Black Moses

When Isaac Hayes is ready to start a concert, he sings his first song from offstage. Only then do the doors burst open, and a cloaked, bearded, shaven-headed figure strides forward, accompanied by four armed bodyguards ("You just can't be too careful with a man of this stature," says his manager). A black girl doing an "African dance of adoration" stops long enough to remove Hayes' orange, black and white cape, revealing him arrayed in black tights, fur cuffs, a leather vest and a necklace of gold chains.

He sits down behind the organ and launches into a jazz-styled number called Do Your Own Thing. In the course of two hours he sings only six or seven pieces: long, intricate blends of soul, blues, rock, white pop and gospel, with titles like One Big Unhappy Family, I Stand Accused or Our Day Will Come! Then, tossing a handful of Isaac Hayes medallions to the crowd, he is gone, with no encores. The rite is over.

At 28, Isaac Hayes is the brightest new black pop star in the U.S., the composer of the hit song from the movie Shaft (now in the top five on the charts) and a singer whose last four LPs have all been what the trade calls "platinum" disks (earning $2,000,000 wholesale).

Such success enables Hayes to drive around in a Jaguar or one of his two Cadillacs; he has a third on order with gold-plated bumpers. "I like luxury, man," he says, "because it's what I never had."

He was born on a sharecropper's farm some 40 miles north of Memphis. Orphaned soon after birth, he was raised by his grandparents. "Bubba," as he was called in those days, started singing in church choir lofts when he was five. Moving to Memphis a few years later, he began scrounging for work in black clubs, notably Curry's Tropicana and the Tiki Club. He did one-nighters at moonshine joints in towns like Greasy Corner, Ark., sometimes with his own group, Sir Isaac and the Doo-Dads. He spent one night sleeping on a crap table, one whole summer living in a junked car.

In 1964 Hayes teamed up with Lyricist David Porter and started composing songs for Memphis-based Stax Records. Then, as now, he could neither read nor write music; he hummed his melodies into one tape recorder, his rhythms into another, and left it to an arranger to combine them. In four years Hayes and Porter turned out enough hits, like Soul Man, Baby and Hold On, I'm Coming, to guarantee them a respectable place in the history of songwriting.

Into their songs, Hayes and Porter injected the whole experience of the black ghetto. Hayes' style, though, is much smoother than that of the ghetto blues shouters. In his throaty baritone, he sings with the cool, unruffled lyricism of a Lou Rawls. And the orchestrations provided for him are so rich in their classical scoring that they often sound as though his 38-piece band has been joined by the Memphis Symphony--which is sometimes the case.

Hayes' most notable contribution to pop so far has been to introduce the "rap" into the top 40. While the organ holds a chord, Hayes talks for as much as ten minutes--or sermonizes, as in his preamble to Never Can Say Goodbye: "We as humans have a tendency to let two things run away from us: our pride and ego." At first the raps were a way to get nightclub audiences quiet. Then they became a bridge between white men's songs (Hayes' favorites: Glen Campbell and Burt Bacharach) and black audiences. Of his 18-minute version of Campbell's By the Time I Get to Phoenix, he says: "I had to bring that song down to soulsville, paint a picture black people could relate to."

Cult Hero. One night in 1967, Hayes and a Stax vice president got slightly looped at a party, and the next thing Hayes knew they were back in the studio. By the following morning, his LP debut as a singer, Presenting Isaac Hayes, was in the can. Nowadays, by contrast, a Hayes LP takes months to prepare--but, then, Stax is no longer presenting a singer, it is presenting a cult hero. Hayes' latest, the just-released

Black Moses, is a prime example. The jacket is an elaborate fold-out that pictures Hayes robed and sandaled against a cross-shaped background. The liner notes tell his life story in biblical language that begins, "And so it came to pass."

Back in Memphis, Isaac Hayes is a more secular hero, but nonetheless a hero. "Hey, Bubba," the white owner of a propane gas station calls as Isaac cruises by in his turquoise El Dorado. "You gotta give me an autograph for my daughter; she doesn't believe you used to work for me." Isaac signs, then nods to a friend: "I used to wash cars and mow the grass around here."

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