“Everybody’s got his own thing. Everybody’s got his way of doing a thing. Now we shall attempt to do a tune that is very popular. It was written by one of the great young songwriters of today. Now, I don’t know what he was thinking about or what inspired him to write this tune. But it’s a deep tune. There’s a deep meaning to this tune, because it shows you what the power of love can do. And I shall attempt here to do it my way, my own interpretation of it. Like I said, everybody’s got his own thing. I’m going to bring it on down to Soulsville…”
With this spoken, dramatic introduction to his landmark, nineteen-minute reworking of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” on his album Hot Buttered Soul, Isaac Hayes lifted the sights of Stax beyond the three-minute single into more complicated, extended musical territory. Modern love, it turns out, is a complicated thing, and Hayes on Hot Buttered Soul stuffed all the complications and contradictions, all the crescendos and letdowns, of modern love into modern soul music. Hot Buttered Soul brought it on down to Soulsville for real.
Isaac Hayes was not exactly unknown to the record-buying public, even if most of that public might not have known that they knew him, in 1969. Hayes’ name appeared alongside David Porter’s as co-songwriters behind some of Stax’s biggest hit records, including nearly all of Sam & Dave’s. But Buttered introduced other facets, such as Hayes the performer, the resonantly soulful pianist and organ player, and a vocalist who projected a distinct, prepossessing sense of cool; while Hayes the arranger, with the Bar-Kays as his band plus brass and strings from the Memphis Symphony, stretched and stroked only four songs into an entire album with extended introductions and nearly hypnotic instrumental passages thick with sweet strings and pungent guitar funk.
Hot Buttered Soul is renown for such journeys through the Burt Bacharach-Hal David classic “Walk on By” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” but my favorite part is actually Hayes’ double-fisted piano break over bass and drums in the almost painfully titled “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic.” This is one of Hayes’ most extended and exciting recorded piano solos, with the piano trio sweating out in throbbing rhythm the pumping gospel sound of Les McCann and Horace Silver, sweet as honey and smoking hot.
(By the way, the “great young” songwriter that Hayes refers to was Jimmy Webb. In addition to “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” Glen Campbell scored hits with Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” and “Gavelston,” as did the Fifth Dimension with his “Up Up and Away.” The combined brilliance of these three compositions almost lets Webb completely off the hook for “MacArthur Park.” Almost.)
Through Hot Buttered Soul, Hayes could enter the worldwide mainstream market more or less on his own terms. It was Stax’s first gold album and sold more than one million copies, unprecedented for an album that did not include the standard three-minute pop single. In fact, there were no singles on the Stax release schedule when this album started blowing up. It simultaneously landed in the Pop, R&B, Jazz AND Easy Listening chart (it bounced between the #1 and #2 spots on the Jazz album chart, for example, for nearly eight months!), upon which “Walk on By” and “Phoenix” were edited into a two-sided single. Each side cracked the Pop and R&B Top Forty.
“When I did Hot Buttered Soul, it was a selfish thing on my part. It was something I wanted to do,” Hayes once recalled. “Al (Bell) said, ‘However you want to do it.’ I didn’t give a damn if it didn’t sell because I was going for the true artistic side, rather than looking at it for monetary value. I had an opportunity to express myself no holds barred, no restrictions, and that’s why I did it. I took artistic and creative liberties. I felt what I had to say couldn’t be said in two minutes and thirty seconds. So I just stretched (the songs) out and milked them for everything they were worth.”
