The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (340 page)

At around this time, Hazard claimed to have composed the basis of ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ while taking a twenty-minute shower. With some tweaking from idiosyncratic singer Lauper, the song became a massive international hit at the start of 1984, shooting its performer into stardom. The same could not be said for Hazard, who despite the acclaim (and royalties) this was to earn him, saw his band dropped after a tour with U2 failed to raise their profile. Hazard nonetheless remained a prolific songwriter, reverting to folksier styles in his later years.

Robert Hazard passed on at Massachusetts General Hospital during surgery for pancreatic cancer, leaving a wife and two sons. He died just a couple of weeks short of his sixtieth birthday.

Golden Oldies #73

Isaac Hayes

(Covington, Tennessee, 20 August 1942)

(Various acts)

For many years, he was the smoldering king of smart, streetwise southern R & B - and, yet, it so nearly didn’t happen at all for Isaac Hayes. Losing both of his parents during childhood - his mother, Eula, died and his father, Isaac Sr, abandoned the family - Hayes was brought up by his maternal grandparents. With the young man expected to help out with their work as cotton-pickers, there was barely time for study, let alone practising music.

Hayes, nonetheless, developed quickly as a singer and musician, performing in church at the age of five and mastering piano, Hammond organ, sax and flute before his teens. After something of a struggle to complete his schooling - Hayes turned down several music scholarships - the young man worked in a meat-packing plant by day, then spent his evenings moonlighting with club housebands like Sir Isaac & The Doo-Dads and Sir Calvin & His Swinging Cats. For Hayes, the big break came in Memphis when Stax took him on as a session man, and, shortly after, as a songwriter. Here, he rose to become a major star as the sixties wore on.

Stax saw huge potential in Hayes, teaming him with writing partner David Porter. The pair changed the fortunes of duo Sam & Dave, penning (among many other tunes) the boisterous standards ‘Hold On I’m Coming’ (1966) and ‘Soul Man’ (1967), both of which made US R & B number one and performed admirably in the Hot 100. (Along with Booker T & The MGs, they also produced the pair’s work, as well as that of Johnnie Taylor, The Astors and Carla Thomas.) Although Isaac Hayes’s own debut album, the jazzy
Presenting
(1968 - recorded with MGs Al Jackson Jr and Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn) was largely unsuccessful, the same could not be said of its follow-up.

DEAD INTERESTING!

THE ENDURING PIONEERS

It is commonly believed that western group The Sons of the Pioneers might just be the longest-surviving band in popular music history. Although obviously requiring a few line-up changes along the way, this multi-award-winning band of cheery entertainers has recorded and performed to faithful audiences since 1933-without so much as a splinter group. (If you think you don’t know them, think again-their songs have appeared in many movies such as
Rio Grande, The Searchers
and even
The Big Lebowski.)

Some group members-most notably Hollywood legend Roy Rogers-went on to bigger things, but fans can take heart that, no matter how many depart this mortal coil, there will probably always be a replacement ready to bust his tether and hit the Pioneer trail. Here, however,
The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars
takes to the dusty path to pay homage to those Sons of the Pioneers who have departed during the first eighty-odd years of the group’s history:

Karl Farr (vocals/lead guitarist, 25/4/1909-20/9/1961
*
)

Pat Brady (vocals/bass fiddler, 31/12/1914-27/2/1972)

Tim Spencer (Vernon Spencer-tenor/lead vocals, 13/7/1908-25/4/1974)

Lloyd Perryman (tenor vocals/guitarist, 29/1/1917-31/5/1977)

Hugh Farr (Thomas Farr-bass vocals/fiddler, 6/12/1903-17/4/1980)

Bob Nolan (Robert Nobles-baritone vocals/bass, 13/4/1908-16/6/1980)

George ‘Shug’ Fisher (vocals/bass, 26/9/1907-16/3/1984)

Roy Lanham (lead guitar, 16/1/1923-14/2/1991)

Ken Curtis (Curtis Wayne Gates-lead vocals, 2/7/1916-28/4/1991)

George Bamby (accordion, 31/5/1921-31/12/1993)

Ken Carson (Hubert Flatt-tenor vocals/guitar, 14/11/1914-7/4/1994)

Roy Rogers (Leonard Slye-lead vocals/guitar, 5/11/1911-6/7/1998)

Wade Ray (Lyman Wade Ray-fiddle, 6/4/1913-11/11/1998)

Jack ‘LaRoux’ Nallie (bass, 15/3/1949-18/4/2004)

Robert ‘Sunny’ Spencer (lead vocals, 20/11/1930-5/2/2005)

Dale Warren (lead/baritone vocals/bass, 1/6/1925-8/9/2008)

Marshal Wild Windy Bill McKay (Daniel Claps-singer/musician, 1921-9/7/2011)

Tommy Doss (Lloyd Doss-baritone vocals, 26/9/1920-25/10/2011)

(The original trio is denoted in italics)

*
A dedicated performer to the last, Karl Farr died of a heart attack while mending a guitar string during a show in Massachusetts.

