Iconic at 50: Isaac Hayes's 'Shaft'

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC and that is the theme song from the 1971 movie, Shaft by Isaac Hayes. This summer, we're looking at, or rather listening to some iconic albums that turned 50 this year and digging into the political and social context in which they were made and their impact on both music and culture. The music historian say 1971, 50 years ago, was a particularly important year. Joining me now to talk about Shaft the soundtrack is Jon Burlingame, music journalist who writes regularly for a Variety. Music and TV-theme expert, and host of For Scores podcast.

That's not four scores as in the Gettysburg address, that's for scores, musical scores. He recently wrote a piece on the soundtrack Shaft for variety titled, How Isaac Hayes' Shaft Reinvented the Game for Film Music. Jon, thanks for doing this. Welcome to WNYC.

Jon Burlingame: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian: Let's start here. Listeners, we're going to play some more tracks excerpts as we go, but like the other albums we've covered in the series, the Shaft soundtrack was really a catalyst for change for Isaac Hayes. Can you talk a little bit about who he was before 1971?

Jon: It's really remarkable when you think that he was only 29 when he won the academy award for best song for the score. He was a kid who was raised largely by his grandparents, who picked cotton in the fields outside of Memphis Tennessee, where he grew up, who taught himself to play organ, piano, flute, and saxophone as a kid, and who by his early 20s was not just writing songs, but a talented song-writer who got hits for stacks in the late 1960s.

Brian: For the completely uninitiated, is it relevant to talking about Isaac Hayes and the cultural context of that song and that album? It's a double album. There's a lot of music on it. Can you briefly summarize the movie Shaft and its place in the culture at that time?

Jon: Yes, perhaps a good point to do that because Shaft was not thought of as a particularly important film at the time. It was an action/adventure movie set in Harlem, starring Richard Roundtree as a black private eye who winds up sort of stuck between white and black gangs at the time. MGM made it and they were not doing so well. Therefore, I think perhaps open to what might be thought of as a more commercially risky project, which is a largely black acted film set in Harlem. Only a handful of films before it really kind of aimed as the African-American movie-going audience.

Brian: And you write "With key members of his Memphis band, augmented by a small ensemble of Hollywood veterans, Hayes came up with a signature sound for that memorable opening scene, hi-hat cymbals and wah-wah guitar." How do you think the theme song for Shaft that we heard at the beginning of the segment, we heard exactly that part, tells the story of the character?

Jon: What I find I find so wonderful, I think, about Hayes' accomplishment here is that he had never even been near a movie studio. He'd never written any kind of film music before and yet, perhaps because of what we had heard in 1969 in his Hot Buttered Soul album, you could tell that he had a dramatic instinct. He had not just the ability to write music and the soul and R&B genre of music-making, but he seemed to almost immediately understand what was necessary to write a dramatic score, which is what you really need to do when you're working in film.

He applied what he knew best, which was his stacks style of not just a soul tune, but augmented with strings and flutes which I also talk about in the article and apply that to what was necessary for an action/adventure movie. I still think it's extraordinary.

Brian: Listeners, wondering if anyone out there right now remembers buying Isaac Hayes' Shaft album. Were you one of the first people to get your hands on it 50 years ago when it came out because you were already an Isaac Hayes fan or because you saw the movie and like the music? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Did it feel as monumental as it does maybe now looking back on it or anything else you want to say about 1971 in the context of the movie or the album Shaft, if you want to say it? 646-435-7280.

If you're younger, how were you introduced to the album if you're a fan of the album now? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. For those of you who heard our 1971 album segment. Last week about the the Alice Coltrane album maybe this is one a little bit like that, where it was out there, but it's more legendary today than it was then. 646-435-7280, even though very different because the Alice Coltrane journey in such Ananda album was obscure at the time. Shaft was in the pop culture. I think, Jon, that the reputation of album that grows to sort of classic status can start from either side.

It can be, "Oh, yes, that pop culture thing Shaft," or it can be this obscure artsy thing like the Alice Coltrane album, and yet here they are, both being legendary 50 years later.

Jon: Oh, boy, I love that. I love that comparison. It just reminds us, I suppose, in a very difficult time in America now, how important music is in our lives, the music that we grew up with, the music that we discovered, particularly in our younger years, and the music we're hearing now. Thank God that I'm in a position to be able to write about this and to enjoy music and write about it at the same time.

