Isaac Hayes: From Shaft to Chef
By Richard Corliss
Isaac Hayes packed a lot of excitement and achievement into his 65-year life, which ended Sunday an hour after his wife Adjowa found him unconscious and collapsed near a treadmill in his Memphis, Tenn., home. He had written hit songs, made platinum records, starred in movies, been elected to two music Halls of Fame and provided the voice of Chef on South Park, which gave him a memorable if premature send-off in 2006. But the biggest triumph for this self-described Black Moses had to be on April 10, 1972, when his Theme from Shaft won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Hayes' theme -- for the proto-blaxploitation policier than helped yank Hollywood's depiction of African-American males from the sanctity of Sidney Poitier into the grittier image of the stud male who rules the streets with a sizzling machismo -- was a cunning mix of wocka-wocka percussion, soaring violins, a sassy girl group whispering the hero's name as if it were a phallic deity and, anchoring it all, the basso talk-singing of the studly composer. "Who's the black private dick / That's a sex machine to all the chicks?" Girls: "SHAFT!" Hayes: "Ya damn right!" Hayes: "They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother--" Girls: "Shut your mouth!" Hayes: "I'm talkin' 'bout Shaft." Girls: "Then we can dig it!"
That aural-verbal concoction would be startling enough just for a single on Vietnam-era AM radio, where the song hit the top of the pop charts. What's extraordinary is that Theme from Shaft somehow beguiled the Bel Air senior citizens who constitute the Academy membership. Hayes, a newcomer to Hollywood movie scoring, was up against such former and future Oscar winners as Johnny Mercer, Henry Mancini, Marvin Hamlisch and the Sherman Brothers. The award typically went to doyens of the classic-pop establishment, all of whom were white. For nearly two decades, the movie-music fraternity had fought the onslaught of rock and soul music through the simple expedient of ignoring it. The closest Oscar had come to acknowledging rock 'n' roll was in its 1971 award to the Beatles for the sound track to their docu-concert film Let It Be.
So when Hayes' name was read out, you could practically hear the sound of mandibles detaching throughout the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, while back at Stax Records in Memphis there must have been astonished cheers. Hayes had become the first African American to win a music Oscar (or, indeed, an Oscar in any category except for acting). But that belated recognition was less a harbinger of enlightenment than a blip on the rainbow radar. No black musician would cop another Oscar until 1985, when Prince was honored for the score of Purple Rain.
In other endeavors, Hayes' influence was more readily apparent. Born in Covington, Tenn., 40 miles northeast of Memphis, he was working in a meatpacking plant after college when one of his songs got him hired at Stax. There he played in the house band behind most of Otis Redding's singles and found a songwriting partner in an insurance salesman named David Porter. They eventually composed some 200 songs and were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 -- the same year as the Sherman Brothers, whose Mary Poppins score was the spoonful of sugar to Hayes and Porter's megadose of Viagra. (Hayes made it into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame on his own in 2002.)
Producing many of the Stax hits of the '60s, Hayes and Porter helped define that studio's sound, which dispensed with the pop craftsmanship of Stax's main rival Motown Records and, taking inspiration from James Brown's mid-'60s ravers, revved up the motor of testosterone. For Sam & Dave they wrote the hits Hold On, I'm Coming and Soul Man. Both tunes are declarations of sexual prowess ready to explode. Get with the program, they said, or get out of the way. When first released, the songs were No. 1 R&B winners (Soul Man hit No. 2 on the pop charts), and they never did lose their power. In 1980 the sham-soul duo the Blues Brothers, a.k.a. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, took Soul Man to No. 14. Those Hayes-and-Porter/Sam-&-Dave collaborations remain anthems for any guy who's had too many beers or is surrendering to the priapic imperative.
Hayes' imposing frame, and a stare that managed to intimidate and seduce, made the songwriter a natural for performing. Oddly, his first LP was the jazz-inflected, discursive Presenting Isaac Hayes. Not until Hot Buttered Soul in 1969 did he connect with the public, and even this album contained several cuts that ran 8 to 10 mins. He'd take a Burt Bacharach song and spin it into soul-improv infinity, or begin his version of Jimmy Webb's By the Time I Get to Phoenix with an 8-min. monologue. Whether singing or speaking, the man could hold an audience. Maybe it was the cover photo, dominated by the top of Hayes' shaved head, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his bare chest wreathed in a gold chain. Mothers and cops had a name for this look: pimp. But it moved the merchandise, and it defined Hayes as a more sultry, satanic Shaft.
With this dramatic presentation, and after the benediction of Oscar, directors lined up to cast Hayes in their films. He had the title role in Jonathan Kaplan's Truck Turner, starring with Yaphet Kotto, Scatman Crothers and, as a randy-mouthed madam, Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols. (It was really a black Rockford Files, the James Garner TV series that started the same year and on which Hayes had a few guest shots.) Hayes also co-starred in Duccio Tessari's Tough Guys, which mixed the blaxploitation and Italian action genres to produce what might be called a blaxpaghetti movie. He never made a career of acting -- he kept recording and touring and was a deejay on New York City's KISS-FM -- but he got plenty of film work when he wanted it. In 1993, for instance, he appeared as one of the rebel ex-slaves in Mario Van Peebles' black western Posse and as a displaced Moor in Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
Hayes had one more career in him: as Chef, the grade-school cook who dished out mediocre food and ageless wisdom on the Comedy Central animated show South Park. The show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, conceived the role for Barry White, another soul basso whose music soothed where Hayes' prowled and pounced. But Hayes did splendid work (his lines usually taped by phone from New York) for the first nine seasons, in which Chef was virtually the only adult character treated with affectionate respect. Parker and Stone also gave Hayes his last hit single: a ribald novelty tune, Chocolate Salty Balls, that went to No. 1 in the U.K. and No. 2 in Ireland. It was a fine tribute to the prime singer-songwriter of gourmet sex: Hot Buttered Soul, Chocolate Chip, Juicy Fruit, etc.
Then Hayes, a proselytizing practitioner of Scientology, took exception to the episode called Trapped in the Closet, in which Hayes' religion is excoriated as a cult of charlatans and fleecers. He submitted his resignation, ignoring the first rule of dealing with Parker and Stone: These guys have their own TV soapbox, so don't piss them off. They snipped together lines of dialogue from earlier Hayes speeches to create the March 2006 episode The Return of Chef, in which South Park's local hero is charged with child molesting before wild animals tear his limbs off -- and those are only the printable indignities.
Two and a half years later, Hayes followed Chef to his demise. Even a musical sex machine can break down. He leaves behind one widow, three ex-wives, 12 children, 14 grandchildren and one great-grandchild. That's quite a legacy right there. Beyond that, he leaves an artistic personality that will keep insinuating itself into the body politic and making it dance. For Isaac Hayes was the pulse of sexual liberation, the erotic sound of black power, the voice of our best bad thoughts.