Songfacts®:

• In this soulful, horn-laden groove, funk masters the Ohio Players can't get enough of a "bad, bad missus in them skin-tight britches." The title track of their fifth studio album, it marked a shift towards a jazzier style of funk that helped propel the band into the mainstream.
• Skin Tight was the Ohio Players' first album with Mercury Records after three releases via Westbound, a Detroit-based label that was home to Funkadelic and The Detroit Emeralds. They had some crossover success with "Funky Worm" in 1972, made popular by lead singer/keyboardist Walter "Junie" Morrison and his Granny character. When the label showed interest in grooming Morrison as a solo act, the rest of the band packed up for greener, and bigger, pastures at Mercury.
• The album introduced the band's classic lineup, with lead singer Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner, keyboardist Billy Beck, drummer Jimmy "Diamond" Williams, bassist Marshall "Rock" Jones, and horn players Pee Wee Middlebrooks, Marvin Pierce, and Clarence "Satch" Satchell. Sugarfoot always kept his vocal ability under wraps and was hesitant about his new role as frontman. "I never did tell anybody I could sing, I never wanted to sing, that's not what I do," he explained in the documentary series Unsung.
  
  But according to his bandmates, he gained the confidence he needed once the hits started rolling in. Jones recalled: "And before you knew it every band and singer was trying to sound like Sugar."
• Mercury was eager to know how many new songs the Ohio Players were bringing with them to the label. The band said 40, but it was a lie. "We didn't have not one. Not one song," Rock Jones laughed in Unsung. "We lied to them and said we got 40 songs."
  
  With the lie hanging over them, they spent nine days jamming and formulating songs in the Chicago studio in between playing gigs. Satch Satchell, the band's sax player and music director, told Melody Maker in 1975 how the sessions typically came together. "The way we do the tracks is for me to come up with a set of changes and play them to the rest of the band for the first time in the studio. Then we try to make things happen with them," he said. "I'm the catalyst for what happens, but we don't prepare for a session at all. It took us a week to make the Skin Tight album but a month to make Fire as we went into the studio completely blind. No lyrics... nothing."
• The single peaked at #2 on the R&B chart.
• Skin Tight was the band's first million-selling album, a feat they repeated with their subsequent album, Fire.
• The Ohio Players already earned a reputation for their kinky album covers. They weren't quite as daring at Mercury, but still plenty sexy. When the band's new drummer, Jimmy "Diamond" Williams, proudly brought home a copy of Skin Tight, his parents didn't approve of the racy cover that featured the bottom half of a bare-bummed model crouching on her knees. Thankfully, he convinced them to ignore the album art and focus on the music.