I hope the death of Isaac Hayes will inspire those who know him only for his “Theme from Shaft,” amazing though it is, or his role as Chef on South Park, to track down his early records. Albums like Hot Buttered Soul, …To Be Continued, The Isaac Hayes Experience, and Black Moses anticipated much if not all of the soul music to follow, from Marvin Gaye and George Clinton to Barry White, from Philly Soul and disco and Quiet Storm to acid jazz and rap, where his sounds continue to be sampled out the proverbial wazoo.
Hayes’ careeer is also relevant to what I’ve been talking to death here in my last few posts. He grew up in the rock ‘n’roll world, knew that repertoire cold, and he expanded it too by co-writing “Soul Man” and “Hold On, I’m Coming.” The epic and extravagant arrangements of his solo work can still take the breath away.
Hayes also engaged, repeatedly, in that essential contribution to the rock ‘n’ roll dialogue, the cross-genre cover of (often) contemporary hit songs. On Presenting Isaac Hayes, his excellent album debut from 1967, for example, Hayes included versions of everything from “When I Fall in Love” to Willie Dixon’s “I Just want to Make Love to You,” even combining “Going to Chicago Blues” into a medley with the pop standard “Misty.” During his classic period as a solo artist, he covered “Our Day Will Come,” “Something,” “I Stand Accused,” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He was especially a fan of the Bacharach/David songbook, recording “The Look of Love,” “Walk on By,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” “They Long to Be Close to You,” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”
The cross genre cover exists today, too, of course, but not like this. Hayes was a serious artist covering what many would have considered not-so-serious pop ditties–and he wasn’t doing this merely in live performances or on records destined for small numbers of some subculture faithful, as in the recent cases of Richard Thompson’s great cover of Brittany Spears’ “Oops I Did It Again” or Ted Leo’s version of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” Hayes was a mainstream star, his sartorial black power stances notwithstanding, who placed these renditions–“take it on down to Soulsville,” he explained it on the epic, mythic (“And seven times he left this woman. And seven times he came back”) introduction to “By the Time I Get to Phoenix–on his several gold-selling albums. That doesn’t happen today.
What’s more, Stax released these covers as singles. Hayes’ first charting solo work, for instance, was the two-sided 1969 hit “Walk on By,” a cover of Dionne Warwick’s hit from just a few years prior, and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which Glen Campbell had crossed over with only months before, on the b-side. At once elegant and impassioned, lush and funky, “Walk on…”/”By the Time…” is one one of the era’s great two-sided hits, right up there with “Down on the Corner”/”Fortunate Son” and “Let It Be”/”The Long and Winding Road.” It is surely one of the longest two-sided singles in history. On the Hot Buttered Soul album, the two tracks toigether last over a half an hour but even in their edited-for-radio versions, the pair still last almost twelve minutes.
Bejewled by the string arrangement he hummed to his arrangers, Hayes’ luxurious relationship with time here, as well as on later masterpieces such as, especially, his impossibly catchy and funky fifteen minute “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” highlighted a cinematic quality in the Soul Man’s work years before he began creating the actual soundtracks he became known for.
In his Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records, Rob Bowman says of Hot Buttered Soul that “No single album had a greater impact on the direction of black music in the first half of the 1970s.” I can’t argue with that but would expand the claim: Between, say, James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, there is no more sonically influential recording than Hot Buttered Soul by the late, great Isaac Hayes.
