ERNIE ISLEY AND VERNON REID: A GUITAR HERO SUMMIT

The Isley Brothers have been a band for 70 years. “Nobody in the history of an electric microphone has that on their résumé,” says guitarist Ernie Isley, 72, who first recorded with the group in 1969, when he played bass on their funk classic “It’s Your Thing.” He was 16 years old.

By then, his older brothers—O’Kelly, Rudolph and Ronald—had recorded two of rock & roll’s bedrock songs, “Shout” (later popularized in the film Animal House) and “Twist and Shout,” covered by The Beatles on their first U.K. album, Please Please Me. In 1963, they hired a guitarist named Jimi Hendrix to tour with them, and Hendrix would live with the Isleys at their New Jersey home for a couple of years before exiting the group.

In the mid-’60s, the Isleys signed with Motown’s Tamla label and scored a hit with “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You),” and then left to start their own label, T-Neck. Following the political and cultural upheavals of the late ’60s, the Isleys were in need of a refresh, and they found it when they added younger brothers Ernie and Marvin (bass) and brother-in-law Chris Jasper (keyboards) to the group. In ’73, with their first album through Epic Records and their first to officially feature the younger trio, they broke through with 3 + 3, thanks in large part to Ernie’s blistering guitar work on the Top 10 smash “That Lady” and their transformative cover of Seals & Crofts’ soft-rock trifle “Summer Breeze.”

Thus began a string of top-selling albums beloved by Black audiences, but which were increasingly ignored by AOR radio programmers, despite Ernie’s guitar heroics. One huge admirer of Ernie’s was a teenaged Hendrix fan named Vernon Reid, who, as a fledgling guitarist himself, found inspiration in virtuosos like Isley and Funkadelic’s Eddie Hazel, but who grew frustrated by the lack of respect and attention they and other Black rock musicians received from white gatekeepers.

Reid would go on to anchor the multi-platinum hard-rock band Living Colour and co-found the Black Rock Coalition, a loose-knit collective of artists, journalists and activists dedicated to promoting the “total spectrum” of Black music. The Isleys, meanwhile, became the living embodiment of such a spectrum, with songs (“That Lady,” “Footsteps in the Dark,” “Between the Sheets,” “Voyage to Atlantis”) that have been sampled by everyone from Ice Cube and The Notorious B.I.G. to Kendrick Lamar and SZA, and a legacy, now carried on by Ronald and Ernie, that remains unparalleled.

“Your brothers owe you,” says Reid to Ernie in the course of a 90-minute Zoom conversation. “I know it’s a family thing, but you, Marvin and Chris dragged your older brothers into the next half of their career.”

While the two guitar greats chopped it up, we tried to keep from asking if we could “plug in” our “axe” and “jam” with them.

"The rock & roll equivalent of 'Happy Birthday'"

Vernon Reid: Oh man, it is great to see you.

Ernie Isley: Great seeing you too.

Reid: We did a few runs together with the Experience Hendrix tour, and that’s really where I got to know you. You would always set the bar incredibly high for the evening, because you would come out and do “Manic Depression.” And you killed it. Every town, every time.

Isley: Thank you, Vernon. I was very fortunate to be an 11-year-old and have a musician of Jimi’s caliber in our home. Being able to sit in my dining room with my social studies book open and observe and listen. He practiced relentlessly. If he’d been around to see me play “That Lady,” he’d laugh and say, “Well, Ernie was the one in the room with me all the time!” But I was too young to ask him questions. Every so often Marvin would butt in on his practice: “Hey Jimi, how do you know when to change from one string to the other to get a note?” And he would stop and explain that. Marvin would on occasion take his guitar from him, and being a right-handed player, try to play it, and he’d be like, “Doesn’t sound the same.”

We would see Jimi practicing before the shows, or before rehearsals even. He’d be playing and doing some moves in front of the mirror and watching what it looked like, getting it together. And when it came time to be onstage, he’d fling the neck of his guitar under his leg and was still playing with one hand, playing behind his neck, playing with his teeth. He was just a dynamic musician.

Reid: Is it true that you and Jimi watched The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show at your house?

Isley: Marvin and I were on the couch. I was on the left-hand side, Marvin was on the right-hand side and Jimi was in the middle. When Ed Sullivan said, “Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles,” we saw it together. But we couldn’t see the future. No one can. Marvin and I didn’t know that we were sitting next to a guitar deity. Then, a year later, when The Beatles did the show at Shea Stadium, their very first song was “Twist and Shout.”

A few years ago, we performed at the estate of the family that owns Revlon. It was a benefit for the Apollo Theater. We’d come offstage and I’m signing autographs and taking selfies and all of that. I got back to my table and my wife said, “Paul McCartney’s over there.” I’d never met him before. So I weaved through the tables and tapped him on his arm. He stood up and gave me a bear hug that just about cut my wind off. He said, “Ernie, if it were not for The Isley Brothers, the Beatles would still be in Liverpool.” Then we went onstage together and the Isleys and a Beatle did “Twist and Shout.”

