Never Can Say Goodbye

Some things you can't forget. Some things you can.

There was that summer I bought two LPs that remain in the former category. What one of them looked like was in the latter.

(Thank you, Wikipedia ... .)

It was a sound I can't forget ... It was an album cover I could. Isaac Hayes recorded The Isaac Hayes Movement with, as was his custom then, only four songs on it, two a side. It was inconceivable then to pay full LP prices for only four songs. But they were renditions of familiar tunes re-arranged as only the masterful Hayes could.
I wasn't familiar with "I Stand Accused," but I soon became that way. I played it (on an old stereo in the back) for the very straight-laced and gracious black man who minded me as I helped him clean the store my father managed back then. He was a gospel musician, but Hayes's version of that song completely tripped him out. Yes, he asked to borrow it. Yes, he kept it a week. And yes, I was glad to be getting it back. But I had to loan it back to him again, and I got it back again, and ... .
The rap (or, really, just a monologue) that starts out the track was a stone mindblower. I felt as though I was violating some cultural taboo (theirs, not ours) by just listening to it. But I did. And it was great -- a slow jam to beat them all.

Wiki says you can get The Issac Hayes Movement now on SACD. You won't regret it.

The other was one my best friend's family (four brothers) played for me, maybe the year or so before. I waited and bought it the same summer The Isaac Hayes Movement came out.

Simply called Led Zeppelin, the stark black-and-white photo was just that -- stark. Yes, I'd heard "Dazed and Confused" "Your Time is Gonna Come" and "Communication Breakdown" on the radio and at my friend's house.

But I wasn't prepared for the rest of it. I still remember gasping at the end of "Black Mountain Side." While it was playing, I guess I had forgotten to breathe. I'm sure the SACD is out there.

Neither album got a lot of spins on the family stereo after that. I'm not sure why. Nor years later, as I lugged my LP collection from dorm to dorm, apartment to apartment, until I got rid of it all by necessity in 1998. Led Zeppelin I went to the guy that paid me for the whole thing.

The Isaac Hayes Movement wasn't in it, though. Yeah, I left it on permanent loan, intentionally.

But I never forgot that sound.

How could I?



Originally posted to LiveJournal on Aug. 12, 2008