When I was still in college, I had one of the more terrifying dreams I’ve ever suffered. We were on some kind of break and school wouldn’t let us stay in the dorms until a specified date so I was crashing with a friend, napping on a couch at his house. The door to his room was open and throughout the nap I remember passing in and out of sleep, conscious of the fact that he was having a phone conversation in the next room as he passed occasionally into sight across the doorway. In the dream I was sleeping in that same room; he was still on the phone, but talking to a specific friend of ours; and of all things, I had just been awoken by the uncomfortable sexual swamp of a night emission. As I stood in an embarrassed and dazed state to go clean myself up, he caught sight of what must have been a wet stain on my pant-garments and immediately conveyed the information through the phone, laughing hysterically and pointing at my crotch. Petrified and half-asleep, I took a step forward and collapsed on the floor, unable to move. I lay there immobile while my friend tried to rouse me, entirely conscious of what was happening but utterly powerless. And when my circumstances finally sunk in and the consequences started to brew, one desperate thought began running through my panicked mind: “Please don’t think I’m dead or in a coma. I’m alive in here.” I woke up in that same room with my friend still on the phone in the next and I gradually coaxed my heavy limbs into motion, waiting for every moment to deliver me to some new level of wakefulness. Thankfully it didn’t.

For the independent music world, it might seem like a strange bad dream to have Mountain Dew start a record label and go around snatching upstart acts for a roster that looks like it’s run by someone at Vice. Sure, it’s a singles only label and Chuck Inglish of the The Cool Kids says it’s okay. Let’s just say I’m suspicious. I’m all for folks getting theirs. But where does soda end and where do I begin? Green Label Sound‘s most recent foray is via Neon Indian’s new single, “Sleep Paralysist”, which also happens to have been recorded and/or produced by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor. Neon Indian is one Alan Palomo, who made a big splash last year with the characteristically 2009 song “Deadbeat Summer” and the album Psychic Chasms. According to Stereogum, he describes his sound as “Childhood re-contextualized through a psychedelic, lo-fi filter. The idea of memory before you were old enough to have memories.” I take it he means to suggest he was born in the late 80s and can’t remember what the music sounded like though he lived through some of it; he intends to replicate it nonetheless. And that’s all good when it’s good, which it is.

Neon Indian – Sleep Paralysist

Whereas “Deadbeat Summer” was enjoyable albeit largely forgettable, Neon Indian raise the stakes on this one. To begin, the aesthetic has been seriously glossed up on this one. The full stereo field pulses with swelling and arpeggiated synth sounds that make me wish I knew more about synthesizers than I do. And the songwriting is expertly catchy. The variations throughout the verses on the “something you don’t know, something I don’t know, something they don’t know” format is straight out of a professional songbook. While I can’t understand a lot of the words, what I think I hear immediately resonates. There’s a terrible dread in the moment of satisfaction at the knowledge that it will all come to an end naturally. Palomo sings in the chorus “I’m for you when I’m awake so just don’t sleep. In the morning it will all seem fake.” The solution to hanging on is simple; it is also impossible.

The only criticism I have of the track is that it’s full of harsh sibilance, something I find myself being especially sensitive to these days and something you would not expect of someone like Chris Taylor or anyone of such notoriety. There are so many tools for folks of some resource to avoid that problem. But don’t let my engineering gripe spoil it for you. This song’s a keeper.

Despite enjoying the twilight of my twenties, I am occasionally surprised to miss out on a whole class of music I would describe as “adult music”. It is not anything like “adult movies” (sexually explicit music ultimately sounds juvenile more often than not). It is vaguely yuppie. I’d characterize it primarily as inoffensive and I would buy it in a Starbucks (which incidentally has become the chief indicator that an indie band has “made it”). I probably heard about it from NPR or a New York Times article and it might get a sleeper Grammy nomination. I would not download it (even though I may have picked up a download card for the single at said Starbucks); I would listen to it on CD in a real stereo at home or in a car or maybe in an iPod dock or something that Bose makes (because whether I am conscious of it or not, I believe music belongs in space and I value its format as a physical/informational/aesthetic entity). More often than not, it is rootsy or a comeback record.

