So Long, Soul Man: An Isaac Hayes Appreciation

When people say Hayes' early '70s recordings anticipated -- maybe even invented -- disco, this is part of what they're talking about. Of course, they're also talking about how the epochal wah-wah of 1971's "Theme From Shaft" so obsessively turned funk rhythms mechanistic; if there's ever been a more inexorable No. 1 pop single, I don' t know what it would be. But his more-lasting disco innovation was to expand the soul-dance beat toward eternity. On albums (not "EPs," despite claims on his Rhapsody page) like Hot Buttered Soul (1969),  The Isaac Hayes Movement (1970) and Joy (1973), Hayes used potentially infinite foreplay and spoken seduction to stretch pop standards past the nine-minute mark: "I Stand Accused" lasts 11:30, "Walk On By" and "Something" 12:00, "Joy" 15:15, the incomparable "By The Time I Get to Phoenix" an impossible 18:40. Psychedelic rock bands were breaking radio-enforced time barriers back then, too, and James Brown had undoubtedly initiated the idea from a funk standpoint. But Hayes contributed a lushness that disco would pick up and run with; the trick was that, once the groove got going (and going and going), you could layer most anything else on top: strings, saxes, sex sounds, down-home guitar, offhand aesthetic comments about bringing it all down to soulsville.

Listen to the disembodied and repetitive female vocal chants in "Part Time Love," off Isaac Hayes at Wattstax (recorded at a historical mega-concert at the L.A. Coliseum in August 1972), and you're hearing a more heavy-metal version of a sound that acts like Silver Convention would turn into Eurodisco three years later. And Isaac got to rap music before rappers did, too. Most of his "raps" were patiently paced monologues designed to lure you into bed (which apparently sometimes worked); in October 1979, a month before the Sugarhill Gang charted with "Rapper's Delight," Isaac and Millie Jackson even hit No. 80 on Billboard with an album called Royal Rappin's. But 1971's "Good Love" definitely hinted at rap in the '80s sense. Hayes' sartorial style -- bedecked in chains that harked back to slavery while forecasting bling to be -- has to be considered a hip-hop antecedent as well. And as this link details, his rhythms provided a foundation on which scores of rappers since have staked their claims.

There are those, of course, who insist the man's most important work was done with David Porter, before the '70s even started, and I sympathize with them -- though, sorry, not with crazy people who think 1998's "Chocolate Salty Balls" from South Park was some kind of career pinnacle. ("Black Lassie" -- Cheech & Chong imagining Johnny Cash rewriting "Shaft" as an tribute to a "great American dog" -- always seemed funnier to me). But his session and songwriting work for Sam and Dave, Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, people like that? Sure, why not. The best 2008 version of an Isaac Hayes number just might be Ted Nugent's barbecue-fed "Soul Man," off his live Sweden Rocks. And this also seems like a good place to point out, since you're unlikely to read it anywhere else, what an awesome year for Isaac Hayes songs 1979 was: ZZ Top's "I Thank You"; Rachel Sweet's "B-A-B-Y"; Isaac's own always-underrated, funkabilly-disco Top 20 pop cover of Jesse Stone's "Don't Let Go." (The Blues Brothers' iffier "Soul Man," which technically hit the charts in December 1978, doesn't count.)

So put Isaac Hayes in the lineage of hard rock, too; he deserves it. He's the cat who wouldn't cop out when there was danger all about. He didn't have to shake us like he did, but he did. And we thank him.