1979 · Behind the Songs
Ian Hunter’s rock-and-roll question, answered by June Pointer at full throttle.
In 1979, The Pointer Sisters stood between two lives. Behind them lay the early-seventies years of jazz clubs, country detours, and funk hits like “How Long.” Ahead lay the eighties pop explosion — “He’s So Shy,” “Slow Hand,” “Jump” — that would make them MTV stars. In between came a detour almost nobody expected: Priority, the group’s second attempt at a full-throated rock-and-roll record, and it opened with somebody else’s song.
The songwriter was Ian Hunter, the former Mott the Hoople frontman whose craggy voice and romantic songwriting had made him one of British rock’s most beloved figures. Hunter had recorded “Who Do You Love” himself for his 1979 solo album, You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic. It was a deep cut, not a hit — the kind of song other singers discover and decide they were born to sing.
The song is built around rock’s oldest question, asked at full volume: who do you love? Hunter’s original frames it as a barroom challenge, a demand for an answer. But the question is elastic — it can sound like jealousy, like devotion, like a dare. That elasticity is what made it irresistible to a group of singers who had spent a decade proving they could sing anything.
Priority, released in 1979, was the sisters’ second rock experiment in two years, following 1978’s Energy. Both albums were produced by Richard Perry, and both found the group trading their jazz-funk finesse for electric guitars and backbeats. It was a genuine risk: the sisters’ audience knew them as soul singers, and rock radio in 1979 was not exactly waiting for a vocal group of four Black women from Oakland. But the Pointer Sisters had never cared much about what radio was waiting for.
The lead vocal went to June Pointer, the youngest sister, and it was the right call. June had the hardest edge of the four voices — a brassy, take-no-prisoners instrument that could cut through electric guitars without losing its soulfulness. Where Anita smoldered and Ruth soared, June attacked. On “Who Do You Love,” she sings like a woman who has asked the question before and is done waiting for the answer.
Perry surrounded the sisters with Los Angeles’ finest rock session players. Bill Payne played piano, Waddy Wachtel played lead guitar, and the credits read like a roll call of the seventies studio elite, with Danny Kortchmar and David Lindley among the others. These were musicians who had played on everybody’s records, and they gave the Pointer Sisters a rock foundation with real weight — no compromise, no novelty-act winking.
Released as a single in 1979, “Who Do You Love” peaked at number 106 in the United States — a Bubbling Under showing, the chart’s way of saying “almost.” It was not a hit. But chart positions only measure one kind of success. As the opening track of Priority, the song announced the album’s intentions before the needle had settled into the groove: this would be a rock record, played straight, by singers who meant it.
What to listen for: Waddy Wachtel’s lead guitar, which answers June’s vocal the way a sparring partner answers a punch — sharp, quick, and respectful. Then the chorus, where all four sisters pile onto the title question and turn it into something bigger than jealousy: a demand, a chant, a group of women insisting on the truth. It is the Pointer Sisters doing what they had always done — harmonizing like family — in a completely new setting.
The rock detour did not last — within two years, the sisters would embrace the sleek pop-soul of “He’s So Shy” and “Slow Hand” and become bigger stars than ever. But Priority and Energy matter precisely because they were detours. They proved the group’s range was not a marketing slogan but a fact, and they gave rock fans a glimpse of what four of the best voices in American music could do with electric guitars behind them.
There is also the Ian Hunter connection to savor. Hunter was a songwriter’s songwriter, the kind of writer other musicians studied. That the Pointer Sisters chose a deep cut from You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic — not a hit, not an obvious choice — says everything about how seriously they took the rock experiment. They weren’t chasing a trend; they were following their ears.
The choice of June as the rock voice was no accident. The youngest Pointer sister had always been the group’s live wire — the one whose stage presence crackled with mischief and danger. On record, that energy translated into a vocal style with no padding: June sang the way she moved, straight at the listener. “Who Do You Love” gave her the hardest-hitting lead vocal of her career to that point, and she repaid the opportunity by sounding utterly at home among the guitars.
Credit, too, belongs to Richard Perry, the producer who steered both of the group’s rock albums. Perry understood that the Pointer Sisters didn’t need to be reinvented — they needed to be unleashed. His production on Priority is direct and uncluttered: the band plays, the sisters sing, and nothing gets in the way. It is the sound of a producer who trusted his artists enough to simply capture them.
Today “Who Do You Love” lives where the best deep cuts live: in the memories of fans who bought Priority on vinyl and never let it go, and in the setlists of collectors who know that the Pointer Sisters’ rock years were no footnote. It is a number 106 single with a number one attitude — June Pointer, four-part harmony, and Los Angeles’ best studio rockers, asking the oldest question in the book.
Who do you love? June already knows the answer she wants. The rest is just rock and roll.