After a critical few years for Stax, Hayes could almost be credited with rescuing the label. Following the death of their brightest star, Otis Redding (
December 1967),
Stax was forced to sell off its archive to Atlantic, thereby requiring some serious business as soon as possible. Of the raft of quickly released Stax material, Hayes’s now-classic
Hot Buttered Soul
(1969) was the label’s biggest seller during this period. The record also pushed the artist to new levels in soul music. This Top Ten album - with a memorable cover depicting Hayes’s shaved head - saw the artist take full control. There were just four extended tracks, which showed off some highly innovative production skills. His follow-ups,
The Isaac Hayes Movement
and
To Be Continued
(both 1970), followed much the same recipe and in turn performed well.

But if these records galvanised his critics and fanbase, then Hayes’s next work was to bring home the rewards. His soundtrack to the fine Gordon Parks blaxploitation picture
Shaft
(1971) is probably the most fondly recalled of Hayes’s career, certainly by those at Stax, for whom it became their biggest-selling album
ever.
While the record topped both the pop listings and the R & B chart - where it spent fourteen weeks at number one - the title cut became an international smash, and Hayes’s only US top single. The soundtrack first won him a Golden Globe award, then an Oscar for the title cut (making Hayes the first African-American composer to achieve this). Both the album and the single earned a further set of Grammys. The phenomenal success of
Shaft
overlapped another studio LP,
Black Moses,
which launched itself into the Top Ten on the back of this bout of Hayes-mania.

All was not plain sailing, however. A collapse at Stax in 1974 resulted in the star suing his label. The parties eventually agreeing that he be released from his contract, with Stax then offsetting
his
bank debts through back-catalogue sales only. Hayes was able to form his own Hot Buttered Soul imprint (via ABC) and continued to issue records and soundtracks throughout the decade. Although he never reached the heights of his early seventies output, he continued to deploy a number of styles, not least disco. Though album sales were now a bit more modest, the 1976 single ‘Disco Connection’ became a Top Ten hit in Britain, while ‘Don’t Let Go’ came close to repeating the feat at home three years later. His 1977 duet album of ballads with Dionne Warwick, however, came under fire from critics who felt Hayes was taking an easy ‘Marvin Gaye’ path, while the 1978 soundtrack to
Shaft II
only really offered up the enjoyable ‘Zeke the Freak’ among its cuts.

Having found a few cameo roles for himself in the previous decade, Hayes took a hiatus from music to concentrate on acting during the eighties: throughout his varied career, he racked up some three dozen credits in television and movies. For most of the next two decades, Hayes only emerged occasionally as a musician.

Isaac finally found a use for all those spare paper clips

Then, there was
South Park.
In his guise as the cartoon lothario Chef, Hayes attracted a whole new generation of fans. His innuendo-driven ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ was propelled by this fanbase to UK number one at the start of 1999. Having contributed to numerous episodes and the inevitable
South Park
movie, Hayes departed the show after an installment ostensibly parodied Scientology, a movement with which he had affiliated himself in the mid-1990s. The following year, the performer then came full circle by appearing - in the flesh - in the John Singleton remake of
Shaft.

Isaac Hayes, who had suffered his first stroke in 2006, was found unconscious by his wife at their Memphis home on 10 August 2008, in close proximity to his treadmill. The singer was taken to Memphis’s Baptist Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 2:08 pm. It was later confirmed that Hayes-just ten days short of his sixty-sixth birthday - had suffered another stroke due to his high blood pressure. At the time, he had been filming the music-based comedy
Soul Men,
which was released posthumously. By remarkable, dark coincidence, Bernie Mac - one of the movie’s star performers - had died just the day before.

Isaac Hayes - who had survived everything from bankruptcy to personal turmoil during his career - was remembered by many as one of the true innovators in soul, R & B and the Memphis sound. Among the dozens to pay him tribute were Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Sam Moore, Gloria Gaynor and British trip-hop innovators Portishead who sampled his ‘Ike’s Rap’ for their breakthrough hit, ‘Glory Box’, The artist was also praised for the tireless humanitarian work he’d undertaken over the last twenty years of his life.