©1994 Alan Light
reprinted from liner notes on Mercury CD - "Funk On Fire: The Mercury Anthology"
Q: What's round on both ends and high in the middle?
A: O-HI-O!
-Ohio State University football cheer
Which is true enough. But if there's one end of the Buckeye State that's rounder than the other, extra round, in fact, it would be the low end, the bottom; the bass end, where the funk is born. Because Ohio (and especially - please note - Southern Ohio, the bottom end of the state) has quietly proven to be a seminal spot in the development of Rhythm & Blues.
Since Augusta, GA's favorite son, James Brown, cut many of his greatest recordings at Cincinnati's King Records studio in the '50s and '60s, all sorts of funky folk have emerged from the area. The Isley Brothers and Bootsy Collins are Cincinnati homegrown pioneers. In the '70s and '80s, groups like Slave, Lakeside, Zapp, Midnight Star, and The Deele (where production powerhouse team L.A. Reid and Babyface first came together) were all products of Southern Ohio soil.
This is not just a coincidence. Southwestern Ohio is one of the few places left in the United States where you can still feel the pull of the nation's different regions. Cincinnati sits on the Ohio River, with Kentucky on the opposite banks. This is the Mason-Dixon line as depicted in slavery tales from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to Toni Morrison's "Beloved." The Southern church - as well as Newport's red light district, just across the river - is a tangible force. But so is the Northern industrial sensibility; it's only a few hours to the Akron-Youngstown rubber belt or even Pittsburgh's steel mills. And directly to the west is Indiana and the beginning of the Midwestern plains. The result is a cultural mix, full of passion and humor, that comes out in the music - less revolutionary, perhaps, but no less fertile than Memphis in the '50s at the dawn of rock & roll.
And no one better exemplifies Ohio's unique contributions to R&B than the state's global ambassadors, the Ohio Players. Soul, rock, country, jazz - it's all there in the funky stew the Players have been stirring up for almost five decades. They were born n Dayton as the Ohio Untouchables in 1959, led by the influential guitarist Robert Ward. Though the group's membership would change countless times, bassist Marshall Jones, trumpeter
Ralph "Pee Wee" Middlebrook and sax/flute man Clarence "Satch" Satchell were in it for the long haul.
The Untouchables' biggest moment came in Detroit as the backing band for the Falcons (whose lead singer was a young Wilson Pickett) on the 1962 hit "I Found A Love." By 1967, however, the Untouchables were back in Dayton, playing as an octet and now known as the Ohio Players.
"After things like Shaft and Superfly came out," says drummer James "Diamond" Williams, "people might have taken our name to mean something else, but we called ourselves 'Players' because our musicianship was as serious and as good as anyone out there." (On the other hand, check out their threads on the cover of the Mr. Mean album to see how their appearance may have sent off some other signals.)
After brief stints with Compass and Capitol Records, closing out the decade in Los Angeles, the Players found themselves back in Ohio once again. But now, R&B was moving in new, experimental directions, spearheaded by Sly Stone's funk-pop rock blends, and the Ohio Players were growing into a new skin. The actual voice of their progressive funk was perhaps its most distinctive component - the nasal, cartoon-character bark of guitarist Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner.
On Detroit's Westbound Records, the home of George Clinton's young Funkadelic band, the Players' PAIN (1971), PLEASURE (1972) and ECSTACY (1973) albums were moderate successes; the highlight was the #1 R&B hit "Funky Worm", a novelty jam about an elderly granny and a graveyard worm sung over and infectious squiggly keyboard riff. The Players were establishing some of their signature characteristics - monstrous guitar and horn powered grooves crossed with lyrics that were alternately salaciously sexy and downright absurd.
By the time the band signed with Mercury Records in 1974, the line-up had finally solidified: Along with the three former Untouchables and Bonner, there was Billy Beck on keyboards (replacing "Junie" Morrison, who later joined Parliament), Marvin "Merve" Pierce on trumpet and trombone, and drummer "Diamond" Williams.
Pierce and Williams (and a few years later, second guitarist Clarence "Chet" Willis) joined the Players from another Dayton are "show band" called Overnight Low. Williams description of this "farm team" illustrates how the music in and around Southeastern Ohio was helping shape the sound of the Players' greatest years. "There wasn't really such a thing as a black music radio station out here," he recalls. "So we would play whatever was on the radio at the time - lots of Jazz Crusaders, Tower of Power, all the way to something like a Grand Funk Railroad or even Peter, Paul and Mary."
As the Players' diverse influences were coalescing into a whole new thing, their early album covers were also establishing the band's other memorable addition to funk lore. From then on, all Ohio Players covers featured a woman in various stages (usually a fairly advanced stage, actually) of undress, evolving from Westbound's S&M-lite poses to Mercury's softer, silkier focus. "As a male group, we knew we were not going to appeal to too many guys," says Williams. "So the covers were a way to get the opposite side of the sex spectrum. If the guys were looking at the covers, the girls might be looking at us. You don't have too long to catch the eye of the buyer."
