Meanwhile, Stax’s distributor, Atlantic Records, had been sold. Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler dropped a bombshell on Jim Stewart about the fine print in their contract: By the way, Warner Brothers now owns all your records, all your masters, all these unreleased tapes and, oh yeah, Sam & Dave too. This was a sizable blow, since Sam & Dave were Stax’s most successful act to date next to Otis Redding — who had died in a plane crash in December 1967.
Left with nothing but the as-yet-unrecorded music of a handful of artists who were under contract, Stax moved forward a year later with a blitzkrieg of releases. In May 1969, Stax pulled the improbable business stunt of releasing 27 singles and 27 albums simultaneously. The label flew more than 200 journalists to Memphis for an immense press summit at the Holiday Inn Rivermont, where Stax unleashed a massive new catalog to replace the one it had just lost. Every Stax artist was represented. But the record with the least pressure to move units ended up changing music forever.
Stax executive vice president Al Bell had wanted a reluctant Isaac Hayes to produce a solo record for the 27-album push. Hayes’ last album, 1967’s Presenting Isaac Hayes, was little more than an alcohol-fueled jam session that had been edited to album format. It tanked, and Hayes vowed to never do another album unless Stax granted him complete creative control. Hayes was given a lot of leeway as one of Stax’s head songwriters, but suits were still suits. Jim Stewart was obsessed with keeping things simple and accessible. He would dissuade Hayes from using minor chords in any song he produced for Stax. On the occasions when Hayes would ask Stewart to record him, Stewart would decline, telling Hayes that his voice was too pretty.
But with 26 other albums for Stax to worry about, Bell granted Hayes the freedom to make whatever type of record he wanted. “I didn’t give a damn if it didn’t sell because I was going for the true artistic side . . . I had an opportunity to express myself no holds barred, no restrictions, and that’s why I did it.”63 Compare Hayes’ approach to that of Hank Shocklee, who said about Nation of Millions, “We didn’t go in there tryin’ to make a record that an A&R person had to like. We didn’t care.”64 In 1969, this felt like a wild luxury, but after the release and subsequent success of Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul, groups like Public Enemy could treat creative freedom as an ultimatum, an absolute imperative.
Hayes couldn’t fit everything he wanted to say on a three-minute side of a Stax 45, so he let himself stretch out for 18-minute workouts like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” — a song Public Enemy no doubt found inspiration in for their MLK Day screed “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” Hot Buttered Soul was as unlikely an album as they came during a time when most R&B albums were just cobbled-together collections of singles and covers. Hot Buttered Soul dripped with extended jams that challenged the radio-single format, slurring strings in sharp contrast to the spare Stax output, showing a bassy bravado that wallowed below the timbres that R&B fans were used to. Plus, it had no singles or promotion to speak of until a month after its release. Nevertheless, it single-handedly changed R&B from a singles genre to an album genre after it sold a million copies, landing simultaneously on the R&B, pop, jazz and easy listening charts. Part of its unique appeal was a result of Hayes pulling from a slew of disparate sources, much in the way that P.E. would stack Slayer and Spoonie Gee. Hayes originally heard “Phoenix” on the radio as performed by country-pop artist Glen Campbell, and none of the Bar-Kays in his backing band were too excited about it.
Out of the four songs on the album, Hayes wrote only one himself, the nine-minute sex romp “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic.” “We wanted to tease one’s intellect,” said Hayes about this juicy jabberwock. “It only meant that I had a roll in the hay and wanted an encore. All of those extensive words, all those syllables — I had a nice roll in the hay, and I want some more.”65 After some lexual healing and a line about hearing a “discussion about a racial relationship,” Hayes plays a six-minute piano solo, including five seconds that are looped for the tense nail-biter of a beat for Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” A Hayes track talking about his “gastronomical stupensity” and “love asphixiation” may have seemed better suited for Flav getting brainknowledgeably wizzy than Chuck D mounting the greatest jailbreak ever put to wax. But P.E.’s use of the only Hayes-penned song on R&B’s creative breakthrough represents the importance of autonomy and self-reliance that Public Enemy stress both creatively and politically.