My tastes suggest I actually do listen to quite a bit of adult music. I love Spoon and Neko Case, Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes. The problem is, most of what falls into the adult music category is either as commonplace as it is principled or it’s a comeback record. And for every great song that pulls you into the genre (e.g. Dylan’s comeback “Sick Of Love” or the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration “Killing The Blues”) you’re going to be disappointed by the rest if you aren’t actually a bona fide “adult”. Considering how often these albums are made by highly talented musicians and engineers, this may not apply to recordists, audiophiles, or “players” who can abide passable songs for either their sound or the performances.

On the night of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, I had drinks with friends in a quiet and moderately fancy bar in Harvard Square. While a solitary dancer swung and ran over projections of Canadian landscapes to the close-captioned lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”, I became typically distracted with the house music and couldn’t help inquiring about an unfamiliar song that intrigued me. It turned out to be a mouthful for the waitress: “The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver” by Mercury Prize winners Elbow. The next day, I found the album at the public library and took it home for a listen. It was a thoroughly adult music experience.

Elbow – The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver

The track comes from their most recent album, The Seldom Seen Kid and it has the kind of title that is no surprise after a single whose chorus brilliantly favors “There’s a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall” over “I get drunk a lot recently”. It reads like an academic treatment of the working class and there is a real-life inspiration for the song. But the image itself is incredibly compelling in its familiarity: the workman trapped in a box of glass and metal hovering in air working alone. It’s the poetic depiction and the musical context that sells it as an applied symbol of personal alienation.

What I find most remarkable is the dreary massiveness that’s conveyed here. After a brief plucking guitar intro, the huge drums rumble in from a great distance with sharp synth strings filling the air. The other guitar appears to play a solitary harmonic panned hard right that chimes in to alternate with the vocals. For all the space that is filled by the production, it feels very private and timid. Singer Guy Garvey begins in a somber low register. “Got to get out of TV / Just pick a point and go.” This is a song about the desperation of escape. The refrain is plaintive. “Come on, tower crane driver. There’s not too far to go.” But after the first verse, we get an open break that transforms the track from a song to a concept piece. Suddenly the space between here and there is as wide open as it is undeterminable.

When the song resumes suddenly, though we haven’t noticed its absence thus far, the bass finally arrives panned hard right with overdriven bursts like a tuba so that the guitar harmonic is revealed to perfectly syncopate with the bassline. Up an octave, Garvey’s voice slides from an easy mid-range to an anguished, tragic croon. “I must have working the ropes when your hand slipped from mine.” By the time the refrain returns, the hope dissipates in the untenable “Oh so far to fall.”

From this pregnant mood comes the climax of the song. In a perfectly paired movement of lyrics and music planted in the middle of the primary progression, Garvey sings “Send up a prayer in my name” and the track soars into a brief but intensely saturated bridge. Suddenly, the track feels like a plane that’s been barreling down the runway as it reaches take-off: there’s no noticeable change in velocity, but the ground has clearly dropped beneath you. The tension sustains like a burning flare. Before you know it, you’re back to a familiar incline, stewardesses are serving beverages, and you’re napping in the clouds. The beat runs out and the ethereal break returns to end the song.

In keeping with the adult music distinction, The Seldom-Seen Kid is one of the most unique-sounding albums I’ve heard in a while and contains a bevy of interesting arrangements (from what I’ve read, they not only recorded the album themselves; they did it with the resources of a mere project studio). The liner notes include lyrics and a refreshingly modest but defiant stance against the loudness wars. The rootsiness of aforementioned single “Grounds For Divorce” turned me off when watching the accompanying video, but ends up being the other highlight of the record (for another, album closer “Friend Of Ours” acts largely as a quiet reprise of “…Tower Crane Driver”). And the rest of the album is pretty good.

