Sam and Dave and Isaac Hayes

When Isaac Hayes died recently there was a surprising (but deserved) amount of coverage. It may have been testament to his massive contribution to music but also to the fact that with his various roles as musician, songwriter, performer, iconic baldy, actor and voice of chef meant that there were simply more good stories about him. Death by treadmill didn't hurt the copywriters either!

Great things about Isaac Hayes.

The fact that he wrote 200 songs for Stax (and you do know a lot of them), the cover of Hot Buttered Soul with the bald head and chain and the fact that the lp only had 4 songs on it including By The Time I Get To Phoenix. With it's generous 18 minute running time, there was a fair chance you could actually get to Phoenix by the time Ike had finished the spoken intro. The slight pause as the monologue ends with the line "He said" and then the song slides into the opening line of the song. A classic soul moment, only bettered by the sweetness of the strings as it gets to the line "She'll laugh when she reaches the part that says I'm leaving"

Obviously Theme from Shaft was great. Even better was the fact that he was lifted onto the stage by a hydraulic ramp to play it at the 1971 Oscars. That's less Soulsvile USA. More like Kiss and Detroit Rock City. You've got to give credit for the fact that he had a tuxedo made of chains and also wrote a song called Pursuit Of The Pimpmobile. Oh yes. And the tooling up sequence in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. The scene gets longer and the weapons get bigger. After being so involved in the whole Blaxploitation genre here was Hayes sending himself up.

But there's more to it than the stories and the songwriting. And more to it than great songwriter writes great song. I think what he did with Sam and Dave is even more interesting.

Hayes and song writing partner Dave Porter took an underachieving soul duo who had been signed by Atlantic's Jerry Wexler (who also died very recently) and forced them to go against their own instincts as singers. The resulting string of singles that Hayes and Porter wrote for them between 1965 and 69 are pretty much as good as it gets. Backed by a multi racial band on a white owned label that aimed at Black audiences (while in the North, Motown was the Black owned label aiming at White audiences) Sam and Dave had the Gospel fire, and the contrast of Sam Moore's pleading tenor contrasting with Dave Prater's gruff roar.

I Take what I Want
You Don't Know Like I Know
Hold On I'm Coming
You Got Me Humming
When Something Is Wrong With My baby
Soul Man
I Thank You
Everybody Got To Believe In Somebody
Soul Sister Brown Sugar

No duffers there! Hearing any of them would make anyone's world a better place. Sometimes you don't have to dig out the rare and obscure. Sometimes the best stuff was actually the hits!

Sam Moore started out singing Gospel and was all set to tour with the Soul Stirrers as a potential replacement for Sam Cooke. He changed his mind after seeing Jackie Wilson and wanted to do a broader range of material. In 1961 he was compering an amateur night in Miami he was joined onstage by Dave Prater still in his baker's whites from his day job. Prater was so nervous he dropped his mike and Sam caught it.

They'd signed to Roulette but the whole thing didn't really come together until they were signed by Jerry Wexler in 1964 and sent to Memphis....which is where Isaac Hayes came in. The hits that Hayes and Porter wrote for them forced them to sing outside their natural keys.

Sam Moore has said "The funny thing was I didn't like any of our hits when Hayes and Porter played them for us. I liked the ballads but I didn't understand their kind of music. I was looking for the straight Rock 'n' Roll and they'd come up with all these changes, horn lines doing this and we'd be doing that. Chords where you'd really have to grit your teeth to sing it"

But of course that straining gave an urgency to the sound. The horn lines, guitar and vocals were all going hell for leather. The band were doing call and response in the same way that Sam and Dave were. Hayes and Porter were writing songs for them that captured the fervour of Gospel but with celebrations of heartbreak and lust. Songs that built the Soul Man tradition. Testifying and testosterone. Sometimes he's a Broke Down Piece Of A Man (actually it's a Steve Cropper song rather than Isaac Hayes) but more likely it's Hold On I'm Coming.

Listen to the wail and flail of I Thank You, and it's opening plea for "Some more of that ooooold Soul clapping". Now go and play Black Grape's In The Name Of The Father. A record that could not have existed with Sam and Dave.

