GRAMMYS GONNA GRAMMY: THE HONEY TRAP

In the mid- to late 1970s, Capitol Records arguably had the best Black-music roster in the business outside of Motown.

Larkin Arnold, an attorney who started the label's soul division, signed and developed such acts as Tavares, Peabo Bryson, The Sylvers, Frankie Beverly and Maze and Natalie Cole. The daughter of Nat King Cole won a succession of Grammys in the '70s, including Best New Artist in 1976.

Around that time, disco, which was birthed first in Black, Latin and gay clubs, began its ascent from euphoric nightlife soundtrack to full-fledged pop-culture sensation, supercharged by the (straight, white) Bee Gees and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. In a 1995 interview, Arnold accurately called disco “camouflage for Black music,” and the nomenclature, at least for a while, helped make it more palatable to Top 40 programmers than soul/R&B had been.

One beneficiary of the disco craze was another Arnold signing, A Taste of Honey, a four-piece L.A. band led by Janice Marie Johnson (vocals, bass) and Hazel Payne (vocals, guitar)—a gender-flipped Chic, if you will. The foursome’s slinky, funky novelty “Boogie Oogie Oogie” became one of the genre’s signature tracks, spending three weeks at #1 and becoming the first platinum single in Capitol's history.

Meanwhile, another genre was gripping the imagination of young rock fans bored by the bloat of AOR radio: punk and its more commercial offshoot, new wave. In England, gimlet-eyed singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, with Nick Lowe producing, released his scabrous debut album, My Aim Is True, while sleek Boston five-piece The Cars achieved a commercial breakthrough with one of the great debut LPs of the rock era.

Come the 1979 Grammy Awards, in retrospect, it’s surprising that the staid Recording Academy even nominated the weirdo likes of Costello and The Cars for Best New Artist, alongside A Taste of Honey, studio wizards Toto and English blues-rocker Chris Rea. The award’s previous two winners, for what it's worth, were nepo-baby schlockmeister Debby Boone and sex-in-the-daytime advocates Starland Vocal Band.

What was not surprising was that soft rock and disco owned the night: Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” won Song and Record of the Year and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack took Album of the Year honors. When host John Denver announced that the Grammy for Best New Artist went to A Taste of Honey, it was firmly in keeping with the commercial winds blowing through the industry, if, to put it kindly, a short-sighted outcome.

Just five months later, the notorious “Disco Demolition”―the culmination of both the oversaturation of disco in the marketplace and the virulent racism and homophobia that accompanied the backlash―was held at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, hosted by rock-radio DJ Steve Dahl.

A Taste of Honey would manage just one more Top 10 hit, a quiet-storm cover of Kyu Sakamoto's Japanese-language ballad “Sukiyaki" from way back in 1963. Toto would win Album and Record of the Year in 1983 and enjoy a long career. Costello and the Cars, meanwhile, went on to become hallowed icons, both inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

As for Larkin Arnold, he jumped to CBS Records in 1980, heading up urban music for Columbia and Epic. Among his first orders of business: convincing Pop radio to play a young Black star named Michael Jackson.