Fire is the sixth studio album by the Ohio Players and the second released through the Mercury label.

The album’s lead single “Fire” was serving in the mid-2010s as the theme song to the US television series Hell’s Kitchen. Fire topped both the Billboard Pop Albums chart and the Billboard R&B Albums chart (where it held for five weeks) in early 1975.Honey may have had the most controversial LP cover of 1975. Its erotic cover, which depicted a nude model covered in honey, was protested by feminists when it was alleged that the model had become stuck to the floor during the photo shoot. Some retailers, in fact, refused to carry it. All the controversy certainly didn’t hurt the album commercially. In 1975, the Ohio Players were one of R&B’s most successful acts, and were inescapable for anyone who listened to R&B/Soul radio at the time. The album kept the band’s commercial momentum going thanks to such hard-driving funk as “Love Rollercoaster” (a song that was sampled to death by rappers in the ’80s and ’90s and covered by the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1996), “Fopp,” and the playfully jazz-influenced hit “Sweet Sticky Thing.” While the Players’ outstanding contributions to funk would continue to have an enormous impact long after the band’s popularity faded, it’s important to stress that only about half of Honey falls into the funk category. In fact, lead singer Sugarfoot’s moving performance on the remorseful “Alone” makes one wish that the Players’ ballads were discussed more often. – Alex Henderson