I’m 6’5″. Sometimes that’s neat. Other times it’s obnoxious. At the amusement park, for example, I can’t ride certain rides because I just can’t keep my limbs and head safely out of harm’s way and my spine isn’t short enough to sit comfortably in those harnesses that clamp down over your shoulders. And all those times when it’s convenient, like when I’m at a show or in a crowd looking for someone, there are always the folks behind me hating me and the short people looking up with strange scared faces.

Now I have a theme song. It’s called “Tall” and it has nothing to do with being tall. It’s about big wheels. And it’s by two gentlemen named Alley Boy and Young Dro, whom I know little to nothing about. But they kill it with some great double-time raps, which is a relief to hear amidst this whole slow flow style that seems to be the standard these days. And the vocals are well-mixed, thank goodness! Underneath their performance is a killer beat whose success relies on an expert combination of East, West, and South. There’s the soul sample that creeps in as a brief bridge, the high-pitched Dr. Dre synths, the bouncy drums. It may not seem like the kind of song that would garner such a recommendation, but I’d say it’s easily the best rap track I’ve heard this year. And it’s one of the biggest blips on my rap-dar since “Int’l Player’s Anthem”. This joint is hot. Feel it.

Alley Boy feat Young Dro – Tall

Apparently, this is from Alley Boy’s new mixtape, The Definition Of Fuck Shit, which sure is a striking title. Here is a link to it thanks to the folks at The Fader.

Though I’m no expert on their catalog, of what I’ve heard, their most successful ballad–their most earnest and honest and least corny–is the slow jam “Bed” by J. Holiday. As soft and sweet as it is sexy and seductive, and with The-Dream on backing vocals, we have an expertly crafted tune with memorable lines, inventive melodic cadence, and a compelling structure that builds verse hook upon pre-chorus hook upon chorus hook upon bridge and back again. It’s nowhere as explicitly game-changing as “Umbrella” or “Single Ladies” but it’s incredibly refined, well-conceived, and perfectly executed.

J. Holiday – Bed

In the digital age, it’s been light-memes since its 2007 release. It’s 2010 and who now should take up The-Dream’s cause but the one and only R. Kelly.

R. Kelly – Echo

The leadoff single from his newest album Untitled, “Echo” is perfectly R. Kelly, both amazing and hilarious. The background vocal chiming in with “sex in the morning, sex all day” and its converse is fabulous. And the real conversation piece of the track, the yodeling chorus, is yet another historical Kels vocal performance, expertly entwined with the bridge’s “got you sounding like you’re screaming from a mountain peak” line to round out the storyboard of a Ricola commercial for the ages.

Of course, the echoing “echo” is the obvious culprit of the indictment that R. Kelly is just the newest derivative of The-Dream’s trademark work. But when we revisit “Bed”, we start to see it as a kind of model for “Echo”. There’s the lingerie talk, the care-taking of the working-woman partner, the same building structure climaxing in the ecstatic bridge. Of course, these are all topics and cliches of modern R&B, but if “Bed” weren’t so distinctly crafted and well, so “bed-bed-bed”, it wouldn’t be as suspect.

Regardless of the level of influence here, R. Kelly nails it like a consummate professional. Moreover, we can just as easily look at the matter from the other direction. R. Kelly has contributed more to what we know about modern R&B than just about everyone else out there today. If you make R&B you are beholden to his innovations. Right off the bat, I doubt J. Holiday would have ever donned the first initial if R. Kelly hadn’t before him. And we have to remember that the central character in all of this is a writer and performer who clearly hasn’t come into R&B from a vacuum. Innovators succeed by knowing their genre so well as to capitalize on its needs. The-Dream is no different.

Take, for example, one of the standouts from The-Dream’s excellent sophomore album Love vs. Money, “Put It Down”.

