The Isley Brothers, The Isleys Live (T-Neck, 1973)

Live albums are moments preserved forever on vinyl/in amber, snapshots with a goldmine of cultural and temporal shrapnel embedded in their metadata. Listen close enough and you might catch an atom splitting, an evolution occurring, a change that’s gonna come. And if you’re an aficionado of those junctures when zeitgeists morph into what will follow, albums like The Isleys Live are veritable treasure troves.

The Isley Brothers’ career is remarkable, not least for its longevity. Over their seven decades in showbiz, the family act has passed through numerous genres and phases, enduring thanks to an impressive gift for reinvention and shape-shifting, and, critically, a crucial infusion of fresh blood in the late 60s.

By this time, the founding Isleys – lead singer Ronald and backing vocalists Rudolph and O’Kelly Jr – had already been recording artists for a decade. An eternity in an era when pop-stars often struggled to outlive the crazes they rode in on, and even future septuagenarian superstars like Jagger scoffed at the thought of still treading the boards in their forties.

The Isleys’ career had been uneven, dry periods stretching between hits like 1959’s Shout!, 1963’s Twist & Shout (cut a year before The Beatles topped the UK charts with their version) and their 1966 smash, This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You). The latter track was a rare success for the Isleys during a frustrating two-year tenure with Motown, the label treating the Ohio-born out-of-towners as less deserving of the label’s best material than home-grown stars like the Supremes, the Temptations and the Four Tops.

Motown offloaded the Isleys in 1968, closing a chapter but not ending their story. Ron, Rudy and Kelly dusted themselves down and took stock of how the wind was blowing. The vicissitudes of pop were calling time on traditional soul vocal groups, so the trio enlisted the talents of their (much) younger brothers, 16-year-old guitarist Ernie and 15-year-old bassist Marvin, along with Rudy’s brother-in-law, 17-year-old keyboard whiz Chris Jasper. And, after a decade hopping between labels like RCA, Atlantic, United Artists and, of course, Motown, they rebooted their own independent imprint T-Neck Records – via which they’d earlier released several pre-Motown singles featuring their erstwhile touring guitarist, a pre-fame Jimi Hendrix – and released 1969 single It’s Your Thing, which married the warmth and sass of Stax soul to the insurgent pop-funk of Sly and his Family Stone.

It’s Your Thing was a smash, topping Billboard’s R&B chart and reaching #2 on the Top 100. As a result, Berry Gordy tried to reclaim his newly successful former charges – but the Isleys had gotten a taste of freedom, and were in no mood to relinquish control. The arrival of Ernie, Marvin and Chris, who’d already formed a trio of their own while in high school, accelerated the group’s creative evolution. A full decade younger than the founding Isleys, these new bloods were attuned to the radical sea-changes then occurring within pop, soul and funk, and to the blurring of previously sacrosanct genre and cultural divisions.

The Isleys followed It’s Your Thing’s chart success with a trio of albums – It’s Our Thing, The Brothers: Isley and Get Into Something – that further developed this newfound funk mode. But it was on 1971’s Givin’ It Back – sleeve image: Ron, Rudy and Kelly all holding acoustic guitars – and the following year’s Brother, Brother, Brother that the younger Isleys’ influence on the group’s development was most clearly felt. The former album featured no Isley originals, but its selection of covers was inspired, and eclectic. The Latino funk of Spill The Wine, a hit for Eric Burdon and War a year earlier, was safely within the Isleys’ wheelhouse, as was Cold Bologna, a slice of street-funk written by Bill Withers that later closed his sublime Live At Carnegie Hall LP. Elsewhere, though, Givin’ It Back saw the Isleys reinterpreting material by hippie-era heroes like Bob Dylan, James Taylor and Stephen Stills, opening with a stunning medley of Neil Young’s searing, still-timely protest howl Ohio and former bandmate Jimi Hendrix’s own anti-war anthem, Machine Gun. And while Brother, Brother, Brother featured a handful of traditional Isleys-penned numbers – the joyous Lay Away and Work To Do, and Pop That Thang, a throwback rewrite of It’s Your Thing that was nevertheless irresistible with its robotic frug – it also included a ten-minute reading of Carole King’s It’s Too Late, again confirming that these revivified Isleys would not be contained or do what was expected.

