Ohio Players on Apple Music (2024)

Honey

By the time Honey was released in late 1975, listeners pretty much knew what to expect from the Ohio Players: groove, poise, and an unsettling amount of waist-down energy. Still, the sheer comprehensiveness of Honey—its humor, its physicality, its range—made the album stand out. You could call the Ohio Players a funk band, and, broadly speaking, you’d be right (as evidenced on “Love Rollercoaster” and “Fopp”). But in the hours-long jam sessions for Honey from which these songs were spun, you could pick out nearly every strain of modern Black music.The Ohio Players could do ballads that brought to mind The Chi-Lites or The Delfonics (“Honey”); they could do hard rock and pure funk (“Fopp”); they could do jazz and fusion like Herbie Hanco*ck (“Ain’t Givin’ Up No Ground”). They could do light (“Alone”), and they could definitely do heavy (“Love Rollercoaster”). And while the sentiments of most of their tracks were pretty straightforward (“Sweet Sticky Thing” is not about bees), the arrangements had a sophistication and complexity to them that, if not reminiscent of Duke Ellington, were at least in the ballpark of Stevie Wonder (in other words, they’d at least take you to dinner first). Honey would be the Ohio Players’ third straight platinum album. As the group pointed out, most people just love to fopp.

Fire

Ohio Players drummer James Williams has a good story about the song that became “Fire.” The band had been playing a show in Los Angeles when they got a visit from Stevie Wonder, who asked what the band members had been working on. They played a few things. That one, Wonder said, pausing the tape. It didn’t have lyrics yet, but Wonder said they could call it whatever they wanted, and it’d still sell like crazy: rock, paper, scissors—whatever. But the consensus was that the track smoked. And so, never being a band inclined to complicate things, the Ohio Players settled on calling it “Fire.”Along with Skin Tight and Honey, the album that followed brought the band further out of the niche of Black radio and into the mainstream. One wonders how strange, liberating, and weird it must’ve felt to hear “Fire” as the No. 1 song in the country between weeks where the spot had been held by Neil Sedaka and Linda Ronstadt. Polished as they were, this was, above all, Black music, with all the cultural ripples Black music made.The improvisatory quality of Skin Tight carried over (“Smoke”). But the ballads got more substantive too (“Together”). And while their general dirty-mindedness always had a glint of humor to it, the members of the Ohio Players were figuring out ways of making the sheer musical kinesis of funk funny in and of itself (“It’s All Over”). Stack it against the other big records of the year, and it’s hard to believe something with so much personality—especially so much loose, proud, libidinal Black energy—sold so well. As the band noted, the music was pretty good—but the ladies on the album covers didn’t hurt.

Skin Tight

In 1974, the Ohio Players went on Soul Train to play a new song called “Skin Tight.” After introducing the band members by name and astrological sign, band member Clarence Satchell took questions from the audience, including a woman named Vicky, who asked how they would classify their sound. “Smart,” Satchell replied. He’d just just gotten off the stage after playing a song that opened with the line, “You’re a bad, bad missus/In them skin-tight britches.” But where Parliament had its interstellar mythologies, and Sly and the Family Stone its messages of social progress, the Ohio Players played funk as pure body music: tough, pleasurable, grounded, and direct. Intellectual? Maybe not. But, like a perfectly fitted suit or a clean new haircut, very smart.The band had moved from Westbound Records to Mercury—who’d been promised that the Ohio Players had 40 songs ready to go. In truth, the group’s reserves were empty. So most of Skin Tight was improvised in the studio during a nine-day period in which the band shuttled back and forth between gigs on the east coast, and recording in Chicago. There was no time to think, and even less time to overthink. When Sugarfoot Bonner sings, “I played hooky from school just to be with you” on “Jive Turkey,” it’s probably because he plays hooky from school to be with you. And when he sings about “the sweet and sour taste of love” in “Heaven Must Be Like This”—well, that’s just filthy, but not inaccurate. But for however libidinal the themes on Skin Tight might have been, the music was intricate and eclectic, bringing together bits of jazz (“Streakin’ Cheek to Cheek”), hard rock (“Jive Turkey”), ballads (“Heaven Must Be Like This”), and gospel (“Is Anybody Gonna Be Saved?”) in ways that opened new spaces in Black music and pop in general. Funk was still a four-letter word, but Skin Tight wrote poetry with it.