YES folks! It's the remaster of Isaac Hayes' 1969 masterpiece: Hot Buttered Soul being released on June 23rd. I've already put my order in on Amazon.com!

Isaac Hayes' 'Hot Buttered Soul' Album Reissued on Stax with Bonus Tracks, Digital Remastering

http://www.allaboutjazz.c...p?id=36452
SOURCE: conqueroo

Four-song long-player ushered in the era of album-oriented soul with hits “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Walk On By.” Reissue contains notes by Jim James of My Morning Jacket.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Until Isaac Hayes released Hot Buttered Soul in 1969, soul music had been a singles-oriented genre. Best known as the partner of David Porter in writing such Stax hits as “Hold On! I’m Coming,” “Soul Man” and “B-A-B-Y” among others, Hayes, along with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield gave the soul album a higher purpose, superseding the standard practice of assembling LPs around recent hits and filler. Even so, a four-song album whose two “singles” clocked in at 12:03 and 18:42 was unprecedented.

Stax Records will reissue Hot Buttered Soul on June 23, 2009 with two bonus tracks (single edits of “Walk On By” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”), digital remastering, new rare photographs, and expanded liner notes by both music historian Bill Dahl and Hayes fan Jim James from the band My Morning Jacket.

Hayes had recorded one previous album, Presenting Isaac Hayes in 1968, which failed to impact the charts the way his Porter-collaborated song compositions had for other Stax artists. Nonetheless, label president Al Bell green-lighted Hayes’ encore long-player. Hayes went to cross-town Ardent Studios to lay down the tracks.

“There was absolutely no attempt to be commercial,” Marvell Thomas, the album’s co- producer, told annotator Dahl. “It was just, ‘Let’s do these songs. Let’s do ’em like we like to do ’em. Play whatever you want to play and have a good time doing it.’ To the company, it wasn’t, ‘We’re going to make one of the all-time great albums and it’s going to sell huge.’ It was, ‘Okay, let Isaac do his thing.’”

Opening with Hayes’ sexy, intimate delivery of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” clocking in at 18 and a half minutes, the album also included an extended remake of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk On By,” given definition by the spacey lead guitar of Harold Beane. “The guitar solo was not something that was planned on front end,” recalled Thomas. “It was like, ‘Well why not?’ We just stretched out and let it go. When you get in the middle of it, you just kind of ride with it until it stops.” Which it did after 12 minutes.

Beane joined Thomas on piano and Hayes himself on organ, backed by the surviving members of the Bar-Kays, a band ravaged by the airplane accident that also claimed Otis Redding. Guitarist Michael Toles and drummer Willie Hall filled out the band. Interestingly, the overdubbing of strings, horns and backing vocals was done in Detroit instead Memphis, thanks largely to the influence of producer Don Davis, who introduced Al Bell to veteran Motown arranger Johnny Allen. Another Detroiter, Dale Warren — the nephew of Berry Gordy’s ex-wife — orchestrated “Walk On By,” with a violin section populated with members of the Detroit Symphony.

The original album contained two other songs as well as the hits. “One Woman,” penned by Wilson Pickett accompanist Charlie Chalmers and his future wife, Sandra Rhodes, was more of a traditional Memphis soul ballad, and was recorded also by Al Green for his Green Is Blues album. The only number on Hot Buttered Soul bearing Hayes’ writing imprimatur (a co-write by Bell) sported one of the longest song titles ever conceived: “Hyperbolicsyllabiccsesquedalymistic.” According to Thomas, “(The title) means the propensity to make a whole big deal of using words to show off your vocabulary.”

The reissue contains single mixes for both “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Walk On By,” extending the four-song album to six. The new edition also contains a second set of liner notes by Jim James, lead vocalist, songwriter and producer for the Kentucky-based American rock band My Morning Jacket.

Quoting James, “Everything is revealed when you open your mind to its secrets . . . [The album makes] your mind bleed . . . blurring the lines of what you thought you knew before was possible with music. It is one of those start to finish classics. And yes, damn near everything is here: Soul. Rock. Sweeping strings. Blasting horns. Full orchestral arrangements. Bare stripped down moments. Humor. Sadness. Funk . . . The recording is so God-damned 3D. It’s black. It’s white. It is universal. It is timeless. It is LOVE.”
[Edited 6/18/09 20:56pm]

Damn, you didn't even let us guess.

I think this reissue is going to be better than the 'Black Moses' and 'Juicy Fruit' reissues Stax did earlier this year. I've been waiting for this one for a while cuz the original CD's master was horrible

silverchild said:

You could do a Hot buttered fried egg in that bald patch

That said, I love classics being remastered before CDs disappear

I almost bought the 'Black Moses' remaster a few weeks ago but I bought a Marvin Gaye CD instead Gonna go back and get it,along with this 'Hot Buttered Soul' remaster too.I'm thrilled that Isaac's catalog is finally getting the attention and upgrading that it deserves.