Which brings us to 1973’s The Isleys Live. The group’s second concert album, it followed 1969’s Live At Yankee Stadium, which had also served as a showcase for their record label, with the Isleys taking the first side of the double set and ceding the other sides to T-Neck signings like The Brooklyn Bridge and The Edwin Hawkins Singers. Also yielding a concert movie – 1970’s It’s Our Thing – the Yankee Stadium performance captured the Isleys in the first flush of their post-Motown success, backed by a full horn section, with Ron, Rudy and Kelly up front, delivering Temptations-esque dance routines in contrasting pastel suits.

The Isleys Live, meanwhile, was recorded at The Bitter End, the Greenwich Village coffee house and nightclub that had served as a launch-pad for the careers of Joni Mitchell, Woody Allen and James Taylor. While the Bronx-based Yankee Stadium boasted a maximum capacity of 65,000 in 1969 (the scant footage currently available from It’s Our Thing doesn’t confirm if the Isleys filled the joint), the Bleecker Street hangout was considerably more intimate, with space for 230 punters. Curtis Mayfield had recorded his brilliant 1971 album Curtis/Live at The Bitter End, launching his post-Impressions career with an intensely funky performance that eschewed the brass and horns, foregrounding instead his song-writing and his guitar-playing. Similarly, The Isleys Live suggested there wasn’t enough space on the club’s pokey stage for the horn section, and was all the better for this, instead shining the spotlight on Ernie, Marvin and Chris, who were now fully fledged members of the group. And it wasn’t just the pared-back instrumentation that rang the changes between the Isleys’ two live albums – the sleeve photos for The Isleys Live find Ron, Rudy and Kelly bedecked in wide-brimmed pimp hats, stacked heels and fringed jackets that would give Roger Daltrey envy. Gone are to pastel suits, in their place a hipness they wear well.

The performance contained within, meanwhile, captures a group in transition. In truth, the Isleys rarely stood still for long, and would continue evolving past the protean moment chronicled herein: to the glorious gospelised soul of Harvest For The World, to the riot funk of Fight The Power, to the paranoid quiet storms of Footsteps In The Dark. But what makes The Isleys Live such a rewarding and entertaining concert album is the sense of a group with one foot in the world of traditional R&B revue, and the other in that of the kind of adventurous, auteurist funk Ernie Isley’s wild, abrasive and inventive guitar-playing points towards. There’s a sense here that they’re playing to two contrasting audiences at once. We’re witnessing the cognitive dissonances suggested by the bold new directions and material selections of Givin’ It Back and Brother, Brother, Brother arising in real time; crucially, we’re witnessing them being gloriously, triumphantly transcended.

To illustrate this point, let’s fast-forward to their cover of Stephen Stills’ Love The One You’re With. Perhaps the archetypal free-love anthem – and one that unwittingly showcases the chauvinistic selfishness hiding behind the florid hippie utopianism – the song is one of two Stills originals the Isleys covered on Givin’ It Back. They weren’t the only soul artists to cover the tune – Aretha also performed it on 1971’s Aretha Live At The Fillmore West, a gospelised ramble that was great as almost everything she recorded in that period. The Isleys’ version retains the lightness-of-touch of Stills’ original take, but anchors it to a heavy groove, as drummer Neil Bathe and conga-player Karl Potter keep up a rolling, bustling fill throughout. The three-part Isley vocals reach for the skies, while the joyful coda builds, and builds, and builds (and could build a little longer without my complaining, to be honest). It’s a treat.

