Isaac Hayes – Hot Buttered Soul (1969)

The first sound you hear on Hot Buttered Soul is Bar-Kays drummer Willie Hall’s blunt, bodied strike of the snare, followed by two booming kicks. The duration of that sequence isn’t very long; it’s a mere second, maybe a little less, in length. Yet, in essence, those 3 hits of the drumset represent the calm before the storm, a dam about to burst at the seams.

What comes next is the flood. Those immortal strings, arranged by Hayes’ frequent collaborator Johnny Allen, envelop the sonic landscape, grandiose, weepy, overpowering, somber as they weave through the drums. Michael Toles’ work on the guitar is raw, powerful, like he’s throwing his soul into each of the strings. The bass, sampled by the likes of Biggie and MF DOOM, drips with sleaze in the way James Alexander plucks the strings. The backing singers act as a Greek chorus for Hayes’ pained lyrics. The song balances on the line between loud and quiet stunningly well, where strings, horns, winds, organs, guitars, and the backing vocals all swirl around Hayes, who stands in the center like he’s in the eye of the hurricane. It’s stunning, an orchestral vamp as far from the traditional Stax repertoire as could possibly be, adamantly pushing onwards as the band gets closer and closer to exploding into a freakout, finally tipping off the edge and fizzling out as the drums tic to the end.

This is “Walk On By”, Hayes’ brilliant reinterpretation of the Burt Bacharach standard, convoluted and warped into a 12 minute odyssey reaching heights funk had never dared to reach before. “Walk On By” is nothing short of high art, an ambitious, near avant-garde reimagining that exists on the outer boundaries of not just black music, but black art itself. It’s magnificent, a declaration of independence from the pressures black artists had often endured to create commercial successes, turning a Dionne Warwick hit into something grandiose and psychedelic through sheer willpower and creative vision alone. The song, and consequently Hot Buttered Soul, is the sound of Hayes getting up to the plate, taking a shot, and hitting it out of the park.

Of course, Hayes’ may have never even been in the dugout in the first place had things not gone the way they did for his label, Stax. Early into his career, Hayes had been employed as a writer and session player for the label, writing with David Porter for artists like Sam & Dave, producing alongside house band Booker T & The M.G.’s. However, he had often been overlooked as an artist on the roster, in the shadow of Stax stalwarts like Otis Redding, The Bar-Kays, and Carla Thomas.

1966 and ‘67 were 2 years of highs for Stax, as their session players were finally put on a payroll thanks to executive Al Bell, and some of their finest artists had gone on a successful European tour. However, 1967 was punctuated by nothing short of utter devastation; their biggest star, Otis Redding, and 4 members of The Bar-Kays perished that December, crashing their plane into Lake Monona. On top of that, the union between Stax and Atlantic had splintered, leaving the Stax back catalogs behind in Atlantic’s vaults, losing the likes of Sam & Dave to Atlantic.

As big as these losses were for the label, they’d end up being a blessing in disguise, ushering a new wave of musicians, spearheaded by the long-waiting Hayes. His largely improvised, jazzy solo debut, Presenting Isaac Hayes, had been panned from the get go, and had seemingly doomed him to work on the sidelines for the rest of his musical career. However, following Stax’s devastating series of losses, in an effort by new Stax VP Al Bell to make up for the talent lost and grow their depleted catalog, every artist on the label, Hayes included, was ordered to go and release a new album. Hayes took this as an open invitation to indulge his most daring ambitions, free from needing the sort of commercial success that his debut had failed to attain, famously remarking “I didn’t give a damn it if didn’t sell, I was going for the true, artistic side… What I had to say couldn’t be said in two minutes and 30 seconds.”

And so we come to Hot Buttered Soul, a 45-minute long exploration into the wildest of Hayes’ imaginations. The first thing you notice is the iconic cover, an overhead shot taking in his bald head, his shades, and his hefty gold chains, radiating stateliness and suave with spades. Then there’s the tracklist, with a single track not exceeding the 9-minute mark. The album is Hayes on his own terms, self assured, audacious, and absolutely enthralling.

