Think about how crazy this is for a moment: Stax loses Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays to a plane crash and the rights to their back catalog (and, later, Sam & Dave) to Atlantic. Without their biggest stars and their best session group, Stax executive Al Bell takes a desperate but necessary gamble: in an attempt to build an entirely new catalog out of scratch, he schedules dozens of all-new albums and singles to be recorded and released en masse over the course of a few months. And out of all of those records, the album that puts the label back on the map is a followup to a chart dud, recorded by a songwriter/producer who wasn't typically known for singing, where three of its four songs run over nine and a half minutes. And this album sells a million copies. If it weren't for the New York Mets, Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul would be the most unlikely comeback story of 1969.
Since then, the album's had an odd reevaluation process: it hit #8 on the pop charts and #1 on the R&B charts, but also hit #1 on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart-- which alarmed partisans of Miles Davis and Sly Stone alike. After another couple of albums in its crossover-friendly, string-drenched vein, Rolling Stone declared Isaac Hayes an enemy of all that was good about soul music in the early 1970s; decades later, a generation reared on hip-hop reverse-engineered the beats on Pac's "Me Against the World" or PE's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and discovered an original brilliance. Now, after a listen to this new reissue 40 years later, Hot Buttered Soul might still seem a little historically counterintuitive. It stood as a newer, funkier phase of Southern soul, but it hinged on a sound more opulent than the most sharp-suited Motown crossover bid. It's an exercise in melodrama and indulgence that lays it on so heavy it's impossible not to hear it as anything but the stone truth. And it's an album whose edited-down singles-- both of which went top 40 pop-- sounded more like trailers for the real thing. (Said single edits are included here and can be safely ignored.)
Yet the success of Hot Buttered Soul owed a bit to a classic crossover formula: start with an easy-listening-friendly pop staple, keep the orchestral sweetness, but layer on a shining veneer of psychedelic R&B, then stretch it out with some soul-jazz vamping and nail it down with a voice that hits like a velvet sledgehammer. Hayes demanded full creative control for this album, and his auteurism resulted in a luxurious rawness that soul artists would scramble to catch up with for years. It wasn't exactly an unprecedented sound, however, and in its own extravagant way Hot Buttered Soul might be to the end of the 60s what Ray Charles' Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was seven years previous: an album that redrew the parameters for R&B's high-class populism.
It's just that it hadn't been quite this audacious before-- not to the extent of Hayes' cover of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", all 18-plus sprawling minutes of it. Here we have a song that turns the idea of a slow build into something monumental: with a monologue he developed as a way to get apathetic club patrons to pay attention to where he was about to go, Hayes spends the first eight and a half minutes actually setting the stage for the scenario behind the song, from the wife's cavalier attitude and how the husband caught her cheating to the specific year and make of car he finally drove off for good in (a '65 Ford). It should be noted that all this time the band's been churning along with this hypnotic, minimalist swaying organ/bass/hi-hat drone that changes imperceptibly if at all; again, this is eight and a half minutes here. And when it finally does transition from Hayes' conversational murmur to the first actual sung line from the Jimmy Webb composition he's covering, it's the beginning of a metamorphosis that gradually transforms the dynamic of the song from sweet-stringed orchestration into full-fledged, brass-packed, explosively-cresting soul.
But where "Phoenix" is all slow build, the album-opening version of "Walk on By" throws almost everything it has at you right away, nailing you to the floor with those first two drumbeats. Hayes takes the restrained sorrow of Bacharach and David's composition as made famous by Dionne Warwick and chucks it out the window, replacing it with an arrangement that is the absolute antithesis of hiding the tears and sadness and grieving in private. And it's goddamned devastating at every turn: its go-for-broke opening, with those weeping strings and that stinging guitar building to their gigantic crescendo; that moment when it collapses and sinks into Michael Toles' famous slinky guitar riff, which then warps its way into psychedelic keening more Hendrix than Cropper; every hitch and moan and heart-wracked ad-lib from Hayes' deep bass voice ("you put the hurt on me, you socked it to me, mama"). The entire last half of the song's twelve minutes is an exercise in seeing just how long you can not only maintain but build on a frenzied finale, where Toles' guitar sounds like it's ripping itself apart and Hayes' Hammond organ trembles and growls and stammers like a panicking tiger. It might be the most intense six minutes of soul recorded in the confines of a studio the entire decade.
The remainder of Hot Buttered Soul isn't quite as ambitiously excessive, though the other two songs still have an indelible presence. Hayes' version of Charles Chalmers' and Sandra Rhodes' "One Woman" is affecting if short-- "short" in this case meaning a hair over five minutes. As breathers go, it works wonders in proving Hayes' way with a mellow ballad could still have an emotional impact in a more confined space. And Hayes' sole songwriting credit is the linguistically convoluted masterpiece "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic," a straight-up slick-as-hell funk jam which gets a lot of mileage out of humorously-deployed latin phrases and five-dollar words ("My gastronomical stupensity is really satisfied when you're loving me"). Even if it's his only lyrical contribution, he subsequently if unintentionally caricaturizes the ornate but down-to-earth personality of the entire album: it's all self-consciously complicated, but man, the meaning's right there in front of you. And it can't help but hit you right where you feel it.