The-Dream – Put It Down

This track, as great as it is on its own, would never exist if it weren’t for R. Kelly. The cadence and phrasing of his line “I see you running like a track meet / With your baton, saying ‘Catch me’” is a Kelly trademark (a perfect example is the moment in “Echo” when he stutter-sings “I left your next clue by the sink. It should be a box with your name, open it up, see what’s inside, whatever it is put it on and head to the bedroom”). This imitation runs throughout the entire second verse, in which The-Dream tells his lover how to respond should people ask her if he sings like Usher or dances like Chris Brown, all the while notably avoiding any comparison to R. Kelly. And seeing as no one takes full advantage of the possibilites of lyrical exploration so well as R. Kelly, what other touchstone can we cite for inspiring lines like “I’m all up on you like a monster truck”, “I’m all up on you like a whitey on a thug”, and the chorus’ query “Does he make that horn go beep?”.

The real kicker here is that by the time we’ve gotten to the end of The-Dream’s album, he’s ready to be explicit about the issue. Love vs. Money ends with the track “Kelly’s 12 Play”, the tale of an extended lovemaking sesh that employs as its soundtrack the early R. Kelly classic known for its hit single “Bump and Grind” (and maybe not so known for deep cut “I Like The Crotch On You”).

The-Dream – Kelly’s 12 Play

The song begins with The-Dream searching for his copy of 12 Play in his CD collection, scouring his shelves for the white cover with red letters. He carefully cleans the CD and checks the surface for scratches, pops it in the player, and commences to sexy time. Throughout the chorus, though, in between each lead line about doing, screwing, and brewing it “to Kelly’s 12 Play”, The-Dream utters a soft “oh Kel” that has enough sexual moan in it to get his listener fruitlessly hoping his partner’s name is a female Kelly. The song turns the more idolatrous in the second verse, when in the throws of passion, she thanks The-Dream for his prowess in the sack and, instead of returning the gratitude, he thanks Kel.

According to the bridge, over the course of the evening the couple apparently listen to the album up to five whole times before petering out. And here’s where The-Dream surpasses his inspiration and places himself in the lineage to take the baton from the aging crooner. With the lovemaking session in intermission, and with the last few seconds of Love vs. Money expiring, his partner leaves the bed, walks to the stereo, pops out the CD, and changes the disc in the CD player “to Dream’s Love/Hate“.

Listening to your own music while sexing your lady? I wouldn’t put it past Kanye. But in the context here, it’s less a literal suggestion than a bold move intended to state The-Dream’s claim to R&B sovereignty. The album ends with the self-determined inclusion of The-Dream’s debut album in the canon of R&B classics, the next great 12 Play. Let Beyonce have her crown or robo-gauntlet or what have you. Based on The-Dream’s ubiquitous success, I can’t think of anyone more worthy of inheriting the throne. That is, of course, whenever R. Kelly decides to step down. Someone may have to pry it out of his cold, dead, mannequin hands.

Thanks to a wonderful teacher in high school, I was fortunate enough to be exposed to the entire Stax singles catalog almost immediately upon becoming interested in 60′s R+B. I went from one cd, Otis Redding’s Greatest Hits, Volume 2 to The Complete Stax Singles 1959-1968. I think a lot of folks can hand something this comprehensive to a kid nowadays, off a hard drive, or loaded onto a 3000gb ipod, and they will take it gladly. Though maybe not listen to it. My teacher said, “Here, write a report on it, give it back in two weeks.” Nine discs, about 250 songs, along with a great huge book that came with the set. I devoured the lot. I can still recall hearing Macy Skipper or Eddie Floyd for the first time. Flipping out over Jeanne & the Darlings and Carla Thomas.

The story of a little re-purposed movie theater with a record shop in the front and a studio in the back, where neighborhood kids would come in and make their dreams come true became something close to a fairy tale for me, and I would regale friends about Memphis’ belle epoque. Each player seemed to fulfill some role in the Stax castle, with Rufus Thomas serving as the wizened Shakespearean court jester with a beautiful daughter, William Bell the sad-hearted knight errant, Johnny Taylor the cad, Booker T. & the MG’s standing sentry over the proceedings, ready at a moment’s notice to jump into action, and label owner Jim Stewart running around like Jimmy Stewart in a screwball comedy (“Whoa, we got a goldmine over here!”). At the heart of this myth was its true hero, Otis Redding: a figure so benevolent that he held the entire place together through his kind demeanor and his ability to touch any person to the core with his voice alone. Here was a guy who used lyrics his wife wrote to create one of the greatest breakup songs ever recorded, who was known to throw a song out after the third take because it wasn’t raw enough, who sang a song to kids about staying in school. I remember being shocked while reading Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music when he mentions that Redding actually got upset at Sam and Dave for getting the crowd too riled up before he took the stage. It was, and still is, the only negative thing I have ever heard about Otis Redding.

