Honey is widely regarded as the best album by the Ohio Players, and it certainly had the chart success to back up that assertion. The album itself made it to #2 on the Billboard 200 and the Players got a #1 single with “Love Rollercoaster”. “Sweet Sticky Thing” also cracked the Top 40 in 1975, landing at #33, and that same year Honey was awarded a Grammy for Best Album Cover Art (the model is Playboy‘s Playmate of the Month for October 1974, Ester Cordet… and if you think the cover is risqué you should see what’s inside the gatefold). All of that would be reason enough for me to have picked up Honey this weekend. But none of those reasons have anything whatsoever to do with my decision. No. I bought it for something that happened a year later, in 1976, specifically the third single from the album peaking at #30. Because, you see, that single has a tie to Seattle. A dozen years after it first charted it would be covered by a then obscure band that was part of a blossoming musical scene that would shortly explode out of the Pacific Northwest like a drop-D-tuned comet. The band was Soundgarden. The Ohio Players song was “Fopp”, and the band recorded two versions of it, including a dub mix, on their 1988 four-song 12″ also called Fopp.
I bought Fopp on vinyl right when it came out and played the hell out of it, especially the two versions of the title track on the A side. At that time in my life I wasn’t buying 12″ singles, had no concept of a remix, and had yet to hear of Adrian Sherwood, so I had no idea what to make of “Fopp (Fucked Up Heavy Dub Mix)”. “Fucked up” I understood, as well as “heavy”. But “dub” meant nothing to me. All I knew was that the way the original track was manipulated, plus the inclusion of samples from Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, blew my teenage mind.
The original version of “Fopp” is some serious funk. While Soundgarden rocked it up quite a bit, it’s still recognizable both for the underlying groove and the horns. Even the vocals are familiar sounding, Chris Cornell using his trademark voice and screams to capture the pitch changes on the original (which appears to have multiple vocalists). The other thing that works well is the speed – the Ohio Players keep things heavy in a funky way, methodically pacing the low end, which was right in Soundgarden’s wheelhouse. (♠)
There’s an urban myth that the song “Love Rollercoaster” captures the scream of a woman being murdered, and one version of the myth indicates that woman was the cover model Ester Cordet. In later years the band has denied that a murder was involved, attributing the sound to one of their own band members Billy Beck. Which is, of course, exactly what you’d expect them to say regardless of the facts. That being said, you can barely hear the alleged scream, so I have no idea what the fuss is about even though I do love me a good urban myth.
Honey is a solid album even without the Soundgarden connection, definitely worth a listen on its own merits.
(♠) Holly completely disagrees with me on this. Completely. Don’t worry though, we’re still together.