Isaac Hayes was one of Chuck’s heroes, his “musical godfather” who appeared on records bought by his aunts, uncles and parents. He was a figure whom Chuck has described as larger than life in his childhood — “like Superman, black Superman.”66 Chuck had picked out the Hayes sample for a Bomb Squad production in 1987, but not for Public Enemy. It was originally intended for a track by True Mathematics, one of a handful of Hempstead MCs whom the Bomb Squad were managing at the time. Yet Chuck wanted it for himself and quietly prayed that Mathematics couldn’t handle it. As fate would have it, the track quickly ended up in Chuck’s more able hands. At that point, Chuck reached back to the years when Hayes was at Stax for inspiration.
The Vietnam War weighed heavily on Chuck, who, around 1967, saw one of his uncles come over to his grandmother’s house to pick up his draft papers. At age 7, Chuck couldn’t understand much beyond the look on everyone’s faces. He had relatives who were drafted out of high school — when they returned, they had Purple Hearts. One had shrapnel in his leg. In “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” Chuck plays a conscientious objector who was imprisoned because he tossed his draft notice. The track’s escape plot, somewhere between story rap and gangsta rap, offers vivid imagery and violent solutions that stand in sharp contrast to the rest of Nation of Millions — the corrections officer who catches a slug in the track stands as the only person whom Chuck has ever killed on a record.
When it came time to lay down vocals, Chuck was hesitant to record them because he had a cold, but the tense, fatigued effect it left on his vocals ended up capturing the passion such a track demanded. To record Flavor’s phone call to Chuck, the Bomb Squad set up a phone in another room. Flav ended up riffing so long that Hank had to run into the room to try and shut him up. At 2:42, you can still hear Flav say, “Yo, Hank, don’t stop me, man.”
The Bomb Squad laid down “Black Steel” on the SP-1200, the sampler that was quickly becoming the standard for producers in 1988. They were still tinkering with their equipment to get it to do what they wanted — for example, playing 33 1/3 records on 45 to get more from the SP-1200’s mere 10 seconds of sample time. When recording “Black Steel,” the Bomb Squad accidentally left one of the effects leads half-unplugged. All they heard was a muffled rumble and none of the high end. Hank learned that if you pull the quarter-inch jack out halfway, it yanks a lot of the high-frequency information from the track, leaving only thick bass lines. By pure accident, they discovered “filtering,” a technique which would be used throughout the ’90s by producers such as Large Professor and Da Beatminerz. Eventually this technique would be so common that it would be a standard preset on outboard gear.
Chuck finally met Isaac Hayes in Cape Coast, Ghana, in 1993. The two were playing the Panafest Cultural Festival. Hayes was surprised that Chuck knew so much about him; Chuck was gassed that Hayes knew about Public Enemy at all. Years later, after P.E. blew through Memphis, Hayes came by and asked Chuck if he would rap on his 1995 comeback record, Branded. Hayes holed up in Memphis, reunited with his old songwriting partner David Porter and picked a slew of pop songs to cover. For the last track, he completed the circle, rebooting “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” for a 12-minute version with Chuck D on the microphone. Instead of blowing through prison walls with a bazooka, Chuck gets into the hot-buttered spirit, doing what is probably the only sex rap of his career: “I think I better let it go / But I go hetero / Bring on the TKO.” They worked again a year later, when Hayes played keyboards and co-produced a track on Chuck’s solo album. But as Chuck mapped out in h
is liner notes to the Ultimate Isaac Hayes greatest-hits set: “When he and David Porter pulled me to the side during the Stax reunion concert and officially named me a ‘soul man.’ It gets no better than that, I’m telling you.”
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By the summer of 1972, Isaac Hayes was maybe the most famous African-American in the country, after the Godfather. He was a dude who called his own shots, whether that meant picking up Academy Awards in a fuzzy blue suit, driving a gold-plated Cadillac or calling himself “Black Moses” — a beacon of independence and the model for R&B autonomy. However, when P.E. looked to 1972 for their mantra, they found one written by an overzealous manager who had lorded over his group. Spoken at the beginning of P.E.’s “Show ’Em Whatcha Got” and typewritten on the album’s inner sleeve is the nine-word Bar-Kays affirmation: “Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.”
