it’s slightly disappointing that Ike didn’t take it out longer).
It’s a tough song to follow, but is certainly given a run by a version of Toussaint McColl and Alan Robison’s ‘Nothing Takes The Place Of You’, for which Hayes delivers one of his finest ever vocal performances, backed by his own Hammond organ that greatly adds to the mood. Side One finishes with ‘Man’s Temptation’, a superb Curtis Mayfield song that Gene Chandler had a minor hit with in 1963. On any other album this would be a standout song; here it is less prominent, but no less excellent.
‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, written by Philadelphia International’s Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, along with Jerry Butler, is surprising, since it opens with deceptively upbeat backing vocals and Gary Jones’ bongos, yet they give way to an aching Hayes vocal that speaks to his hurt. Like so much of Black Moses (and much of Ike’s music in general), the song tells of loves lost and men cheated and beaten, which is something that made Hayes’ music reverberate with Southern black males population: this was a man who spoke directly to them.
The first of Ike’s ‘Raps’ (confusingly titled ‘Ike’s Rap II’, though there is no ‘Ike’s Rap I’) preceeds ‘Help Me Love’ – on which Sidney Kirk’s piano playing is just wonderful – while the song itself is “on message” with the rest of the album, as well as being beautifully arranged. In 1995, British trip-hop pioneers Portishead sampled ‘Ike’s Rap II’ in their song ‘Glory Box’, while fellow Bristolian artist Tricky used the same sample for his song ‘Hell Is Round The Corner’. More recently, ‘Ike’s Rap II’ was been sampled for Alessia Cara’s breakout single ‘Here’, which reached No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2015.
The second Curtis Mayfield song on Black Moses is ‘Need To Belong To Someone’, and was also a hit in 1963, when sung by Jerry Butler. As ever, Hayes takes it into uncharted territory with a stunning orchestral arrangement, coupled with a longing vocal delivery that should make a believer out of everyone. By way of juxtaposition the Hayes co-write ‘Good Love’ is funky, upbeat and full of great vibes.
‘Ike’s Rap III’ prefaces ‘Your Love Is So Doggone Good’, another album-defining track – smouldering and sexy in the extreme. It’s a great riff that has layer after layer, producing a spine-tingling effect. This is Isaac Hayes at his very best, and the song gives way to a surprising outro that is surprising cries out to be sampled.
The sequencing on Black Moses is part of what makes it work so well, as you will hear when Kris Kristofferson’s ‘For The Good Times’ follows, as the second track Side Three. Understated, beautiful, sad and emotional, Hayes’ version takes a song that topped the Country charts and turns it into a soul classic. Never doubt that the two are kissin’ cousins – just listen to that horn section!
Side Three closes with ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’, another Bacharach and David song that’s almost an answer song to ‘For The Good Times’. Originally a hit for Bobbie Gentry, having been debuted in the musical Promises, Promises, it is beautifully delivered, with Hayes accentuating the superb Bacharach melody in all the right places. It also highlights what a really good singer Hayes could be: he embraces the lyrics and makes you believe that he had lived every syllable.
‘Part-Time Love’ opens the fourth and final side with its orchestra-punctuated wah-wah guitar. Written by Clay Hammond, this was yet another hit from 1963, and an R&B No.1 for Little Johnny Taylor. Isaac Hayes was would have turned 21 in 1963, and the amount of Black Moses songs taken from that year show how important it was to the man from Tennessee, who, in ’63, was working in a Memphis meat-packing factory by day and playing jook joints by night.
Ike’s third and final ‘Rap’ (‘Ike’s Rap III’) gets us in the mood for the Gamble, Huff and Butler’s ‘A Brand New Me’, a song that Jerry Butler had a minor hit with in 1969, and which both Dusty Springfield and Aretha Franklin covered. If we’re sounding like a broken record, we’re sorry, but yet again Isaac Hayes takes this song to places that no one had hitherto dreamed it could go. It builds and builds and leaves the listener in a crumpled heap as it climaxes. Say it loud – he’s Black Moses and proud. It’s an awesome track.
But how to close the album? Any normal person would have thought ‘A Brand New Me’ was impossible to follow, but not Hayes. He saved the best for last. ‘Going In Circles’, written by Jerry Peters and Anita Poree, and a No.15 hit for The Friends Of Distinction in 1969, is simply breathtaking. Skip Pitts’s guitar, the orchestra, along with Hot, Buttered and Soul, drive this opus to giddy heights of decadent lust, allowing Isaac to deliver his greatest ever vocal performance. As he sings “Strung out over you” and the girls answer with “Going in Circles”, and the French horns of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra provide a cushion of sound, it is impossible not to be deeply affected.