Thing is Hayes also had to convince the label owner. "Jim Stewart just did not like minor keys. Yeah yeah. The bread and butter of Gospel and Blues. He hated them in fact....Of course you couldn't be at all funky and innovative if you didn't use some of those options. So we were always at work sneaking them in"

As a live act they were legendary. They were Double Dynamite, with the non stop, athletic dance routines, the call and response vocals, feeding off each others lines and moves. I remember seeing a clip of Hold On I'm Coming where they make loosening a tie seem like a choreographed act of Soulful intensity, rather than just a way of breathing more easily.

In Gerri Hirshey's book Nowhere To Run (a terrific book on Soul that should be on the national curriculum) there is a lot of Sam and Dave...and sweat.
Prater saw it as proof that he'd worked for his pay and Moore said "Unless my body reaches a certain temperature, starts to liquify, I just don't feel right"

But despite their onstage chemistry the pair had a volatile relationship. Moore was a long term heroin addict. In 1968 Prater shot his wife during an argument. Prater's wife survived but he was never prosecuted. Moore wouldn't speak to him again. "I said I'll sing with you but I'll never talk to you again ever. So for 12 years our lives were completely separate"

In 1970 Moore recorded a solo album for Atlantic, backed by the cream of Atlantic and Stax musicians including Bernard Purdie on drums, Aretha Franklin on keyboards, Donny Hathaway and the Sweet Inspirations. Plenty Good Lovin' didn't get released until 2002.

Moore himself didn't remember making it but he did remember going to see the albums producer King Curtis in 1971. "Unfortunately when I got there he was ...ahh...getting murdered"
King Curtis Sax player (on everything from Yakety Yak to Memphis Soul Stew) and producer was carrying air conditioning equipment into his Harlem apartment when he was stabbed.

Moore remembers "Aretha was sitting across the street and I was walking towards the apartment. I could see King screaming at this guy to get off his steps....Aretha got out of the car and screamed but at the time I wasn't so clean. I was carrying stuff I didn't want any one to find. I ran before I saw him die

Sam and Dave continued to work with each other on and off through the 70's. There were various reunion tours and ill advised re recordings of their hits. The success of the Blues Brothers prompted another short lived reunion before Moore got a job serving Warrants and Prater worked for a Pontiac dealer.

Moore talks about those 70's gigs in a recent interview at http://www.zani.co.uk/Interviews.aspx?id=56 to plug his recent Overnight Sensational album (I'd go for the release of the 1970 album myself....it doesn't feature Sting or Jon Bon Jovi)

"Oh my god it was real bad. You've got to understand it wasn't a promoter that broke Sam and Dave, it was us. Sometimes Dave would show up, and I wouldn't. Sometimes I would show, and he wouldn't. We'd get up on stage, but it wasn't like the old days when we connected, and say to each other "Let's go and get them". We were getting high, I was pimping my girlfriends at the time. It wasn't such a good life then."

The Sam and Dave act had led to a myriad of male duo acts. Sam and Bill, Sam and Dan, Sam and Sam, Eddie and Ernie. At one point Dave Prater was touring as Sam and Dave with Sam from Sam and Dan.

There were legal shenanigans when Sam Moore stopped Atlantic from releasing a Sam and Dave album in 1985 that featured Sam Daniels. Moore himself felt the weight of legal process when he was ordered to stop performing Dole Man in support of Bob Dole. Sadly he was not stopped from recording Soul Man with Lou Reed. Prater had the misfortune to sell crack to an undercover policeman and then worse luck when he died following a car crash in 88.

The popularity and impact of their hits and their own personal problems meant that they were stuck with each other and their hits even when they weren't together. Although the sweat and intensity of their live shows was down to their own talent, it was the song writing of Isaac Hayes and Dave Porter
that gave them the hits that they could never escape from. Their story has some of the most thrilling moments in Pop, squandered talent, unseen chances and their own poisonous relationship.

It's like Rod Hull and Emu.