According to Stax historian Rob Bowman, that line was probably penned by Bar-Kays manager Allen Jones. At the time, Jones decided everything, from what they wore to what they said onstage. For their appearance at the seven-hour Wattstax festival, held in Los Angeles in August 1972, the Bar-Kays had a 15-minute set booked in the middle of a long day — a mere three songs to be played somewhere in between performances by more than 25 of their Stax brothers and sisters, including Hayes, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas and blues legend Albert King. A huge impression was needed, and Jones had been planning a production for weeks. The band was suited in daring gladiator uniforms that made Hayes’ giant chains look demure — a look that, like their single asserted, truly made them the “Son of Shaft.” Saxophonist Harvey Henderson was fitted with a giant gray Afro that would have been visible from the top rows of the Los Angeles Coliseum. The original plan was even more audacious — the band had intended to circle the stadium on chariots driven by white horses. Supposedly everything was on order but Stax top brass caught word and canceled that stunt, so no performer would outshine Black Moses’ headline spot that evening.
The Bar-Kays had backed Otis Redding in the ’60s until four members perished in the same plane crash that killed the singer in 1967. After reforming around bassist James Alexander and playing as Hayes’ supporting cast on Hot Buttered Soul, the Bar-Kays started moving into funkier, wilder directions throughout the ’70s. They picked up vocalist Larry Dodson, explored post-Sly psychedelic swirls and released an ambitious but commercially unsuccessful album called Black Rock. When they hit the stage at Wattstax, they were cresting on their highest-charting single in five years—the hard-as-hell “Son of Shaft.” The track’s opening guitar riff wouldn’t prove to be as iconic as Hayes’ Oscar-winning original, but was just as funky, eventually even playing a role as the high-octane theme to the courtroom drama in Public Enemy’s “Caught, Can I Get a Witness.” The Bar-Kays were all set to open their Wattstax set with the explosive “Son of Shaft” — part parody, part tribute, part barb directed at the man who had just stolen a few Bar-Kays for his own touring band.
From the second Henderson stepped onstage, you could tell he was burning to make an impact. Jesse Jackson had given his stirring “I Am Somebody” speech earlier in the day, and Dodson said it was still ringing in the heads of his bandmates. “Black people were in a ball of emotion,” he said, “but if you looked out into the audience, you saw black people becoming proud of themselves. Maybe for the first time in a lot of instances.”67 Sometime before the sun went down, Henderson stepped up to the mic, his tenor sax around his neck, and surveyed the audience with a look of both assurance and surprise — with an estimated 112,000 people in attendance, it was the largest audience the band had ever rocked. With gusto, he opened with the immortal salvo, written by his manager in an effort to be mysterious, with shades of both George Clinton and Robert Frost: “It’s been said many times, in many places . . . that freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude. And we would like to invite each of you to come and go with us, and perhaps you’ll see a side of life you’ve never seen before.” Years later, Dodson remembered, “Right there we were saying if you’re free in your mind, ain’t nobody got you locked up. You’re free to do whatever you wanna do. We ain’t ever gonna be locked up.”68
With the speech and the three sweat-soaked songs that followed, the band clearly made the impact they wanted — especially so with Chuck D, who said on the Wattstax DVD commentary, “When I think of Wattstax and images, even beyond Isaac Hayes, I think of the Bar-Kays. They’re going for broke.” Just as it set off a Bar-Kays performance, the line “Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude” was almost the first thing you heard on Nation of Millions. It opens “Show ’Em Whatcha Got,” a two-minute instrumental made up of noir saxophones and drums (taken from Parisian funk band Lafayette Afro Rock Band’s 1975 track “Darkest Light”) that’s basically a spotlight for a speech by Nation of Islam general counsel Sister Ava Muhammad. Through a cloak of Bomb Squad distortion, Muhammad runs down a list of civil rights leaders, anti-apartheid activists and black figures who picked the road less traveled. Muhammad herself would eventually become the first woman in the history of the Nation of Islam to ever head up a mosque.
