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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."
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It's difficult to imagine what Hayes couldn't do as Black Moses, since he managed to play those torrid scenes with starlets and to wear leopard-skin capes and fur boots as well as chains. His assertion that he didn't originate the Moses role is beside the point; he played it to the hilt. But ultimately Hayes can get away with this kind of self-absorption and make it pay. There's a humorous catch to his voice that suggests he's always chuckling at the outrageousness of his postures.
He's been able to carry these roles because he's a gifted and highly original musician. His second album for the Enterprise label (a division of Stax Records), Hot Buttered Soul, introduced the extra-long R&B cut, initiated the vogue for smooth, sultry direct address later exploited by Barry White and, in effect, created an entirely new musical genre, called easy-listening soul or, less charitably, black muzak. Later, his Shaft theme, with its chunky, cleverly orchestrated rhythm pattern and lush sweetening, set the stage for disco instrumentals by White and Van McCoy.
Isaac had gone to work for Stax during the mid-Sixties with childhood memories of rural blues, black fife-and-drum and sanctified church singing still vivid in his mind, and with experiences as an R&B saxophonist, pianist and part-time jazz singer recently behind him. He was on organ and piano on many of the biggest Southern soul records during the next few years, including most of Otis Redding's output and Wilson Pickett's "In the Midnight Hour." As half the Hayes/David Porter songwriting and production team he was behind some of the best Stax records by Sam and Dave, Carla Thomas and Johnnie Taylor.
Shaft and other film scores came Hayes's way as a result of Hot Buttered Soul's success, and the first phase of his career peaked with his dramatic, Moses-like appearance in the film Wattstax. Acting roles followed, but meanwhile his relationship with Stax was deteriorating into what he calls a "cold war." He didn't feel they were doing as well with his records as his burgeoning film career suggested they should be. In fact, Stax was grinding to a standstill due to problems with its distributor, CBS. Finally, legal skirmishing ensued, a settlement was reached and Hayes formed Hot Buttered Soul Records in affiliation with ABC. "We're off and running now," he says. "The reason I wanted to have my own company was so that I could do all the different kinds of music I like — funk, jazz, blues, gospel or even country."
Chocolate Chip continues in the innovative but commercial vein established by Hayes's early albums. There are brilliant arranger's touches, including the use of an acoustic 12-string guitar solo over a ponderous, heavily amplified track on Tony Joe White's "That Loving Feeling." There's the brassy title tune, along with several intimate ballads. "Actually," he says, "I don't know how we cut it. By the time I was loose from Stax, I was under a tremendous financial strain. The studio had been closed, I didn't have an engineer, my musicians hadn't played together in God knows when, the equipment hadn't been serviced, I hadn't written any tunes. But Roosevelt Green, my road engineer, got in here and learned the board while I rehearsed the band, I started writing and cutting rhythm tracks, I took a week off to write the lyrics and inside of six weeks we had an album.
"And it's a winner for me. I'm also in a new film, a British-style comedy with Anthony Newley and Yvonne DeCarlo called It Seemed like a Good Idea at the Time. The soul brothers might not go for it so much but I felt like getting into other areas so I wouldn't get typed. I'll be doing some television too. Everywhere you look, you're gonna see Isaac Hayes."
[From Issue 197 — October 9, 1975]