BLOWY SHIRTS

I have always found Isaac Hayes’ twelve-minute version of “Walk on By” entrancing. It carries a sense of tragedy that the lyrics don’t warrant–and it’s irrationally long. At some point I learned that Hayes had recorded it after taking a year-long hiatus early in his career. Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination–which he almost witnessed first-hand–had drained him of any desires to create.

It’s not that I began hearing Hot Buttered Soul as an elegy but it made sense to me that this album full of unusually long, meandering, beautifully redemptive songs had been produced under such awful circumstances. And then I remembered that a sample of “Walk on By” (and Hayes himself) provided the spine for “I Can’t Go To Sleep,” one of the Wu-Tang Clan’s most paranoid songs. Ghostface sobs; the record gets spun back, violently, as though trying to return to sometime else; Hayes is spectral, a guiding star. And there was King, too, in RZA’s half-lunatic, half-prophet verse:

I can’t go to sleep, I can’t shut my eyes
They shot the father at his mom’s building seven times
They shot Malcolm in the chest, front of his little seeds
Jesse watched as they shot King on the balcony
Exported Marcus Garvey cause he tried to spark us
With the knowledge of ourselves and our forefathers

Anyhow, both are songs I listen to on MLK Day (now that it’s way too creepy to listen to Bill Cosby’s “Martin’s Funeral”). Here are a few pages of a talk I gave like ten years ago where I tried to enunciate that sense of history and aspiration that I heard in “Walk on By”:

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“Walk on By” is the lead track off Isaac Hayes’ 1969 album Hot buttered soul. There is something unnerving about how long it is, by how it manages to be so deeply anguished and pained, yet how it manages to avoid feeling overwrought. There are no wasted gestures over the course of these twelve minutes, nothing that doesn’t sound completely and utterly essential to the full logic of the song. Perhaps this is why “Walk on by” has been sampled so frequently by hip-hop artists big and small, for it expresses so much in its shuddering organ riffs, swan-like glide of strings and shrapnel blast of guitar.

In the late 1960s, Hayes was a highly successful songwriter for Stax, the famed Memphis soul label which was the only real challenger to Berry Gordon’s Motown empire. While the label was never, like Motown, black-owned, Stax was a beacon of multiracial cohabitation, at a time when such a thing was still unusual, from its staff to its integrated backing bands, and they all toiled away in a tough, tough town.

On the afternoon of April 4, Hayes, who was primarily a songwriter, was on his way to the Stax studios to work on a Sam and Dave recording session. He had initially planned on fetching Sam and Dave’s sax player, who was staying at the Lorraine Motel, on the way to Stax. But at the last minute, his wife needed to use their car, so he called a cab instead and instructed the sax player to do the same and just meet him at the studio. Hayes heard about King’s assassination in the cab on this way to the studio. When he arrived, he heard the news. Devastation. That night, a curfew was imposed in Memphis, but those who were already at Stax were allowed to work through the night.

For his part, Hayes lost his ability to work at all. “It affected me for a whole year,” he later explained to the historian Rob Bowman in Bowmans’ remarkable Soulsville USA. “I could not create properly. I was so bitter and so angry. I thought, What can I do?”

Hayes took an indefinite hiatus, toying with the idea of retiring altogether. In 1969, after thinking about how becoming a successful artist would empower him to make a difference, he returned. But he did not pick up where he had left off, with the tepid jazz-inflected soul of Presenting Isaac Hayes, his 1968 solo debut. Rather, Hayes’ comeback album reimagined the process and craft of soul music, as well as the possibilities of the soul economy. Stax, as with all soul labels of the time, relied upon the seven-inch vinyl single. Soul albums were generally cobbled-together collections of previously released singles.

Hayes shuddered at the idea of constraining his craft to the two to three minute song form and he created an album which flaunted the convention of the single. Released in the summer of 1969, Hot buttered Soul featured Hayes and the Bar-Kays on only four tracks: an eighteen minute version of Glen Campbell’s 1967 hit “By the Time I get to Phoenix,” a twelve-minute version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk on By,” a nine minute track "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” and a five minute track by his musicians called “One Woman.”

Hayes explains: “When I did Hot Buttered Soul, it was a selfish thing on my part. It was something I wanted to do. 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.”

In a very basic way, “By the Time” and “Walk on By” were characteristic of the trends of the time—most soul records at the time featured cover versions of songs one might today consider schmaltzy or safe—anyone who has browsed sixties albums knows of the ubiquitous funky cover of “Wichita Lineman.”  But Hayes’ choice to make half of the songs on his comeback album these covers was bizarre, as was their expansive sitcom-length. What Hayes and the Bar-Kays did to these songs was an act of creative destruction. The songs were torn apart, note-by-note, limb-by-limb, and in place of the quotidian pop heartbreak of “Walk on By,” we are left with a nine minute exorcism that smolders and writhes, an epic mourning of a lost love supreme.

Hayes explains: “What it was, was the real me. I mean, okay, the real me had written those other songs but they were being written for other people. As for me wanting to express myself as an artist, that’s what Hot buttered Soul was. Although I was a songwriter, there were some songs that I loved, that really touched me. I wanted to do them the way that I wanted to do them. I took them apart, dissected them, and put them back together and made them my personal tunes. I took creative license to do that. By doing them my way, it almost made them like totally different songs all over again.”

Again, Hayes describes the songs as attempts to communicate something about form. These songs were a radical departure from mainstream R&B at the time, and Hayes essentially created the idea of the modern soul album, the hourlong statement of purpose-slash-dream world, with Hot Buttered Soul. These liberally defined “covers” swabbed these safe recognizable tunes in a historical moment of depression and longing, of a profound kind of heartbreak far grander than what most young lovers might recognize.

Drawing back, Hayes’ statements nest within a larger context of black and white ownership, for mere days before King’s assassination, Stax had been finalizing a deal to sell its assets to a Los Angeles corporation called Gulf and Western, which already had diverse holdings in the film and music industries. In the aftermath of King’s assassination, Hayes observes that he became more “rebellious. I was militant. When Dr. King was killed I flipped and I just did a lot of reevaluating…” Hayes spearheaded an effort to hire more local African Americans and to improve the working conditions of longtime Stax employees.

And implicit in all of this, I think, is a rejection of the trajectory of pop music as it then existed. The final instrumental breakdown takes five minutes—as long as two sturdy pop singles—and  Hayes’ own vocals are probably the least memorable ingredient of the song. Instead, one is stung by Michael Toles’ savage guitar in the first ninety seconds, and haunted by the way Marvell Thomas’ triumphant, almost rapturous organ solo over the song’s last five minutes tries unsuccessfully to vanquish the song’s darkness. The song ends with a whimper, Thomas seemingly collapsing at the keys and Willie Hall banging out a stiffly efficient drum break that rattles to a weary close.

The history of culture is made solid through objects, records, books, speeches, but the image of a band in a recording session, that vision of democracy, of a struggle triumphant, is where the recovery of King began for Hayes–when depression was not a force that crippled but rather one of possibility, a pause for patient yet forceful deliberation.

Over the previous twelve minutes, Hayes and the Bar-Kays had poured themselves into the moment, and “Walk on By,” was an act of formal resistance smuggled within a safe pop title, changed everything. It imagines the possibility of resolution, partly because the song is allowed the space to meander and veer off path, to deal with both the beauty and hostility of the moment. There is the logic of the music itself—the interlocking of notes, the tightness of the rhythm section, the texture of the melody. And then there is the sense one gets, as a listener or as someone who has played in a band, that everything just feels right.