“Shout” and “Twist and Shout,” those two songs are the rock & roll equivalent of “Happy Birthday.” Everybody knows the lyrics. Everybody knows the songs. But we didn’t stay with the same musical approach. We changed. We went from “Twist and Shout” to “This Old Heart of Mine.” And then we left Motown. Nobody had success on Motown and left. But we started our own label, T-Neck, and then came “It’s Your Thing.”

Reid: And you played bass on that, right?

Isley: Right. We recorded it in November of ’68. I remember it was a Monday night and we were at the studio, and I didn’t go to school the next day, which was Election Day. Richard Nixon was elected president. Wednesday I went back to school. I was 16. Teacher asked, “Hey Ernie, where were you?” “I was at a recording session.” “It’s Your Thing” came out in early 1969. Record World said, “The Isley Brothers will have one of the biggest records this year; it’s called ‘It’s Your Thing’.” And a couple of weeks after that, it was everywhere. Everybody knows that song. I’ve seen The Jackson 5 do it, The Temptations do it. Stevie Wonder did it. Everybody.

"FROM BLACK-AND-WHITE TO 3d TECHNICOLOR"

Reid: “That Lady” charted a new chapter for the band, and for guitar playing in general. How did you come up with that incredible sound?

Isley: Before we recorded the song, I went to a guitar store on Sunset Boulevard. I was looking for a sound and I asked for a Strat, some cables and a pedal. And I found this pedal called a Maestro Phase Shifter and I got the sound in the store.

Reid: The sound was already in your head when you went to the store?

Isley: Yeah. The next day we were in the studio. I said to Kelly, “I need 100 bucks to get this pedal,” and the engineers said, “Ernie, we can get that from SIR, Studio Instrument Rental.” So they got the pedal. I plugged in and when I hit the note—the lead note on “That Lady”—the very first time, that track went from black-and-white to 3D Technicolor. I lost it. The engineers, Malcolm Cecil and Bob Margouleff, who worked with Stevie Wonder, they lost it too. Kelly just stared at me through the studio glass without blinking.

Reid: I was a teenager when “That Lady” came out. I’d just started playing guitar and I was discovering Hendrix’s albums. But you and Eddie Hazel, you were making music in real time. At that point, I’m reading all the guitar magazines. And it bothered me so much that you were never given a cover of Guitar Player. I want to emphasize this: You were making hit records. It wasn’t underground. I would get my Guitar Player and I would see other cats on the cover and I never saw you. And it bothered me so much. I saw a lot of my other favorite guitar players. But it was like, “Why is this cat...” I mean, I get it. He’s great. But how is it he’s on the cover and Ernie Isley isn’t? It made me mad.

Isley: After we recorded the 3 + 3 album, CBS heard it and said, “It doesn’t sound like ‘It’s Your Thing.’ We like it, but you don’t have saxophones or trumpets on it. How should we market it?” We said, “Just put it out. Just put it out.” They put it out—boom. I was in my senior year of college at that time, and I could go from left to right on AM and FM and I would hear “That Lady.”

In ’77, when we released the album Go for Your Guns, we got ticked because we didn’t feel like we were getting the acknowledgement we deserved. We all signed a letter and sent it over to CBS. The next day they requested a meeting with us. One of the guys there, Gordon Anderson, said, “You guys are the #1 selling artist here because of Go for Your Guns. You might be #5 or #7 on the pop charts, but you’re the #1 artist right now at CBS.” And they called up to Boston, a record chain called Strawberries and asked, “Hey, what’s going on there? What you got selling?” And they said, “Well, we got Boston. We got Fleetwood Mac.” He mentioned a bunch of other albums. And the CBS guy said, “By the way, where are The Isley Brothers?” And the Strawberries guy said, “Oh, they’re #1.” He said, “Well, why didn’t you say anything about them? They’re #1 and you’re telling me all these other albums, but you’re not saying Isleys.” And it was just the political climate or whatever. It had nothing to do with music. And it had nothing to do with sales. We were selling platinum, platinum-plus.

"IT CHANGED THE ISLEY BROTHERS"

Reid: You wrote yet another classic, “Fight the Power,” which was more politically charged than the band had ever been. How’d you come up with the lyrics?

Isley: In ’74 we had finished the Live It Up album in California, and we were going to fly our mom, the wives, my nieces and nephews out to L.A., and we were going to go to Disneyland. I was 22 at the time and had never been to Disneyland. I woke up that morning in a real good mood, and I was in the shower, and for some reason I started singing or reciting, “Time is truly wastin’/ There’s no guarantee/ Smile’s in the makin’/ You gotta fight the powers that be.” And when I said that, the soap went this way, shower curtain went that way. Water’s all over the place. I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and I wrote that down. I mentioned it to the brothers about two or three months later when we had to come up with some new material. And that was what I presented.

I’d written the word “nonsense” in the line “When I rolled with the punches/ I got knocked on the ground/ With all this nonsense going down.” And when Ronald sang it in the studio, he sang “bullshit” in place of “nonsense.” None of us had known he was going to do that. And when he finished it, I was like, “Oh, man, you can’t do that. You got grandmothers and little kids listening.” He said, “Ernie, you wrote the song, right? What you meant is ‘bullshit.’ You just didn’t say it. When you say ‘bullshit,’ you’re being true to yourself and you’re not chopping yourself off. If you say something other than ‘bullshit,’ you’re chopping yourself off.”

