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| Isaac Hayes |
| Born August 20, 1942 in Covington Tennessee, just outside of Memphis. Hayes would help put Memphis on the musical map numerous times throughout his long career. Raised by his grandparents in an impoverished rural setting, Isaac ran errands, cut lawns, delivered groceries and wood to homes for fuel, cleaned bricks for two cents apiece, and shined shoes on Beale Street. The same street he now dominates as a musical legend. Isaac began singing in the church at the age of five, but stopped when his voice cracked at puberty. He was persuaded by his high school guidance counselor to enter a talent show in 1958, singing "Looking Back," a Nat King Cole hit. "When I finished, the house was on its feet, man, and I was a hit." Overnight the girls, even those a couple of grades ahead, were sending lunch invitations. "Career change! So I started pursuing music big time." He then joined the school band, learning to play the saxophone from Lucian Coleman (brother of hard-bopper George Coleman). Hayes then began singing gospel with a group called the Morning Stars, doo-wop with Sir Isaac & the Doo-Dads, the Teen Tones, and the Ambassadors, even trying some jazz with the Ben Branch house band at Curry's Club Tropicana out in north Memphis. He then joined Calvin Valentine and The Swing Cats as a singer and saxman, and did some prom dates with The Missiles. He took a crash course in piano playing by literally faking it for the first time on a New Year's Eve gig at the Southern Club with Jeb Stuart, "because I needed the money." Isaac finally graduated at age 21 from Manassas High School in Memphis, Class of 1962. An earlier drop-out of school delayed his graduation, and left him deeply ingrained with a sense of education and literacy. 1962 was the year after the first releases began to trickle out of a new label called Stax Records, part of the Satellite Records company and Satellite Record Store that started back in 1958, housed in the old Capitol Theatre on the corner of College & McLemore. Hayes had won seven college scholarships for vocal music that he chose not to pursue. Instead, he became adept enough at the piano to land a job with baritone saxophonist bandleader Floyd Newman at the Plantation Inn across the river in West Arkansas. Newman was also the staff baritone musician on most Stax recording sessions and was up for a recording date himself with his own working group in late 1963: "Frog Stomp," the only solo single ever cut by Newman, was co-written by and features Hayes (on piano), the first major notch in his discography at Stax Records. His first paid sessions were with Otis Redding in early 1964, and Hayes was soon a ubiquitous presence at Stax. Not long after, singer and lyricist David Porter suggested to Hayes that they collaborate as songwriters. After a few modest starts for Porter ("Can't See You When I Want To"), Carla Thomas "How Do You Quit [Someone You Love]"), and Sam & Dave ("I Take What I Want"), "everything just blew up big time," Hayes says. As writers (under the name 'Soul Children'), arrangers and producers, the Hayes-Porter duo became Stax's hottest commodity starting in 1966. Sam & Dave's "You Don't Know Like I Know," "Hold On! I'm Comin'," "Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody," "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby," "I Thank You," "Wrap It Up," and the R&B Grammy award-winning "Soul Man" were among some of the 200+ Hayes-Porter compositions that became standards. For Carla Thomas they did "Let Me Be Good To You," "B-A-B-Y" and "Something Good (Is Going To Happen To You)." Johnnie Taylor scored with their "I Had a Dream" and "I Got To Love Somebody's Baby." And Mable John's one and only hit was the Hayes-Porter "Your Good Thing (Is About To End)." Hayes' work with Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Booker T & the MG's, the Mar-Keys, the Bar-Kays, Rufus & Carla Thomas, and virtually the entire Stax roster created what was known as the "Memphis Sound." It transformed popular music, was absorbed by everyone from Elvis Presley and Ray Charles to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. History notes that, with the exception of Booker T & the MG's, Isaac Hayes has worked on more Stax sessions than any other musician. His own solo career began with "Presenting Isaac Hayes." His debut album was recorded as a trio (with MG's bassist Duck Dunn and drummer Al Jackson) in the wee hours of the morning after an all-night Stax party. The intimate, sensual jazz-flavored jam session approach (including three 9-minute versions of standards) did not reach the charts, but served as a blueprint for future albums. On April 4, 1968, as Stax Records was finalizing its sale to the Gulf & Western Corporation, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis. Hayes, a close friend of King's, was devasted and put his career on-hold for over a year. He then emerged in the summer of 1969 with the landmark "Hot Buttered Soul," and his career would never be the same again. The album was uniquely composed of four lush, sensual arrangements, framed by the opening 12-minute version of "Walk On By" and the closing 18-minute take on "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." Both of which were edited into a double-A sided