That cover's a fucking classic by itself!

PANDURITO said:

Naw.....that will take a while.

Why all this remastering? That's like butchering classic music to fit modern audiophile standards. There is a reason why the records were recorded the way they are. As a producer, I'd be really offended if someone remastered my music 30 years from now.

MrSoulpower said:

Maybe because labels are too slow to just reissue the album as it was originally recorded. I don't mind it if they have unreleased joints but if you're doing it just to put single mixes, then no thanks, lol.

MrSoulpower said:

I don't see it as butchering at all, but rather restoring the music back to the way it actually sounded in the studio when the artist originally recorded it. Many of the classics we hear and purchase today are just copies of copies of copies. And just like images on the Internet that get copied over and over again, eventually get grainy, faded, and lose their original sharpness and color, those old classics become muted, lose brightness, instruments get lost in the mix. When the remastering process is done correctly, it just brings out each individual instrument as the artist originally meant for it to come through in the mix. Like restoring the original colors, contrast, & sharpness to an image - so that RED looks like RED again, and not BROWN.

The only thing I kinda hate though is re-purchasing so many CD's in my collection once they've been remastered. Like now, I gotta re-purchase "Hot Buttered Soul" like for the third time. But I do so because the remasters (again, when done properly) sound so much better. Not butchered, just better - brighter, cleaner. But at this point, I won't be filling in any of my collection with missing classics until I see they've been remastered. (...and really, really wish they'd remaster SOTT - properly)

MrSoulpower said:

Yeah, they didn't have the technology at the time to insure that the mix that was intended would sustain itself over decades of copies.

MrSoulpower said:

...and as a producer, I would really APPRECIATE if in 30 years professionals took the time to apply the current technology of the day to my music to preserve it even further as I had intended it to sound. Though I understand your basic premise, as artists; we generally HATE having our work messed with in ANY fashion. But I welcome & celebrate remasters when they're done correctly.

(...incidentally, those DJ-Foefur so-called "remasters" of Prince's stuff ABSOLUTELY butchered it, lol.)

Timmy84 said:

I'm glad that Isaac's back catalog is finally getting remastered. I've been holding off on getting his stuff until it's been remastered.

PDogz said:

Shit, that cover and Marvin's What's Going On are probably the best covers for its simplicity but yeah for its majesty of the way the covers portray each other. Isaac's, you can tell, had that golden touch (hence why his album was titled what it was) plus that gold chain. Marvin's for Marvin's pained expression while wearing a trenchcoat in the middle of the rain. Hell Stevie's Talking Book and Carole King's Tapestry are also up there for their simple but understated covers!

I can see why it's remastered though for one reason: HBS is 40 years old!

Timmy84 said:

You mentioned some very iconic album covers, that's for sure. But OMG! PUL-EEEEZE don't tell me I've been around long enough to remember when my big sister purchased the BRAND NEW Isaac Hayes "Hot Buttered Soul" album! SMDH-LOL.

PDogz said:

I'm sorry I can't help it, I love "anniversaries".

I think most of the time, the album art becomes romanced by the classic music it came to represent.

I saw a book of "Classic Cover Art" and it wasn't much more than a book of classic albums.

Timmy84 said:

That's alright, I'm grateful to have been around all these years, considering what the alternative would have been!

Cinnie said:

That's so true (I have a book like that, I wonder if it's the same one). I've seen reissues of some classic albums where the cover artwork was different or had been changed, sometimes even slightly (like an added border, different font or something - they do that sometimes with Imports), and THE MUSIC didn't sound the same to me, lol. Even though it was, lol. I love those classic album covers from the 70's. In fact, many times I would try out a new artist solely based on what the cover looked like, and it was usually on the money. Rick James' "Come Get It" was a classic example of that. I hadn't heard of him yet, but that cover told me the entire story, lol.

PDogz said:

Cover art often answers the question "Does this artist boast a sufficient amount of swagger?"

I think that we're all better off the more closely you can recreate that same sound that was heard in the studio as each element was being patched into a whole. Or for live album, the more closely you can resemble what it sounded like if you had a perfect seat.

But I’m quite happy with my “Hot Buttered Soul” and it often becomes a game to get as many repeat customers as possible.

I especially dislike the practice of adding on extras such that you’ll never be able to decipher the real album experience that people have been enjoying for decades.

If there are extras, there should be either a large blank space at the end of the album or, even better, an extra disc.

You wouldn’t rerelease a book with additional chapters at the end and just leave it to the consumer to figure out the real ending.