Along with the Pedro Bell comix drawn for Funkadelic's albums of the same vintage, the always-controversial Ohio Players covers could be considered precursors of the music video movement - they were visual representations of the music that carried on from one release to the next, a narrative advertisement for a sound. Like rock groups who have successfully utilized videos, it got so people looked forward to a new Ohio Players album almost as much for the cover as for the songs. ("We did, too," laughs Williams.)
With 1974's SKIN TIGHT, their first release for Mercury, the Players began a three-year run at the top. "The guys came in with much of the basics done and ready to go," says A&R exec Robin McBride, the group's key creative associate at the label. "We finished the whole album in about a month." The title track - whose sublime B-side "Heaven Must Be Like This" is one among many underrated mellow Players jams - and "Jive Turkey" were both Top 10 R&B grooves. Says Williams, "We were creating a feeling and an atmosphere, creating a scene musically."
Increasingly, this meant adding new elements and sound effects - the country vibe on "Far East Mississippi", the sirens announcing "Fire," and later, the space bleeps of "Funk-O-Nots." "The SKIN TIGHT album opened the door in terms of saying the public would accept that from us," says Williams. "Then on the FIRE album we were really exploring ourselves, seeing how far we could take them."
FIRE, released later in 1974, was quite simply the Players' greatest achievement. And they knew it. "We were in L.A. mixing the album," says Williams, "and we were listening to the tracks with Stevie Wonder at a hotel he owned on Sunset. Just the tracks, without the words, but you just knew it was going to be a hit. You could have called those songs anything - with that album, we hit a groove where something magical was happening."
Like most of their songs, 70 to 80 percent by Williams' estimation, "Fire" originally took shape out of an instrumental jam. "We were in the studio making tracks and all of a sudden, it jumped out," is how Bonner has described it. ("There It Is" is an example of this process at work - a jazzy jam that clearly developed into the more fleshed-out version of "Far East Mississippi.")
The lyrics to "Fire" may not have been much, but the bone-crunching groove, out at the point where funk and rock become difficult to distinguish, the irresistible one word chorus, and the unforgettable percussion breakdown were undeniable. It became their first Number One single on the pop charts. The FIRE album also included "I Want To Be Free", one of the few times the Ohio Players ever came close to social commentary. "Certain entertainers, like a Marvin Gaye, are more comfortable doing messages in their songs, but for us to imitate that or relate in that way would have been a detriment," says Williams.
Hits like "Sweet Sticky Thing" and the thunderous "Fopp" followed, but the next Number One came with more of a story. "Love Rollercoaster", inspired by a bumpy plane ride, may not have been the worlds deepest song ("To this day I don't know what I wrote," Bonner once said. "The words didn't make any sense to me.") but it was a runaway smash. And with it, those multi-layered sounds finally caught up with the Players. In my grade school, the story was that the scream at the song's instrumental break was the sound of a girl being murdered in the next studio. Variations on this tale spread across the country - apparently started as a prank by a DJ in Berkeley, CA - and with it, so did sales. The band, never known for passing up promotional opportunities, took a vow of silence, maintaining the mystery around the scream. (For the record, it was a shriek by keyboardist Beck, caught deep in the mix on tape.)
After "Rollercoaster" came the nasty "Who'd She Coo?" and then the hits cooled off; appropriately enough, the 1978 chant "O-H-I-O" was the players last major single. They continued to tour and burn dow
n stages worldwide, as they do to this day. It's always been surprising that no one put out a live Ohio Players record. It turns out, though, that a live-in-the-studio album was recorded in 1977 and recently unearthed: the smoldering "Alone" on this collection marks the first time a recording of the Players performing in front of an audience has seen the light of day.
The other unreleased tracks here included here are outtakes from JASS-AY-LAY-DEE, which was planned as a double album. Some hints of directions the Players were pursuing are evident here, most notably on "Shady Lady." This song's burbling keyboards and breathy falsetto vocal seem to directly anticipate the efforts of a young Minneapolis funk fan named Prince. The harmonies and horns on "Wonderful" show the players moving closer to their contemporaries Earth, Wind and Fire. "More Than Love" is a soul operetta. And, finally, the rare seasonal single "Happy Holidays" has the distinction of simultaneously the slinkiest and goofiest Christmas song ever recorded.
The influence of the Ohio Players remains strong. Samples from their classic tracks have been the foundation of countless records by West Coast hip-hop-pers, a cornerstone of Dr. Dre's "G-Funk" sound. Funk rockers like Primus and the Red Hot Chili Peppers try their best to carry the torch. "Fopp" was covered note-for-note by Seattle rockers Soundgarden, and a remake of "I Want To Be Free" was a hit for Too Short.
Yet "Diamond" Williams knows there's something missing from contemporary pop music, an attitude the Ohio Players reveled in (and their Ohio musical compatriots shared) that can't be copied. "There's not enough light heartedness in the music world today," he says. "Nothing serious or heavy, just good dance records that everybody relates to. Silly, even! People can relate to silly all day long!"
©1994 Alan Light, editor-in-chief of VIBE magazine
