Ohio Players: What is the murderous scream heard on ‘Love Rollercoaster’?
Music has long been a breeding ground for urban myths, particularly in the pre-internet days. Imagine a group of teenagers in the mid-1970s gathered around a record player, excitedly dropping the needle on the latest Ohio Players album. Rumour had it—likely courtesy of someone’s older brother—that if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of a real murder captured on the record.
When the Ohio Players released Honey in 1975, they could not have anticipated that ‘Love Rollercoaster’, the album’s biggest hit, would also come to be haunted by a persistent urban legend that would follow it for decades. As with every urban legend, this one begins with a piece of information that is passed on from one unreliable source to another, growing out of proportion until the line between fact and fiction is completely blurred.
In this case, the culprit is a high-pitched scream, heard at 1:24 on the single edit or 2:32 of the album version, which seems out of place in such a cheerful track comparing love to a rollercoaster ride. It’s not immediately obvious to the listener, but it is quite distinct when noticed. The most common version of the story is that someone – a girlfriend, a neighbour, or a cleaning woman – was killed in the studio or next door to the studio while the song was being recorded, but variations add colour and detail.
The freakiest one theorises that the victim is actually Ester Cordet, the model who posed nude on the album cover and supposedly suffered a freak accident during the photoshoot. Another variation claims the scream was real but pre-recorded on a 911 call. We’ve all heard that Robert Johnson sold his sold to the devil or that Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ contains subliminal messages only revealed when played backwards. But what about a supposed murder caught on tape?
Much like the satanic panic of the 1980s, many of these myths came to fruition at a time when fact-checking was not at our fingertips. But for the Ohio Players, this may have been a blessing in disguise. While the band did little to dispel the rumours, eventually, they revealed that the scream was actually band member Billy Beck adding his own flair to the song.
According to drummer James ‘Diamond’ Williams, the ghastly rumour was circulated by a California radio DJ, who would ask listeners to call in if they knew where someone was getting stabbed in the song whenever he played ‘Love Rollercoaster’.
“The DJ made this crack, and it swept the country,” he said, adding that the band “took a vow of silence because that makes you sell more records”.
In spite of – or maybe because of – its notoriety, ‘Love Rollercoaster’ was a massive hit, reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in January of 1976.
