In 1970 and 1971, Lou Ragland, Tony Roberson and George Pickett laid down more than 30 tracks as Hot Chocolate, a hard-charging funk combo, on the Co-Co Cleveland label. Ragland played guitar, tambourine and conga drums and sang, Roberson played drums, Pickett bass. Their sole album, Hot Chocolate, was recorded at Cleveland Recording and pressed at Boddie Recording Company on Union Avenue. Dick Dugan, a well-known illustrator for the Cleveland Press and Plain Dealer, who died April 16, created the cover for $100.
Contemporary hits included Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World,” the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” and the Carpenters’ “Superstar.” But 1971 wasn’t a bad year for soul, either: Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff” and the Undisputed Truth’s “Smiling Faces Sometimes” charted high, too.
Shortly after Hot Chocolate made it into local stores, the band released “Good for the Gander/We Had True Love,” also on Co-Co, in 1971. Two years later, Co-Co again was the imprint for “I Can’t Take It/What the Doctor Prescribed.” That Hot Chocolate 45 was recorded at Way Out Studios at 1966 East 55th St. Lester Johnson, a businessman and former singer in the Five Quails, owned Way Out with Cleveland cop Billy Branch, and Cleveland Browns legend Jim Brown put money into the operation, affiliating with Way Out under the Big Jim label. Johnson and Branch hired Ragland as their engineer.
“Good for the Gander” recently popped up on Local Customs: Burned at Boddie, a limited-edition, 17-track sampler previewing a three-CD box of Boddie pressings Chicago label Numero Group promises by year’s end. Ragland said the track was recorded first at Cleveland Recording, again during a live broadcast from Agency Recording in the old Agora building on East 24th Street, and, finally, at Boddie. The versions differ in length, and Dewitt McQueen, not Pickett, plays bass on the Boddie take.
Only 1,000 copies of the seven-cut, heavily instrumental LP were pressed, says Ragland. They sell for hundreds of dollars to aficionados of Northern Soul, primarily in England. “Hot Chocolate was a live recording, the first record I ever recorded in album form,” says Ragland during a long telephone interview from his home in Las Vegas. “We were doing our show and they recorded it. We had practiced enough… we had about 30 songs and we narrowed them down to those that the people requested, so we just sat down in the studio and created one of our sets over again, and then we found out that ‘Good for the Gander’ was one of the best songs we recorded.” [pictured, l-r: Lou Ragland, R.C. Johnson, Dewitt McQueen and Eddie D'Marco. Drummer Tony Roberson didn’t make it into the frame.]
