Look who kicked the Rolling Stones out of the top spot, a relative unknown girl group called the Honey Cone. And, this group did not work for Motown.

Remember Holland-Dozier-Holland, the songwriting team who created so many hits for acts like the Supremes and the Temptations. They wrote those hits while working for Motown during most of the Sixties. By 1968, H-D-H had run into some disagreements with Motown over, what else, money. They didn’t feel like they were getting the profit-sharing and royalties that they were entitled to, so they left Motown and created their own label. Actually, they created two labels, Hot Wax and Invictus.

The three-girl group, the Honey Cone, had been around for a few years, but had never really made an impression. In 1969, they got a job working on the Andy Williams Show. They were to sing backup for Burt Bacharach on the show. The Honey Cone was made up of Edna Wright, Carolyn Willis and Shellie Clark. Edna was friends with Eddie Holland of H-D-H and called him and told him to watch the show. Eddie was impressed and signed the group to his new label, Hot Wax.

I think it’s cool that all three of the girls had lots of experience in the music industry in some way. Edna Wright was the sister of Darlene Love, who was the lead singer of the Crystals. Carolyn Willis came from the group Bob B Soxx and the Blue Jeans who had a couple minor hits in the early Sixties. Shellie Clark was a former Ikette, who was the backing group (usually a trio) for the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. It took the three of them getting together to produce a million selling hit.

Since Holland-Dozier-Holland were songwriters, you would expect them to have written most of the songs that were recorded on their two new labels and they did. But, there is only so much time in a day and soon, the task became too great for just those three guys, so they hired some other writers. “Want Ads” was written by General Norman Johnson who was the lead singer for the group Chairman of the Board (who recorded on Invictus, the other H-D-H label), Greg Perry and Barney Perkins. The idea for the song came about one day when Perkins was reading the classified section of a newspaper and came up with the idea of a song called “Want Ads.”

Next came the catchy opening line and they were off. They pitched the song to other singers, but no one felt right with the lyrics until they had the Honey Cone sing it. They knew right away that this was the group that should sing the song.

“Want Ads” debuted on the pop charts on May 1, 1971 and spent one week at the top. It did much better on the R&B charts, staying at number one for three weeks. It was a million selling record, but while the Honey Cone did have a couple follow up hits, “Stick-Up” (#11) and “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show (#15,) they would never have another number one. The Honey Cone broke up in 1973.