ERNIE ISLEY TALKS THE "POWER" OF ROCK WITH VERNON REID

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” and “Twist and Shout,” covered by The Beatles on their first U.K. album, Please Please Me. In 1963, The Isley Brothers 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.

VERNON REID

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, they broke through with 3 + 3, their first album on Epic Records, thanks in large part to Ernie’s blistering guitar work on the Top 10 smash “That Lady.”

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. Reid would go on to anchor the multiplatinum 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' performance on FOX’s prime-time Super Bowl Soulful Celebration on 2/8 set the stage for this chat, in which Ernie and Vernon took time out from destroying neighborhood kids at Guitar Hero and chopped it up for HITS.

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

Ernie 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, 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. 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.

Look for the full conversation between guitar superheroes Isley and Reid in HITS' upcoming Black History Month special.