The banter that precedes the track is particularly choice, outing Ron, Rudy and Kelly as stiffer and less hip than many of their funk contemporaries (and, indeed, their siblings and bandmates). Funkadelic’s George Clinton interspersed their jams with far-out jibber jabber, while Mayfield preceded his songs with earnest musings on their meaning and place within the current cultural discourse. By contrast, the older Isleys are vintage entertainers, ribbing the audience and themselves with possibly pre-rehearsed but entirely endearing routines. They dedicate It’s Too Late to Ron’s old flame Pauline, who’s in the audience, and do a charming routine where they have to snap Ron from a romantic reverie by pointing out Pauline’s husband is sat beside her (“How you doing, my man?” replies a suddenly chastened Ron).

Later, the lead singer precedes their cover of Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay with a ramble where he suggests an age-based divide within the group, Ron and his elder brethren not quite sharing vociferousness of the younger Isleys’ worship for the voice of their generation. “Everybody up here is so crazy about Bob, everything he writes they say, ‘Hey, this cat is right in to it’,” Ron says, sounding a smidgeon fogeyish, or at least skeptical of His Bobness’s divinity. But he does acknowledge the man has penned a good tune or several. “He wrote a song that I’m crazy about,” he adds, leering, with some serious Creepy Uncle energy, “If it’s got anything to do with laying, it’s gonna be my favourite tune…” Ron. No.

The banter reaches its peak just before Love The One You’re With. As a touring soul act of over a decade-plus standing, it’s unlikely the elder Isleys weren’t familiar with the concept of a girl-in-every-port, but there’s a sense here that they’re struggling somewhat with the messier details of the sexual revolution as it stood in the hippie era. “Now, we’re going to do a little something written by Stephen Stills,” purrs Ron. “A tune that says: ‘Look girls, when you can’t be with the one that you love…’”

“…Love the one you’re with!” volley back the audience, completing the hook. But Ron’s reconsidering what he’s preaching here, and if he really wants to be practicing it. “No, I shouldn’t have said that to the girls, my wife might be sitting out there somewhere and I ain’t around…” he mutters, highlighting that if one loves the one they’re with, an absent significant other might be getting a raw deal – a situation that doesn’t really jibe with an old school romantic like Ron (who doubtless also doesn’t want to be cheated upon while he’s on the road). “So I’m going to say this to the young ladies,” he continues, rewriting Stills’ message on the fly with a refreshingly honest bathos, “If you can’t be with the one that you love… Just wait?”

Comedy isn’t the dominant mode of The Isleys Live, however. And while the Isley elders’ singing is glorious throughout, the album is just as much a showcase for Ernie Isley’s electrifying, lucid and eloquent post-psychedelic guitar-playing. The ghost of Hendrix looms large over Ernie’s performances here, not just because the album closes with the powerful Machine Gun. It’s clear throughout that, at least at this stage in his career, Ernie is an unabashed disciple of Jimi, sharing the former Isleys ax-man’s love of effects and noise. But he’s no mere copyist, and throughout there are glimmers of the lyrical voice that would further develop on subsequent albums, in particular with the glorious That Lady (Parts 1&2) later that year.

Kelly makes the Hendrix influence explicit as he introduces Ernie’s climactic solo on It’s Too Late. “Back 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1965 we had a very young guitar player with us, by the name of Jimi Hendrix,” he says, nine minutes in, to a smattering of crowd applause. “Jimi’s not here anymore, but while he was with us, he inspired our youngest brother, Ernest Isley. We’d like to feature young Ernest Isley now, on lead guitar…”

As on the studio version, The Isleys take perhaps the most traditionally soulful hit off Carole King’s epochal Tapestry album, slice away the groove and slow it to a dark, heavy mourn. Their unhurried, quarter-speed wallow in King’s regretful blues yields many pleasures, not least the sense of release whenever the key oozes from minor to major, the way Ron takes his sweet time dwelling on every blossom and curlicue of heartache across the track’s thirteen minutes, sliding between high-end tenderness to raw-throated howl, Kelly and Rudy’s ghostly, distant harmonies or the brief blasts of cathartic fuzz guitar Ernie fires off at the close of each chorus, matching Ron’s skyward cries with spiralling clusters of notes.

