Ohio Players

They covered Sly and the Family Stone.

Obviously, they covered the Ohio Players with Love Rollercoaster, which, by the way, still isn't on Spotify.

Pet peeve of mine, songs that you still can't get on Spotify, because it's on the Beavis and Butthead movie soundtrack.

But I will say this, having, you know, spent a lot of time with them, And Flea is such a nutter.

Let's backtrack now to the pure funk albums for the year that, in my opinion, were able to mostly stay away from the lure of disco and stay true to the original foundations of funk.

Having already discussed some of the funk albums of the year that were discophied, The Ohio Players had struck on a run of major success in the early 1970s with a formula that combined solid funk butt grooves with sweet soul balladry all packaged inside albums with some of the sexiest covers outside of the nudie magazine industry.

The band broke that momentum, though, in 1977 when they released two new albums.

The first 1977 album, Angel, stripped out some of the sweet soul numbers, and instead it relied primarily on the band's mid-tempo funk style, just as the rest of the world was pumping up the backbeat rhythms of funk for the discotheques.

This lost the Ohio players their pop crossover appeal, and the Angel album was only a moderate success that sold mostly to R&B fans.

The group's next album from 1977, Mr.

Mean, took the band in a soul jazz direction, which lost them the R&B side of their fan base since that style was not in vogue in 1977.

So that album sold even worse.

It probably took me five minutes to write the whole thing, he said.

For the music, he borrowed a few ideas from the song Fire by the Ohio Players, but with a little hint of the Led Zeppelin track How Many More Times stirred into the mix.

The only problem was that all the other band members were a little nervous about the white boy line.

Even my father, when I played it for him for the first time, remembered Parisi, he took the needle off the record and said, oh no, you can't do that, you have to take it out.

Yeah, it was a continuation.

I think the funk that I'm trying to contribute and having been contributing since then has always been a continuation, like you said, of funk, of artists like Judy Morrison, who's a big inspiration of mine, who was one of the original members of the Ohio Players and went on to his own solo material.

He did Funky Worm, the G-Funk lead synth on there that influenced so many G-Funk records.

And and

And of course, when Cable came, we got Donnie Simpson and BET's things.

But to make a long story short, when you mentioned Judy Morrison, yeah, he ended up being my main hero and prince because of the way Judy Morrison talked about things.

If you check out songs like Triune from him or or things that he did on his three solo albums that we did on Columbia, or even the stuff he did on Westbound Records when he left Ohio Players before he joined P-Funk.

Junie Morrison, I think, is the godfather of...