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Track Listings
| 1. Walk On By |
| 2. Hyperbolicsyllablecsesquedalymistic |
| 3. One Woman |
| 4. By The Time I Get To Phoenix |
| 5. Walk On By |
| 6. By The Time I Get To Phoenix |
Product Description
Review
With its four tracks, Hayes extended his songs and created something completely new. Working with producer Al Bell and members of the Bar-Kays as his backing band, Hot Buttered Soul’s long instrumental passages simply revelled in their repetition.
It starts with a 12-minute version of Bacharach and David’s standard, Walk on By. Its sultry setting still sounds contemporary; a huge horn fanfare; fuzz guitar, subtly introduced vocals. When Hayes’s Hammond begins to dominate in its tenth minute, you are mesmerised by the groove.
With the statement, “I’m talking about the power of love now, I’m telling you what love can do” at the start of Jimmy Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Hayes single-handedly launched the ‘love man’ genre that was soon to prevail; the roots of Barry White’s sensual symphonies and Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On can be traced right back to here.
Hayes strips Webb’s narrative down to its bare bones, spelling out the tale through his extended rap. His level of detail is breathtaking. He outlines what car the protagonist is driving, the songs that the couple would have sung between them. It’s eight-and-a-half minutes (and there’s still another ten to go!) before it finally breaks into the melody.
Of the album’s remaining 50%, the space and controlled aggression of the Hayes-penned Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic moves from deep soul to something approaching krautrock. It is only the relatively conventional One Woman that makes you remember you are listening to what is, nominally, an R&B record.
With a picture of Hayes’ bald head on the cover, Hot Buttered Soul really is one of the landmark soul albums. A huge commercial and critical success, it brought Hayes forever out of the backroom. Twenty years after its release, its languorous sound was still influencing; this time being sampled extensively for hip hop. Forty years on, it sounds as curiously charming and unsettling as ever. --Daryl Easlea
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Customer Reviews
If you already have this album on a previous CD, you will want to know about the remastering - on the whole it's pretty good although this version is way more hissy than the previous CD I owned, it does have a much more upfront in-your-face sound and the drumkit is especially way clearer than before. However the track "hyperbolic....." has for some reason almost all been stuffed into the right channel (totally unlike this track on the original CD, or the other tracks on this remaster), the left channel is muffled to near-silence, and this sounds particularly bad through headphones. Something has gone badly wrong and I suggest you avoid this reissue until they fix the problem.
Big shame - the music is sensational but a big black mark against Stax's quality control for this.
You have to remember that, 40 years ago, Soul albums to this point had usually consisted of 2 or 3 hit singles and a few other tracks that weren't considered commercial enough for single release. Ike changed all that with this, his second album for Stax, released as part of a 27 album blitz, designed to put Stax back on top after the death of Otis, and the loss of the back catalogue to Atlantic (both in '68).
The track selection probably didn't take too long, there are only 4 tracks after all, and the format had been established by Ike in his live shows, as he stretched out standards with raps and instrumental breaks, to take Soul places it had never been before. It was all a long way away from the gritty, sweaty Southern Soul Hayes had written with David Porter for Sam & Dave, among others, and which had earned him the right to do things his way.
I cannot hear Ike's version of "Walk on By" without marvelling at the sheer audacity of the man - but I love it, the strings, the guitars, the slow build up (will he ever sing?) and then the gravelly vocal - epic stuff. There's more - "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" is the same, but more so, and while "One Woman" is almost standard fare, Hyper..." was the forerunner of the funk workouts for which Ike would become famous on later albums.
Isaac Hayes would go on to make one of the best known Soul/Funk albums in "Shaft", which has come to overshadow "Hot Buttered Soul" to some extent, but the impact of this album can hardly be underestimated - it ushered in an era where the album became important in Soul, bringing in Orchestral, Jazz and Rock influences, and predated equally influential sets by the likes of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway among many others,
This may take a couple of plays for you to get into, but it's worth the effort, just play it through the way it was meant to be heard - there was no-one quite like Ike, gone but not forgotten. RIP.
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