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‘Walk On By’ and ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ from the groundbreaking Hot Buttered Soul, ‘I Stand Accused’ from The Isaac Hayes Movement, ‘Our Day Will Come and ‘The Look Of Love’ from To Be Continued were cases in point – they were extraordinary recreations, some of which contained lengthy monologues before transforming into masterfully hypnotic extended grooves.
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There didn’t seem to be any three minute classic Hayes couldn’t stretch into fifteen, all the while keeping you captivated, often hypnotised, until the very last note (He once famously quipped that this allowed radio DJs sufficient time to nip out for a coffee!) By the time of Black Moses, his music had become almost exclusively about those extravagant embellishments which had become progressively more ambitious in scope. Despite his hugely successful songwriting partnership with David Porter which yielded major hits for Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor and many other Stax artists in the late 60s, Ike had established himself first and foremost as a masterful interpreter of others’ songs. Foolish of me, for paradoxically, when it came to the task of reworking others’ songs, there is no one I would have trusted more than Isaac Hayes. I had underestimated him, mistrusted him even. It seems my initial judgement of Hayes’ music had been grossly unfair. I had to have my secretary hold my hand while I was singing tunes like ‘Help Me Love’.” Indeed, on that particular track, one can hear him edge ever closer to emotional breakdown with a near deranged “ple-ea-ea-eaaaase” falsetto at 3:39 and again at 6:56, those ascending strings continuously strangled by the mournful brass tugging from below as if to hammer the point home: God, how hard it is to get up when you’re broken.
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I used to stand in front of the mic and cry. “Most of the titles were about relationships ending. “When I recorded Black Moses in 1971, my marriage was breaking up and I was broken-hearted,” he recounted to author Vivien Goldman. Yet as I was later to discover, Hayes recorded these songs during a wretched time in his personal life. In that sense Black Moses appeared to be a triumph of opulence over frugality, and artifice over sincerity. The confessions he whispered on ‘Ike’s Rap II’ (“I abused you, took advantage of you, used you selfishly”) existed only as the preamble to renewed utterances of seduction. And there, on his fifth studio album Black Moses, the velvet-voiced lothario was at it again. How else was I to read that sly smile on his lips and the kilo of gold hanging from his neck? I always suspected the ‘love woes’ of which he sang to be indulgent exercises in self pity, narcissistic, and possibly even imaginary altogether. Before immersing myself in his music in the early ‘90s, I had long imagined Isaac Hayes to have a penchant for sheepskin rugs and mirrored ceilings.
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