A glimpse of greatness
Isaac Hayes and Rick James cover James Taylor ... on 'The A-Team'?
Our boss at my day job bought a 72-inch TV for our breakroom a few months ago. We don’t have cable — it’s mostly for playing videogames on the PS4 and watching old movies I bring in.
Yesterday, I was browsing the streaming channels that the TV’s manufacturer provides for free. We’d had two weeks of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” which provided a fun if too-short flashback to my own youth (and frankly confused the heck out of the younger guys who were completely unfamiliar with the show, the concept of which confounded them). But yesterday, Steve Austin — a man barely alive — was nowhere to be found.
But we did have re-runs of “The A-Team.”
The episode that was on at lunch was from Season 4, and featured R&B star Rick James playing himself as the client that hired the A-Team that week. He had a buddy about to get released from prison, but this friend was being told he wasn’t going to get out alive — so could the A-Team help out?
That buddy was played by Isaac Hayes.
While best known as a composer, arranger, and singer, Hayes also kept busy on screens big and little throughout his career. He starred in an early blaxploitation film, “Truck Turner,” and later had a recurring role on “The Rockford Files” as competing private eye Gandolph Fitch. (He probably had his greatest fame in the latter part of his career as the voice of Chef on the TV series “South Park”.)
Back to “The A-Team.” After Rick James arranges with the warden to perform a free concert for the inmates, singing his big hit “Super Freak,” the A-Team manages to insert itself into the prison grounds as James’ roadies. After his first song ends, James then invites his friend, C.J. Mack (Hayes) to come sing a song with him.
So I’m sitting in the lunchroom, eating my burrito, and now I have Isaac Hayes laying into a superb, smoky version of James Taylor’s “Steamroller” — with Rick James on rhythm guitar!
Of course, just as Rick James takes a verse on lead guitar and vocals, the plot raises its head. The concert is interrupted when a corrupt guard tries to kill Hayes’ character, the A-Team intercedes — and we never get to hear how James and Hayes would have wrapped up one of James Taylor’s signature songs!
While Hayes is rightly known for the many songs he wrote himself, he was also a master of the cover, able to rework songs that had definitive hit versions by other artists into something new and all his own.
On his 1969 sophomore release, “Hot Buttered Soul,” he took Dionne Warwick’s “Walk On By” (written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David) and turned it into a 12-minute smoldering dirge.
On that same album, he also reworked Glen Campbell’s country smash hit “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” (Jimmy Webb) into an 18-minute spoken word soul-jazz vamp.
The next year, on “The Isaac Hayes Movement” LP, he tackled The Beatles — taking George Harrison’s “Something” (only released a few months earlier!) and interpolating it for a solid 12 minutes, never once losing the thread of the melody, using the kinds of horn arrangements that Paul McCartney and George Martin had utilized on so many Beatles songs. It almost gives this version of the song more of a Beatles feel than the original on “Abbey Road.”
A year later, Hayes wove The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” into a 15-minute-plus languorous soul jam.
But it may have been his 1971 opus, “Black Moses,” where he really showed the full range of his skills as an interpreter. Here, he takes ownership of everything from bubblegum pop (“Never Can Say Goodbye” by The Jackson 5), to countrypolitan (Ray Price’s “For the Good Times” (Kris Kristofferson), to adult contemporary with the Carpenters’ “(They Long to Be) Close to You” (Bacharach and David) and Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” (Bacharach and David).
All of this before his breakthrough hit, the theme from “Shaft”!
While his mid- to late-1970s albums had been more focused on his original compositions, with the covers tending to be of more obscure titles, he had tackled James Taylor in 1978, with a simmering take on “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.”
Back to “The A-Team”: After the corrupt warden was corralled and the episode over, I went to Discogs.com to see if Hayes had ever recorded “Streamroller” on vinyl.
Turns out, the only time he ever tackled that song was on this episode of “The A-Team.” And yet, on a song that was more Mcguffin that anything else. Hayes showed — again — that he could take any song and make it all his own.
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