Isaac Hayes: Black Moses Moves On

MEMPHIS—He doesn't look anything like Black Moses, aside from the shiny bald head and sunglasses. In fact, he looks like a black biker. He's wearing jackboots, old jeans, a black T-shirt and a blue denim jacket with the sleeves snipped off and a "Memphis Choppers" club sign embroidered on the back. Maybe he's getting into the character of Chocolate Chip, the "master rip," from his new album by the same name.

Whatever. He's Isaac Hayes and he's sitting at a mixing console at his own Hot Buttered Soul Studio, reel of tape whining forward. It stops and "you ain't never had a nigger like me" comes blasting over the monitors.

The studio is a warm, smallish room just a few blocks from the site of the old American studio, where Hayes cut his first single in 1962. Isaac is tapping his feet to the thundering, bottom-heavy "Chocolate Chip" rhythm track. The pinched-sounding vocal refrain comes around again. "The word 'nigger' is nothing to me. I mean Sly had that 'Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey' thing out years ago, but it still might be offensive to some people, especially comin' from Black Moses."

Hayes's role as the entertainer who promised to lead the soul children out of bondage was a curious one. He would appear onstage stripped to the waist with chains crisscrossing his chest, a hulking reminder of black enslavement. Yet when he opened his mouth, it was usually to croon a pop tune like "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" in a mellifluous baritone. And while he was posing for album covers in Biblical garb and rapping on records like a romantically messianic revivalist, he was celebrating the black superstud in his music for Shaft and portraying a hard-living, fast-loving player himself in Truck Turner and Three Tough Guys.

Eventually there was some sort of identity crisis. "I'm trying to get away from that Black Moses thing now," he explained. "It was a tremendous responsibility on one individual, especially when people started forgetting how it originated and looking at me as the originator and wondering whether I was trying to play god. Plus, there was a lot of restrictions. I would look at other entertainers havin' a ball . . . and Moses, oh no, Moses couldn't. Hey, I'm human too."