Customer Reviews

Hot Buttered Soul (40th Anniversary Edition)

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MAN!!--MAN!!--MAN!!
The memories for me associated with this classic album! (-:
It brings back my childhood watching my parents and older cousins
"do their thing" at the house parties, card parties, BBQ's/Fish-Fries, etc.
that they would throw in my family back then when they were all young
and many who are gone now were still around.

Issac Hayes served notice to the musical world of 1969
that HIS MOMENT had indeed ARRIVED and he was so much more
than just being part of the great Stax Records songwriting/producing
team of Hayes & Porter, who had given the label it's core sound
during the mid 60's with classics performed by Sam & Dave, Otis Redding
and others. This was a MAJOR DEPARTURE from the standard STAX sound
and a glimpse into the bright & funky future of the 1970's and beyond!
I always say that Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, Issac Hayes, Stevie Wonder
and Marvin Gaye did more to establish that black music was so much more
sophisticated than it's simple gut-bucket beginnings than any other artists
of their generation. They were the forerunners for Barry White, P-Funk,
The Isley Brothers 70's T-Neck Years, and many others that came after them.

From the opening notes of Issac Hayes' classic sleek, seductive and
infinitely funky re-working of the Burt Bachrach/Hal David via Dionne Warwick
1964 pop classic "WALK ON BY", you just know that this is something very special!
The sweeping orchestration is epic!---The funky-as-a-pot-of-chittlins rhythm section,
replete with fuzztone & wah-wah guitars, percolating bass line, echoplex &
other trippy psychedelic effects, and drums that sounded like the drummer
reached way back and came down on the snare with such force that the drum kit had
to be riveted to the floor! This is an 11 minute soul-funk opus that is just
timeless and still BAD 2 DEATH 40 years later!!
So many hip-hop careers have been made sampling from the riffs
and licks off of Issac Hayes's 1969-1973 work that it's ridiculous!
But not just hip-hop and R&B, but pop, rock and alternative too! (Oh yeah!)
He has to be right up there with James Brown, Sly Stone, P-Funk, Curtis Mayfield
and others for number of songs dissected, sampled, and in some cases, downright
plagiarized by hip-hop and modern R&B producers who have the nerve to label themselves
as modern musical geniuses! HA!!--Yeah, right! (-:

Track 2 is another one of those almighty funk-rock bomb jamz which influenced
so many generations since then and has been sampled to death....
The stank-funky 9-plus minutes long "HYPERBOLICSYLLABISTICSESQUEDALYMYSTIC",
with it's heavy wah-wah, rolling way-out piano, sick bassline, more of
that hellacious drumming...
MAN!!---It's just southern-pimp-a-delic-groovalistic-funk at it's best! (-:

Track 3 is a relatively short (5-plus minute) exercise in soulful romance
advice called "ONE WOMAN", where Brother Ike basically sermonizes the virtues
of finding, loving and sticking with THAT ONE good woman or man in your life!

Track 4, and amazingly the final track on the album is Issac's classic
re-working of Jimmy Webb's country classic "By The Time I Get To Phoenix",
which introduced the world to one of Ike's trademark "raps"
over a sustained organ chord, with sparse bass line and rimshot/high-hat
timekeeping underneath as Issac spins an 8-plus minute tale, building & building,
finally climaxing into the actual song, replete with horns and strings,
which lasts a full 18 minutes and 42 minutes! WOW!!