single, and both sides became top 40/R&B crossover hits. #1 on the Billboard R&B chart for 10 weeks, the album stayed on the Pop charts for an amazing 81 weeks. A pair of albums in 1970 reprised the format of the tightly-arranged extended versions of original material and reworked standards, "The Isaac Hayes Movement" (7 weeks at #1, with "I Stand Accused") and "...To Be Continued" (11 weeks at #1, with the original version of "Ike's Rap," a decade before Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight"!) By now, the silky smooth romantic rap soliloquies had become a Hayes trademark. The arrival of the "Shaft" movie, soundtrack double-LP, and theme-song single in the summer 1971 was a career-defining event - the image of Isaac Hayes loomed at least as large as the film's star Richard Roundtree or director Gordon Parks, and all three embodied a new era of Black empowerment. "Shaft" was the first album in history by a solo black artist to hit #1 on both the Pop and R&B chart (14 weeks, making it the #3 R&B album of the entire decade of the 1970's). At the Academy Awards the following year, Hayes became the first African-American composer to win the Oscar for "Best Musical Score." In addition to generating three Grammy awards, the music from "Shaft" won a Golden Globe award, the NAACP Image Award, and the prestigious Edison award, Europe's highest music honor. He was quickly assigned to score the 1972 television series "The Men" (starring Robert Conrad), whose theme became a Pop/R&B hit. The summer 1974 would see the release of his next two movie soundtrack albums, "Tough Guys" (from the movie "Three Tough Guys," Hayes' first co-starring movie role as a macho character), and "Truck Turner" (in which Hayes starred in the title role as a tough guy again). A third film role offered a comedy turn in 1975, "It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time." Hayes delivered a second double-LP in 1971, "Black Moses" (#1 for 7 weeks, with "Never Can Say Goodbye"), whose nickname reluctantly stuck with him for years afterward. A long spell of touring throughout Europe and the U.S. in 1972 (including the WattStax Festival in August) introduced many audiences to Hayes for the first time. His live show was captured on his third consecutive double-LP, which arrived in 1973, "Live At The Sahara Tahoe" (#1 for 2 weeks). Later that year came the album "Joy;" aside from its title tune, an R&B/Pop crossover hit, it included "I Love You That's All." By the time his two 1974 soundtracks albums were issued by Stax/Enterprise, relations with the label and business disagreements had deteriorated to the point where Hayes severed his ties. That same year, he made his TV debut in a recurring role on "The Rockford Files" as Gandolph Fitch, aka Rockfish. In 1975, Hayes launched his own new record label: HBS, or Hot Buttered Soul (via ABC Records). His first new album, "Chocolate Chip" (#1 for 7 weeks, with its title track R&B hit), showed him adapting to the disco era, but with his musical identity intact. Hayes followed up with three new HBS albums in 1976, all top 20 R&B chart entries, "Disco Connection," "Groove-A-Thon" and "Juicy Fruit." His tour with Dionne Warwick was chronicled in early 1977 on the final HBS release, the live double album "A Man And A Woman," recorded at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. (Hayes and Warwick backed it up with an appearance together on "The Rockford Files.") Business setbacks had taken their toll, however, and Hayes was forced to file for bankruptcy. It would be decades before he would see his solid gold Cadillac Eldorado again (a relic of the Stax prosperity), liquidated by the IRS in 1977, but finally found and restored for display in 2003 at the Soulsville Museum. He emerged at the end of 1977 with a new record label (Polydor), a new home base (Atlanta and its Master Sound Studios), and a new album, "New Horizon." His next album, 1978's "For The Sake Of Love," brought a strong return to the charts with "Zeke The Freak." He followed that with the top 10 album "Don't Let Go," whose title single was his first major R&B/Pop crossover hit in five years. The 12" single brought him back to disco charts from where he had been absent for several years. His final album of the 1970's was "Royal Rappin's," the unforgettable collaboration with Millie Jackson that spun off the single, "Do You Wanna Make Love." In addition to releasing new albums in 1980 and 1981, "And Once Again" and "A Lifetime Thing," respectively, Isaac produced albums for Linda Clifford ("I'm Yours") which produced the major club hit "Shoot Your Best Shot," Donald Byrd, and the Masqueraders. After his 1981 role as the bad guy in John Carpenter's "Escape From New York," Hayes took a well-earned five year break to spend more time with his family. During this period, he began to turn more and more to acting, starting with roles on tv's "The A-Team" (1985), "Hunter" (1986), and "Miami Vice" (1987), then a made-for-TV movie, "Jailbait: Betrayed By Innocence," and another pair of tough guy features films, "Counterforce" and "Dead Aim" (1987). Since then, not a year has gone without Isaac Hayes undertaking a movie role or two. He has done three dozen plus films since 1990 and at the same time, there have also been roles on a number of tv series. On the music