Light in the Attic’s new compilation of tracks by Honey Ltd. opens with the female vocal quartet singing a curiously harmonized and lushly orchestrated song called “The Warrior.” It’s from 1968, so you know they’re talking about Vietnam, even if they never name that country. A lover readies himself for war, then dies in a battlefield, then is lowered into his grave a hero; the chorus goes, “And it’s good, it’s good… everybody knows it’s good.” Honey Ltd. play it so close to the chest that’s it’s hard to know just how to read the song nearly a half-century later. Is it a pro-war bromide, a corrective to the kneejerk pacifism of the late 1960s? Is the song counter-counterculture? That could be an intriguing perspective-- and certainly not an unusual one for the time.
The liner notes for The Complete LHI Recordings insist “The Warrior” is a “dark, angry, and wonderfully eloquent anti-war anthem.” In other words, the song, written by the group’s own Laura Polkinghome, is meant to be a wake-up call to a war-ready America, with air quotes around every “it’s good.” Intention, however, does not determine outcome, and Honey Ltd. don’t really have the interpretive skills to make “The Warrior” sound angry or accusatory or bitterly ironic. They make it sound too sincere and too sensual, which turn out to be their default settings. The four women fare better on less topical songs about romance gone sour, which are less ambitious yet more straightforward. The Complete LHI Recordings collects every song Honey Ltd. recorded for Lee Hazlewood’s imprint, which means it collects every songs they ever made. Even then it only adds up to 13 tracks, two of which are instrumentals. In other words, theirs is a story of a group only just getting started but never going anywhere.
Honey Ltd. formed in the mid 1960s in Detroit: four Wayne State co-eds who harmonized in the cafeteria and eventually dubbed themselves the Mama Cats. After gigging with Glenn Frey (later of the Eagles) and Bob Seger, they departed Motown for sunnier Los Angeles. You can hear that westward progression in their music, which mixes the polite sounds of Motown vocal groups with the much less formal folk-pop of the West Coast. This is what the Crystals might have sounded like if they’d grown up in Laurel Canyon instead of Brooklyn. Or what the Mamas & the Papas might have sounded like if there’d been no Papas.
After signing the group, Hazlewood changed their name to Honey Ltd. and shooed them into the studio, where he produced these 13 tracks over the course of a few months. As a result, there is a uniformity of sound here that belies the comp’s catchall nature, but Honey Ltd. are no Nancy Sinatra-- at least not at this early stage of their career. They can’t quite muster the romantic one-upmanship of “I’ve Got Your Man” and “No, You Are”, but they fare surprisingly well on the more psychedelic “For Your Mind” and “Silk 'n Honey”, with its acrobatic high notes. And then there’s the cover of “Louie Louie”, which Jack Nitzsche arranged at a slower tempo with an awkward, protracted coda. It’s faintly ridiculous, especially when Honey Ltd. get around to singing “me gotta go,” but those flashy horn blasts-- which sound 10 stories tall-- match the quartet's vocals much more astutely and naturally than all the acoustic and electric guitar that Hazlewood added to their production. It’s bold enough to make you wish they’d reteamed with Nitzsche again.
It turns out, however, that the group truly was anti-war. In 1968 they did a USO tour with Bob Hope, and their experience cemented their opposition to U.S. military presence in Vietnam. LHI did not share their outrage and persuaded the four singers to back off their stance. Once they bent to pressure, they broke. Alexandra Sliwin married JD Souther and left the group, and the remaining trio eventually disbanded. All that remains is a handful of songs and little in the way of a legacy. With so little of their promise realized, The Complete LHI Recordings works less as a piece of revelatory music than as a historical artifact: a curio from a different era of politics and pop culture. The truncated quality of their career gives this compilation a tragic sheen, though: Honey Ltd. obviously had ambitions to match their talents, but we can only wonder what they might have accomplished even with another 13 songs.