And that was what made it stick, more so than anything else. I know it changed us. It changed The Isley Brothers, like, “These guys are serious. They put it in your face, like a Muhammad Ali jab.”

Reid: I remember hearing it on WBLS. They didn’t censor it. And it was a sensation. This was also around the era of Richard Pryor too. There was something very raw and real in the air. Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” even though it’s not a cover, that “Fight the Power” wouldn’t exist without The Isley Brothers’ “Fight the Power” inspiring it. No doubt. No doubt.

Isley: That album, The Heat Is On, from 1975, became our first #1 album and our first platinum album.

Reid: Really, the whole Quiet Storm format started with “The Heat Is On.”

Isley: And it wasn’t too long after that that we had “Harvest for the World” and “(At Your Best) You Are Love,” and then “The Pride” and “Footsteps in the Dark.”

Reid: Oh my God, “Footsteps in the Dark.” Ice Cube knew what he was doing when he sampled that for “It Was a Good Day.” I mean, you’re an iconic lead guitar player, but your rhythm parts! “Footsteps” is one of those tunes where the words are so perfect and the parts are perfectly intermeshed. What came first, that rhythm lick or the words?

Isley: Actually, what came first was the drum lick.

Reid: Oh man, we haven’t even talked about your drumming yet!

Isley: The drums are where the foundation of the song rests. Then there were two guitar parts. That was where the funk thing happened, and the drums emphasized that. And then you got to the lyric: [sings] “Are we really sure/ Can a love that’s lasted for so long still endure?/ Do I really care? Hey, hey, let’s talk about the distractions goin’ on elsewhere/ I keep hearing footsteps, baby, in the dark.” And the second verse is, “My mind drifts now and then/ Looking down dark corridors and wonders what might have been/ Something’s up ahead/ Hey, should I keep this same direction or go back instead?/ I keep hearin’ footsteps, baby, in the dark/ Honey, now let’s stop walkin’ around/ When there’s love lost to be found/ Oh, you know I still care/ What’s the sense of goin’ elsewhere?”

Reid: You have to have a couple of relationships under your belt before you even get to what that is. It’s very mature. It’s about love. It’s about conflict. I’ve been to many parties where, once the drum starts, people are heading to the dance floor. By the time the guitar kicks in, it’s a ballad about a very mature subject, but it’s also funky as hell.

"girls WERE screaming like I was Justin Bieber"

Reid: We were focusing on your life as a guitar player, but you’re an excellent drummer. How’d you start playing drums?

Isley: I started playing drums when I was 12. I played my first live gig with my brothers in Philadelphia when I was 14. Their drummer suddenly quit. My brothers said, “Ernie plays better than that guy.” I’d been sitting in on the rehearsals. So we did “Twist and Shout,” “Shout,” “This Old Heart of Mine,” which had come out that year. After we got offstage, my eldest brother, Kelly, gave me a $50 bill and told me to go get a hot dog. I still had my stage clothes on. There were girls screaming for me like I was Justin Bieber. My mind was blown. I didn’t get that kind of action back in New Jersey!

Also, Martha and the Vandellas were on the show, but they didn’t have a drummer, so they asked me to sit in and then play for them. Of course, I had been studying a lot of the Motown records, the drum parts and the bass parts. I wasn’t necessarily interested in who was singing, with all due respect; I was more interested in who wrote the song and the musicians. I started listening to the Motown records just to hear James Jamerson’s bass parts. Nobody was playing like he was.

Reid: Played with one finger, which is insane.

Isley: And he wasn’t necessarily credited because they weren’t doing that at the time. I could tell if a Motown release was going to be a hit just based on the bass line.

Reid: Ernie, did you ever talk to Prince? I’m sure he was influenced by your playing. I’m curious if you guys ever had a chance to chat.

Isley: I was playing behind Keyshia Cole at the House of Blues on Sunset. She was going to be performing our song “Voyage to Atlantis,” so somebody decided to fly me in and play with her. After we finished the song, this guy came up to me and said, “Hey Ernie, my name is so-and-so, and I work for Prince and he’s here tonight.” And I said, “He is? Hey man, tell him to come on back. I’m a big fan of his. All the brothers are. Tell him to come on back, man. We can talk.” He never came back.

Reid: Yeah, he did that same thing to us the last time we played in Minneapolis before he passed. People ran up to us after the show and said, “You know who was here?” I said, “Who?” “Prince was here.” “Prince was here?” One of his bodyguards came up afterwards and said, “The boy said to tell you that the show was dope.” I said, “He could have told me that himself.”

Isley: We were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. The next morning I was walking to my hotel, and I ran into B.B. King. He started grinning. I’m already grinning before him. And I said, “Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.” When you can do that, you get more joy.

At heart, I will always be 11 years old, sitting in the dining room with a social studies book open, looking and listening to Jimi.