Bermuda Music Festival - Page 4

"Usually our songs came from personal experiences," he continues. "For instance, with 'When Something's Wrong With My Baby,' David and I were working and working and working, and we just couldn't come up with anything. So we gave up and each went home. After about 30 minutes, he called me: 'I got it, I got it, I got it.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He had just written it on toilet paper or something, and said, 'When something's wrong with my baby, something's wrong with me.'

"He came over and we started going over the lyrics. I sat down at the piano and started playing something slow. We got the changes and the melody and put it with the first verse, and the rest was easy. Sam & Dave were in town - we would usually work on their songs when they were around - sometimes we'd have them sitting there while we wrote to get a good feel for them.

"'You Don't Know Like I Know' was originally a gospel song: 'You don't know like I know what the Lord has done for me.' Well, a woman can do some good things for you too. We just switched it around," Hayes says with a chuckle.

"'Soul Man' came about during one of the riots. I was watching TV and they said something about businesses being bypassed when 'soul' was written on the door. That reminded me of Passover in the Bible. So I thought about this 'soul' thing: there's a lot of pride in it. I didn't look at the rioting as destroying. I looked at it as frustrated people taking out their frustrations on whatever got in their way. I told David about it and we started working on it. Everything just clicked."

Hayes recalls the Stax studio. "We only had a one-track recorder at first. [Label-owner] Jim Stewart was considered the king of one-track. If anybody screwed up, we had to start all over again and [trumpet player] Wayne Jackson's lips would fall off. Eventually we got two-track when Tom Dowd came in and installed it for us.

"Regarding arrangements, we did them in out heads, where Motown may have had them written out. We went on feel. I continue to do that. Otis [Redding] would come in sometimes with just an idea. He would get behind the microphone and say 'work up a groove' and start doing lyrics spontaneously - [singing] 'I can't turn you loose.'"

Though deeply in the groove, Hayes was always a thinking man with a conscience as well. "I was active even in high school in marches and things. I was afraid but I thought it was the right thing to do. When Dr. King was killed [in '68] I went through a period when I couldn't write, couldn't create. I just went blank. I was so hurt by that and I had so much bitterness and hatred for racist attitudes. Then one day after about a year I cognized: 'Hey man, the only way you can make a change is to do what you do.' So I got busy again."

Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and publisher of Blogcritics.org, which, quite frankly, rules - as do his wife and four children.

Visit Eric Olsen's author page — Eric Olsen's Blog