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Hangin' on
H-D-H and the soul trio Honey Cone
BY DOUGLAS WOLK

Honey Cone

One of the nastiest things you can say about a pop group is that they're fakes -- manufactured on a production line to meet the demands of the market. Yet that's not necessarily an insult. The soul trio Honey Cone, who've just had their entire discography reissued as a wonderful two-disc set, Soulful Sugar (on the British label Hot Wax/Sanctuary), were as artificial a group as have ever existed. But 34 years after they were invented by a production team, they sound better than ever.

A little background: Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland were Motown's star songwriters in the mid '60s; their successes included a long string of hits for the Supremes ("Baby Love," "Where Did Our Love Go?", "You Keep Me Hangin' On"). But by 1968, after a royalty dispute, Holland-Dozier-Holland, as they were known, had dramatically reduced their songwriting output for Motown; in time they left the company altogether to start their own record labels, Hot Wax and Invictus, which were modeled on Motown in sound and style.

The team recruited a trio of session background singers, Edna Wright, Shellie Clark, and Carolyn Willis, to be the H-D-H Supremes, naming them Honey Cone. These vocalists didn't even appear on the cover of their first album -- H-D-H owned the Honey Cone name, and they didn't want any confusion if the line-up were to change later on. At the time, H-D-H were unable to release any new songs outside Motown, so the stylistic fingerprints all over early Honey Cone singles like "While You're Out Looking for Sugar" must be a coincidence. (Holland-Dozier-Holland still own the name and the master recordings, and they're not currently affiliated with any American label, which is one reason why Honey Cone's records have barely been available in the US in the last 20 years -- and why, in turn, even their hits are almost never heard on oldies radio.)

Everything about Honey Cone's career suggested a desperate attempt at cashing in. Their second album repeated songs from their first, and their third (Soulful Tapestry, whose title deliberately echoed Carole King's Tapestry) repeated songs from their second. When sounding like the Supremes didn't get them a hit, they were assigned a new writing and production team to make them sound like the Jackson 5; after "Want Ads" (featuring guitar work from future "Ghostbusters" songwriter Ray Parker Jr.) went to #1, they did a blatant rewrite of it, "Stick-Up," for their next single. Three years after the original trio broke up (in 1973), H-D-H assembled a new Honey Cone with no original members (but a singer who sounded a bit like Wright) for one last single.

Let a couple of decades pass, though, and intentions matter a lot less than results. Soulful Sugar is a joy to hear, some of the sweetest soul music of its era. Clark, Willis, and Wright sound as if they'd been born to harmonize (even emoting full-tilt, they mesh perfectly), and their formal unity of purpose and technique is refreshing. Their writing teams figured out very quickly what the trio were good at: anthemic quasi-feminist kiss-offs and ballads that dig into a moment of romantic crisis. The group hit their peak on "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show," a Latin-flavored stomper that shares its title with at least six other blues and soul songs -- but one of the surprises of Soulful Sugar is how good even the filler is.

And even when the material falters, it sounds terrific. The anonymous musicians' crisp, vivid grooves lie somewhere between the orchestral sprawl of Motown and the subtler pulse of Hi Records, and Edna Wright, in particular, could make anything sound urgent and passionate, even the ridiculous lyrics of "Want Ads" ("Wanted: a young man, single and free/Experience in love preferred, but will accept a young trainee"). Her voice was grounded less in the genteel pop soul of Motown than in gospel (she'd sung with André Crouch's group the Cogics) and harder Southern R&B -- she reveals one of her models in "Sittin' on a Time Bomb" when she sings the word "bewildered" with exactly the same melismatic inflection that James Brown used. As a band, Honey Cone were a sham, but as the handiwork of great singers and songwriters and instrumentalists, they're undeniable. What good is authenticity, anyway?

Issue Date: February 1 - 7, 2002