Isaac Hayes was born on August 20, 1942, in Covington, Tennessee and passed away at the age of 65 in 2008. Hayes led a full life that went from being a poor sharecropping child to working in a slaughter house as a teenager to changing the sound of Black music at Stax Records with Hot Buttered Soul (1969) and becoming the first African-American composer to win an Academy Award for the iconic 1971 soundtrack for “Theme from Shaft.” In honor of Hayes 80th birthday, I was inspired to write about the man, his art and our first meeting twenty-seven years ago.
It was Valentine’s Day, 1995 and I was on my way to meet soul man Isaac Hayes at East of Eighth, a bistro on West 23 rd Street in New York City. A fan of his music since I was an eight-year-old Harlem kid begging mom to buy me “The Theme from Shaft” in 1971, I’d been assigned by Tower Pulse editor Marc Weidenbaum to write a cover feature on his then-new releases Branded and Raw and Refined (Pointblank Records). It had been seven years since his last record Love Attack , and Hayes was more than ready to reestablish himself as an R&B superstar in a new jack swing/hip-hop world that had forgotten about many of the yesteryear legends who’d contributed so much to modern music.
I got off the subway at 7 th Avenue and, after stepping out of that hole in the ground, I thought about the opening high-hat riff of “The Theme From Shaft” that pulled listeners in from the first tap. While Hayes was known as a deep-voiced lover man (“Walk On By,” “Part Time Love”) who also made more than his share of noirish funk that began with Shaft . On screen, the “Black private dick” was clad in his soon to be iconic sleek leather as he walked cockily through the midtown crowd and steady traffic while his personal theme song began to bubble. Without Isaac’s music, that “driving, savage beat,” as director Parks described it, Shaft’s cool coat wouldn’t have meant shit. That theme contributed to the character’s mystique, sex appeal and swag.
Walking up the stairs to the Chelsea-located East of Eighth, I was greeted by the publicist who informed me that Spin magazine writer Michael Corcoran and photographer Jennifer Crisafulli were already working with Hayes. Wearing shades, Hayes was dressed in a multicolored Coogi sweater, black slacks and businessman shoes. He sat across from the writer, but when he spotted me he paused, stood-up and shook my hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said, his voice iceberg cool. As urbane as he looked, Hayes still sounded like a son of the south.
Hayes went back to chatting with Corcoran, talking about his early songwriting days with David Porter (the two wrote “Soul Man,” “Hold On, I’m Coming” and many others) his crew at Stax Records and how, in the postmodern world, many of his musical contemporaries had been kicked to the curb. “The R&B veterans were put out to pasture,” he said. “Nobody’s been learning to play instruments, so you end up with a lot of redundant rap records. Without live playing where are you going to get new ideas? Do you think the new direction is going to come out of a drum machine or a synthesizer?”
Filmmaker Andrew Dosunmu directed the moody video for Hayes single “Funky Junkie”
I sat back in my chair and thought about the time I brought the Shaft soundtrack to my 3 rd grade class and almost caused the classical music loving teacher to have a heart attack when she played the movie’s famous theme. Putting the needle to the record, when Isaac deep voice growled from that mono record player, “Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks? Shaft…you’re damn right!” Miss Wilson turned red and literally snatched the disc off, scratching the vinyl it in the process.
The history behind the Shaft soundtrack is quite interesting. In 1971, through Stax Records executive Al Bell’s dealings with the almost bankrupt film studio MGM, he was approached to have the company commission and release the soundtrack for a different kind of Black movie. “Melvin Van Peebles did his Sweetback soundtrack at Stax, so Al Bell set-up a meeting with MGM to discuss a concept they wanted to sell to Black consumers,” Hayes told me in 1995. “It was as if they just discovered there was a Black market out there. For Shaft , they already had a leading Black actor (Richard Roundtree), a Black director (Gordon Parks) and Black editors (Hugh A. Robertson/Paul L. Evans), so now they wanted a Black composer and they picked me.”
With the exception of Quincy Jones, who’d been scoring films regularly since 1961, it was rare that Black musicians were tapped to record the music for a major film studio, but the then 29-year-old Hayes was excited about the challenge. “I also was a little nervous. I had never recorded a soundtrack before and I was scared that I would mess up.” Instead, Hayes’ soul sonic outcome was quite the opposite. As a test, Parks gave him some footage from Shaft and he went into the MGM’s sound lab and composed the iconic theme song as well as the vibraphone heavy “Ellie’s Love Theme” and downtempo “Soulsville.” Parks loved it. “It was an exciting time. They turned me loose and let me do it.”
