Talkin’ ’bout Shaft

No offense to Bernie Mac fans out there. But didn’t the media fail to properly memorialize an arguably more significant figure of Afro-American culture, the late Isaac Hayes, who passed away on August 10 in his home of Memphis, Tennessee?

Here’s an American story for you: start out as a songwriter for Memphis-based Stax Records in the ‘60s, write hits (Soul Man, Hold On, I’m Comin’) for Sam & Dave; go solo with shaved head, bling and sunglasses and release pace-setting orchestrated funk albums like “Black Moses” and “Hot Buttered Soul”; then bag an Oscar for scoring the blaxploitation flick Shaft, the prototypical funk groove of the early ‘70s; then become a sex symbol, lose all your money and property as Stax Records goes bankrupt; next appear in small TV roles in several kitsch-classic American shows like The A-Team, Hunter and Miami Vice before somewhere along the way becoming a Scientologist and being rediscovered by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and the guys from South Park, where you leave a respectable legacy as the guiding voice of Chef.

From Shaft to Chef: that’s the amazing Isaac Hayes for you.

So here’s the thing about Hayes: you can take his laid-back, 18-minute, gospel-tinged epic suites as kitsch, with their spoken-word intros and call-and-response choirs, or you can just dig where he was coming from, and see his body of music as pointing towards what eventually became acid jazz and trip-hop. We don’t need to deduce this: just check the liner notes for Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine,” or check the sample driving Hoover’s 2 Wicky or investigate the DNA of Portishead and you’ll see the huge debt owed to Isaac Hayes. Or listen to the fatback drums of Joy from “Black Moses” — one of the most sampled breakbeats in hip-hop history.

The same goes for the man’s weather-beaten soul croon, the stuff that may have sent panties southward back in the early ‘70s, but can seem self-consciously hip filtered through today’s ironic reflector lenses. Take the telephone number analogy in Good Love, with its funky refrain,  “Good love, 69-9-69.” Lines like “I’m listed in the Yellow Pages all around the world, 30 years’ experience in lovin’ sweet young girls” may seem a bit strained, but this was arguably the birth of the early “dozens,” calling out other soul singers and boasting of one’s lovin’ abilities (a practice that would transform into boasting of one’s killin’ abilities with the rise of less-innocent rap music).

Yes, Hayes’s voice was one of a kind, and whenever we hear it we can’t help thinking of Chef, the South Park School cafeteria commando who was quick with a quip, a moral lesson (“Children, I think we all learned something here today”), or a semi-pornographic soul ballad. It’s true: when you hear the longing growl in By The Time I Get to Phoenix, you immediately flash on Chef singing his love song to lunch snacks, Salty Chocolate Balls. In the soul ballad department, Hayes ran parallel to Barry White — both traded in string-wrapped numbers with chugging beats and basso voices; but for my money, Isaac Hayes was the innovator, rearranging pop songs by Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach,  The Jackson 5 and even Glen Campbell into lavish productions, full of orchestral touches, acid-drenched guitar generally pulsing through the center. It was a potent musical fusion, and it hasn’t aged a bit, especially on the aforementioned  “Hot Buttered Soul” (1969) and “Black Moses” (1971). Whereas ‘70s funk tended to speed things up — an exaggerated four-on-the-floor tendency that led directly to disco — Hayes slowed it all down, exploring minor changes, adding embellishments and gospel choruses, in the way that Motown man Marvin Gaye explored urban decay in his string-washed “What’s Going On?”

I recall watching Hayes a few years back on David Letterman leading a full funk orchestra — horns, strings, drummers, percussion, bass and scratching guitar — through a 10-minute Theme from Shaft. He didn’t need to do much but growl the first insinuating lines (“Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine with all the chicks?”) to get his point across, but there he was, directing the band, calling out the count-offs by hand, obviously enjoying the role of conductor. For good or bad, when you think of blaxploitation cinema or music, you think of Theme from Shaft.

But there was much else going on in Hayes’s music. Take a cut like Ike’s Mood, an instrumental from the 1970 release, “To Be Continued…” There’s little in funk music, then or now, to compare it to. Opening with a circling horn riff, it settles into an insistent trip-hop bass line and downtempo beat, before exploring piano variations on the theme, then dropping in flute lines and string enhancements, finally building to an orchestral climax before stripping away the instruments one by one and shifting to a smooth funk-soul fade. Nobody else was doing music like this.

But perhaps Hayes will be more remembered more by this generation for his abrupt departure from South Park, after apparent differences with creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone over the humor directed at Scientology, particularly an episode depicting Tom Cruise holed up in a closet with fellow celebrity Scientologists. According to Wikipedia, Stone wrote a response to the actor’s exit saying Hayes — a Scientologist — “has no problem — and he’s cashed plenty of checks — with our show making fun of Christians, Muslims, Mormons or Jews.” Stone added the creators had “never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin.”

That’s no way to remember one of the great soul innovators of the past half century. Rather, it’s interesting to note that Hayes, released from his South Park contract, was recently in the middle of filming a history of Stax Records called Soul Men with — it’s funny how these things work — comedian Bernie Mac. Hayes died of complications from a stroke one day after Mac passed away.