"Love Rollercoaster" is an absolutely fantastic title for a funk record. It promises dizzying peaks and valleys, heart-stopping twists and death-defying turns - in short, the ride of your life - and its playfulness and pizzazz no doubt helped the Ohio Players rumble all the way to the top of the charts in early 1976. "Love Rollercoaster" is an unspeakably terrible title for a hardboiled crime saga, on the other hand, but there's a murder mystery captured in the record's grooves as well. For decades, rumors have persisted that if you listen closely to "Love Rollercoaster," you can identify the haunting scream of a stabbing victim - most likely Ester Cordet, the former Playboy model featured on the cover of the Ohio Players' Honey - whose final moments of life were inadvertently captured on tape while the band cut the song in the apartment next door. Or something like that: there are many versions of the "Love Rollercoaster" legend, and many rabbit holes to explore. Now, for the first time ever, you can solve the mystery conclusively - and exclusively - within the KORD app. Here's the evidence we've collected.
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Buried in the Mix • Want to hear the mysterious scream that beget an urban legend in 1976? Go to the 1:24 mark and then tap and hold the Backing Vocals stem to solo it. Was it murder, or simply a soulful screech? You be the judge.
• At 1:31, try soloing the Keyboard stem to hear the crucial musical directive signaling the end of the breakdown, "Everybody come in now!"