side, Hayes returned in late 1986 with a new record deal (Columbia) and a new album, "U-Turn," which boasted his first top 10 R&B single in some 13 years, an update of "Ike's Rap." The rap's strong anti-crack message resonated to the extent that its lyric, "Don't be a resident of crack city" was adopted as the slogan of a rehab center in Detroit. By the time his second Columbia album showed up in 1988, "Love Attack," the crack epidemic had become so pervasive that Hayes agreed to become a lecturer at colleges and prisons, inspiring students and inmates to fulfill their lives' potentials without drugs. Hayes' role as a humanitarian began to take sharper focus in late 1991, when he and Barry White traveled to the Ivory Coast in Africa to shoot a video for "Dark & Lovely (You Over There)," the single from White's comeback album "Put Me In Your Mix." The following year, Hayes and Dionne Warwick accepted an invitation by the Cultural Minister of Ghana (Ivory Coast's eastern neighbor) to visit the Cape Coast and Elmina slave castles. Walking through the dungeons, listening to the horrifying stories told by the guide, Hayes was overwhelmed with emotion. Isaac realized it was not enough to help finance the renovation of the castles, there was bigger work to be done in Africa: He asked how much it would cost to build a school. Returning to America, Hayes took his energy on the road, speaking to African-American community groups and Black expos around the country. He encouraged everyone he met to visit Africa if they could, to interact with the people, or at the very least to support economic development. There is little to match Hayes' devotion to spreading the message that literacy and education are the keys to freedom and prosperity in this world. In 1993, he stumbled into Scientology and the study technology process it teaches. That same year he was named the international spokesman for Applied Scholastics' World Literacy Crusade, which currently has over 20 literacy programs in five countries with more than 1,800 people participating. Soon after, he started The Isaac Hayes Foundation (IHF, based on Wall Street), whose mission is to enable people around the world to become whole by promoting literacy, music education, nutritional education, and innovative programs that raise self-esteem among the underprivileged and teach young people how to study. He is also the international spokesman for the Sheppard Foundation, a Harlem-based nonprofit organization that researches alternative treatments for degenerative diseases. In 1995, newly signed to Virgin Records (via its Pointblank label), Hayes took a typically bold step by simultaneously issuing two new CDs: "Raw And Refined," by the Isaac Hayes Movement, was a set of newly recorded and old instrumental tracks, some dating back a quarter-century to the Stax era; while "Branded" was a lavishly arranged set of newly recorded tracks, including one with David Porter. Among the highlights were the 7-minute take on the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer In The City," and the Watoto de Afrika children's choir singing on the 6-minute version of Sting's "Fragile." Hayes finished out the year speaking at the historic Million Man March on Washington. True to his promise, and thanks to the hard work of the IHF, Hayes was able to return to Ghana in the summer 1998 and officiate at the groundbreaking ceremony for the school, as part of the Asafotufiami Cultural festival in Ada. The 8,000 square foot facility, called NekoTech, enjoyed its ribbon-cutting two years later. Today, it not only delivers literacy, education, computer technology and Internet access, and health education, but also houses a chapter of the World Literacy Crusade. His concern with literacy at home is well known. In November 1998, he took part in groundbreaking ceremonies for the $60 million Central Library in Memphis. He and Lisa Marie Presley, a lifelong friend and fellow Scientologist, established a mission for the organization in their hometown of Memphis. The mission now houses a LEAP center (Learning Education Ability Program), "for kids after school to learn how to study, to learn how to read and write." The IHF continues to partner with other nonprofit organizations to support global causes that serve community needs, actively promoting celebrity benefit concerts (like the Jam For Literacy at the House Of Blues in Los Angeles), Literacy Links 2000 (a middle school program in Memphis), and the Crusaders, a volunteer team of exhibition basketball players from all over the country who put on benefit shows for various causes. From the lessons he learned at his grandmother's side, to the wisdom that only a true king possesses, Isaac Hayes has earned his position as one of the most influential - and productive - figures in African-American culture today. His instincts as an astute businessman and unstinting philanthropist are tempered by the soul of an artist - an accomplished musician and published author, in-demand actor on-air radio personality, and one b-a-a-a-d cook in the kitchen. We honor the man, the humanatarian, the legend and the genius of Isaac Hayes. For his contributions to R&B, pop and disco music but for his commitment to literacy and the people of Africa...we thank you. |
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