Why aren’t the Isley Brothers worshipped as the rock gods they are?
USA Today once published a story on the Isley Brothers, the soul/rock act that has been going for nearly 70 years, that illustrates how integral the band is to rock ’n’ roll — and yet underscores the group’s relative anonymity among rock fans.
The article included an anecdote from February 1964, when then-10-year-old Ernie Isley and his 11-year-old brother, Marvin, were watching the Beatles make their American debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Observing with them was Jimi Hendrix, who recorded and toured with their older siblings, Ronald, Rudolph and O’Kelly, the Isley Brothers. Though what they were witnessing was a revolution and perhaps a threat to the
Isleys’ more traditional R&B style, the brothers weren’t worried. After all, the Beatles had even covered two songs the Isleys had already made famous:
“Twist and Shout” in 1962 and the Isley-penned “Shout” way back in 1959.
“My eldest brother, Kelly, took the floor and said, ‘This English band has changed everything,’ ” Ernie recalled to USA Today. “‘I understand they do ‘Shout’ and ‘Twist and Shout,’ so I think we’re going to be OK. They’ve got two guitar players, but we’ve got Jimi.’ ”
Of all the people in this story ( Jimi, Ed, the Beatles), the Isley Brothers — Ron and Ernie still tour under the name and they play Houston’s Toyota Center
Jan. 15 — are the only ones who, if they magically appeared in most American living rooms, would go largely unrecognized.
Take me to the next phase
Jimi left the Isleys in 1965 (for the curious, an album called “In the Beginning” compiles several Isley tracks to which he contributed, such as “Testify” and “Move Over and Let Me Dance”) but his brief tenure made a lasting musical impression on young Ernie, who grew up to bring his own distorted, Fender Stratocaster guitar wild-style to the Isley Brothers’ sound.
When Ernie, bassist Marvin and brother-in-law/keyboardist Chris Jasper began contributing more to the group in the early ’70s, they shoved the Isley Brothers in a more rock direction. They blended the gospel-inflected R&B and funky soul, for which the group had been known, with a wiry, rangy rock ’n’ roll electricity, adding a new element to Ron’s fluid vocals, which could be honey-sweet one minute and firestorm-ferocious the next.
In 1971, they released “Givin’ It Back,” an album of rock covers that included a mashup of CSN&Y’s “Ohio” with Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” Stephen Stills’ “Love the One You’re With” and Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay.” The 1972 album “Brother, Brother, Brother” featured a smoky, 10minute take on Carole King’s “It’s Too Late.” But the Isleys threw their rock ’n’ roll coming out party with the 1973 album “3+3,” kicked off by the fiery, six-minute “That Lady,” with its closing, three-minute guitar freak-out, and including a sizzling version of Seals & Croft’s easy-going “Summer Breeze.”
The group then entered one of its most popular periods in the ’70s, cranking out a stream of hits such as “Fight the Power,” “The Pride,” “Livin’ in the Life” and “Take Me to the Next Phase,” but it was a golden double-edged sword that sheared them off from rock respectability. They made singles — thick, concrete slabs of hand-clapping funk tailor-made for the “Soul Train” line and raise-the-roof house parties — that topped the R&B charts but obscured their other musical ambitions. Rock and pop audiences turned a deaf ear.
Race may explain part of it — in the ’70s, with the exception of the likes of Hendrix and Sly & the Family Stone, FM album-rock had become stratified and segregated — but not all of it. By the late ’70s/early ’80s, many of the Isleys’ equally pioneering Black contemporaries in funk, such as Parliament-Funkadelic, Earth Wind & Fire, Living Colour and even the woefully underrated cult band Kid Creole & the Coconuts, were getting some of the wider media and crossover recognition that always seemed to elude the Isleys. And then Prince came along and took it all to a whole other level.
Yet Ernie served as stylistic connective tissue between Hendrix in one era and Prince, Vernon Reid, Lenny Kravitz and
Tom Morello in another. At least the Ohio Players received royalty checks from the Red Hot Chili Peppers covering “Love Rollercoaster.”
‘A damn shame’
In 2015, when Rolling Stone compiled its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, P-Funk’s Eddie Hazel got in at No. 83 but Ernie was nowhere to be found. Peter Jackson doesn’t need to make an eight-hour documentary about the Isley Brothers, but that there’s never even been a serious book written about them — except for Elizabeth Isley Barkley’s self-published, 72-page memoir, “One Isley Brother’s Daughter” — is odd, considering their history.
As one Reddit user on the
Let’s Talk Music subreddit put it two years ago, “There’s a real lack of Ernie Isley appreciation in the guitar and music community today, and it’s a damn shame.” Another responded, “Isley doesn’t get mentioned because, I don’t know, the Isleys were never cool compared to Funkadelic. They had too many hits geared towards Black folks. The Isley Brothers aren’t part of the Mojo Magazine classic-rock firmament and so Isley doesn’t get his due.”
I reached out to NPR TV critic Eric Deggans, a longtime follower of the Isley Brothers’ career, who agrees. “Their story is much more the story of sort of the segregation of music,” says Deggans, a longtime Isleys fan, in a phone interview. “Ernie Isley should be right up there with
Jimi Hendrix …But, but because Ernie’s guitar solos were powering songs that were popular with Black people, white people never really got hip to him …Isley, Eddie Hazel and (Headhunters and P-Funk’s) Blackbird
McKnight … there’s this long legacy of really amazing Black rock guitar players that are sort of unknown because white audiences don’t know them.”
Not everyone on the rock side ignored the Isleys. In 1992, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Carlos Santana is a fan and recorded “The Power of Peace” album with them in 2017. In 2018, NPR said that Ernie Isley is a favorite guitarist of
Mark Speer, the new-generation Stratocaster hero of Houston trio Khruangbin, and that he even had “an obsession” with him.
The Isleys track “Foosteps in the Dark,” featuring Ernie’s signature slinky, let’s-slip-into-something-comfortable riff, has been pilfered by everyone from Ice Cube (“It Was a Good Day”) to Thundercat (“Them Changes”) and Justin Bieber (“Bad Day”). Finally, in 2015, Sony’s Legacy Recordings acknowledged the group’s deep history with the release of “The Isley Brothers: The RCA Victor and T-Neck Album Masters 1959-1983,” a 23-disc (!) compilation.
The Isley Brothers ended up moving on from their funk and rock hybrid, replacing it with smooching songs-for-grown-folks such as “Between the Sheets,” “Contagious” and “Caravan of Love.” In 2006, in a move about as subtle as a siren in a library, Ronald Isley just went ahead and titled his album for what it is: “Baby Makin’ Music.”
Still, Deggans remains hopeful that the Isleys ultimately will get their due. “We did a ‘Tiny Desk Concert’ with them,” he says referring to NPR’s intimate-concert series. “There were younger music fans who probably didn’t know much about them. So, I think the fact that they’re still active, still playing concerts, still out there, means there’s always the chance that they’ll land on a project that will get them that kind of mainstream attention.”
PLAYLIST: For a curated Isley Brothers playlist, go to Spotify and search for “Best of the Isley Brothers.”