Time Capsule: Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul
Every Saturday, Paste will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and assessing its current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at Isaac Hayes’ transformative 45-minute, four-song second album. The results were not only more dynamite and dramatic than the clean-shaven #1 hits coming out of Motown before, during and after, but they were strange, novel takes on a funk genre not yet fully borne from soul's most progressive idealists.
I heard Isaac Hayes long before I knew who Isaac Hayes was. It was while watching The Blues Brothers, and it was while watching 90210 re-runs. There he was—or, there his writing was, as “Soul Man” and “Hold On, I’m Comin’” went into view. Hayes and David Porter became something of a songwriting team for Stax Records in the early ‘60s, becoming the lyrical hot-steppers while Booker T. & the M.G.’s tracked all the instrumentals for Sam & Dave, one of the most successful soul duos of all time—a duo who, in the eyes of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “brought the sounds of the Black gospel church into pop music with their call-and-response records,” records covered in Isaac Hayes’ fingerprints.
Hayes was born into a sharecropper family in Covington, Tennessee, and raised by his maternal grandparents after his mother passed away and his father abandoned him and his older sibling. He was a farmer in Shelby and Tipton counties, but by age five he taught himself piano, organ, saxophone and flute. Hayes sang at his church. After getting his high school diploma in Memphis at age 21, colleges and universities offered him music scholarships, but he worked at a meat-packing plant in the city instead. He’d moonlight at juke joints in the evenings, playing right there in Memphis or, sometimes, going to northern Mississippi. Famously, he became a regular singer at Curry’s Club with Ben Branch’s house band backing him up.
The soul man’s debut album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, which was co-produced by two M.G.s, Al Jackson Jr. and Donald “Duck” Dunn, held promise but sold horribly. “Precious, Precious” stood out, for it being a 19-minute jazz composition later diced into a three-minute single that didn’t chart. When Stax lost its back catalog to Atlantic, all of the signed artists had to record new material to replenish the label’s wealth. That’s when Hayes, splitting time between Ardent Studios in Memphis and Tera Shirma Studios in Detroit, went to work with Al Bell. Elsewhere, M.G.’s guitarist Steve Cropper was doing the same. Bell granted Hayes full creative control over his follow-up, and he came back with a 45-minute album featuring four songs that were this spectacular collision of psych-soul, prog-funk, blues-rock and gospel. The jazz habits of Presenting were stylistically gone but remained in the pillars of his symphonic risks.
Hot Buttered Soul came out on Stax’s Enterprise subsidiary and became one of the greatest soul albums of both its time and all time. Without it, Hayes doesn’t go on to make his magnum opus, Black Moses, or write the music for Shaft, thus stripping us of one of the most culturally important soundtracks in the history of cinema. The coolness of a record like this begins with its cover, which features a bald, Cuban link chain-wearing Hayes tilting his head towards the camera, veiling his big-rimmed sunglasses out of focus. While making his sophomore effort, Hayes figured out what formula might propel him out of the commercial failures of Presenting. He asked the Bar-Kays to be his backing band, and he called upon pianist Marvell Thomas (who would earn a co-producer credit for his contributions) to fill out the ensemble. During the recording sessions, Hayes played a Hammond organ and tracked his singing live while simultaneously conducting the Bar-Kays. Detroit arranger Johnny Allen was hired to compose the string and horn parts; Russ Terrana engineered the final mix, filling in the melodies’ missing piece—a radically proficient orchestra. Hot Buttered Soul also featured pre-delay reverb, which engineer Ed Wolfrum would later employ on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. Terrana would never be too far away, either, using Hot Buttered Soul as a launch pad into his most famous role, as an engineer at Motown Records.
The only song on Hot Buttered Soul penned by Hayes was “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” a nine-and-a-half-minute, stupefying fashion of funk and decade-spanning cultural prisms. I hear this song unfurl through the tempo shifts and genre swaps and can pinpoint the influence of James Brown’s live recordings and Ray Charles’ Big Band, ABC-Paramount performances. The album itself gave soul music a brand new vocabulary, and it gave an opportunity to experiment to the genre’s next generation, especially Curtis Mayfield and the Ohio Players. I’m not saying that Isaac Hayes invented the 10-minute soul song, but no one else from his generation made it sound as cool. “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” is like stepping into a museum full of artifacts it created.