Rufus Thomas, “The Breakdown (Part 1)”
Single originally released July 1971
From the album Did You Heard Me?
#31 Pop, #2 R&B single

Stax Records didn’t come much better in 1971 than Rufus Thomas’ “The Breakdown (Part 1),” which Thomas also included in his Wattstax set.

The songwriters? Three of the label’s best and most prolific: Rufus Thomas with Sir Mack Rice and Eddie Floyd, a star Stax performer himself.

The producer? Tom Nixon, one of the hired guns that Al Bell imported to expand the label’s sound after Bell bought out co-owner / -founder Estelle Axton and began directing Stax operations with Jim Stewart in 1969. Nixon was an experienced hand with Thomas who produced his ‘69 single “Do the Funky Chicken” (#5 on the R&B singles chart) and Thomas’ #1 R&B single “Do the Push and Pull,” released in October 1970.

The supporting musicians? Isaac Hayes’ band, with former Bar-Kays drummer Willie Hall nailing down the rock-solid funky foundation along with bassist Ronald Hudson, two keyboard players (Lester Snell and Marvell Thomas, Rufus’ son) and two guitar players (Harold Beane and Charles “Skip” Pitts, the same guitarist who ravishes Hayes’ Live at Sarah Tahoe).

The singer? Stax stalwart, the world’s oldest and longest-living teenager and quite possibly “The Funkiest Man Alive,” Rufus Thomas.

And the result? A slam-dunk of trademark Memphis funk, with Thomas riding the beat hard and slow right from one of the greatest opening lines he ever committed to wax: “Honey, baby, I’ve been told/ You know how to shake your butter bowl…”  This push-and-pull rhythm track sounds closer than most of Thomas’ hits to the rubbery funk with which James Brown consistently blew up the soul / R&B landscape throughout the early 1970s; Thomas’ vocal performance, like all his best work, ain’t nothing but a party. 

(Thomas and Nixon recorded “Do the Funky Penguin,” also part of Thomas’ Wattstax set, with essentially this same band.)

The third, final disc in the newly re-minted Wattstax: The Living Word benefit opens with some seriously soulful bumpin’ and grinding: Little Milton’s “Open the Door to Your Heart” and “Backfield in Motion” by Mel & Tim, which is unusual because they recorded this hit for Bamboo Records (owned and operated out of Chicago by Gene “The Duke of Earl” Chandler) in 1969, before the vocal duo signed with Stax.

After Albert King nails down his version of Howlin’ Wolf’s blues standard “Killing Floor,” CD three seems primarily noteworthy for sets by two artists who had been with Stax since its very beginning, Carla Thomas and her poppa Rufus.
 
Carla’s set features some of her most familiar and best-selling Stax singles, “B-A-B-Y,” “I Like What You’re Doing (To Me)” and her breakout hit “Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes),” for which the crowd seems to roar in fond remembrance twelve years after its 1960 release. Her set demonstrates how self-assured and polished she had grown since that fawn-eyed debut, and ends with a song she wrote to express her gratitude for her success, “I Have a God Who Loves.”

Poppa Rufus’ subsequent hurricane of rubbery songs named for energetic dances whips the LA Coliseum crowd into a frenzy like almost no other force of nature could. These include tributes to two of his favorite winged, feathered creatures, “Do the Funky Chicken” and “Do the Funky Penguin,” bawdy nursery rhyme lyrics stuffed into thick hot slices of pure, wicked rhythm and horny horns.

Of course, disc three also delivers the ultimate Wattstax highlight, Isaac Hayes’ live performance of “Theme from ‘Shaft’” burning with crackling rhythm guitar and percussion.

David Porter, “Can’t See You When I Want To”
Released April 1970
From the album Gritty, Groovin’ & Getting’ It
#29 R&B, #105 Pop single

Porter launched his post-Isaac Hayes solo career in 1970 by re-doing a single he had first recorded for Stax in 1965. “Can’t See You When I Want To” was written in the early days of the Hayes-Porter songwriting partnership (though Hayes for some reason is credited through the pseudonym “Ed Lee”) and this first solo single served as the centerpiece of Porter’s set at Wattstax.

By the time Porter re-recorded “Can’t See You When I Want To,” Hayes was well on his way to solo superstardom - so far down this superstar path, in fact, that even though he nominally worked on the new rhythm track for Porter with the Bar-Kays “house band,” while Porter cut the lead vocal, overdubbed the background strings and vocals, and did the final mix, Porter listed Hayes as the session’s producer. “I didn’t put my name down as producer even though I did most of the work on the album,” Porter later recalled, “because I wanted clout. I needed his name attached to mine in my mind.”

This studio single version seems to suspend Porter between male soul vocal generations: The passion and strength in his vocal often whips up the primal urgency of an Otis Redding shout. But its horns, strings, background vocals and crystalline piano, which sort of swirl around that vocal like a musical garland Porter extends to his unrequited lady love, grow into an early example of the type of “quiet storm” soul ballad that made Teddy Pendergrass, for example, a superstar of ’70s soul.

But no matter what style you call it, or whose name came attached to it, “Can’t See You When I Want To” is one of David Porter’s best Stax singles.

The second disc in the recent Wattstax: The Living Word concert documentary / soundtrack highlights performances by two artists extremely important to the label’s prospects in 1972.

As soul music transitioned from the 1960s into the ’70s, the Bar-Kays more or less assumed the role of label “house band” from Booker T. & the MGs, serving as the rhythm section, for example, on Isaac Hayes’ landmark Hot Buttered Soul and Music from the Motion Picture ‘Shaft’. Their set opens with “Son of ‘Shaft’,” well-intentioned if overenthusiastic psychedelic soul. “Son” segues into the seething “Feel It,” which features colorful audience participation tips (”We’re gonna give everybody a chance to play with what you’ve got. You ain’t got nothng to play with, reach over to the person next to you and ask ‘em if you can use theirs…”).

Psychedelic rock-funk with electric guitar sprawled throughout (very like the Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing,” especially its wobbly horn chart), “In the Hole” sets up the Bar-Kays’ finale, which honors “the father of the Memphis sound, Otis Redding,” by stomping out “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” 

Then this second disc demonstrates what soul history might call “the David Porter solo push.” Porter co-composed many of the label’s ’60s hits with Isaac Hayes, but when Hayes’ solo career skyrocketed in the early 1970s it stranded Porter without his partner. Porter released romantic soul music under the unfortunate marketing guise of a kind of “black Valentino,” which is how he’s introduced to the Wattstax stage to perform two ballads (”Ain’t That Loving You (For More Reasons Than One)” and “Can’t See You When I Want To”) with a seductive gentlemanly charm that bridges the musical generations between ’60s soul shouters such as Redding and ’70s soul balladeers such as Teddy Pendergrass.