‘Love Rollercoaster’: the song that made a killing with a murder mystery
There are plenty of ludicrous tales that have emanated from the world of funk music, ranging from innocent japes such as George Clinton claiming to have formed Funkadelic in a hairdresser’s, to many more sordid stories.
We’re all drawn to the rabbit holes that true crime stories lead us down, and even the slightest promise of such a story existing is enough to turn our heads, but sometimes discovering the truth is much more disappointing than the urban legends that end up being fabricated for our entertainment.
So when the rumour started that the sound of a woman being murdered can be heard in the Ohio Players’ 1975 hit, ‘Love Rollercoaster’, people were instantly drawn to playing detective and attempting to figure out if it was true. Our obsession with true crime inherently makes us want to believe such a thing actually happened, and for a long time, many fans did, but in actual fact, it’s a case of incredible bullshitting and an unwitting game of ‘Telephone’ that the music industry played on itself.
Around the 2:32 mark of the song, a blood-curdling scream can be heard deep in the mix of the track, and while it’s easy to miss such a detail, it’s the sort of thing that, once you’re aware of it, you’ll always be anticipating its arrival. However, while it passed many people by, a DJ on Californian radio around the time of the single’s release decided to make a poor-taste gag about the fact that the band murdered a woman in the studio in order to achieve this excessively high note.
Of course, this was only ever meant to be interpreted as a joke, but because fellow DJ Casey Kasem took it as gospel and repeated the anecdote on his own top 40 show a year later, the rumours began to sprout legs. Naturally, as is the case with shaggy-dog tales like this, different variations of the story began to develop and circulate, and the rumours got out of hand.
One thing that the Ohio Players were previously known for was their commitment to using excessively suggestive artwork for their album sleeves, usually involving women in varying states of undress, and the cover for Honey, the album that ‘Love Rollercoaster’ featured on, was no different. Model Ester Cordet can be seen dripping the sticky substance over her bare skin, and if the lasciviousness of the photo wasn’t already controversial enough, people began to spread rumours that this was linked to the murder itself.
As the urban legend goes, Cordet complained that the honey had caused her to have an allergic reaction, and that her complaining about the subsequent injury led to her being bludgeoned to death by her partner, who happened to be the album’s producer. In actual fact, the band produced the album themselves, and Cordet, contrary to popular belief, is still alive and well.
While the album’s credits don’t allude to who contributed the screams to the song, the band have since confirmed that keyboard player Billy Beck was the one who projected his pipes to terrifying levels. It’s boring, but still impressive that he managed to force such a sound from his mouth without having immense pain inflicted on him, so if the truth is so easily determined, how did the rumour spread so far without anything being said to debunk and discredit it?
To put it simply, the band caught wind of the rumour and recognised that it was bound to drive interest and sales of the single, so they chose not to say anything – it might be an urban legend with a disappointing truth behind it, but it certainly served the band well, helping ‘Love Rollercoaster’ become their best-selling hit and achieving gold status in the US.
