Isaac Hayes - When It All Changed… by Cisco

  I saw “Shaft” when it first came out, in New York, in the winter of ‘71. I didn’t know what it was, other than a private eye movie. In those days, so long as it was a Western or a private eye movie, I’d go see it.
Right from the opening credits, I was hooked. There it was, New York in the winter, just like right outside the door of the Times Square movie house I was slumped in.
And here he came up the subway steps: John Shaft, all cool and Bogie-esque, only now the trench coat was leather. He stalked the mean streets of Manhattan like he owned them.
And pulsing beneath, that ultra-cool, driving, dangerous, soaring, funky-hunky MUSIC.
This was no typical film noir. This was NOW.
Have a look and a listen… Now, truth be known, “Shaft” isn’t really a great film. Richard Roundtree was not - yet - enough of an actor to pull off “cool.” The coolest actors - Mitchum, McQueen, Poitier, Denzel, Sam Jackson - know that, in order to project “cool,” the character has to have an inner-story, something churning under the surface, that they just don’t share with the audience.
Roundtree didn’t know that yet, and while Gordon Parks was one of the greatest photographers who ever lived, that didn’t make him film director enough to get the performance needed from Roundtree.
So Roundtree tried to “act” cool, and cool can’t be acted.
But he was something else that Sidney Poitier hadn’t been during the 60s: Roundtree’s Shaft was angry. One angry black man, and that fitted the temper of the times.
There’s a scene in “Shaft” that nails it. Shaft’s just hoodwinked a couple Mafia thugs in a bar, and turned them over to the cops. One the goom-bahs spits in his face.
Poitier might have glared, or slapped him (see “In The Heat Of The Night”).
Roundtree doesn’t blink. He swings a whiskey bottle and shatters it over the thug’s head.
There was a new bad muthfucka in town, and his name was John Shaft. John Shaft kicked off and locked in an era of black action films that found an audience, white AND black, and in their wake came some fine dramas and film biographies (”Sounder” and “Lady Sings The Blues,” to name but two).
From that era came a flood of films and stars that have, right up to today, given us Sam Jackson and Denzel Washington, Halle Berry and Morgan Freeman, Spike Lee and John Singleton, Theresa Rusell and Wesley Snipes and Queen Latifa, among many many others.
And our world and our popular culture is a better place for it.
But I’m here to tell ya, without the music in “Shaft,” the movie might have sunk like a rock.
The music was all Isaac Hayes.
That theme from “Shaft” is nothing short of brilliant. It is THE damnedest combination of old Hollywood, late 60s early-70s funk, and “new” jazz (listen to Miles Davis’s 1969 classic “Bitches Brew,” and you’ll hear the same echoes Isaac adapted to “Shaft”).
Yeah, the lyrics are kinda dumb, but that was part of the fun back then - and still is.
Then came the Academy Awards. Isaac Hayes was nominated for “Best Song” for the theme from “Shaft.”
No way in hell, I thought. The song was a major hit, far too popular, I thought, for Oscar to give it a nod. And besides, the movie wasn’t much.
And dare we say it? Isaac was black.
Then, man, he came rolling out on the stage at the Oscars, behind that funky keyboard, shrouded in a fog of dry ice, with his bullet head, muscles draped in gold chains like Othello ready to rock, those fine lady back-up singers all slinky and set to throw down.
And Isaac Hayes tore the place up - and copped the Oscar.
Isaac Hayes never had a bigger hit than “Shaft.” Doesn’t matter. In an inspired explosion of creativity, with one piece of music, he changed our culture, and it changed our world.
We’ll be listening to his work for a long time.
It don’t get better than that.  RIP, brother.

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