As I grew up and started understanding the lyrics to the songs I heard, I began looking for personal connections to them or to the performers. The “personal connections” back then were mostly a shared emotional state, as it was tough for a preteen from small-town Ohio to grok the hippies’ counterculture movement, much less participate in any aspect of it. When CSNY released their protest song “Ohio” in 1970 in response to the Kent State shootings earlier that year, I was embarrassed. I think it was the first time I’d heard my home state referenced in a song, and it was in such a deservedly negative way that I couldn’t feel any pride in it.1
The next Ohio connection I remember was much more pleasant in several ways. It was 1976 and I was going steady with one of the sweetest boys I’ve known. We met through marching band; he played sousaphone and although he was in junior high, the band director asked him to join marching band because we needed another sousaphone to round out our brass section. One of the biggest hits that year—and his favorite song—was by an Ohio band.
Wild Cherry’s lead singer, Rob Parissi, was from a steel-mill town in southeastern Ohio. Our southwestern Ohio county seat was also a steel town at that time. Again, it’s a tenuous and random connection, but for me back then, it made their music just a bit more enjoyable.
“Play That Funky Music” was Wild Cherry’s only hit, but it was a smash hit for them. It was from their eponymous debut album; the song topped both the Billboard R&B and pop charts, and the single and album were each certified platinum. To this day, that opening guitar lick is all I need to hear to start movin’ to the groovin’.
In researching this essay, I discovered another random connection to the band. Its name was taken from a box of cough drops—and as soon as I read that, the image popped up in my mind. My maternal grandmother always had those cough drops in her purse, and had passed me a box many times during church.
Don’t know that they ever did much for my cough2, but they were very tasty. Just like this song.
After thinking through some of the implications of all this, I became much less emotionally invested in connections like this, recognizing the randomness of much of it.
Which may or may not have been a genuine cough; the odds were even on that
Ha! Luden’s!! My brother and I made up lyrics to the guitar hook from CCR’s “Down On the Corner” once while standing in a check out line. Lyrics included things you might see on display next to the conveyor belt. “Tic Tacs and Chicklets and Twizzler’s and Luden’s.” I still sing these words if I hear that song. Heh heh...Luden’s!!
Ohio IS the home of FUNK.
And my apologies to Dr. Dre, but West Coast Funk is really Ohio Funk, because it was all built on beats from Cincinnati- Roger Troutman and Zapp, in particular.
Regarding the cough drops, I ate them too as we were allowed to have them in school because they were not technically candy. Loophole!!