Over in the lucrative contemporaneous realm of white rock music and on the new-fangled FM stations, such lengthy, introspective, expository wailing blues had become the paradigm, acres of vinyl given over to side-long vocal and instrumental self-indulgences. It’s not a stretch to hear It’s Too Late as the Isleys’ answer to such post-acid rock excesses, a quarter-hour purgation with Ron and Ernie duelling miseries until their longform agonies are expunged.

But while this track is indeed an unabashed and unrestrained showcase for the Isleys’ twin soloists, what could have been overwrought and overdone is instead sorrowful but deep. There’s a sweetness to Ron’s wails that’s a universe away from Percy Plant’s tight-trousered screaming, the Isleys never losing their connection to soul even as they bond with what’s happening in rock’n’roll. Halfway through the performance, Ron switches to straight-up and explicitly acknowledged Ray Charles mimicry, perhaps another holdover from their days as chitlin-circuit crowd-pleasers. Followed by a beautiful solo from Ernie, casting languorous and emotionally expressive lines saturated with the crackle of distortion, the result sounds like Brother Ray walking the edges with Funkadelic, and it rules – the very fusion of past and future, of tradition and avant garde, that marks the very best of this era of Isleys.  

If you’re streaming or playing the album on CD, The Isleys Live then jarringly cuts from this bleak, soulful moment, straight into a bold and wickedly funky It’s Your Thing. This seesaw of mood and mode is a characteristic of the album, and of a band itself swinging between what it was, and what it can be, and what it will become. Part of the magic of The Isleys Live is how the performances are so great – so vivid, so wild, so passionate and inspired, the recording so intimate it gets you right up on that cramped stage – that such cognitive dissonances are transcended. You’re snapped from elegy to rave-up, but the music is so ecstatic, so righteous, any rude awakening is instantly forgiven. 

Their medley of Ohio and Machine Gun, however, could only have closed the album. It’s clear, once it’s finished, that there’s nowhere else that the band could go afterwards, no chirpy funk number they could have moved to that wouldn’t have fatally broken the spell, or cut free the suspended disbelief. As Ron introduces the song, he notes that “we didn’t do [it] last night because Kelly got so down after we did it the second show.” It’s the kind of performance after which an artist could only feel entirely spent.

“It’s a song about the situation at Kent State,” says Ron, setting the scene for the May 1970 confrontation between protesting anti-war students and the National Guard, which left four dead from the bullets of the latter. For a band who’d previously shied away from any form of protest song (Freedom, off 1970’s Get Into Something, was as close as they’d gotten, though the lyrics suggests their main focus was the freedom to “flirt where you wanna flirt”), Ohio/Machine Gun saw them dive into the political deep end.

This act was, in of itself, a signal that the Isleys were leaving behind their identity as 60s entertainers and highlighting a newfound seriousness in tune with the new decade. They weren’t alone – as he went solo, Curtis Mayfield foregrounded the political concerns that had powered some of his former band The Impressions’ best material; Stevie Wonder’s unimpeachable series of albums through the 1970s turned up fiercely brilliant issues-driven tracks like Big Brother, You Haven’t Done Nothing and Living For The City; the arguable highlight of Bill Withers’ Live At Carnegie Hall was I Can’t Write Left-handed, a devastating song about the tragic, pointless waste of war. And while the Isleys didn’t pen their protest song(s), they made this medley their own.

