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.

Among the records I have only in vinyl format is this single from Pete Rock‘s Soul Survivor II featuring Dead Prez on vocal duties. Nasty. Rugged. Ill. Dead Prez on a club track spitting hedonism in the midst of warzone-like social conditions? Hectic. I first read about it when it was released on Turntable Lab and every sentence in the review jokingly concluded with the phrase “in the club”. One section gets stuck in my head all day after I listen to it: “I don’t even bring ID to the club / Why they need to know my government name in the club? / I ain’t got no paper for the bar in the club / Already got drunk before I came in the club.” The production is ridiculously hype switching from half- to double-time throughout and is an incredible example of efficient sample selection. The guitar/keyboard line, tambourine, and strings are used perfectly by a master. By the end of the track, the “what is Dead Prez doing in the club?” factor is mostly resolved as ironic, but deadly serious, commentary. “Why the fuck I came in the club?” Well, probably because you hoped to wild out on banging tracks like this.

No luck on the mp3 for me. But here’s the YouTube version…

It’s been way too long since we’ve updated this joint. Good lord. Maybe we can get our act together for the New Year. In advance of that possibility, I would like to share the two hottest slow jams of the winter to melt this frigid white Christmas. The first is initially novelty–a cover of The Dirty Projectors’ “The Stillness Is The Move” by Solange…you know, Beyonce’s sister who takes B and Jay to Grizzly Bear shows and such? Anyway, once you’re past the whole wuh? factor, it’s really hot. Also, I must confess that the original just doesn’t resonate with me; this captures the whole sentiment of the song in a way I can connect with. The gravitas is more moving. And for a guitar sample that is so classic, it’s put to very classy use. It’s smooth, funky, and downright splendid. Dig that.

Solange – Stillness Is The Move

The second is “Slow Dance” by Keri Hilson. I don’t know much about her but it appears she’s a songwriter/hit-maker who’s making her foray into solo work. I’ve sampled some other tracks that just don’t cut it. But this one gets me in a major way. It’s got as ill a groove as you can get in this type of ballad. And that alternating vocal and synth play in the chorus is so delicious. The amorphousness of it as a whole is really enchanting. Listen in headphones and the disorienting synth and rewind pan are the details that throw the whole floaty element over the top. Grin-ding!

Keri Hilson – Slow Dance

And just in case that’s too much sexiness for you, I’m throwing in a video that is not a slow jam at all. It’s the video for Shakira’s “She Wolf”. It’s actually a pretty enjoyable funk-jam. But it’s probably the most awkward video I’ve seen in a long time. I feel uncomfortable watching it.

Well. Merry Christmas!

“Impossible Souls”

“Age Of Adz”

“There’s Too Much Love”

Also, hooray for digital shorts…

First, start this video, watch it for a minute or so and then read the next paragraph…

One thing that struck me about the Orthrelm clip (check out more links in the Moody post) was that when I stopped watching it and just listened while performing other computer tasks, it stopped sounding like shredding and started sounding like an experimental remix. There were moments where it sounded like a piece of a song was being looped and the drums and guitars punched in and out of the mix. There were moments where the guitar work sounded like tabulated feedback: distorted guitar noise broken down into playable notes and patterns. There were moments where it sounded like a section of song was being put through a digital delay or echo set to infinite repetitions, with different delay rates and lengths punched in every 20 seconds or so. The music didn’t grab me until I started listening to it like that–like the deconstructed sounds the band is influenced by being played like normal music. What a strange back and forth of ideas. Meta-pre-post-modernist even.

But soon Rick and Tim’s conversation on Orthrelm reminded me of the band Hella, which I’ve never explored much, but respected for their talent, which is immediately apparent if not immediately accessible. And against the challenge of Orthrelm, they soon oozed pop-appeal. Take these videos for example.

“Biblical Violence”

“Ungrateful Dead”

And this one, which can’t be embedded.

Killer. The real winner, though, was Hella drummer and Orthrelm collaborator Zach Hill’s solo effort, “The Dark Arts”. This track is badass. I had seen the video once and wasn’t patient enough for the extended running visuals, however cheeky they were (and they are pretty chucklable). When I just now revisited the song and again stopped watching the visuals, the song itself came through clearly. It rules. Check it out.

I’d take this on to some Marnie Stern thoughts, but I just haven’t gotten into her. So I’m not. I’m stopping here.