Isaac Hayes' Wattstax "Ain't No Sunshine"

To piggyback on the last post, devoted as it was in part to Neal Adams' run on the Inhumans in Amazing Adventures from 1971, here is the powerhouse version of "Ain't No Sunhsine" by Isaac Hayes which concludes the two-disk remastered Wattstax concert album.

I heard it on my iPod while running this morning. Wattstax, a documentary of a concert put on by performers of the Stax Records label, was filmed at the L.A. Coliseum in August 1972. This is what the California I grew up in looked like. The dominant powers were tainted -- Vietnam, Watergate in the pipeline -- and the people were on the rise. Rejecting the sanctity of those at the apex of the chain of being, people felt as if they had a little room to breathe.

The feeling wouldn't last long. Wattstax documents a moment in time when people thought that feeling would last forever.

Super Fly

In addition to Last Tango in Paris, another great film from 1972 is Super Fly, by Gordon Parks, Jr. I don't think I had ever sat down and made a study of it until I was laid off in 2011 (over the years since I was a kid I've seen parts of the movie many times over on television). What struck me is that it's all about trying to get out of the rat race (the rat race in this case being the drug trade). Priest, played by Ron O'Neal, is trying to hit one more big score and then he's out. He's just like every other American. We all go to work every day in the hope that one day we won't have to. This is what unites the minimum-wage worker with the 1% -- the desire to be free of the rat race.

The Curtis Mayfield soundtrack is timeless; I always have it loaded on my iPod. Tonight on a brisk run (so brisk my left hamstring is aching) I was accompanied by "Little Child Runnin' Wild":