Brian: Let's hear a little more most of the soundtrack is instrumental being a movie score, but besides Shaft, the theme song, there's a song called Soulsville, which features lyrics.

Isaac Hayes: [singing] Slums, ghetto, and black belt

They are one and the same

And I call it Soulsville

Brian: I call it Soulsville, want to reflect a bit on those lyrics and the fact that they are  

really the main lyrics of the album.

Jon: What's interesting to me about it is that-- and that's what we would normally in film music refer to as source music that is generally heard in the background often in a bar, or a dance hall, or a disco, or someplace where we don't necessarily notice the lyrics, but it was an opportunity here for Isaac Hayes to write something other than the instrumentals that were sort of propelling the film along.

It's a great example of the fact that here was an opportunity for him to talk about the black experience in America, that he was seeing, that he was feeling and that he knew his brothers and sisters were feeling at the time. It's a highlight of the album, I think. Certainly, one of the most important tunes he wrote for Shaft.

Brian: You're right, the Shaft single went to number one in November 1971 as did the album, and that the film was among the 20 top-grossing movies of 1971 and launched the so-called blaxploitation genre. Can you talk a bit about that genre? What was it all about and for people who don't know, what does that word even mean?

Jon: [laughs] Blaxploitation is a term that was invented around that time. Basically refers to films that were being made mostly in Hollywood. Although there were some independent films that were designed specifically to appeal to African-American audiences, and they had largely black cast and were occasionally as in the case of Shaft made by African-American writers and directors. In this case, the director was Gordon Parks who had quite a celebrated career as a photo-journalist for life and who had made a film in 1969 called The Learning Tree, based on his own life.

It was again risky of MGM to devote this kind of resources and to choose these talented African-American artists to make a movie specifically for that audience. Of course, as we know, it crossed over into a massive white audience as well.

Brian: Here's an aspect of it, musically that I love. Hayes' son, Isaac Hayes III views the Shaft soundtrack as validation of his father's ideas about soul music. The younger Hayes told you, "He always wanted to incorporate flutes and strings," his dad, like Motown, and mixing the two was frowned upon by a lot of people on the Memphis music scene. Let's listen to just a little example of a bit of soul mix with flutes and strings on the song Regio's Café.

[music] Do you want me to elaborate a little bit more on what Hayes' son told you? Was there a camp that says, "Wow, that really swings," and "Wow, what use of orchestral instruments, strings and flutes," and another camp that says, "Oh, don't muck it up with all that stuff"?

Jon: [laughs] It's true and so funny to look back on it from 50 years later and we take that for granted now. I think the thing is when you have commercial success, as some record labels did in that era, and you establish a house style that dictates certain things that are done and not done, it's sometimes can be thought of as risky to depart from that format. I think Hayes' success with the Hot Buttered Soul album in '69 clearly indicated that he had an aesthetic.

He made musical choices that were perhaps from the Memphis point of view outside the box, but boy, it worked. That particularly, the Café Regio's tune is one of my favorites on the album. The album as a whole is partly soul, partly R&B, there's a little funk, there's some jazz, and some blues. It is just such a magnificent piece of work.

Brian: Debbie in the Bronx. You're in WNYC, as we talk about Isaac Hayes' Shaft film score at 50 years old. Hi, Debbie.

Debbie: Hi, Brian. Listen to you all the time, love the show. I'm a black woman. I went to see the movie because it was something so new at that time. I saw the movie three times, not for the acting, but for the music. I grew up on jazz. Daddy was a real jazz box. I played that album to death. The theme song, Shaft, I can't number how many times I've heard it. It still excites me every time I listened to it. I hear something that I didn't hear before.

It was just a phenomenal piece of music and the whole album was great, but the theme song, it still blows my mind.

Brian: Debbie, thank you so much. Judith in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Judith.

Judith: Hi, how are you? I just wanted to say mentioning Café Regio's, I still stopped at this time and always think about it. It's one of my favorite songs also. I just wanted to say that I was at Isaac Hayes' last concert, which is right here in Brooklyn in Prospect Park, June 2008. He passed away two months after that. Isaac Hayes, he was a wonderful composer, not just on Shaft, but he was such a fabulous composer that I always think that unfortunately, if he had been a white male working in the music business, he would have had so much more claim, the claim that he deserved. 

