Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) by Christopher R. Weingarten Page B

fatigued effect it left on his vocals ended up capturing the passion such a track demanded. To record Flavor’s phone call to Chuck, the Bomb Squad set up a phone in another room. Flav ended up riffing so long that Hank had to run into the room to try andshut him up. At 2:42, you can still hear Flav say, “Yo, Hank, don’t stop me, man.”
    The Bomb Squad laid down “Black Steel” on the SP-1200, the sampler that was quickly becoming the standard for producers in 1988. They were still tinkering with their equipment to get it to do what they wanted — for example, playing 33 1/3 records on 45 to get more from the SP-1200’s mere 10 seconds of sample time. When recording “Black Steel,” the Bomb Squad accidentally left one of the effects leads half-unplugged. All they heard was a muffled rumble and none of the high end. Hank learned that if you pull the quarter-inch jack out halfway, it yanks a lot of the high-frequency information from the track, leaving only thick bass lines. By pure accident, they discovered “filtering,” a technique which would be used throughout the ’90s by producers such as Large Professor and Da Beatminerz. Eventually this technique would be so common that it would be a standard preset on outboard gear.
    Chuck finally met Isaac Hayes in Cape Coast, Ghana, in 1993. The two were playing the Panafest Cultural Festival. Hayes was surprised that Chuck knew so much about him; Chuck was gassed that Hayes knew about Public Enemy at all. Years later, after P.E. blew through Memphis, Hayes came by and asked Chuck if he would rap on his 1995 comeback record,
Branded
. Hayes holed up in Memphis, reunited with his old songwriting partner David Porter and picked a slew ofpop songs to cover. For the last track, he completed the circle, rebooting “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” for a 12-minute version with Chuck D on the microphone. Instead of blowing through prison walls with a bazooka, Chuck gets into the hot-buttered spirit, doing what is probably the only sex rap of his career: “I think I better let it go / But I go hetero / Bring on the TKO.” They worked again a year later, when Hayes played keyboards and co-produced a track on Chuck’s solo album. But as Chuck mapped out in his liner notes to the
Ultimate Isaac Hayes
greatest-hits set: “When he and David Porter pulled me to the side during the Stax reunion concert and officially named me a ‘soul man.’ It gets no better than that, I’m telling you.”
    * * *
    By the summer of 1972, Isaac Hayes was maybe the most famous African-American in the country, after the Godfather. He was a dude who called his own shots, whether that meant picking up Academy Awards in a fuzzy blue suit, driving a gold-plated Cadillac or calling himself “Black Moses” — a beacon of independence and the model for R&B autonomy. However, when P.E. looked to 1972 for their mantra, they found one written by an overzealous manager who had lorded over his group. Spoken at the beginning of P.E.’s “Show ’Em Whatcha Got” and typewritten on the album’s inner sleeve is the nine-word Bar-Kaysaffirmation: “Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.”
    According to Stax historian Rob Bowman, that line was probably penned by Bar-Kays manager Allen Jones. At the time, Jones decided everything, from what they wore to what they said onstage. For their appearance at the seven-hour Wattstax festival, held in Los Angeles in August 1972, the Bar-Kays had a 15-minute set booked in the middle of a long day — a mere three songs to be played somewhere in between performances by more than 25 of their Stax brothers and sisters, including Hayes, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas and blues legend Albert King. A huge impression was needed, and Jones had been planning a production for weeks. The band was suited in daring gladiator uniforms that made Hayes’ giant chains look demure — a look that, like their single asserted, truly made them the “Son of Shaft.”