And then it’s over.
Isaac Hayes’s finest album…? Probably. Black Moses is full on: magnificently conceived, over the top, beautifully arranged, played and sung. This is lush, deep soul music, and a love album for men, every bit as it is for women. One that men can relate to, without feeling soft and sappy.
Isaac Hayes… genius.
https://www.factmag.com/2012/05/20/interview-isaac-hayes/
Isaac Hayes: “I did real good.”
by FACT,
May 20, 2012
This article was originally published in 2007. Hayes died in 2008.
Where do you start with a man like Isaac Hayes?
In his 65 years on the planet, the Memphis-born legend has covered (almost) every conceivable base. He’s owned a solid cold Cadillac, won multiple Grammy’s, produced 12 kids, been crowned a king (that’s right, a KING), authored a best-selling cookery book, written multi-million selling albums, sold-out worldwide tours, played cameos in feature films and guest starred in Miami Vice and The A-Team. But despite all this, there are many that will know Isaac Hayes for one small request: asking us to suck on his chocolate salty balls. That’s right, put ‘em in your mouth and, um, suck ‘em. Well, well, well, there’s a lot more Mr Hayes than satirical Christmas songs…..
Hayes will be remembered (by the non-South Park fanatics) as the man behind one of the greatest soundtracks ever recorded. Richard Roundtree’s portrayal of a black detective in 1971’s Shaft was accompanied by Hayes’ score, winning a Grammy, Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe. Two years before sweeping the board with Shaftas, his pinnacle LP, Hot Buttered Soul was released to mainstream success. The LP saw Hayes break from the usual trend; just four tracks long, the songs ran in at 8, 10 and 12 minutes long. Lynard Skynard eat your heart out. The tongue twisting album track
‘Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquidalimystic’ was later sampled by Public Enemy in ‘Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos’.
The sampling of Hayes’ tracks has become a regular occurrence, evidence of the respect Hayes has earned amongst the hip-hop crowd. Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Notorius BIG and many, many more, have all used his material to enhance their own work, proof that his music is just as relevant today as it was in the early-‘70s. Making him even hipper, Quentin Tarantino used Hayes tracks on both Kill Bill volumes.
But, despite his catalogue of achievements in music, it would be his career on the small screen that would reignite his career. In 1997, South Park writers Trey Park and Matt Stone made the ingenious decision to use Hayes as the voice for the school chef. His culinary delights were often sidelined for his antidotes on life and love; Chef became the kids of South Park’s unofficial sex education teacher, performed brilliantly by Hayes’ deep soothing delivery. The character was a success and in 1999, ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ hit number one in the UK. The South Park/Hayes relationship came to a sticky end in 2006 when South Park, being South Park, decided to rip into the celebrity cult of Scientology. Hayes, a fully fledge member of the cult, handed in his notice.
Now, with commitments to television behind him, Hayes is back in the UK, performing and writing new music. The last time Hayes graced a UK stage was four years ago, so be sure to catch him when he tours in August, kicking off at Sheperds Bush Empire and concluding at the Big Chill Festival on August 5. FACT caught up with the multi-talented chef-come-actor-come-multi-million musician to track the progress of his new LP and find out what’s so special about ‘banana and syrup dessert’, Hayes-style…
“I’m an old-school guy.”
What have you been up to of late?
“We’ve been doing dates, and lots of ‘em. I’m excited about our upcoming Hollywood Bowl gig…”
What’s an average day like for Mr Hayes?
“I live in Memphis…I get up …I got a studio at home, I got a wife…and a 14-month-old son. He’s called Kojo, which means ‘Monday born’…he’s my 12th child…I got grandkids…Heather, my daughter, sings, used to sing with James Brown. My son Icke had a record out first part of the year, my other son is writing songs…Lily my youngest daughter gonna turn out good.”
You’ve been sampled numerous times, by artists like Dre, Snoop, Notorious B.I.G. – do you like any of them?
“Some of them, some I don’t like…but hip-hop is hip-hop. I’m an old-school guy, but it’s kind of coming around. Soul music is coming around again, I think it is.”
Do you have a favourite Isaac Hayes record?
“’Walk on By’, ‘I Stand Accused’ and ‘Shaft’.”
“At this time of my life I like cooking. I’ve done it all, now I like to cook.”
Are you working on any new music?
“Yeah, I can’t tell you what it is, but it will be out in 2008. With a new record company…it’ll be some good stuff. Angie Stone is on it. It’s gonna be good.”
What contemporary bands do you like?
“Anthony Hamilton, he’s very soulful. I listen to Alicia Keys too, and Mary J Blige.”
Do you get bored of one thing easily?
