SOULMOBILE: ISAAC HAYES AND THE ENGINE OF A NEW SOUND
Isaac Hayes once drove the most badass whip in the history of recorded music. His 1972 electric-blue Cadillac Eldorado, with its refrigerated mini-bar, built-in TV, white fur carpeting and 24-carat gold trim—perennially on display at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis—is like a blaxploitation opus on wheels.
Its current home served as Stax Studios from 1959 to 1974, during which Stax Records put out generation-defining songs by Hayes, Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, the Bar-Kays and many more.
Since 2003 the theater marquee announcing SOULSVILLE U.S.A. has welcomed music lovers to the site where R&B classics like Redding’s version of “Try a Little Tenderness” were recorded. Seven-inch vinyl discs blanket an entire wall. Original recording consoles worked by Stax producers David Porter and Steve Cropper (legendary guitarist for Booker T. and the MG’s) are stationed outside a recreation of Studio A, where one can imagine producer Al Bell laying down finishing touches on the Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself.”
A songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist who helped build the foundation of the Stax legacy, Isaac Hayes deserves his flowers as a major creative force in soul music history.
Though he wrote and produced Stax recordings like Sam & Dave’s 1967 pop #2 “Soul Man” with Porter, Hayes is renowned for his own Stax albums, including Hot Buttered Soul (1969), The Isaac Hayes Movement (1970), Black Moses (1971) and the Shaft soundtrack (1971). The expansive string sections, choir vocals and sturdy backbeats on epic singles like Hot Buttered Soul’s “Walk on By” influenced a host of artists to come.
“As a marketer, I’d look at Isaac Hayes and I’d see [him] banging on the piano and watched his approach,” Stax executive Bell remembers in biographer Rob Bowman’s Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records. “When he was working up material with David Porter, I’d sit around and watch him writing. To me, he was a unique person. He had the bald head and he would come in with a purple shirt on and some pink pants and some lavender socks and some white shoes. There was this little club where I went one time and Isaac was in there playing on the organ and I decided, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got to record this guy. I believe we can have us a huge, huge artist.’”
Born Isaac Lee Hayes Jr. in the summer of 1942, Stax’s eventual superstar entered the world in humble circumstances in rural Covington, Tennessee. He sang regularly as a child at Steven Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, right across Rialto Road from the tin shack where his sharecropping maternal grandparents raised him. (His mother, Eula, died young; Isaac Hayes Sr. abandoned the family.) They moved to the New Chicago community of North Memphis in 1949, and by ’53, Hayes had become the family provider after the death of his grandfather. He was 11.
Forced to drop out of school, young Isaac practiced whatever instruments he could get his hands on (piano, flute, sax, organ) even as he ran errands, shined shoes and picked cotton for a living. He eventually returned to his studies and graduated at 21. He nonetheless rejected some university music scholarships and instead found work in meat-packing plants.
In 1963 rock ’n’ roll radio was rotating girl-group hits like “Heatwave,” by Martha and the Vandellas, the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and “He’s So Fine,” by the Chiffons, as well as the inescapable Beatles cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout.” Hayes listened intently to all this—and the ever-present blues—and tended his own musical garden, playing piano in Memphis nightclubs and juke joints. According to Bell, he was soon discovered on that scene and brought into the Stax fold, initially as a session pianist.
By then, Stax’s sister label, Volt (founded in 1961) had already minted its first star in 21-year-old Otis Redding, courtesy of his searing 1962 soul ballad “These Arms of Mine.”
Beginning as Satellite Records in 1957, Stax was the brainchild of entrepreneurs Jim Stewart (whose surname would supply the “st” in Stax) and Estelle Axton (the “ax” in Stax). They segued from a country/rockabilly format to R&B (and changed the name of their company) when “Cause I Love You,” the 1960 duet by father/daughter duo Rufus and Carla (Thomas), became a substantial regional hit. In 1961, “Last Night” was a hit for locals the Mar-Keys (later the Bar-Kays). Stax house band Booker T. and the MG’s momentously hit #1 on the R&B chart with the epochal “Green Onions” in 1962. Rufus Thomas’ 1963 “Walking the Dog” was a Top 10 pop hit.
Stax was on its way to establishing the Memphis sound—melodic horn lines blown in unison, Hammond organ and gruffly soulful vocal performances.
Though Hayes started as a session player, the label’s burgeoning productivity (in no small measure attributable to the A&R chops of David Porter) soon enabled him to discover a true partner in rhyme: Porter, one year his senior.
As a high-school student, Porter had worked as a clerk at a grocery store across the street from Satellite. By some accounts, he was instrumental in convincing the label to focus on R&B—in part so his friends, including Booker T. Jones, could record under its aegis. Among other considerations, these discussions ultimately persuaded the company to hire Porter as its first staff songwriter.
Porter and Hayes’ marriage made in heaven would ultimately result in the composition of 200 songs, including Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’” (#1 R&B) and “B-A-B-Y,” by Carla Thomas (#3 R&B), both of which were produced by label co-founder Jim Stewart.
