6. Love Rollercoaster

Ohio Players: Honey (Mercury, 1975);
composed by William Beck, Clarence Satchell, James Williams, Leroy Bonner, Marshall Jones, Marvin Pierce, and Ralph Middlebrooks

I hate even mentioning the stupid old rumor that “you could hear someone being murdered” on this track, since the audible “scream” is obviously just someone aspirating a little too close to a hot mike. On the other hand, the single edit is two full minutes shorter than the album track and they kept the scream in both. Even better is that the rumor is nowhere near the most unsettling aspect of the song. The Players largely composed their music in the studio, and by the mid ‘70s after ten or more years of endless gigging, personnel shuffles, and false starts, they had it down and hits they came. But this was a different kind of reward for group cohesion, because this tune has two riffs and seven players take it in as many directions at once. The astonishing double-triplet Diamond Williams drops into his drum intro is of a piece with his eschewing a straight four throughout – he has the whole band surfing on a bag of marbles. Only Sugar Bonner’s cackling vocal interjections are clearly on the one. Billy Beck’s synth part could be Hindemith. And it jams. So, saying that someone died making this is just . . . redundant.