Isaac Hayes' Soul Symphony

Considering the size and scale of 'Hot Buttered Soul'

Greetings music lovers and Happy New Year! I hope this post finds you at the end of what I wish has been a relaxing, enjoyable and restorative holiday season.

My first essay of 2025 touches on an album where I don’t think it is hyperbole to call it momentus. Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul from 1969 represented a huge leap into the stoplight for Hayes as well as a transition for Stax Records from gritty Memphis soul to something way more expansive. It remains a daring and astonishing recording, and I hope that comes through in what I have written. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts as well. Don’t be shy and please drop a comment.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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There are albums that retain a daring vitality long after they were recorded, released, received, reviewed and then canonized. I think it comes down to the sense that the act of creating the LP involved tossing aside established rules and in their place, putting into practice new ideas in how music could be made and presented to the public. If the ideas were confirmed to be good ones, they birthed rules that would eventually be discarded as well.

There are many records that fit this description. Here are five that come to mind: Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home (the obligatory au courant Dylan reference), Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out, the Velvet Underground and Nico and Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul. Each was, in a way, a rupture with both the past and the present day. Each bursts with a proposition that is realized with freshness, rejecting accepted dogmas of the time or throwing away the rules completely. The latter is what strikes me as what continues to make Hot Buttered Soul feel almost like an artefact from another planet.

When viewed from a certain perspective, that such an album would be released on Stax Records and would be recorded by Isaac Hayes seems almost miraculous. Prior to its release in June 1969, Hayes was a presence at Stax who was heard but rarely seen. Starting as a session player for the Memphis label and then forming an important songwriting and producing partnership with David Porter, Hayes was one of Stax’s most consequential figures.

For example, if there’s a piano heard in addition to the organ on a cut featuring Booker T. & the MGs during the time Stax had a distribution deal with Atlantic, it more than likely was Hayes playing the keys. He does so on Carla Thomas’ ‘B-A-B-Y,’ which he wrote with Porter. It was their second big hit, coming a few months after Sam & Dave’s ‘Hold On, I’m Comin’.’

Hayes and Porter’s work with the dynamic Sam Moore and Dave Prater is justly celebrated and can be found not only on hits like ‘Soul Man’ and ‘I Thank You’ but also on deeper cuts like ‘I Take What I Want,’ ‘You Got Me Hummin’,’ ‘Wrap It Up’ and ‘When Something’s Wrong With My Baby.’

The first disc of the 2017 collection The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976) provides a broad overview of Hayes’ work as a cog in the Stax machine. Highlights include the Astors’ ‘Candy,’ from 1965 and co-written with Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the MGs, with its clever quote from the ‘On the Trail’ section of Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite, the in-the-pocket gotta-gotta of William Bell's ‘Never Like This Before’ and selections from Hayes’ brief association with Charlie Rich.

In its early days, Stax was the earthier, grittier counterpoint to Motown. Both had pan-racial appeal—catch any clip from Stax’s Europe package tour of 1967 and see a crowd fired up by the sound of the sweet soul music. When Hayes was involved, there would be the occasional sweetening that hinted at something that he would in a few years fully and sometimes exhaustively explore. Thomas’ ‘B-A-B-Y’ is a good example of this. Hear Hayes’ recurring amen piano passage—churchy for sure, but also elegant—and consider these lyrics in the bridge: “whenever the sun don’t shine / you throw out the lifeline.”

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And then there’s the case of his debut album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, recorded in January 1968 and released two months later. Recorded at the prompting of Al Bell, Stax’s executive vice president, it bears no resemblance to the Stax sound at the time beyond the presence of Hayes as well as Donald “Duck” Dunn and Al Jackson Jr. of Booker T. & the MGs. Except for a mellow, compact cover of the standard ‘When I Fall in Love,’ the album is a late-night, unstructured jam session, the ideas flowing organically from one to another. Muddy Waters’ ‘I Just Want to Make Love To You’ shifts to B.B. King’s ‘Rock Me Baby.’ Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing’s ‘Going to Chicago’ morphs into Erroll Garner’s (by way of Johnny Mathis) ‘Misty.’ Both performances blow past the three-minute mark.

‘Precious, Precious’ opens the album with a two-and-three-quarter minute excerpt of a 19-minute workout on a gospel figure that twists and turns on its own seemingly inextinguishable momentum. The excerpt was released as a single. Unsurprisingly, it went nowhere as did the album. It must have seem baffling in the age of Wilson Pickett, Eddie Floyd and Johnnie Taylor. Today, it is an astonishingly prescient if unassuming document, foreshadowing not only something like the similar sounding First Take, the debut album by Roberta Flack released a year later, but also in how Isaac Hayes would suddenly be propelled into a defining voice of Stax’s second era.

That was prompted by “the Soul Explosion,” Al Bell’s gambit to quickly flood the market with product after Atlantic retained the label’s collected works in the aftermath of the collapse of Stax’s distribution deal with Atlantic. Twenty-seven albums and 30 singles were released in just over half a year. Hayes’ contribution is arguably the crown jewel of this effort, launching Stax as an independent label.

That Hot Buttered Soul was to be a provocative LP is signified by its cover, focusing as it does on Hayes’ shaved head and black sunglasses in the foreground with a gold chain around his neck in the background. His face is nowhere to be seen. His name and the album title are discreetly listed on the top right-hand corner. The opening sounds of the album confirm its ambition.

