In the late 1960s Isaac Hayes helped save Stax Records. After its considerable success earlier in the decade, the Memphis record label hit hard times that almost destroyed its modest empire. In December 1967 Otis Redding—the label’s biggest act and one of the most popular R&B singers in the world—was killed in a plane crash alongside most of the Bar-Kays. In April 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, converting what had been a hideout and meeting place for the house musicians into a symbol of the nation’s escalating racial tensions. Meanwhile, Stax’s owners had been renegotiating the label’s contract with Atlantic Records, which had distributed nearly every Stax release; they were horrified to discover a clause that gave ownership of the entire back catalog, along with control of its second biggest act, Sam & Dave, to Atlantic. Stax had no funds and no way to get funds. One of the biggest success stories of the decade looked like it might meet an ignominious end—just another indie gobbled up by the New York giants strengthening their grasp on the market.
Instead, Al Bell—Stax’s African-American president and co-owner—concocted an ambitious plan. He would create “an instant catalog by releasing nearly 30 albums and singles simultaneously,” writes Robert Gordon in the liner notes to the electrifying Isaac Hayes box set The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976). Among them were records by Booker T. & the MGs, Eddie Floyd, and Rufus Thomas as well as Hot Buttered Soul, the curious second solo album by Stax pianist, songwriter, arranger, producer, and now singer Isaac Hayes. He had come to the company as a keyboard player in Floyd Newman’s band, eventually teaming up with a local kid named David Porter to write some of the biggest soul hits of the decade, including “B-A-B-Y” for Carla Thomas and “Hold On I’m Coming” and “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby” for Sam & Dave. He’d already recorded a solo album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, which had gone nowhere, but the label gave him full artistic control for a follow-up.
Hot Buttered Soul is an odd record, but at the time it must have sounded almost aggressively unmarketable: four songs spread over two sides, only one of which was credited to Hayes himself. Side one opens with a 12-minute psych-soul cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk On By,” and side two closes with an epic cover of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” prefaced with several minutes of Hayes just talking. It sounded like nothing Stax had ever released, and under normal circumstances it might not have even been released. But Stax was desperate for product—any product—that might keep the company alive.
Hot Buttered Soul marked a turning point for Stax, for Hayes, and for American popular music. Selling more than one million copies, it dominated the pop, jazz, R&B, and easy listening charts for more than a year. It also established Hayes as one of the biggest artists of the era: an exemplar of black sophistication and masculinity, a figure who rejected the fashions of the decade as too staid but embraced the pop songs of the ’60s as the scaffolding for his R&B experiments. Hayes was an outsize figure: bald yet bearded, his muscular frame accentuated by tight pants and chainmail vests. When he accepted his Oscar for “Theme from Shaft,” he stood at the podium in a blue tuxedo with a fuzzy collar and oversize bowtie.
His musical and sartorial flamboyance has at times overshadowed his legacy in the decades following his heyday. To subsequent generations he is a punchline (“They say that Shaft is a bad motherf—” “Shut yo mouth!”) or perhaps a trendy sample source (particularly for 1990s trip-hop). Others may know him as Chef from “South Park” or simply as another name on a long list of celebrity Scientologists. Even more than the recent reissues of Hayes’ records, The Spirit of Memphis presents him as an endlessly complex and compelling artist, one who mixed genres freely and viewed soul music as a vehicle for mind-bogglingly ambitious gambits. Hayes spent the first years of his career learning the rules of pop songcraft, then spent the rest of his life exploding them.
That trajectory lends The Spirit of Memphis a unique narrative thrust that distinguishes it from so many single-artist box sets. It opens with a disc of songs predating his solo career, when he was playing in the house band, producing records, and writing songs for nearly every Stax artist. Porter was the lyric guy, while Hayes wrote the arrangements. Because he had no formal musical training and could not read or write music, he talked the musicians through their individual parts and directed the band while recording. The grooves on Floyd Newman’s “Sassy” and Booker T. & the MGs’ “Boot-Leg” have lost none of their elasticity over the last half-century, and “I’ll Run Your Hurt Away” shows how sensitive Hayes was with singers; rather than try to compete with Ruby Johnson’s sublime vocals, the piano and horns provide a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, underscoring every growl and whisper.
Hayes’ velvety baritone may be his most recognizable instrument, but it doesn’t show up until three songs into the second disc, which collects his singles for Stax subsidiaries Volt and Enterprise. Even then, he mostly moans and beatboxes his way through “Precious, Precious,” off Presenting Isaac Hayes. According to the liner notes, the album was recorded while Hayes and the MGs were drunk on celebratory champagne, which lends the songs their slightly askew sensibility. The second disc portrays him as an artist with an ear for luxuriant and witty arrangements. The Bacharach-David hit “The Look of Love” becomes a crushed-velvet boudoir jam, somehow both macho and gentle. “Theme from Shaft” builds itself from the ground up, starting with a hi-hat rhythm and adding wakka-chikka guitar, bass, strings, and flute. Each instrument subtly ratchets up the tension and colors in the cinematic universe of Gordon Parks’ blaxploitation film.
If the organizing principle falls apart on the third disc, that’s fine, because the music attains its own force, its own momentum. In addition to more covers—including songs byAl Green, Jerry Butler, the Moonglows, and of course Bacharach-David—there’s a short live set that was recorded in Chicago but sounds like Vegas. Perhaps even more enticing is a handful of studio jams on the fourth disc, including a rambling deconstruction of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” and the notorious half-hour detonation of “Do Your Thing.” That song, which appears on the Shaft soundtrack in an extremely abbreviated version, shape-shifts almost constantly, mutating from an R&B stomp into a film score into a psych-rock exploration into something like a free-jazz foray. Hayes and his band stretch the song until it snaps, then keep on playing for another twenty minutes to see what lies beyond the melody and lyrics.
The Spirit of Memphis stops in 1976, the year after Stax declared bankruptcy and Hayes signed with Polydor amid accusations that Stax had withheld royalties. He never hit the same heights again (although 1995’s Branded is a fine late-career peak), but he did remain a constant presence in pop culture until his death in 2008. Living up to its title, “Do Your Thing” is a fitting climax for The Spirit of Memphis, as it reveals Hayes to be a an artist who saw soul as a world-devouring music: one that could not only speak to African American desires and aspirations, but could swallow up any other sound and be molded into any shape he could dream up.