Brian: Judith, thank you very much. Jon thinking about Debbie from the Bronx's call, and how she went back to the movie to see the movie again and again. Largely for the music, it makes me think of the passage that you wrote that the success of his two-LP soundtrack album assured that every black action/adventure film for the next several years would be scored by a major artist of color. What was the legacy of the soundtrack in film in that respect?

Jon: I think it took Hollywood by storm in a sense. Because once again, Hollywood studios did tend to be risk-averse. I think that the unusual choice of having a black artist do a soundtrack. Again, it's something he'd never done before and which really worked, opened the door. I should say the eyes really of studio executives to the idea that, "Okay, now that we know this works, let's do it every time out from now on."

You wind up with Curtis Mayfield during Superfly in '74, you wind up with Bobby Womack doing Across 110th Street, and you wind up with Marvin Gaye doing Trouble Man in '72. In many cases, these albums were actually more successful than the movies themselves, or at least are very, in many cases, better remembered.

Brian: We're going to play a couple of clips here, music clips, and spoiler alert, one of them is not from Shaft. Hayes' son told you that the soundtrack is something that

producers of hip-hop consistently go to for inspiration or just to find that really good sample. Let's take a little listen first to some of Bumpy's Lament from the Shaft soundtrack and listen closely to the end of this clip, folks, where the sample is played.

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All right, remember that ending. Here's one example of the Shaft soundtrack being used for samples. Here's Dr. Dre's classic 2001 song, Xxplosive.

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Dr. Dre: [singing] West coast

My ish ways attract, girls that used to turn they back

Brian: From that little snippet, what was the impact of the album on rap music that would come much later on or even R&B?

Jon: I think that what it shows us is that groups like Public Enemy, Dr. Dre, Tupac, and Big Daddy Kane, all revered what Isaac Hayes had done and understood what that legacy was and took inspiration from it. Not to mention the examples for their own work. I think in many ways, it's an Omaha to Hayes to utilize that material. They all seem to recognize that this is quality stuff and worth employing in their own music.

Brian: You're right, that Hayes skipped scoring the Shaft sequels, Shaft's big score in 1972, and Shaft in Africa in 1973 because you quote him saying, "I don't like repeating myself and I don't think I do them justice." Much later on in his career, he did something completely unexpected from 1997 until 2006, he voiced the character Shaft on the oftentimes controversial animated adult sitcom, South Park. Listeners, did you know that Isaac Hayes did the voice of Shaft on South Park? Let's listen to just a bit of season one episode one where Shaft is introduced.

Kid: Shaft, have you ever had something happen to you, but nobody believed you?

Shaft: Oh, children, children. That's a problem we've all had to face at some time or another here. Here, let me sing you a little song. It might clear things up.

[singing] I'm going to make love to you, woman

I'm going to lead you down by the fire

Brian: In a way, Isaac Hayes is poking fun of himself and the legacy he had created. I also think Shaft was probably the most sympathetic character in South Park, but want to weigh in on that or maybe what his time at South Park might say about the artist that he was?

Jon: Well, I think that those guys who did the South Park cartoons clearly appreciated Isaac Hayes. What does that say about Isaac Hayes himself willing to

poke fun at his own reputation, and in doing so found an entirely new generation who perhaps knew nothing of his earlier career or music? Helps to usher him into a brand new 21st-century audience in a way.

Brian: We're appropriately, I think, going to go out on the last song on the album called, The End Theme. Before we do, you quote, "David Arnold, the composer who scored the 2000 sequel of Shaft on the original score, he told you that idiosyncratic approach, singular voice, and understanding of the character and the world he occupied. Isaac Hayes was intimate with that world, culturally ethnically societally. He was part of the black experience in America at that time. Of course, he was going to translate that into amazing music." Rumor has it that Isaac Hayes tried out for the part of Shaft, the acting part. In our last 30 seconds or so, is that true?

Jon: We are told it's true. We don't know if he actually got the opportunity to audition, but he certainly wanted the part. Of course, he went on to play roles in many different films after that. Notably, Escape from New York, which is one of my favorites. It is said that he tried desperately to actually take on the role of Shaft.

Brian: There, we leave it with our guests, Jon Burlingame, a music journalist who writes regularly for a Variety. Music and TV-theme expert, and host of For Scores, the podcast. He recently wrote a piece on the soundtrack for Variety titled, How Isaac Hayes' Shaft Reinvented the Game for Film Music. This is great. Thanks so much for coming on.

Jon: Thank you, Brian.

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