Holing up for four-days with the Bar-Kays, the Memphis Strings & Horns and advisor Tom McIntosh, an American jazz trombonist, Hayes cut the music to film in penthouse studio on the MGM lot. “The engineer asked to see our charts and I told him, ‘We have no charts, just roll the film.’ We had worked out everything in our heads already and memorized it. The first two days we laid the tracks, the third day we did the strings and the fourth day we put down the back-up singers. I would go sit in my car and write lyrics. We finished a day and a half early.” Both the film and its soundtrack were a hit.
Novelist S.A. Cosby ( Razorblade Tears ) wasn’t yet born when “The Theme from Shaft” was released, but it was the first Hayes music he heard as a boy. “My first exposure was while sitting in my Dad’s Pontiac listening to that theme on an 8-track cassette,” he said. “My first thought was that Hayes sounded like my Dad, my uncles and all the men in my life who were rough around the edges, men who articulated the weight of the world in the weariness in their voices.”
Hip-hop producer and Hayes enthusiast DJ Premier remembers being a boy in Texas when Shaft came out. “Every Black household in Prairie View had that record,” Premier says. “I thought his look, with his cool shades, bald head and beard, matched the music. I remember my mother taking me to the Majestic Metro to see Shaft and there were guys coming into the theater dressed like Isaac.” The following year, Hayes won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
However, when there was speculation that Shaft would be nominated for an Oscar, some Academy members tried to disqualify Hayes, claiming since he didn’t write the music on paper then he wasn’t a composer. Hayes’ respected friends Quincy Jones and Henry Mancini, who covered “Shaft” in 1972, came to his defense. Hayes eventually became the first Black composer to win an Oscar for Best Original Song. “I took my grandmother as my date; she was so proud.”
A few months after Hayes win, Burt Bacharach told the New York Times , “I kind of feel that his score for ‘Shaft’ is one of the most brilliant things that’s been done this year, I think it’s fantastic.” Shaft set off a domino effect of Black soul composers being commissioned to record soundtracks; a partial list of the best includes Curtis Mayfield ( Superfly ), James Brown ( Black Caesar ) and Marvin Gaye ( Trouble Man ). Considering that fellow soul men and devoted fans were following his lead, Hayes’ friend and hired gun (literally) Dino Woodard began calling him “Black Moses” and Jet magazine writer Chester Higgins popularized the moniker in the pages of the weekly.
In November, 1971, Hayes released an album using Black Moses as the title. Every record store in Harlem had that provocative album cover hanging in its window. “My youngest aunt was a big music fan and I can remember just staring at the cover for Black Moses,” Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid said in 2017. “I would just stare at it amazed, because he was the first bald soul singer I’d ever seen. But, besides the fact that his songs were often really slow, I didn’t really know much about Hayes music until the Shaft soundtrack a year later. That theme was a departure from the sexy, grown-up music he’d been making and was faster than his previous material.”
Three years later, me, baby brother and the weekly movie crew (Beedie, Darryl, Kyle, and Marvin) went to our local Harlem grindhouse the Tapia, and watched Hayes on the big screen twice within a few months. Isaac, who always wanted to act, appeared in Three Tough Guys (Blaxploitation meets Poliziotteschi) and Truck Turner , flicks that he also did the soundtracks for; though I’m partial to the latter, both are excellent albums that, as funk expert Scot Brown has noted, “Fused the gap between soul and instrumental funk.”
Truck Turner (currently streaming on Pluto) was directed by Jonathan Kaplan, who’d made the Jim Brown prison movie The Slams in 1973 and would go on to a celebrated career that included making the Jodie Foster film The Accused in 1988. The then young filmmaker wasn’t anticipating working with acting novice Hayes, but they made it work. “When I was first given the project the studio (American International Pictures) was thinking about using Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine or Robert Mitchum in the lead role,” Kaplan told Josiah Howard, author of Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide (2008). “But then I got a call from producer Larry Gordon telling me that I would be making the picture with Isaac Hayes instead. I said, ‘That’s quite a switch from Robert Mitchum!’”
The story of a bounty hunter (or, as they call him in the film, a skip tracer) with a big gun who killed a pimp named Gator (Paul Harris) that skipped bail and led Truck on a crazy chase through the streets of Los Angeles. Co-starring the late Nichelle Nichols (Dorinda) and Yaphet Kotto, both played crazy, murderous pimps seeking revenge against Turner while spouting wild dialogue. Anyone expecting to see prim, proper Lieutenant Nyota Uhura will be sorely disappointed when they see Nichols cursing and trash talking about her stable of hookers. “These all prime cut bitches,” she sneered, “$238,000 worth of dynamite. It’s Fort Knox in panties.”
