Isaac Hayes
Saying it gave him the chance to increase his visibility from “six to 96,” Isaac Hayes doesn’t at all shy away from his reincarnation as the libidinous Chef, on the animated series “South Park.” At the same time, it’s slightly discomforting someone so integral to the evolution of pop music, specifically R&B, disco, and rap, should be simplified and rewritten as an overweight loverman.
Concord Music, which acquired the legendary Stax Records catalog recently, hopes to alter that perception with Can You Dig It? Ultimate Isaac Hayes, a two-CD/DVD set released in November. Spanning his most creative period from 1968 to 1977 and chronicled in the liners by friend and confidant Rob Bowman, it’s an impressive cross section that still manages to woefully underestimate Hayes’ contributions.
Naturally, Hayes disagrees, “Because they got me singing a gospel tune at Operation PUSH with Jesse Jackson. And they got me singing live ‘If Loving You Is Wrong.’ And got me playin’ sax on Bread’s tune, ‘Baby, I’m-A Want You,’ and we’re singing ‘Do It.’ There’s some things that some people might not have heard, and we also have a DVD, which is from ‘Wattstax’ [the Stax-funded concert in 1972 intended to quell the Watts riots in Los Angeles]. I did ‘Shaft,’ ‘Soulsville,’ and then I got Chef singing ‘Chocolate Salty Balls.’ And Dionne Warwick and I, she’s singing ‘I Say A Little Prayer,’ and I did ‘By The Time I Got To Phoenix,’ and those tunes are interwoven.”
Then let’s hope there’s another compilation on the way showcasing his work in tandem with David Porter as the songwriting muscle behind Stax. And then after ’77, well, let’s see, there’s his headlong dive into disco, a movie career, his influence on the royal family of Ghana, Scientology, restaurants, radio shows . . . those will have to go in the biography.
Hayes was born outside Memphis in 1942, raised by grandmother Rushia Addie-Mae Wade after his mother died and father split. If he were a movie, that’d be your setup, dire circumstances pushing a young man up against incredible odds. While he sought to see Wade’s faith in him through, the vibrancy of Beale Street in Memphis was the real draw, and Hayes wanted nothing more than to be a part. Like Chicago’s Maxwell Street market up north, Beale was the center of the black cultural universe in the South, where not only B.B. King and Rufus Thomas ruled — as the tourist attraction it currently is suggests — but friendly Motown nemesis Stax Volt gained ground.
“I’d been to Stax several times trying to audition for a spot with a blues band, with an R&B group, two doo-wop groups and we were turned down each time,” Hayes laughs. “But I got into Stax on Floyd Newman’s back. He’s a baritone sax player and he played with The Mar-Keys and the staff musicians at Stax, and I was his keyboard player. [Stax founder] Jim Stewart, he said ‘Young man, I like the way you play. Booker T. is off in school now, so I need a staff musician. So would you like the job?’ I almost jumped: ‘YEEAAAH!’ But I was cool. ‘Yeah, I think I’d like that,’ he laughs again.
Once in, he aligned himself with songwriter David Porter, a man he had been unknowingly competing against for years. “I went to Manassas High School and David went to Booker Washington, and I sang with a group called The Teen Tones and he sang with a group called The Marquettes. We used to compete on Beale Street in talent shows. David said, ‘Look man’ — I think David [at the time sold] insurance as well, so he sold me pretty good on the idea — ‘I’m pretty good with lyrics and you’re good with music, so let’s team up and be like [Motown team] Holland-Dozier-Holland and [Burt] Bacharach & [Hal] David.’ I said, ‘O.K., why not?'”
After some misfires, the pair penned hits for Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, and a truckload for Sam & Dave (including “Soul Man”) and became the heart of the Soulsville sound. “We used to be teased by the other guys, ‘Hey, these niggas, how many songs y’all write today?’ because there was no emphasis on songwriters then — everybody wanted to be the star. But when David and I started writing hit songs, everybody wanted to be a songwriter then!”
Opposed to the machine-like reputation of Motown, Hayes paints Stax as an ongoing jam session. “We had a big heater against the wall, mid room, with Al Jackson’s drum set over there, and the keyboards — Booker’s organ — and the piano. Sometimes Steve [Cropper] would have his guitar and amplifier in the area. [Donald] Duck [Dunne]’s bass and all the vocals you had to get behind the bathroom for the mics and things. And the bathroom was up in the top of the room in the corner. When we wrote ‘Hold On I’m Coming,’ me and David were sitting at the piano working on a tune, and David said, ‘Man, I gotta take a restroom break!’ ‘Well, go to the restroom then!’ And then I said, ‘David, come on I got something! Man, come on!’ ‘Hold on, I’m comin’!'” Porter ran out yelling, “‘That’s it, I got it! That’s it!’ With his pants hanging down.”
His place in history assured, Hayes nonetheless wanted to cut out on his own. He got promotions director Al Bell to let him swing his own set, though Presenting Isaac Hayes didn’t tap into his full energies because “I was drunk,” he readily admits. But two years later, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the nearby Lorraine Motel, a new Hayes, cutting an imposing figure with his bald head, beard, sunglasses, and chains, emerged with the landmark Hot Buttered Soul.
“The guy that recorded Hot Buttered Soul had all his faculties,” he explains. “No outside influence, no alcohol influence, no anything. It was kind of selfish on my part because I knew if [Al Bell] said I could do what I want to do, I wasn’t thinking about doing Sam & Dave stuff. I knew what I had to say couldn’t be said in two minutes and 30 seconds. And that’s when I worked on Hot Buttered Soul. I felt no pressure.” Critics lavish praise on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? for breaking from the Motown singles machine. But Hot Buttered Soul went even further — two years earlier, too — completely ignoring convention, and turning in a four-song, 40-minute album with a single song, “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” occupying Side Two. Within a short time, movie director Gordon Parks asked him to score Shaft, the theme song eventually winning Hayes an Academy Award nomination (he would then win). He started on a winning streak that continues with news of three more seasons of “South Park” and his impending biography. But how did he respond in 1972? By bringing grandma as his date to the Oscars.
He recalls, “Everybody was thinking, ‘Man, you could have a fine chick with you.’ ‘Naw, no, I’m taking my grandmother.’ Because I prayed, ‘God, please give me an opportunity to thank this woman the way I want to thank her.’ She had seen me through a lot of hard times. And I had the chance to honor her in front of millions of people, which was a big night for me.
“Well, I remember getting in the limo heading down to the pavilion and I was so damn nervous. And you know, misery loves company? I said, ‘Mama, you nervous?’ She said, ‘No!’ I’m telling myself, ‘Fine friend you turned out to be!’ We stood on the red carpet, she’s waving at everything and I’m so nervous. We got inside, like the reception before the show started, she met a lot of people. She met Dionne Warwick, and Robert Wagner — he had the TV show, ‘It Takes A Thief’ — and she said, ‘Oh, you’re Alexander Mundy!’ His character’s name!”
It was just another trend he started. “After I did that, a lot of entertainers started taking their mothers to award shows and stuff like that.” Maybe people should start taking Hayes.
— Steve Forstneger