Of course this version of events is too perfect to be entirely true, and it ends with a crushing blow. That happens on the evening of December 9, 1967, when Otis, his manager and four members of his backing band, the Bar-Kays, are killed in a plane crash in Lake Monona, Wisconsin. Besides the posthumous release of Otis’ biggest hit, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” the coda of this tale is sung in not one but two other songs, “A Tribute To A King” by William Bell, and “Otis, Sleep On” by Redding’s protoge Arthur Conley. The moment I had always thought of as perhaps the most fitting end to Otis’ story is on the last song he recorded “The Happy Song (Dum Dum),” when he laughs his way through the line:

You oughtta see my baby’s face/ she just grins grins grins…

Otis Redding – The Happy Song (Dum Dum)

And right there my concrete sense of Stax ends. Black and White photos turn to that gritty 70′s Brown and Yellow. Al Bell makes some highly-profitable but not-so friendly moves. Isaac Hayes stops writing music for others and starts making music for himself,

and this

turns into this

There I left it, and really have ever since. When I hear about the great Stax artists of the 70′s — Hayes, The Staples Singers, The Bar-Kays, Luther Ingram — I enjoy ‘em, but they don’t stir my heart. When I recently watched Mel Stuart’s excellent 1973 documentary, WattStax, I found myself searching the artists’ faces for something of the past. A sheepish grin over all the attention, maybe? An insular attitude amongst the musicians? No dice. There is a powerful composure and professionalism throughout the all the performances. Even Rufus Thomas pulls off some artful crowd control after folks start rushing the field to get closer to the stage. And when Bar-Kays sax player Harvey “Joe” Henderson says, “Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude,” he means that he and his bandmates have earned it.

I guess I’m saying that as much as I like the 70′s stuff (and LOVE this performance of “Son of Shaft”),  I don’t pay too much attention.

All of this as a lengthy defense for the indefensible crime of misattribution* by yours truly. In my last post I indulged deeply in the fantasy of a Stax that never existed.

In my mind, Isaac Hayes was backed up by Booker T. & the MG’s in one final late-night jam, as he recorded one of the greatest soul masterpieces of all time: “Walk On By.” But, as my fact-checkin’ cuz Tim points out in the comments:

I hate to burst your bubble, but the MGs are not on “Walk on By”. Booker had just left or was soon to leave Stax, Cropper left soon after this too. That’s The Bar-Kays.

The Bar-Kays. Well, yes and no. The Bar-Kays and Harold Beane on lead guitar. Not Charles “Skip” Pitts who plays wah-wah on Shaft, or regular Bar-Kays guitarist Michael Toles, who plays rhythm guitar on “Walk on By” and on Shaft, and who later became part of Hayes’ touring group, and certainly not Steve Cropper. It is indeed Hayes on keyboard, not Booker T. That fanatic, exhausted drumming is courtesy of the Bar-Kays’ Willie Hall, not my hero Al Jackson Jr. The strings and horns, it turns out, were outsourced to Detroit, with members of the Detroit Symphony playing on violin. Definitely not the Memphis Horns, as I had always assumed. Here is how Marvell Thomas, son of Rufus, piano player and Co-Producer of Hot Buttered Soul tells the story of Beane’s playing to music historian Bill Dahl:

“The guitar solo was not something that was planned on front end,” recalled Thomas. “It was like, ‘Well why not?’ We just stretched out and let it go. When you get in the middle of it, you just kind of ride with it until it stops.”**

And that’s where I’m sort of left too. If I didn’t know a lot of this stuff, especially the bit about Detroit, I think I’d be a lot happier. And if I didn’t talk about it, the song may even be better. The fact that the fantasy of Stax is is impossible is something I’ve probably always known. I’m sure Otis Redding was secretly a shoplifter, William Bell was fiercely confident, and the works of Booker T. are actually by a different man with the same name. The golden age of Stax perseveres not through its anecdotal history, but by the immense, emotional scope of the music, and the joy which one inevitably feels while listening.