As Stax songwriter-producers, Hayes and Porter’s output included the Charmels’ 1967 song “As Long As I’ve Got You.” Though it wasn’t a hit, it achieved a degree of immortality 26 years later when its lithe opening piano riff and dusty drum shuffle provided the hook and percussion for the Wu-Tang Clan’s gold “C.R.E.A.M.,” which Rolling Stone recently crowned the greatest East Coast hip-hop song of all time (and which itself has been sampled by Drake & JAY-Z and Miley Cyrus).
The same year Hayes and Porter delivered “As Long As I’ve Got You,” a plane crash claimed the lives of Otis Redding and Bar-Kays Jimmie King, Ronnie Caldwell, Phalon Jones and Carl Cunningham. The label family was still reeling from the tragedy when the company ended its relationship with distributor Atlantic Records, only to find that Atlantic was contractually entitled to its back catalog.
Al Bell’s solution mandated the recording of 27 brand-new albums to be released during the summer of ’69. Though Hayes’ jazzy debut, 1968’s Presenting Isaac Hayes—produced by Bell, Stax session bassist and MG Donald “Duck” Dunn, and MG’s drummer Al Jackson Jr.—proved a commercial failure, he returned to the studio for a creatively pioneering sophomore set that turned around Stax’s fortunes.
In 1969 Hayes released Hot Buttered Soul, which helped lay the foundation of orchestral soul music—and arguably created a new subgenre. Among other things, the songs “Walk on By” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” were turned inside out and expanded to unprecedented lengths, and the artist’s use of extensive spoken intros contributed a cinematic gravitas; according to music critic Robert Palmer, Hayes was “rapping on records like a romantically messianic revivalist.”
The results, four songs total, were groundbreaking, magnetic. Granted complete creative freedom, Hayes and his co-creators conjured a work worlds away from Presenting Isaac Hayes. “Walk on By”—written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for Dionne Warwick, who took it to the pop Top 10 in 1964—was dipped in acid, rendered a 12-minute funk vamp with strings and horns arranged by Motown pianist Johnny Allen. (He and Hayes would later share a Grammy Award for “Theme From Shaft.”) Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” a #2 country hit for Glen Campbell in 1967, was stretched from that version’s 2:42 running time to a whopping 18:42, closing the album with sweeping stylistic elements nearly unheard of in soul music.
Detractors called it “easy-listening soul” and “Black Muzak,” but one listen to the baritone come-ons of Barry White or the arrangements of his Love Unlimited Orchestra; the string-laden instrumentals of Van McCoy (“The Hustle”) and much of the disco era; or even a 1994 trip-hop track like Portishead’s “Glory Box” or Alessia Cara’s 2015 hit “Here” (which both sample “Ike’s Rap II” from Black Moses) and Hayes’ influence is undeniable. By some estimates, an electric guitar line from the intro to his radical reinvention of “Walk on By” has been sampled more than 100 times.
Hayes is nonetheless not a credited producer of Hot Buttered Soul. Bell returned to the board, this time with Bar-Kays producer Allen Jones and Stax in-house keyboardist Marvell Thomas. But Hayes’ creative oversight of the album included, to name just one feat, conducting the Bar-Kays to manifest his vision while simultaneously delivering live vocals.
The Isaac Hayes Movement followed the same blueprint in 1970—four songs, heavily orchestrated, including the Bacharach/David tune “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” recorded by Warwick in 1966—but this time Hayes received full production credit. The quartet of covers included The Beatles’ “Something,” barely a year old, expanded to over 11 minutes with violin solos by John Blair. Hayes’ fourth album, 1970’s …To Be Continued, sustained the sound of the previous two (particularly on yet another Bacharach/David song, “The Look of Love,” popularized by Dusty Springfield in 1967).
Hayes’ productions have frequently been described as “cinematic,” and deservedly so. Movies seemed inevitably around the corner. Photographer Gordon Parks elevated his career by directing the 1971 action thriller Shaft—and employed Hayes to score the film and produce its double-album soundtrack. Though the cut “Soulsville” borrowed its rhythm from Aretha Franklin’s Ronnie Shannon-penned “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” the rest of Shaft sounded wholly original: mostly funky instrumentals played by the Bar-Kays and led by “Theme From Shaft,” which won Hayes the 1972 Oscar for Best Original Song.
Both the album and its lead single topped the pop charts. Shaft also paved the way for a slew of artist-driven soundtracks, including Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly (1972), Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man (1972), Gladys Knight’s Claudine (1974), Aretha Franklin’s Sparkle (1976) and 1974’s Truck Turner—a blaxploitation film starring Hayes himself. He likewise wrote, produced and performed on the music for that year’s Three Tough Guys, in which he also appeared.
Hayes’ early production innovations—the chicken-scratch wah-wah guitar fills almost as much as the symphonic grandeur—became baked into much of the succeeding work of Philadelphia International, blaxploitation, disco and other musical forces.
But as a visit to the Soulsville Foundation’s Stax Music Academy (or, for that matter, an Apple Music playlist of his essential recordings) will reveal, there’s a reason Isaac Hayes’ production aesthetic has sometimes been take for granted: His was a sound whose time had come.
Pictured, from top: Hayes with one of his Grammys; his "Soulmobile" Cadillac; Bowman's tome; Hayes with Al Bell; Hayes performing in full Black Moses mode