Past “Walk On By” comes the sole original number, the mouthful of kick-ass soul that is  “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic”. Look into his lyrics, and at first they read like a man’s raw, untamed desire for a mystical woman. Read a little further, and the druggy undertones become clear. Hayes’ had taken psychedelics in the past, and the lyrics seem to indicate a dependence on heroin, lines like “your sweet phalanges, know how to squeeze” seemingly dead giveaways. As for the music, it’s as electric as the rush of the first plunge of the syringe into the vein. Testing the water with a few plinks of piano and some hats, the song falls right into a raw funk groove, with a slick riff strung out by the indomitable pair of Alexander and Toles. With Hayes playing the keys like he’s blind, we’re reminded of his incredible musicianship once again, levitating above the foundation set by the Bar-Kays. After his verses, he bows out, letting his piano work carry the song, only supplementing the hypnotic filigrees with his euphoric wails, moans, and yelps. It’s another brilliantly ambitious piece, one that proves Hayes as a brilliant arranger in his own right. It oozes blackness in spades, evoking James Brown in Hayes’ brilliant vocal performance and the jam-band-like feel of Sly and The Family Stone, later sampled everyone from DJ Quik to Public Enemy, who lifted a piano chop for their marvelous “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos”. “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” is as radical as anything Public Enemy did, raw and caked in grime and sludge.

The juxtaposition makes the next track, “One Woman”, so much more impactful. The song, written by Charles Chalmers, is an inverse of the last two numbers, slower, absent of all the funky grit and grandiosity. As the shortest song on the album, clocking in at just over 5 minutes, it’s the closest thing to a conventional song here, Hayes at his most tender and passionate. His lyrics detail a man caught between two choices, his loving wife and the coffee-shop worker he’s cheating on her with. With the passionate detail he uses to describe both women, Hayes manages to make himself sound sympathetic; he’s not as much a womanizing scumbag as he is a lost soul caught between two sides of his heart. His croon is charming, making the song less an admission of infidelity, more a love song to two different women. Of course, with the swooning backing, it’s easy to ignore these meanings. Strings, pianos, guitars, horns, and twinkling chimes all embellish the song, adding beauty to Hayes’ words, ebbing and flowing through the musical ups and downs. The backing vocals are particularly amazing, undeniably soulful, evoking the heavenliness of a church choir so well that the track begins sounding like Hayes is delivering his words in a confessional booth. It’s maybe the most accessible song here, arranged immaculately, blooming into something both radiant and intimate.

If “One Woman” was the most straightforward song on Hot Buttered Soul, the 18-minute closer, a cover of Jimmy Webb’s “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, is easily the least, an audacious reinterpretation of the famous torch song. For starters, Hayes doesn’t even start singing until about the halfway through. For the first 9 minutes, there are only 3 things in frame: the metronome-like ride cymbal, a single syncopated note on the bass played over and over, and Hayes’ gravelly voice telling a story. There’s a man, and he’s head over heels in love with this woman, his wife. She knows she’s adored, but she’s the kind of woman to take that kindness and mistake it for weakness. So, she cheats. And she cheats and cheats and cheats. And one day, when he comes home sick, he discovers it for himself. He says he’s going to leave, seven different times, and every single time he finds himself running right back to her. But that eighth time, he says no, with tears in his eyes, and heads on the road, in his 1965 Ford, to anywhere but there, anywhere he can escape.

Suddenly, everything comes into focus. The snare drops, the bass starts changing notes, and an organ starts creeping below the whole thing. The strings swing up, and Hayes isn’t speaking anymore. He’s crooning the original songs lyrics, and these stunning winds surround his words, the words of a man leaving behind a woman who doesn’t love him as much as he loves her. For the next 7 minutes, it keeps pushing farther, growing and growing, adding in horns, organs, and whatever else it can, a fanfare for a heartbroken man. The song finally peters out, and we get one final shot of this miserable man, looking broken, devastated as he stands in the pouring rain. It’s a poetic note to end on, but Hayes doesn’t let go so easily. One last time, he throttles the organs, letting the drums freak out before the pianos come to close it out, letting the storm rage on before it finally clears.Hot Buttered Soul is filled with moments like these, moments that are as poetic as they are euphoric. The album turns 50 this year, and yet, in the maybe 10-to-15 times I’ve listened to it while writing this review, it still sounds as radical as it must have when it first came out. It inspired contemporaries from Curtis Mayfield to George Clinton, as well as future generations of black artists, from Biggie to Beyoncé. Hot Buttered Soul is a record that remains transcendent, a true document of black excellence and brilliance from Black Moses himself.  

by Raghav Raj