And so, I think I’d prefer to let the misinformation of the previous post stand. It’s a reverie brought about by late night radio– a truth that’s undeniable. Plus, everybody knows advice that was given up for free…lots of details to discern. Lots of details.

*This word, by the way, being the ultimate in onomotoseeia.

**This quote, and much of the personnel information comes from AllMusic and the Concord Music Group website, which oversaw the 2009 reissue of Hot Buttered Soul.

I wasn’t as enamoured with The Ecstatic as everyone else appeared to be. First off, the mix sounded really strange to me, the same kind of strange that the Q-Tip album sounded. It had sloppy production on the beats end with flat sonics and not much frequency range, so the vocals sat on top of the music in an alien way. And none of the songs seemed very thoroughly explored.

On the other hand, the new track “24-Hour Karate School” renews my faith in the Mighty Mos for still retaining the capacity to make good music. Some critics have complained that he doesn’t spit more than a few bars at a time here, but that’s what makes it for me. Clocking it at just over two minutes, it’s a high-concept mash-up of rap meets 24-hour fitness center meets dojo that explores a laughable fantasy in song form. It’s endearing in a harmless hair-brained stoner-comedy way. And since it has no context, we have no expectations that Mos has to meet. We just get to listen to a little ditty that just so happens to have much better production (thanks to the great Camp Lo collaborator Ski) and a vocal mix that actually sits with the music.

I honestly didn’t find much in a first listen to The Ecstatic to encourage more, but I might give it another shot because of this effort. Maybe I missed something. I doubt it. We’ll see. Nevertheless, while this song is of no consequence, I’d rather have one of these every couple of months than albums of passable material every other year. Because this is fun times for real.

Chop-chop body work…

Mos Def – 24-Hour Karate School

I’ve been digging into the Stax again lately and am just floored by Steve Cropper’s versatility and style as a guitarist. His stuff on ANY given Otis Redding song would be the high-water mark for any other session musician’s career.

Not that he was just a session musician, mind you. Hardly a journeyman, Cropper stuck around the old theater on East McLemore Ave. from his teens in the early 60′s and just past its major upheaval in the 1970′s. He was a Mar-Key, an MG, and later a Blues Brother. But Steve Cropper would never allow you to mistake him for anyone else (though occasional Steven Seagal comparisons are warranted). Take “Let Me Come On Home” from 1967.

Otis Redding – Let Me Come On Home

Featuring the kind of straight-fingered piano plink that makes white-haired RZA scratch his chin, the song manages to be one of those great and rare moments in 60′s soul music where the singer allows himself to get caught up–and ultimately lost–in the band’s sound. You can’t blame Otis, either. The horns are so tight, Booker T. and Al Jackson are in a mind-meld, and whenever Cropper is playing, you hear Otis just back right off. The rumor is that Otis Redding was an incredibly demanding bandleader, and in this case, the band is just too good to sing over.

Cropper’s ability to transition his playing early on from the style of The Ventures, John Barry or Dick Dale, to someone who could later easily play on a Meters or Funkadelic track–all without losing his trademark twang–is also remarkable.

And, he plays on Isaac Hayes’ “Walk On By”

Isaac Hayes – Walk On By

I’m going to say that every other version of this song pisses me off. Even the shortened version of the Hayes song. To really appreciate it, you’ve got to hear it all the way through, allowing for the brutal pauses where every instrument has its say before Mr. Hayes sings his first word — over two minutes into the track. For a songwriter famed up to this point in his career for writing songs with an almost overwhelming sense of urgency (hey, the guy wrote a #1 song about getting off the toilet), I think giving the time to explore words he appreciates with the help of an outstanding backing band can certainly be called a turning point.

Can we go back in time for a moment?