“Truck was a different challenge in that the character was the center of the movie,” Hayes told Vibe magazine in 2000. Though he was new to acting, he had two fine teachers on set. “Working opposite Yaphet Kotto and Nichelle Nichols was like being in class.”
Hayes’ double-album soundtrack for Truck Turner is one of the most underrated of that era. In a 2009 Pitchfork review of the Shaft soundtrack, critic Nate Patrin wrote that he thought the Truck Turner soundtrack was better. “(It) might be his best album of the ‘70s,” he wrote. Twelve years later, Patrin explained, “The soundtrack’s got a couple lulls, but there are so many peaks. ‘Pursuit of the Pimpmobile’ works amazingly as a dance cut that keeps escalating its ideas and personifying chase-scene energy. ‘The Insurance Company’ is Memphis Bernard Herrmann, there’s a grip of just chef’s kiss instrumentals, and the title song is ‘Theme from Shaft’ on a sugar high.” Twenty-three years later Quentin Tarantino used the Truck Turner theme in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 .
Those soundtrack albums were also Hayes last official releases on Stax. “My last gold album was Joy and there were the two soundtrack albums after that,” Hayes told Blues & Soul writer John Abbey in 1975. “It bothered me because I felt that they had just thrown those two sets (albums) out. You know, I joined Stax back in ’63 as a writer, they gave me my start in the business and I had put blood, sweat and tears into the work I did for that company and so it all upset my pride.”
Although the soundtrack might’ve been slept on, the movie fared much better. Hayes and the filmmaker got along, and he supported Kaplan when the director wanted to make changes in the chauvinistic script. “I completely rewrote the relationship that Truck had with his girlfriend Annie (Annazette Chase),” Kaplan said. “I made their relationship much more tender, gentle and equal… at the time, insisting on that kind of a change was a really big deal. I had to put up a fight to make it happen. But, you know, Ike was on my side too because he said, ‘I don’t want to be slapping this girl around either.’ He was very aware that his audience was largely female, and, you know, he’s a very attractive guy, and all the love songs he had written and everything; it just didn’t make sense for him to be playing some misogynist creep.”
Hayes got the last laugh when the studio thought they could lowball him on salary. “They thought, because he was black, that they were going to get him for a lot cheaper than a white guy,” Kaplan said. “Then they found out that, no, in fact, Ike was going to cost them more than a white guy: a lot more! They realized that Ike didn’t need them; he was already making a lot of money just being Isaac Hayes; being ‘Black Moses’ was very profitable for him.”
Two of my favorite co-stars were Annazette Chase as Turner’s girlfriend Annie, a fine mama with a tender heart, and Alan Weeks as his partner Jerry. Best known for his role as the junkie accused of picking his toes in Poughkeepsie in The French Connection (1971), he was loose and funny in Truck Turne r. For Hayes, Truck Turner was just the beginning of an acting career that stretched for three decades and included roles in The Rockford Files, Escape from New York, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka You and the infamous voice of Chef on South Park .
Black film expert/award-winning comic book writer David Walker wrote in his 1990s fanzine BadAzz MoFo , “ Truck Turner is a highly entertaining film, and among one of the better Blaxploitation films you’re likely to find. Much of what makes this bad boy so much fun are the performances of Hayes in the lead of role…Hayes is laid back, tough and charming, all at the same time. Not exactly the best actor in the world, he’s very comfortable in front of the camera, and radiates cool.”
Rewinding back to that afternoon in February 1995, when the Spin interview was over, Hayes was ready for the photographer. He playfully snapped jokes as he posed, and flirted with our pretty young blond waitress. At some point the waitress informed Hayes that she was dating his girlfriend’s son. “Are you serious?” Hayes asked. When the young woman gave him names, addresses and anecdotes, everyone in the room, including her, laughed heartily. “It’s a small world,” Hayes said, shaking his head, “a small world.”
Though I was assured by the publicist that the photographer wouldn’t be long, she was wrong; Crisafulli’s camera continued clicking for the next forty-five minutes. A while later I glanced at my watch and noticed I’d been in the restaurant for two hours. Normally I wouldn’t care about waiting, but it was Valentine’s Day and I had a date. After I explained to Hayes, he replied, “I understand. When you’ve sung as many love songs as I have, you know a little something about Valentine’s Day.”
Although I didn’t do a formal interview until weeks later in Memphis (another story for another time), I’ll never forget the joy, pride and swagger Isaac Hayes’ soulful music and films instilled in me from childhood. For all eternity that brotha will always be a bad mutha.