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