Let me tell those who don't know already....this was a very innovative
album for it's time and changed the game on so many levels:
The length of what a song could be, arranging & orchestration,
production techniques which were cutting edge for black music at that time,
everything was all about BIG RICH SOUND!!
Issac Hayes voice was also innovative for that time and his baritone crooning
filled with longing and sensitivity while still maintaining his masculinity
and that low bass rumble which drove the women crazy of that time!
No disrespect to the late great Maestro Barry White, but Issac Hayes had
planted that flag in the "soul dirt" 5 yrs before him! (-:
This album was also perfect for the then new & emerging FM RADIO,
where emphasis was being placed on whole albums instead of just 2 minute singles like before.
This album was a HUGE SELLER in it's time and literally saved STAX records,
who had foolishly signed away the rights to their previous publishing catalogue
and all the great artists and songs therein to Atlantic Records in May of 1968.
Damn!!--Talk about bone-head moves!
After an unsuccessful attempt before this album for Issac Hayes to go solo
and break free of the whole behind-the-scenes staff songwriter-producer
thing, "HOT BUTTERED SOUL" was his second attempt, and boy did it work!
Again, I can't emphasized enough how important and influential this record
was in it's time, and it's influence extends way into the future!
If you haven't listened to it before, PLEASE CHECK IT OUT!!

A BONNIFIED SOUL/FUNK CLASSIC that has been remastered to perfection!

REST IN PEACE ISSAC HAYES aka BLACK MOSES!! (1942-2008)

THIS HISTORIC ALBUM WAS RELEASED 1 YEAR BEFORE I WAS BORN. IKE ENDED THE '60'S WITH A BANG. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE HOW HE RE-WORKED "WALK ON BY", HIS DELIVERY WAS DONE WITH SO MUCH CONVICTION AND CHARISMA. THAT SONG REALLY MAKES ME FEEL TEN FEET TALL BECAUSE IT MAKES ME FEEL GOOD. HYPERBOLLIC...... IS JUST ASTOUNDING. "BY THE TIME I GET TO PHOENIX" KINDA REMINDS ME OF BEING IN CHURCH. IKE WASN'T CALLED BLACK MOSES FOR NOTHIN', HE SURE LED THE TRUE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL(SO-CALLED AFRICAN-AMERICANS) THROUGH SOME TIMES WITH HIS WONDERFUL MUSIC AND HIS MASTERFUL REMAKES. I LOVE ME SOME ISAAC HAYES RIGHT ABOUT NOW. REST IN PEACE.

If someone were to ask me what is the greatest soul album ever made this would be my choice. As evidence I would play the second song, Hyperbolicsyllablecsesquedalymistic. If that long soulful outro on that song doesnt get you I am not certain what will. The piano playing at the end is out of this world. Then, you have the classic song Walk On By and the last track seems to go on forever and when you are listening to it you kind of hope it will. If you listen to just the samples you might think it sounds too much like Barry White, and it probably was an influence on Barry, but don't let the snippets fool you. The magic in this album is the long grooves of the songs. I think it is great music for road trips especially on a lonely highway. But, however you are going to play it I think you will enjoy it.

Hearing Hot Buttered Soul for the first time draws some amazing contradictions about Issac Hayes. Hayes spent much of the 1960s at Stax, writing stripped soul hits for guys like Sam and Dave. The epitome of southern grit and its most famous Memphis label.

But if the late 1960s planted the seeds for art rock, why not art soul. This hot buttered take on the genre takes music that made up the best singles of the 1960s and turns it into a lush, spacious hub of sound.

In a sense, the emphasis here is not on writing. There were four tracks when this came out in 1969, and though one of the best American songwriters, Hayes wrote only two. Hot Buttered Soul is about expanding what can be done with songs: sonically, texturally.

Hayes kicks off the album with Burt Bacharach's "Walk On By." Last anybody heard, this was a nice bossa Dione Warwick took to the charts. Hayes rips and reassembles limb from limb--turning "Walk On By" into a dark, brooding, orchestral fuzz guitar symphony. Never had soul music been so frighteningly epic, a departure point for such daring experimentation. And it sounds as revolutionary in 2010 as it did in 1969. The rave up that ends the track is alone a unique invention.

"Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedellmystic"-wow that was not easy- shows Hayes able to take this epic soul approach, and with circular buzz saw guitar, make it stomp hard has Hendrix. Lushness with steel teeth. And though "One Women" shows Hayes able to make what would have been a perfect single, Jimmy Webbs "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" done by Hayes is a precursor to rap.