“Yeah, I do quite a few things…if I didn’t do so many I would be bored.”
You’re a singer, radio DJ, king, actor and chef…what do you most enjoy doing?
“At this time of my life I like cooking. I’ve done it all, now I like to cook.”
I’ve got to cook my girlfriend a romantic dish for her birthday but am useless in the kitchen…what do you recommend?
“Let me see…make some barbeque. For desert, take a banana , put some syrup on it – no chocolate – and heat it up good.”
What’s your favourite meal?
“Turkey meatloaf.”
“I thought it was a joke to be honest…then they gave me an island.”
What does it feel like to be a king? Do you have a royal palace?
“No…I built a school over there. When they first asked me, I was surprised, I thought it was a joke to be honest. Then they gave me an island…there’s a lot of islands in that area, I picked mine out. There’s no royal palace though.”
Do still drive your solid gold Cadillac?
“No. It’s at the Stax museum.”
Do you miss it?
“No, those are bygone days…was it easy to drive? Hell, yeah.”
How would you like to be remembered?.
“I did the best I could do. I think I did good, I think I did real good.”
Robin Lomax & Sean Bidder
Meet the Musicians Who Gave Isaac Hayes His Groove
by Sean Howe
You might recognize the guitar riff that provides the chorus melody for Beyoncé’s “6 Inch.” Or perhaps you’re familiar with the creeping bass line that drives the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Warning” — it rolls out of speakers like a storm cloud, maybe, or a tank. If not, you’ve surely heard one of the other 89 songs that sample Isaac Hayes’s 12-minute version of Burt Bacharach’s “Walk on By.”
The
music that Hayes recorded from 1969 through 1971 has since supplied the
hooks, beats and textures for more than 500 songs by other artists.
When Hayes died in 2008, however, the proto-disco “Theme From ‘Shaft’”
and his voice performance as the character of Chef on “South Park”
crowded his extraordinary legacy out of obituary headlines. A recent
boxed set, “The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976),”
not only gives an overview of the most fertile years of Hayes’s career,
but also shines a light on the versatile musicians who consistently
backed him: One of the four discs is entirely dedicated to spotlighting
the band’s interplay.
“We
were the tightest band you’d ever find,” said the keyboardist Lester
Snell, who joined Hayes shortly before the recording of the “Shaft”
soundtrack, which won two Grammys and an Academy Award. “It could be
straight-out jazz or Jimi Hendrix, but no matter what was going on, you
never lost the groove.”
Like many studio musicians, Mr. Snell and his peers, who spoke of their work in telephone interviews, were often not listed in album credits. With no documentary film to attest to their contributions, they haven’t yet enjoyed the kind of history-correcting rediscovery afforded James Brown’s bands, or Motown’s Funk Brothers, or the Los Angeles-based session players known as the Wrecking Crew.
In
early 1969, after Stax lost its back catalog when Warner Bros. bought
its distributor, Atlantic Records, Stax’s president ordered the rush
production of 28 new albums. In this frenzy, Hayes, a staff writer and
producer — who, along with his songwriting partner David Porter had
generated hit records for Sam & Dave (“Soul Man”) and Carla Thomas
(“B-A-B-Y”) — was given a green light to record a solo album with
complete creative control. Hayes chose the rhythm section of the
Bar-Kays for accompaniment.
The young
Bar-Kays had already been through plenty. Stax had hoped to groom them
as the next Booker T. and the MG’s, the house band that had broken out
as a headliner in its own right. But only months after their song “Soul Finger”
became a hit, four of the Bar-Kays perished in the same 1967 plane
crash that killed Otis Redding. The group’s 20-year-old trumpeter, Ben Cauley, was the sole surviving passenger; the bassist James Alexander, 19, had not been on the flight.
With their manager, they began rebuilding. The drummer Willie Hall, who was 17 at the time, and the guitarist Michael Toles, who was only 15, joined, and they rushed to release an album under the group name. Mr. Hall said the band was as green as goose droppings, though he used more colorful language. “We didn’t know anything,” he said, “but the company needed something out there before the sympathy died.”
From left: Ben Cauley, Michael Toles and Larry Dodson of the Bar-Kays, around 1970.CreditBob Smith, via Concord Music Group
It wasn’t long afterward that Hayes began sitting in with the group at Memphis club gigs, and leading the musicians through chord changes while he rhapsodized at length. By the time they were backing him in the studio, a musical intuition had formed. Mr. Alexander’s relentlessly agile bass lines bandied with Mr. Hall’s stop-time rhythms; Mr. Toles’s finger-stretching guitar figures cut through Hayes’s thick organ.
We recorded ‘Hot Buttered Soul’ in two days,” Mr. Alexander said. “He
gave you a creative direction, maybe a line to play, and we kept going.”
