It’s the ultimate party, rock and roll, anthem. “You can wave the American flag at half-time at the Super Bowl, and put togas on everybody,” says Ernie Isley. It’s built around the brothers’ now-legendary title track, an amped-up gospel work-out that has taken on a life of its own through countless cover versions, as well as its inclusion in the film Animal House, where it’s performed by a fictional Otis Day & The Knights.
The band, initially a vocal trio consisting of brothers Ronald, O’Kelly, and Rudy, debuted for RCA Records with Shout!, the first album included in the set. Because there was a lot of good music coming out all the time. We wanted our material to be comparable, something that would be able to withstand what was happening. Everybody was putting out really good music. You just had to be aware of what was going on. During that time, it was like, every week someone was dropping a bomb. “We tried to be aware of what was coming out, who was coming out. “We listened to everybody,” says Isley Brothers keyboardist and songwriter Chris Jasper. Which isn’t to say you can’t love the Isleys just as much, or more. In their songs, if they weren’t directly responding to these giants, they were often working within the boundaries that the giants were busily expanding and re-defining. The Isleys will never loom as large in the canon as James, Otis, Jimi, Sly, and Stevie. “It’s kind of like an encyclopedia, musically, on us,” says Isley, “and it will illuminate folks who take the time to get into it and see, record by record, through the years, how we just went with it and stayed true to our own identity.”
This era of the band also produced the songs that have served as the foundation for a staggering number of hip-hop hits. It’s a phenomenal collection that memorializes the band at their commercial peak, a period when ten of their albums went gold or better and 22 of their songs broke into the Top 10 of the American R&B Chart, with six going to #1. The band has never stopped evolving and the 22 albums (18 studio albums, 3 live discs, and one compilation of early recordings) and bonus tracks collected as the expansive RCA Victor and T-Neck Album Masters contain almost all of the important recordings done by the Isleys prior to their initial break-up in the early ’80s. “We have stretched any kind of pre-conceived notion about musical genre, and where something fits in or doesn’t fit,” says the band’s guitarist and songwriter, Ernie Isley. They’ve released over 30 records since their breakthrough “Shout!” from 1959, with hit albums coming as recently as 2006’s Baby Makin’ Music. The Isleys, more than maybe any band you want to name, really could do it all. The Isley Brothers could be, or serve up, any and all.” who was on your living room turntable and who was on the bedroom boom box was strategic, an emotional equation calculating desire and intention. In soul, you reached for artists for moods: who was on the 8-track in your car vs. In her liner note introduction to the new 22-album collection of the music of the Isley Brothers, journalist Lynell George precisely sums up what sets the band apart as hit-making juggernauts: “‘Are you Beatles or are you Stones?’ That pop world, test-the-waters question to ascertain your inner life never applied to soul music.
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