Isaac Hayes wrote over 200 songs with partner Dave Porter in the mid-1960′s at Stax before breaking up the partnership to focus on his solo career. Their tunes were dependably great and a “Hayes/Porter” on a 45 was a stamp of approval. For one thing, they write one hell of an intro (pay attention Mr. Rza):

Charmels – As Long As I’ve Got You

But beyond that, I think they appreciated who they were writing for. As the above song easily proves, these guys could write and arrange some highly refined music for the right artists. But where Sam & Dave were concerned, they hardly wanted to sound refined or anything else. Sam Moore and Dave Prater sang intense, proud and raw music, which needed no stylistic buffers to get their point across. And with songs like “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby” or “I Thank You,” Hayes and Porter offer no buffers.

How great then for Hayes, to have the opportunity to explore a highly-refined song, by two highly-refined songwriters (Burt Bacharach and Hal David), written originally for a very classy lady (one Dione Warwick).

Ok, forward in time to mid-1969

Now I guess that around the time Isaac Hayes recorded “Walk On By” for his album Hot Buttered Soul, things were in a bit of upheaval at Stax records. Everyone was still mourning the death of label superstar Otis Redding (and to tell you the truth, I’m still mourning him too), control of the label had been not-too-kindly handed over by label founders Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton to powerful businessman Al Bell, and the entire Stax back catalog had been sold to Atlantic Records in a distribution deal. So, Al Bell ordered that 27 records and 30 singles come out, all in Mid-1969.

Hot Buttered Soul was not Hayes’ first solo record. Presenting Isaac Hayes had come out in 1968 on Stax at Bell’s urging and had sold poorly. The opening track, “Precious, Precious”, though, had been cut down from a lengthy 18 minutes of tape, and thus begins Hayes’ mature exploration of songs, musicianship, and pushing past the 3-minute boundary of radio-friendly music. This is how Hayes described the process in the liner notes to his 2005 greatest hits album Ultimate Isaac Hayes (Can You Dig It?):

“What it was, was the real me…I mean, OK, the real me had written those other songs ['Soul Man,' 'Hold On I'm Comin',' etc.], 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. Came the opportunity, I wanted to record these tunes. 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.”

Hot Buttered Soul has 4 songs. The longest, “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” clocks in at 18 minutes. Of course, the first half of the song features an elaborate spoken backstory. Here is how Hayes explained the song to National Public Radio:

“The rap came out of the necessity to communicate. There’s a local club in Memphis, primarily black, called The Tiki Club. One day there I heard this song by Glen Campbell – ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix.’ I thought, ‘Wow, this song is great, this man must really love this woman.’ I ran down to the studio and told them about the song, and they said ‘yeah, yeah.’ They didn’t feel what I felt, I thought maybe they weren’t getting it. The Bar-Kays were playing the Tiki Club a few days later, so I told them to learn the song and that I would sit in. I told them to keep cycling the first chord, and I started talking, just telling the story about what could have happened to cause this man to leave. Halfway through the song, conversations started to subside, and by the time I finished the song, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”

Man, Glen Campbell’s version is beautiful, but the video isn’t what you’d call heavy soul:

Hayes takes this and “Walk On By” and does more than dissect them, he hears them. In the same way Gram Parsons does, when he records William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” with the Byrds, or Dan Penn’s “Dark End Of The Street.” I think that Isaac Hayes is saying that in 1969 there were two sides of the aisle–Black Music and White Music–and if you tried to get someone to hear a song from the other side of the aisle, they would say ‘yeah, yeah’ but they wouldn’t want to do anything with it.

I find it funny that if you google ‘Isaac Hayes, By The Time I Get To Phoenix,’ you’re going to see words like ‘soulful’ and ‘erotic’, and without his name, you don’t get any description of the song at all, just that it’s sung by Glen Campbell and that it’s a #1 hit.

