History
After recording an album for Capitol Records in 1968, the group had split up. Some of the members decided to take a chance once more and it led them to Armen Boladian, whose Westbound label in Detroit was the then-home of George Clinton and his band Funkadelic. The group recorded "Pain" and was released as a single. Positive feedback lead to Boladian signing them for a full contract, making the band record enough material for their Westbound debut.
The group still has some of the vocal and musical qualities found on their Capitol material, but their first work in the 1970s showed them incorporating a bit of jazz and a harder yet polished soulful sound.
A number of things were established with this album. The romantic and sexy aspects of their music started with Pain, with songs devoted to their love of women. It would become one of their trademarks throughout their career. The group would also become known for their suggestive photos on the album covers. Fans of the group in the mid-1970s may have been taken aback by ladies in various states of undress, but for those who knew of them beforehand, the music was defined by the S&M, bondage & discipline imagery on their sleeves, which can be viewed as a mixture of the sexual and perhaps cultural metaphor. The group would also present a character in the form of a grandmother who was simply known as Granny, voiced by Walter "Junie" Morrison. Granny and her stories would remain with the group until Junie left the group in 1974, the year the Ohio Players signed with Mercury.
When the album was released, the original mono mix of "Pain" was used. No known stereophonic mix is known to exist. The rest of the songs on the album are in stereo. The album was engineered by Arlen Smith who also engineered Pleasure and Funkadelic's America Eats Its Young.
Read more about this topic: Pain (Ohio Players Album)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)