Milestones: Honey by Ohio Players
The Ohio Players dropped an album that immediately had everyone talking, even before the needle hit the vinyl. In the broader history of soul and funk, Honey earns its place as a landmark.
By 1975, the Ohio Players were already funk royalty. Hailing from Dayton, Ohio, they had spent years honing a horn-driven, gritty funk sound and had recently broken into the mainstream with back-to-back smashes, the slick Skin Tight (1974) and the fiery Fire (1974). They were inescapable on R&B radio; you couldn’t turn on a soul station without hearing their latest jams. Into this climate dropped Honey, and the new album kept that momentum blazing. The music on Honey is a tour de force of mid-‘70s funk, from hard-driving dancefloor anthems to velvety slow-burn ballads. The Ohio Players drew listeners in with the same one-two punch reflected in the cover: sensuality and shock, sweetness and spice.
On the funk side, Honey delivers some of the band’s most iconic tracks. “Love Rollercoaster” leads the charge, a track so infectious and wild that it rode a wave of airplay all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 by January 1976. Fittingly, the song is a thrill ride from start to finish. The groove assault continues with “Fopp,” a track that captures the Ohio Players at their most unadulterated and raw. Riding a dirty, hard-hitting riff and a syncopated drum beat, “Fopp” is the kind of song that makes you scrunch up your face and move. It even later caught the ear of rock musicians; in the 1980s, Soundgarden covered it on an EP, turning the funk workout into a sludgy rock jam, proof that the track’s groove transcends genre. For all their reputation as raunchy funkateers, the Ohio Players had a sophisticated side as well, and it shines on “Sweet Sticky Thing.” When the rhythm kicks in, it’s slinky and laid-back, guided by Marshall “Rock” Jones’s buttery bass line and a feather-light touch on the drums. Sugarfoot’s vocals here are velvety, playful, almost crooning. He teases the innuendo of the title with a lover’s delight, the lyrics celebrate a “sweet, sticky thing” that’s got him mesmerized (we can guess what he’s referring to).
If Honey were just wall-to-wall funk bangers, it would still hold an esteemed place in 1970s music. But what elevates this album further is the other half of its personality: the ballads and slow-burning soul tracks that showcase the Ohio Players’ emotional range. Roughly half of Honey isn’t funk at all. It’s sweet, deep soul. These quieter moments tend to be overlooked when discussing the band, perhaps because the group’s image was so tied to risqué funk jams. Yet the introspective songs on Honey deserve every bit as much praise. “Alone” is a revelation to anyone who knows the Ohio Players only for “Fire” or “Rollercoaster.” Over a gentle, bluesy guitar and a churchy organ, Sugarfoot pours out his heart. “I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be alone… I don’t want to be alone anymore,” he pleads in the chorus, his voice trembling with vulnerability. The bravado and lascivious swagger he exudes on the funk tracks is gone; in its place is a man begging for companionship, even redemption. “Hear what I am saying, child, I’m so ashamed…I don’t want to be alone… Somebody pick me up off the floor,” he sings, the pain in his voice palpable as he stretches out the word “alone” into a falsetto cry. It’s a performance that can give you chills.
The title track also falls on the softer side of the spectrum. Fittingly, it’s a sultry love song that doubles down on the album’s central metaphor. Over a languid groove, Sugarfoot compares his lover to the sunrise and sweetness itself: “Mother nature must’ve made you; you got a smile like the rising sun… You’re the one, honey… so sweet, you’re so sweet like honey, child,” he sings in a warm, teasing tone. The music is unhurried, built on a mellow guitar chop and lazy, seductive horns. Tucked in the middle of the album is “Let’s Do It,” a unique number that shows the Ohio Players’ playful experimental streak. The track is subtitled “Let’s Love” in some releases, and for good reason, as it interpolates the classic Cole Porter jazz standard “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love),” even crediting Porter as a co-composer in the liner notes. Amid a funky mid-tempo jam, the band slides into a cheeky quote of Porter’s famous melody, bridging 1920s pop with 1970s R&B. It lasts only a few bars, but it’s a delightful Easter egg that speaks to the band’s musical wit. One moment you’re grooving to a conga-heavy soul tune, the next you almost expect Ella Fitzgerald’s voice to swoop in. Far from being jarring, this little interlude works as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the past, showing that the Ohio Players knew their musical heritage even as they forged the future of funk.
All these contrasting elements, the raunchy funk throwdowns and the heartfelt slow jams, the modern street grooves and the nostalgic nods, come together on Honey to form something greater than the sum of its parts. The album captures a band in full command of their artistry, unafraid to take risks both visually and sonically. In the Ohio Players’ discography, Honey is often regarded as the pinnacle. It was their seventh studio album and ultimately their last to achieve such monumental success; in a sense, it was the last great album of their dominant mid-‘70s era. Subsequent releases would chart lower as musical trends shifted (1976’s Contradiction and beyond saw the onset of disco and the waning of classic funk), making Honey something of a final victory lap for the band. And what a victory it was. Looking at the broader panorama of 1970s R&B, Honey stands as a definitive mid-‘70s funk statement, right alongside Parliament’s Mothership Connection and Earth, Wind & Fire’s That’s the Way of the World (both also released in 1975). Those albums, like Honey, managed to distill the essence of the era’s black music: the confidence, the flamboyance, the deep roots in soul and blues, and the forward-looking experimentation.