Not many picked up on the massive mandate Hot Buttered put in front of soul. Had they, soul would have been all over progressive FM radio in 1969. That never happened, and it was not until the mid 1970s that bands like Funkadelic and Earth Wind and Fire, really started to explore soul on this grand a scale.

But talk about a leap off the tight rope, Hot Buttered Soul is still one of the most revolutionary albums far too few people know about

Though he had been part of the famed Stax sound for a number of years, having also co-written the Sam & Dave hits "Hold On (I'm Comin') and "Soul Man", Isaac Hayes really broke into his own with an album that, right out of the chute in 1969, was identified as an R&B masterpiece, and one that showed at least one direction of where the genre would go into the 1970s--HOT BUTTERED SOUL.

The original release of this album contained only four songs on it, two of them being extremely extended takes of Jimmy Webb's "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" (a career-establishing hit for Webb in Glen Campbell's 1967 version) and the Burt Bacharach/Hal David classic "Walk On By" (a huge hit for Dionne Warwick in 1964). But unlike a lot of the extended psychedelic "jams" that had infected much of rock and roll during the last few years of the 1960s and had drifted into mind-numbing repetition, Hayes' approach, utilizing recitations, lush string arrangements, and his own great keyboard work, made those songs into something completely different. This re-mastered version, interestingly, contains the singles' versions of "Phoenix" and "Walk On By", which were mild hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1969 (though still unusually long at, respectively, 6:57 and 4:33).

Along with his later soundtrack score to SHAFT in 1971, HOT BUTTERED SOUL defined Isaac Hayes' smooth but straightforward approach to his genre, one that would be emulated (particularly by Barry White), copied, and arguably stolen by many over the ensuing decades, right up until his shockingly untimely demise in August 2008. For anyone with a taste for R&B, HOT BUTTERED SOUL is unquestionably a masterwork of the highest order.

After several years as a staff arranger, producer, writer and instrumentalist for Stax Records, Hayes cut his 1967 solo debut, Presenting Isaac Hayes, sketching an album template that was rendered in ink on this 1969 follow-up. Where the debut riffed on tunes by Willie Dixon and Count Basie, this sophomore effort offers full-length dissertations. With only four tracks, but a running time of over 45-minutes, Hayes stretched covers of Bacharach and David's "Walk On By" and Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" to epic length. The single versions, added here as bonus tracks, still clock in at 4:33 and 6:57, respectively, even when edited to their radio essentials.

Hayes didn't just lengthen these songs by adding musical jams and verbal recitations; he refashioned them completely into soul music, with thumping drum beats, deep bass, and wailing psychedelic guitars. His deeply pained vocal on "Walk On By" is as much sung as it is begged, and an 8-minute rap blossoms brilliantly into an emotional reading of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." These covers didn't just separate themselves from earlier versions, they separated themselves from everything else then being recorded in soul music.

The album's new pieces include the heavy soul "Hyperbolicsyllablecseseuedalymistic," featuring a terrifically funky piano solo, and a standard ballad arrangement of Charles Chalmers' "One Woman." Interestingly, Hot Buttered Soul, wasn't recorded in the famed Stax studio, but at the nearby Ardent complex that regularly hosted overflow Stax work and was the home turf of Big Star. Clearly there was magic in those rooms. This latest reissue includes 24-bit remastering by Bob Fisher and a 12-panel booklet with introductory notes by Jim James, liners by Bill Dahl and a couple of great photos. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

I owned this as an eight track years ago, so I was happy to be able to own it again on cd. I always enjoyed the long version of "By The Time I Get To Phoenix".

Isaac Hayes soul music. Interesting as to what he does with some main line songs.

Few albums climb to the top of their genre so as to define the genre. Isaac Hayes' album is the very definition of Hot Buttered Soul. The vocals, in combination with the orchestrations on virtually every track on the album, provide a powerful mood-setting experience. I purchased the original album in 1970 based on the recommendation of (the late great) Marty Faye---a Chicago Jazz DJ; But this re-release on CD is sublime.