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*Isaac Hayes personally gave me information that I found indispensable. Seriously. Told it to me when I interviewed him in BRE Magazine publisher Sidney Miller's Hollywood office late afternoon, April 19, 1995. The date is etched in my brain because it was the same day of the Oklahoma City Bombing. All day people had been clued to their televisions for developing news.
His promoting a new album he'd done for Virgin was all the reason I needed to work the affable, easygoing Hayes over for more than an hour, querying him on everything regarding his music that I'd been bursting at the seams to know ever since I was a kid, seduced by his 1969 breakthrough album, "Hot, Buttered, Soul."
Finally, a weary Hayes said he had to go. I relented, but not before asking, as he rose from the brown leather couch, if he'd oblige me with something personal.
Before he could answer, I began with the solemnity of a man confiding sins to a suspicious clergyman: I'd been doing it for a couple of years, I acknowledged, looking up into Hayes' face from my seat. The way in which I did it, I said, just didn't feel right. If I kept it up, there were bound to be complications. There already were.
Finally, I just flat out asked him: “How are you shaving your head?”
Hayes' face went from a puzzled, cautious gaze that could have asked, “Is this cat about to ask me for money?” to the loving expression of a master pleased to impart to the grasshopper an excerpt from the Dead Sea scrolls. He eased back down onto the couch, his eyes taking stock of my shaven head as he sat.
“What you doin'?” he asked in a concerned baritone, the same one that crooned such exquisitely crafted covers as Bacharach/David's “The Look Of Love,” which, in Hayes stylistic hands, sounded like movie music. Or Ruby and the Romantics' 1963 ditty, “Our Day Will Come." Hayes presented the song as a cocktail-hour ballad whose delicious concluding vamp flirts with infinity.
“I'm using a Lady Bic razor and shaving cream,” I replied, relieved. He was going to help me.
“That's your problem right there,” Hayes said. "You using a blade."
He directed me to a beauty supply shop for an Andis brand professional T-Outliner. Wrote it down on a piece of paper for me. “Don't barbers use those to give edge-ups?” I asked gingerly, not wanting to appear to question a virtuoso.
“Yeah, they do. But what you want to do is shave your whole head with it, using it the same way you would if you were giving yourself an edge-up.”
Respectfully, I said it didn't seem like that would give me the kind of close shave I was getting the old fashioned way. “You're right--it won't,” he said, “but it'll LOOK close, and you won't be getting the nicks you're getting using a blade.” Plus, he added, a bald head with just a little fuzz can give a woman a great sensation when you rub your head between her legs. He winked and smiled mischievously.
Shaving his head that way all those years, Hayes declared, was how he maintained his trademark bronze dome.
Sensing my quiet glee, Hayes rose again, this time on his way. I just sat there, trying to somehow grasp the sheer sureality of it all: the soul superstar who took Jimmy Webb's sentimental “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” and brilliantly recast it as a long-playing melodramatic meditation on infidelity--pontificating on the track for eight minutes about exactly WHY the man left his woman for Phoenix before singing a single note--THAT man, a paragon of bald who shares the Mount Rushmore of Glabrous with such iconic peers as Yul Brynner, Kojak, Michael Jordan and Mr. Clean, had just given me, a guy who as a teenager played Isaac Hayes albums in the background while trying to get girls hot on the phone, earnest advice on how to shave my head. Shit.
Steven Ivory's book, FOOL IN LOVE (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster) is in stores now or at Amazon.com (www.Amazon.com) Respond to him via STEVRIVORY@AOL.COM or MYfeedback@eurweb.com.