The 1975 release immediately had everyone talking, even before the needle hit the vinyl. The cover of Honey was impossible to ignore: a nude model (Playboy’s October 1974 Playmate Ester Cordet) draped head-to-toe in glistening honey, lips parted as she licked a sticky spoonful of the stuff. It was provocative, bold, and unabashedly erotic, perfectly in tune with the band’s reputation for racy album art. But it also sparked a firestorm. Conservative record retailers balked; some flat-out refused to stock Honey on their shelves. Women’s rights activists were incensed by what they saw as crude objectification, and a disturbing rumor only fanned the flames. Word spread that during the photo shoot, the model had been literally glued to the studio floor by the hardening “honey,” allegedly requiring a harrowing, painful removal. As the story grew more outrageous, it morphed into an urban legend: the model’s skin was said to have been damaged (ending her career), and in one lurid variation, she burst into the recording studio to confront the band, only to be stabbed to death, her scream captured on the album’s lead single “Love Rollercoaster.” It was utterly false, of course, a macabre fantasy—but the notoriety was real. For a time in late ‘75, Honey was the most scandalous record in R&B. Feminist groups staged protests, media gossip churned, and the Ohio Players smiled all the way to the bank.
Ironically, the controversy that could have sunk Honey ended up fueling its commercial success. People couldn’t resist finding out what all the fuss was about—banned in one store? They’d search for it in another. And once they got past that honey-drenched cover, listeners discovered the music inside was just as irresistible. Honey shot up to No. 2 on the Billboard pop albums chart (and ruled the R&B album chart at No. 1) in the fall of 1975. It became the Ohio Players’ third consecutive platinum-selling LP during their mid-‘70s hot streak. Even the Grammy Awards gave a sly nod to the brouhaha—Honey won 1975’s Grammy for Best Album Cover Art, as if to validate the band’s audacity. What could have been a PR disaster turned into gold (literally, in the case of record sales and certifications). The Ohio Players had learned the same lesson that rock & roll rabble-rousers from Elvis onward knew: controversy sells. And sell it did, but controversy alone doesn’t make a record a classic. Honey endures because of the grooves, the songs, and the sheer vibrant musicianship of a band at its peak.
The legacy of Honey is still sticky (pardon the pun) on modern music. For one, the album’s songs have been mined by later generations of artists and producers, ensuring the Ohio Players’ grooves live on in new contexts. Hip-hop in particular owes a debt—by the late ’80s and ’90s, sampling had brought dozens of 1970s funk riffs back to life, and Ohio Players records were a go-to source for DJs crate-digging for the perfect beat. (Dayton’s funk scene was so influential that one historian quipped, “Dayton, Ohio, is the most sampled city” in music. From the West Coast G-funk of Dr. Dre, which lifted the Ohio Players’ 1973 song “Funky Worm” for a huge synth hook, to tracks by The Notorious B.I.G., Salt-N-Pepa, A Tribe Called Quest, OutKast, and Mary J. Blige, pieces of Honey and its sister albums have been repurposed in countless ways.
That famous “Love Rollercoaster” scream even found new life as a sample on songs and skits, a little pop culture in-joke that producers knew would make listeners’ ears perk up. Beyond the samples, the Ohio Players’ overall style – Honey’s mix of hard funk and silky soul – paved the way for many artists to come. Prince, for example, often cited the influence of ’70s funk bands on his music; one can hear echoes of the Ohio Players in Prince’s lascivious grooves and falsetto croons, not to mention his love of provocative imagery. (It’s not a stretch to draw a line from Honey’s cover to Prince posing in a shower of purple rain or on the cover of Lovesexy.) R&B crooners like Luther Vandross also inherited a thing or two—Vandross’s velvet arrangements and passionate delivery owe something to the generation of bands that proved funk musicians could also do romance.
In the Ohio Players’ catalog, Honey stands tall, with many of us calling it the band’s very best album (I’m one of us), a verdict that’s hard to argue against when you experience its breadth. And in the broader history of soul and funk, Honeyearns its place as a landmark that is a perfect storm of sensational presentation and superb music. It’s hard to imagine a more 1975 album in terms of vibe: Honey sounds like platform shoes on a summer night, like Afros and bell-bottoms swaying under colored lights, like a Cadillac cruising slow with the windows down. Yet, great music transcends its era, and Honey does that too. The emotions in “Alone” are timeless. The groove of “Love Rollercoaster” still slaps. The Ohio Players set out to make a record that would make you dance, make you swoon, and maybe make you blush, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The Ohio Players gave us all of that in one package. Sweet, sticky, funky, and soulful—Honey is a classic that still sticks with us.
Masterpiece (★★★★★)