Sam and Dave's Living Half Holds Back at Sunset Junction

Amid the blue light and scent of potent aftershave, he knew it was meant to be Isaac Hayes on Sunset Junction’s Hoover stage tonight. But he knows he’s a legend too, so Sam Moore, the long-surviving half of Sam and Dave, gave the people what they want and, in so doing, honored Hayes, who died on August 10.

But Moore also did something few old-timers dare. On Sam and Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” one of many Stax hits written for the duo more than 40 years ago by Hayes and David Porter, he let his backup singers repeat the refrain to the point of tumult — and to Moore’s delight, his fingers jittering like those of a blind man processing it all. But why did he barely sing those words himself?

“When something is wrong ... when something is wrong ...,” Moore sang in the song’s dying embers, eyes closed and shoulders hunched. Then it ended, and the other half of the refrain, “Something is wrong with me,” was still playing in my imagination an hour later at the 4100 Bar on Sunset, hopping with the post-Junction crowd.

I walked in on the concert late, after finding an unmanned entrance — or maybe the event’s officials save their graciousness for the late p.m. and stop charging the much-contested, ever-rising fee. Some hardened, noisy men were gathered around me, one super-relaxed with his bottle in a paper bag. Theirs was the aftershave in whose smell I found transcendence, as I gazed at Moore like he was my father. The men, all of them black, joked and laughed throughout. In a mostly non-black crowd (how times have changed), they were the most fearless in calling out, “‘Soul Man’!” “‘Soul Man’!” between Moore’s songs.

Moore bided his time.

Finally, it happened: The horn-section riff that millions know so well, that Sam and Dave tripped to in late-’60s black-and-white, like stuttering Jell-O in their tapered suits. The crowd went wild, the refrain came again, and Moore pointed to his singers as they delivered on his behalf.

“I’m a soul man, I’m a soul man,” they cried, and so did we, as we waited once, twice, three, four times for Moore to do the same, so we could see the glow.

It never happened. Like a good psychiatrist, he made us do the work. You get what you put in; memory lived is memory repaid. So I’ll go to my grave wondering how raspy and fulfilling Moore’s singing “I’m a soul man” could have been.

“This is for Isaac,” he said as the band began “Theme From Shaft.” And, “They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother— ... I can’t get that low.”

Then he left, and it was over. I headed down a closed street lined with food vendors and jewelry stalls, feeling as empty as I did at 17, when I had to walk out on Gary U.S. Bonds at the Venue in Victoria to make the last train home to the London suburbs. As I walked alone, I wondered if my withdrawal would be worse had Moore not denied me like he did. I also knew some things aren’t mine to know, and this soul man ain’t givin’ it away.