I Love My Music

by Alex Henderson In the late 1970s, Wild Cherry took a hint from the Ohio Players and favored LP covers that depicted young women in sexy poses. I Love My Music, Cherry's third album, depicted a scantily clad woman with the band's name tattooed on her derriere -- if that isn't right out of the Ohio Players' school of LP-cover erotica, nothing is. But those sexy LP covers didn't do much for Cherry commercially. More than titillating covers, the band needed a really strong single, and no such thing was to be found on I Love My Music. Nothing on this album is in a class with "Play That Funky Music," the gem to which all of Cherry's late 1970s output would inevitably be compared. Still, it's a decent, if unspectacular, soul/pop/rock release, and the band is likable enough on material that ranges from the driving, Commodores-influenced funk of "Don't Stop, Get Off" to melodic blue-eyed soul offerings like "Fools Fall in Love," the ballad "Try One More Time," and the Motown-ish "1 2 3 Kind of Love." Cherry's appreciation of 1960s Motown also asserts itself on covers of the Isley Brothers' "This Old Heart of Mine" and the Four Tops' "It's the Same Old Song," both of which are competent but definitely fall short of the excellence of the original versions. Like Electrified Funk and Only the Wild Survive, I Love My Music has long been out of print, and the chances of it ever being reissued on CD are slim.