T-Neck 33536
Producer: The Isley Brothers
Track listing: Fight the Power (Part 1 & 2) / The Heat Is On (Part 1 &2) / Hope You Feel Better Love (Part 1 & 2) / For the Love of You (Part 1 &2) / Sensuality (Part 1 & 2) / Make Me Say It Again Girl (Part 1 & 2)
September 13, 1975
1 week
Ernie Isley can still remember the words of CBS Records executive Ronald Alexenberg during a party where the Isley Brothers were being presented with a gold single for “That Lady” and gold albums for 3 + 3 and Live It Up. “He said if the next album has the same quality as the last two, it’ll go platinum.* We felt that was astounding,” says Ernie, “because only the biggest groups were going platinum at that time.”
The Isleys were certainly on a roll. The group’s 1973 album, 3 + 3, which had featured younger brothers Ernie, Marvin, and cousin Chris Jasper on an album cover for the first time, had marked the veteran R&B act’s album chart high when it had reached number eight. While the Isleys, founded by brothers Ronald, Rudolph, and O’Kelly in the early ’50s, weren’t necessarily an album chart force, the group was a virtual pop and R&B hit machine, churning out such ’60s and ’70s classics as “Shout,” “Twist and Shout,” “It’s Your Thing,” and “That Lady.”
It was almost immediately following the completion of 1974’s Live It Up that Ernie came up with “Fight the Power.” He recalls, “We decided to stay in L.A. for an extra couple days and fly out our mother, my brothers’ wives, and the kids. We could have done a commercial. ‘The Isley Brothers have just finished their latest album, what are you going to do now?’ ‘We’re going to Disneyland.'” With his family flying in, the album completed, and his first trip to Disneyland on the horizon, Ernie was in an upbeat mood. “I stepped into the shower and started singing this song. The inspiration was like a bolt of lightning. After I sang the first few lines, I realized that it was a song. I jumped out of the shower, soap and water flying everywhere. I grabbed a piece of paper, wrote it down, and stuffed it inside my guitar case.”
By the fall of 1974, the group had recorded a demo version of “Fight the Power” and several other tracks that would round out The Heat Is On on a four-track machine in the basement of their mother’s home in Inglewood, New Jersey.
Yet the demo session didn’t make it much easier to record the album once the group entered Kendun Recorders in Los Angeles. “In a basement setting we could get a full sound with four tracks musically with bass, drums, keyboards, and guitar,” Ernie says. “In a professional recording studio, that was hardly even a skeleton. So we had to create other parts that had to be created virtually on the spot to fill out the songs.”
But within a week, the instrumental half of the Isleys — guitarist/drummer Ernie, bassist Marvin, and keyboardist Jasper — were able to complete the basic tracks, leaving Ronald, Rudolph, and O’Kelly to work their vocal magic.
Following a long-established Isleys tradition, each track on the album was presented in a lengthy version, subtitled “part 1 & 2.” When the songs were released as singles, they were edited down and billed simply as — “part 1.”
Each side of the album had a distinctive mood. “It has a dance side, or a fast side, and a slow side or love-making side,” says Ernie. “We were told by numerous people how much they dug that concept.” One of the tracks on the slow side, “For the Love of You,” would later be recorded by Whitney Houston.
On July 19, 1975, “Fight the Power” became the Isley’s second Number One R&B hit. Two months later, The Heat Is On hit the summit of the Top LPs & Tapes chart, becoming the Isley’s first and only Number One album. And, as Alexenberg predicted, the album did go platinum.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of September 13, 1975
1. The Heat Is On, The Isley Brothers
2. Red Octopus, Jefferson Starship
3. Between the Lines, Janis Ian
4. Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Elton John
5. One of These Nights, The Eagles
* Music journalist Chris Molanphy points out: “this anecdote in the opening paragraph is impossible, because the RIAA only invented the platinum award in 1976.” Had we known that when we spoke to Ernie Isley, we might have called him out on it. Perhaps Ernie was using “platinum” for short-hand for “selling a million copies” or maybe he was just confused. — CR