In the original mix of Nation of Millions, “Show ’Em” was the first song on the record, serving as an intro that would allow the names of Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and Rosa Parks to work like samples. It was a statement to prepare the listener for a radical package that couldn’t be reduced to the politics of just one individual. As Chuck vowed to ’80s-era interviewers, one of Public Enemy’s goals was to “build 5,000 political black leaders in the span of two years.” Nation of Millions was meant as a jumping-off point to forming your own opinions and making your own revolutions — the operative word in “Show ’Em Whatcha Got” was “you.” And just like it was impossible to lump together the politics of Malcolm and Martin and Farrakhan, Public Enemy themselves were, as Chuck said, a “diverse consortium of black men”69 — how else do you explain the severe, proselytizing Professor Griff coexisting in a band with the future Viking-helmeted star of Flavor of Love?
In a way, Wattstax was a perfect antecedent, the living embodiment of the Public Enemy line “All in, we’re gonna win.” The festival brought together a diverse group of people from South Central L.A. for a day of music and revolution. On the Wattstax DVD commentary, Chuck remembered 1972 as a crossroads, with the idea of black power “falling out of favor” for “a time to focus on your individuality and your collectiveness.” Chuck commented on the panoply of ages, fashion styles, dance moves and attitudes, saying it all drove home the spirit of individuality for him. As for the collectiveness, that manifested in the estimated 112,000 people in attendance, one of the largest gatherings of African-Americans in history at that point — second only to King’s March on Washington.
Wattstax was a response to the six-day Watts rebellion in 1965, a breaking point of racial tension in the L.A. area that left 34 dead and the neighborhood in flames. Stax was building its brand in Watts that summer with the Stax Revue — a series of Los Angeles shows including Booker T and the MGs, Carla and Rufus Thomas, and Wilson Pickett — which was to culminate over a weekend at 700-capacity 4/5 Ballroom, promoted by KGFJ DJ Magnificent Montague. At the show, Montague was sure to use his excited catchphrase — “Burn, baby, burn!” — which would take new life in the oncoming days. A groundswell of racial tension in the area peaked after a struggle between a white motorcycle patrolman and an African-American accused of driving under the influence. The neighborhood subsequently erupted.
Out of the rebellion’s ashes, the Watts Summer Festival was held every year, raising awareness of political issues, fostering economic development in the community, commemorating the lives lost and building toward the future. Stax’s California representative Forest Hamilton suggested that the label get involved with the festival in 1972, proposing what funky Stax poet John KaSandra once pitched as a “Black Woodstock.”70 Under the guidance of Stax president Al Bell, the festival grew into a massive charity exercise that drew an un
paralleled number of attendees. Poet and Watts prophet Jacquette Dedeaux, who helped Hamilton and Bell with the original ideas, said the LAPD recommended that they use the Los Angeles Coliseum because “they didn’t want to see that many black people in Watts ‘uncorralled.’”71 Despite the inflammatory, paranoid suggestion, the venue choice did accommodate a massive crowd, ultimately raising thousands of dollars for the Watts Summer Festival, Martin Luther King Hospital, the Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation, Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH and the Watts Labor Action Committee. Stax and Schlitz Brewing ate the entire cost of production, and all the artists played for free. Tickets were priced at $1 — tax deductible, no less — so that everyone could come. The original press release for the film called it “The best deal in town. Any town.” And, of course, Stax would get something out of it too: promotion for its sizable roster, its first steps into the film business and two soundtracks that would follow.
One of the largest black-owned companies in America, Stax made sure the event was a pro-black event with no equal. It requested that the LAPD use African-American officers and that the security forces at the Coliseum do the same. The private security force that Stax hired was African-American as well. No one was to carry a gun. “It was a hot day in Los Angeles in mid-August, and we did not have one incident amid 112,000 black people that went through the turnstiles in that 90,000-seat stadium,” said Bell. “That, to me, is terribly significant. Everyone was saying that all of these people from Watts were supposed to be violent.”72 In addition, Bell insisted that film producer David Wolper integrate his camera crew with local African-American cameramen. Forty-five out of the 48 cameramen were, as Stax press materials put it, “skilled Blacks who have been ‘discovered’ for Hollywood” — a coup in the still-very-segregated ’70s movie business.
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