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So, we’re 7 & 1/2 minutes into “Walk On By,” and we know where this thing is going. Isaac has introduced a flute run after each time he and the ladies say “walk on” at around 6:30.  That run gets picked up by the rest of the brass and a few strings at 7:30, just as Hayes bows out. The brass fades out by about 8:20 and the strings fully take over. Fully, I should say, with the exception of that guitar player. Steve Cropper is so insistent that his sound come out alongside the strings that they start to fade in and out. Then, incredibly, they bow out entirely at about 9:12, just as Booker T lays it all on the table. It’s as if they’re saying “This is not the Love Unlimited Orchestra, We’re BOOKER T. & THE MG’s!” It’s 11:10 and Al Jackson Jr. is flipping the fuck out! Cropper is playing all sorts of bizarre angular chops and the band is totally together. The 70′s, Gamble and Huff, and all sorts of fluffy R&B shit may be right around the corner, but for a couple of minutes at the end of an impossibly long and perfect song, the Stax house band reigns, and the bandleader is wise enough to get out of their way.

Outkast – Happy Valentine’s Day

I particularly like songs that, you know, do stuff. Sequentially, the thing about doing stuff is that one goes from doing nothing to doing something. Causally, the tension of not doing stuff often propels one into doing stuff. But if we were talking about absolute opposites, doing nothing would just be nothing and doing something would be everything.

In musical composition, faced with the extremes of doing nothing and doing everything, either extreme is impossible and unlistenable. But it’s nevertheless a compelling model to work with and one that contains all sorts of exciting possibilites. So the creative problem is closer to reconciling doing just enough with doing as much as you can justify. This edging of extremes inwards requires the building of untenable tension towards an overwhelmingly cathartic and ultimately exhausting mass; one must explore each extreme until it self-destructs towards its opposite. In the achievement of these ends, we occasionally have an addition to a catalog of paced and thrilling pieces, chaste and hedonistic hemispheres that detonate upon contact: we have songs that explode.

I wanted to have a playlist all ready for this post but couldn’t think of enough tracks that fit the bill off the top of my head. Instead, I’ll contribute what comes to mind when it does and folks can throw the new additions into an iTunes playlist or something. It’s kind of hard to sequence this type of song anyway. If anyone has ideas, please comment with your nominations and we can develop a list together. Until then, here’s the track that inspired the effort…

The Twilight Sad‘s self-titled first EP contained their incredibly wonderful first splash “That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy”. Of all of their songs to this point, none challenge that track’s supremacy but the EP’s opener. “But When She Left, Gone Was The Glow” starts out with the quiet sounds of calm breathing: an air organ, the lilting Scottish bedroom voice. But once you’ve settled into the pregnant mood, the drums hit with quick warning shots, the guitar squeals like a loose engine belt, and the band opens the floodgates. It’s like that cliche stealth-to-action breaking point in crime movies: the entire police squad is positioned in the hallways and stairwells of a sketchy-ass apartment building, the delegated trumpeter knocks on the door and yells “Police”, they kick down the door, and all hell breaks loose. When I listen to this track I’m so pumped from the beginning, waiting for that moment, that when it actually occurs, I actually have a visceral reaction like a writhing sensation in flux with the roaring waves of guitar. The effect is ecstatic and transcendent and would never occur if the gesture were anything but perfectly executed.

The Twilight Sad – But When She Left, Gone Was The Glow

Hot Chip – I Feel Better

As I intimated in my reaction to Black’s post about Pete Rock and Dead Prez, I would rather dance to a song in my car than in the club. In fact, the last club I was in was in Mexico, and was long enough ago that folks were dancing to “La Macarena” without irony.

“Hai!”

So, the true dancefloor test is my kitchen while I’m doing the dishes. Yup, said it. “I Feel Better” features what I consider to be all the classic features of a great club song. The Zapp-vocals, the synth strings, the beat. It would certainly not be out of place in that video of the Ukranian lady drawing with sand. When listening the album, both the wife and I managed to zero in on this track and put it on repeat for a good part of January.  That’s fine, because you walk away feeling like you’ve just witnessed a boy version of “La Isla Bonita.” And to quote ODB, “Listen to the album, ’cause it’s bangin!” It’s also out in some countries on some record labels today.