“I’m a little hoarse, but I’ll try it anyway,” Ron murmurs. It’s quickly clear he’s more than up to the challenge. The mood of their take of Ohio is spectral, darkly sombre, swapping the protest-folk strum of the CSNY original for a slow-burn intro of blues spiritual piano and gospelised bass-line, switching the tempo from a rousing march to the unhurried gait of someone off to commit a crime of passion. “I’ve seen the soldiers, I’ve seen them marching,” he cries, conjuring them like mortal threats on the horizon. “Soldiers are cutting us down,” he adds, his voice somewhere between croon and scream. “How could you run, when you know?” he asks, his voice once again rising to the heavens, as Ernie takes Neil Young’s primal guitar figure, dips it in funkdafied alloy and transforms it into a rallying cry.

But if there’s any anthemic energy building within Ohio, it swiftly dissipates as the Isleys shift into their nightmarish interpretation of Machine Gun. An infernal but irresistibly funky blues when performed by Hendrix on the Band Of Gypsys album, the Isleys’ version maintains the funereal pace and mood established by Ohio, while keeping the martial drum rolls and visceral lyrics describing bodies being torn apart by machine gun bullets from the Hendrix original. It then segues back into the ghostly chant of “Four dead in Ohio” before the climactic tornado of electric guitar ensorcellment, relocating Hendrix’s protest of the senseless violence then occurring in Vietnam to the internal battlefields of America, with US soldiers turning their bullets on their own citizens.

It’s a chilling moment, the most powerful of the album, and evidence of a group fearlessly embracing their brave new direction. You wonder how the audience felt afterwards, filing out into the New York night – what Pauline and her husband made of the raging, fiery, avant garde protest rock with which the Isleys closed a night of Laying and Work To Do. But it’s in this track that this transitional Isleys make the most sense, the two generations playing to their strengths, and playing off their opposite numbers. Ron, crooning and howling, screaming of being torn apart by the bullets, begging for his body to be carried home with the same blind fervour he once delivered gospel numbers and pop hits. Ernie, striking percussive, wah wah-accented funk guitar, then swooping into iridescent and wild fuzz-blues soloing, and then offering his own cathartic tribute to Hendrix’s climactic guitar abuse, his feedback and noise and fevered whammy-hammering stirring up its own apparitions of the horrors of war, and the spectre of domestic fascism. Ron and Ernie, duetting and duelling, and marking out some new space and unpredictable future for the Isleys within their melee.

The albums that followed The Isleys Live marked an imperial phase for the group, beginning with 1973’s 3+3, its title formally acknowledging that the Isleys were now A Band, and that the youthful guitarist and his rhythm section were equal partners in the endeavour. The album’s lead single, That Lady (Parts 1&2), marked the Isleys’ first Top Ten hit since It’s Your Thing, and struck the finest balance yet between the group’s key strengths: Ron’s honeyed vocals and Ernie’s eloquent, limber guitar-playing.

For the rest of the decade, they’d enjoy considerable success, their albums balancing sides of wild, forceful funk with oleaginous (but similarly irresistible) balladry. The productive tug-of-war between the elders’ traditional soulful impulses and the musicians’ more progressive tendencies yielded their greatest chart success yet with 1975’s double Platinum The Heat Is On, their first chart-topping album, and delivered further hits like Harvest For The World and Footsteps In The Dark.

Such unstable chemistry couldn’t last forever, of course. As the 70s turned into the 80s, the balladeering overwhelmed the funk, and the younger half of the group split off into the own unit, Isley-Jasper-Isley, best known for 1985 chart-topper Caravan Of Love. Kelly passed in 1986; Rudy retired from showbiz three years later. A 1990s reunion of the group featuring Isleys Ron, Ernie and Marvin, meanwhile, scored chart success following a guest appearance on R Kelly’s Down Low (Nobody Has To Know), but diabetes saw Marvin’s legs amputated in 1996, while Ron served three years in prison for tax evasion, recording his first solo album, Mr I, behind bars. Ron and Ernie have since reunited, and continue to perform as a duo.

The Isleys Live, meanwhile, remains as a precious historic artefact, offering a snapshot of that chemistry in its protean stages: a record of a group redefining their boundaries and possibilities in real time. It’s also as electrifying hour of funk, soul and rock’n’roll as you’ll ever hear.