It begins with a snare bomb by drummer Willie Hall of the Bar-Kays that leads into a slow groove anchored by Hayes on organ and Funkadelic’s Harold Beane on guitar. Just as it seems to resolve itself into the opening verse of Hayes’ cover of Bacharach and David’s ‘Walk On By,’ the groove is pared back and continues. There is the odd obligato by Beane and the occasional stray questioning string line. The primary groove then picks up again. A chorus of female singers are heard in the background and Hayes plays a few sharp bursts on the organ. Again, the expected is being delayed and then, Hayes finally is heard singing, “if you see me walking down the street…” It takes two minutes, 12 seconds to get to this point. Hayes is just getting started.

Slowing down the tempo of a well-known of a well-known song was not new. Vanilla Fudge built a career out of doing so. But what Hayes did was not simply ground the metronome to a halt. He took the foundation of ‘Walk On By’ and proceeded to build an edifice, adding layers of brass and strings, taking the song’s hooks and riffs and expanding on them, adding instrumental passages including a garantum coda so that after Hayes begins to sing, there’s another 10 minutes of music to savour. He had already shown himself to be completely unafraid of taking running times to the extreme but with ‘Walk On By,’ he showed he could do so in a much more methodical manner. I would go further. With it, Hayes created symphonic soul.

I’m reasonably familiar with classical music and wonder how much of the structure of Hayes’ recasting of ‘Walk On By,’ with its repeated interludes, development of that material and the evolving coda, approximates sonata form. I’m sure it doesn’t but it’s an intriguing thought to have in mind while listening to it.

At the very least, Hot Buttered Soul does invite a comparison to symphonic form being as it is comprised of four cuts totaling about 45 minutes of music. ‘Walk On By’ has the might, power and weight of the opening movement of such warhorses as Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony or Tchaikovsky’s Fourth. Release comes with what follows.

The word ‘Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic’ was one Hayes made up. The song is charged with sexual tension, the lyrics being a series of somewhat obscure double entendres. If there’s a sense that Hayes's vocal hangs back a bit on ‘Walk On By’—almost as if he was mindful that the real attraction there was the sound—he is now in the foreground. He digs into the beat. He accentuates it with his rich, deep baritone. The effect is like hearing the kind of song that was Hayes’ (and David Porter’s) speciality with Sam & Dave taken to the limit. That comes through the six-minute piano improvisation by Hayes that stretches ‘Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic’ to the end of Hot Buttered Soul’s opening side.

To be clear (and not trying to be the jazz police here), Hayes’ solo is primarily a series of riffs but they do build on each other. They are hypnotic, working in the same way as in Joe Sample's statement on the Jazz Crusaders’ live version of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ from 1967 if a little more elementally in Hayes’ case. The climax, with a rollicking series of propulsive chords, has an inevitability that obscures that it most likely had been worked out before the tape rolled.

‘One Woman’ is similar in feel to a symphonic scherzo. It is the only performance on the album whose length is reasonably close to being radio friendly. Even still, it takes its time to unfold its age-old scenario: a man torn between wife and mistress and torn apart as a result. The production highlights the drama even as Hayes perhaps doesn’t really sell it. This type of adult-based soul points to the production Hayes would lavish generously upon Billy Eckstine (Mr. B was one of Hayes’ heroes) for his 1971 album Stormy as well as in how wide swathes of soul in the seventies would sound.

No matter what, ‘One Woman’’s destiny was as an afterthought, easily and instantly overshadowed by what followed. To stretch Jim Webb’s ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ to almost 19 minutes remains audacious and outrageous, even on an album that so bravenly pushes the envelope. Webb’s song—the first of his to be recorded (Johnny Rivers in 1966)—is an achingly poignant travelogue of heartbreak illustrating the growing distance between the one who has reluctantly left and the one who is about realize she has been left. It compactly says all that needs to be said. Or does it?

It takes eight minutes and 39 seconds for Hayes to begin the first verse. He spends that time setting up the song. He does so through what might properly be called a monologue but to call it anything but a rap is to rob it of its inventiveness. Hayes builds a specific scenario that motivates the action of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix.’ The theme is “the power of love.” It is a force that has ensnared the protagonist. At several points, Hayes croons offhandedly, “I cannot change.”

Before his makes his fateful journey to Arizona and beyond, Hayes pinpoints the number of times the protagonist previously tried to leave at seven. The elaborate setup precludes one grafting his or her own experience of leaving an unhealthy relationship onto the song. Concerning, yes, but when Hayes sings the first line and Hall settles into a backbeat—the rap is spoken against a drone of organ, bass and ride cymbal—it is breathtaking to finally hear Webb’s lyrics. Using one final reference to symphonic form, what Hayes has concocted is a finale of an unfathomable scope.

It crests on a brass figure that punctuates a great leap forward in soul music. The entering of a new era for Stax and the emergence of Isaac Hayes as a bold artist. And even as ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ is at extreme length, it doesn’t feel that long. It needs all that time to makes its point. That is the magic of musicmaking at its highest order. The final daring stroke that continues to make Hot Buttered Soul momentous. It still needs to be heard to be believed.