The Honey Ltd. were a 60s Phil Spector-ish girl group that emerged from Lee Hazlewood's studio. They only released one album, which is now difficult to track down. The band's singles, however, are well known. The band later turned into Eve and produced an album which was much less obscure and more highly recognized. However, a compilation called "The Complete LHI Recordings" were released in 2013, including the album and some singles.
The band came together in Detroit in the mid-60s when friends Laura Polkinghorne and Marsha Jo Temmer met sisters Alex and Joan Sliwin at Wayne State University. The four started singing together – mainly covers of the Motown hits being churned out of their home town – and by 1967 had formed a group that producer Punch Andrews named The Mama Cats. In the same year they released one single "Miss You, and in the summer, as riots were sweeping the States, they spent two weeks in L.A. and loved it so much that in January of 1968, they pooled resources and moved there to try their luck as a band. They slept on Temmer's grandmother's floor and hitch-hiked, stoned, to their audition with Lee Hazlewood at 9,000 Sunset Blvd.
Though the band remembers Lee Hazlewood at one point telling them the album was pressed, in boxes, and ready to be distributed, to this day less than a handful of copies have ever been located, and this album goes on the very shortest list of rarest major label releases, along with “The Groop” and The Tokens’ “Intercourse.” The album itself doesn’t have the appearance of something intended for actual release, as it is in mono and has only 8 songs (totalling barely over 20 minutes.) Nonetheless, it’s excellent, as good a girl group record as I’ve heard, one that has enough of a rock edge to appeal to fans of garage rock and light psych. They later changed their name to Eve, and released a less interesting but much easier to find album for the label. Hazelwood, notoriously silent and difficult, never shed any light on the reason for this album’s rarity. .