Featured Record: Isaac Hayes — Hot Buttered Soul
Four songs. Forty-five minutes. One of the most consequential accidents in soul music — and the record that taught hip-hop how to sound patient.
Enterprise Records, 1969. Four songs. Forty-five minutes. One of the most consequential accidents in soul music.
Most great records are made because someone had a plan. This one got made because a record label lost everything it owned and panicked.
The mess that made it
In 1968, Stax split from Atlantic and discovered, buried in the small print, that Atlantic now owned the entire Stax back catalogue. Every hit. Everything before 1968. Gone. The label that defined Memphis soul suddenly had a name, a studio, a roster — and nothing to sell.
Al Bell's answer was brute force: 27 albums and 30 singles, released at once, to manufacture an instant back catalogue. Everyone on the roster into the studio — and the behind-the-scenes staff too. Steve Cropper made a solo record. So did a songwriter-producer called Isaac Hayes.
Hayes wasn't keen. He was a songwriter and producer first — half of the Hayes/Porter team behind "Soul Man" and "Hold On, I'm Comin'" — and his 1968 solo debut, Presenting Isaac Hayes, had sold badly enough that he was ready to go back behind the scenes for good. He'd made it half-drunk after a company party and felt the label had meddled with it.
So he named his price. He'd make a second album only with complete creative control. Bell, who had leaned on him to make the first one, said yes.
That's the whole story, really. A desperate label, a bruised songwriter, and nobody left in the building with the authority to say make it shorter.
What he did with it
Hayes went into Ardent in Memphis and Tera Shirma in Detroit with the Bar-Kays — the reconstituted band, rebuilt after the 1967 plane crash that killed Otis Redding and most of the original line-up. Marvell Thomas on keys. Johnny Allen writing string arrangements that owe more to film score than to Motown. Production credited to Al Bell, Marvell Thomas and Allen Jones.
Then he ignored every rule of the singles-driven business he'd been writing hits for.
Four tracks. Two of them covers of white pop standards, taken apart and rebuilt at three or four times their original length. Long instrumental stretches where the band, not the singer, holds the room. Spoken-word monologues that run longer than most complete songs of the era. The Bar-Kays get the spotlight for minutes at a time, and Hayes arrives with a persona — bald head, shades, gold — that made everyone else on the radio suddenly look like they were following instructions.
The four sides of it
Walk On By — 12:03
Bacharach and David, written for Dionne Warwick as a tight three-minute heartbreak. Hayes opens it with fuzz guitar and strings that take a full ninety seconds to get anywhere, then settles into a groove that simply refuses to be hurried. The most-sampled thing he ever recorded, and you'll know why within thirty seconds.
Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic — 9:38
The only original on the record and the funkiest thing here by a distance. Wah-guitar, organ, a rhythm section absolutely locked in. The title is a joke about DJs trying to announce it on air. Nobody has ever pronounced it correctly on first attempt, including in our shop.
One Woman — 5:10
The short one, and the one people skip past. Don't. It's a straight country-soul cheating song, sung beautifully, and it exists to give you somewhere to breathe before the last track. Sequencing as an act of mercy.
By the Time I Get to Phoenix — 18:42
Jimmy Webb's song, a hit for Glen Campbell at under three minutes. Hayes spends roughly the first eight and a half minutes talking — a slow, quiet backstory suspended over one looping bassline and a droning organ — before he sings a note. When the melody finally lands, it lands like a wave breaking. The last five minutes are the best five minutes of the record.
What happened next
It worked. Hot Buttered Soul went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 8 on the Billboard 200, with a heavily edited "Walk On By" reaching No. 30 on the Hot 100. A record built out of eighteen-minute monologues outsold most of the three-minute singles it was competing with.
More importantly, it moved the ceiling. If Hayes could hold an audience for forty-five minutes across four songs, then soul could be an album-length artistic statement rather than a hits vehicle — and What's Going On, There's a Riot Goin' On and Innervisions all arrive in the few years after it. As Pitchfork put it, Hayes had no grand commercial ambitions here, but the long cuts and high drama made him a star and opened creative doors for everyone who came next. Two years later he'd write Shaft and become the first Black composer to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song.
The samples: where you've already heard it
This is where the record's second life begins. Producers didn't sample Hayes for a hook — they sampled him for atmosphere, for those long instrumental passages where nothing much happens except everything. "Walk On By" alone has been sampled in something like 140 records. Chuck D has called Hayes his musical godfather. If you grew up on nineties hip-hop, you already knew this album before you'd heard it.
The Notorious B.I.G. — "Warning" (1994)
The definitive "Walk On By" flip. Easy Mo Bee takes that queasy string figure, slows the room down around it, and Biggie turns it into a 3am phone call about a robbery that hasn't happened yet. Listen to the Hayes original first and you can hear exactly which four bars did all the work.
Beyoncé — "6 Inch" (2016)
Same source, opposite mood. On Lemonade the "Walk On By" strings get rebuilt into a song about work, worth and money — the heartbreak still audible underneath, which is rather the point. Proof the record is still being mined nearly fifty years on.
Wu-Tang Clan — "I Can't Go to Sleep" (2000)
The best of the lot, and the least like a sample. RZA didn't chop "Walk On By" so much as move into it — then got Hayes himself in to sing the hook, with Ghostface and RZA unravelling over the top. One of the heaviest things on The W.
DJ Quik — "Born and Raised in Compton" (1991)
The other side of the record gets its due: Quik builds his debut single off "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic," keeping the rhythm section's swing and adding weight underneath it. A useful reminder that the funkiest track here was the one Hayes wrote himself.
And beyond those four: Compton's Most Wanted, Cypress Hill, Queen Latifah, The D.O.C., and a long tail of records that all lead back to the same four songs.
Why it's in our crates
Because it's a record about patience, and we don't have many of those left.
Nothing on Hot Buttered Soul is in a hurry. It asks you to sit down, put a side on, and stay there — which is exactly the opposite of how most of us listen now, and exactly why it still feels so good. Put "Phoenix" on at midnight with the lights low and it does something a playlist physically cannot do.
It's also the sound of someone being given permission for the first time and using every inch of it. There's a lesson in that for anyone making anything.
Sounds like: Curtis Mayfield · Marvin Gaye's I Want You · Shuggie Otis · Bobby Womack's spoken intros · anything the Bar-Kays touched between 1969 and 1972
Perfect for: late-night kitchens · long Sunday afternoons · the last hour of a shift · anyone who thinks they don't like soul because they've only heard the singles
Start with: "Walk On By." Finish with "Phoenix," and give it the full nineteen minutes.
Featured Record is our regular pick from the racks — the ones we keep pulling out for people across the counter. Come and ask us about it.