A flier included in the liner notes for “The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976).”
When the guitarist Harold Beane stopped by the studio for a mixing session, Hayes asked him to improvise freely.
“He
told me, ‘I want to take it out of the box,’ so I turned on the fuzz
tone and turned up the tremolo,” said Mr. Beane, whose lengthy “Walk on
By” solo evokes both buzz saws and Morse code. “Then I took my guitar,
and I slid it up and down the microphone stand. The arranger in Detroit
heard that, and he matched that sound with strings.” Mr. Beane then
began playing in Hayes’s touring band, before joining Funkadelic.
Harold Beane, who played the guitar solo on Hayes’s cover of “Walk on By,” at his home in Memphis.CreditHouston Cofield for The New York Times
“Hot Buttered Soul” became a sensation, and, thanks to the stubbornly long running times of its four songs, carved out a place for album-oriented black radio. Mr. Toles and Mr. Hall left the Bar-Kays band (which had hired a lead singer and begun moving toward more dance-oriented funk on its own very popular albums). Adding a second guitarist, Charles Pitts, known as Skip; the keyboardists Mr. Snell and Sidney Kirk; and horn players, including the trumpeter Mickey Gregory, the group was rechristened the Isaac Hayes Movement.
The
band members worked hard for their $75-a-week salaries, and Hayes kept
the players on their toes. The first time Mr. Snell played with Hayes
was in front of 70,000 people, he recalled, with no set list or
rehearsal. Hayes opened with a song Mr. Snell had never heard before.
“It
was fast,” Mr. Snell recalled. “Chords coming, and here comes the
breaks, and it’s got all kinds of stops. And then right in the middle of
that, the tune breaks down into ‘Oh mama let me light your fire. …’ I’m
like, what? Then it comes back to going fast again, then into triplets,
now totally ripping. That’s the first tune. The rest, I knew.”
The keyboardist Sidney Kirk, who joined the band that backed Mr. Hayes, which was renamed the Isaac Hayes Movement.CreditHouston Cofield for The New York Times
Recording could be similarly unpredictable. “He was a night owl,” Mr. Hall said of Hayes. “He’d say, ‘Hey, man — session tomorrow night at 7.’ But then he may not show up until 11, depending on which chick had just flown into town.” If the musicians started to get sleepy rehearsing ballads in the wee hours, Hayes would dispatch his assistants to take attractive women to the studio.
“At that point, all the crooked backs
straightened up, everybody’s got their hips shaking, and grinning, and
boy, now you got something going on,” Mr. Hall said.
By
whatever means, Hayes was able to coax out sounds that could shift from
slippery syncopation to dizzying, psychedelic crescendos. “The Spirit
of Memphis” includes a cover of Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine” that
begins with a musical quotation from Jimi Hendrix’s “If 6 Was 9” before
evoking the sounds of both the Meters and Wes Montgomery. Even as Hayes
was studying the orchestrations of the Carpenters, Mr. Hall said, “we
were leaning toward rock. Blood, Sweat and Tears, Cream — just drop a
tab of acid, and go crazy.”
The Bar-Kays’ single “Son of Shaft.”
The Bar-Kays’ single “Son of Shaft.”
The
jaw-dropper on the boxed set is the recently unearthed 33-minute
version of “Do Your Thing,” from 1971. With its swirling organ, boogaloo
fugues and aggressively atonal guitar bursts, this extended
improvisation suggests a musical showdown between the jazz guitarist
Sonny Sharrock and the avant-garde German group Can.
That spirit of discovery couldn’t last forever. After “Shaft,”
Hayes began a drift toward acting, bankruptcy and rote disco. Mr.
Alexander dedicated himself fully to the Bar-Kays, who would amass their
own series of Top 10 R&B singles. By the end of the 1970s, the
members of the Isaac Hayes Movement had found other work.
“We
didn’t have any kind of uniformity other than following our leader,”
Mr. Hall said. “What you hear on those recordings is a reflection of the
energy between all of us. We loved each other.”
The
former members of the Movement continue their contributions to the
Memphis music scene today. Mr. Beane, Mr. Toles and Mr. Gregory have all
played with Elmo and the Shades; Mr. Hall joined the Bo-Keys, along
with Mr. Pitts, who died in 2011.
Mr. Alexander is shepherding the Bar-Kays into their sixth decade. They’re holding auditions for a singer.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Moving a Backup Band Closer to the Front. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
Related Coverage:
Isaac Hayes, 65, a Creator of ’70s Soul Style, Dies
Hollywood Joins Memphis for a Farewell to Isaac Hayes
Tributes to Motown and Southern Soul
