The O'Jays and the Importance of Context

On the brilliance of their breakthrough album, 'Back Stabbers'

For a long time, I have wanted to write about the O’Jays’ breakthrough album, Back Stabbers. It strikes me as an LP that has a narrative arc, one that starts in a society full of paranoia and heartache and ends with imagining the possibility of realizing the dream of true brotherhood and sisterhood. It’s also in hearing Back Stabbers that I truly appreciated ‘Love Train,’ the huge hit that closed the album. Revisiting the album for this essay underlined why I love it so much and why it remains a great achievement in early-seventies soul music. I hope you enjoy the essay and will let me know what you think too!

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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As in everything, context is important in music. How a certain recording is heard influences how it is received. Consider the radio. Even as it remains one of our greatest instruments for discovering music and its power to conjure ecstasy, it can also pulverize individual songs, reducing them to objects of banality through mindless repetition.

Such a thought can lead to innumerable tangents but here, I’m thinking of ‘Love Train,’ one of two recordings that launched the O’Jays as leaders of the Philly soul movement as well as of soul with a social conscience. Its proto-disco beat and earnest, uplifting lyrics can make the song seem lightweight, certainly in comparison to ‘Back Stabbers,’ the other recording marking the group’s sudden rise. There, the sultry, jazzy beat that could have soundtracked a blaxploitation picture and its lyrics in synch with the paranoia of the early seventies has an edge that cuts deep no matter where or how it is heard.

‘Back Stabbers’ entered the Billboard chart five weeks after five men were caught breaking into the Watergate Complex where the headquarters for the Democratic National Committee was located—the signature event of a previous age marked by deep distrust of government. It was, by my count, the thirty-fourth single by the O’Jays. Their first come out in 1960, two years after the group started, first calling themselves the Triumphs and then the Mascots before becoming the O’Jays in 1963.

Initially, the group was five men strong. They became a quartet when Bill Isles left in 1965. Two years later, the O’Jays reached the Billboard Rhythm and Blues Top 10 with ‘I’ll Be Sweeter Tomorrow (Then I Was Today)’ on Bell Records. With its slow tempo and spotlight on Eddie Levert, it not only foreshadowed the group’s sound in five years time but made clear that the building blocks for the group’s eventual success were already falling in place. A soul that was sophisticated. A group sound rooted around a charismatic, dramatic lead vocalist. A tempo a hair slower than what would be traditionally associated with a ballad.

These were characteristics that two musician friends: Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, were also exploring with Jerry Butler and the Intruders, for two examples, and by 1968, with the O’Jays too. ‘One Night Affair,’ from 1969, is the closest the group got to a hit with Gamble and Huff prior to ‘Back Stabbers.’ It sounds ahead of its time, beginning with what sounds like a slide whistle mimicking a siren and a first verse oriented around the hi-hat and swirling strings that resolves into a mostly up-tempo, urgent plea for a night of passion. It may have been then that the record-buying public needed to catch up with where the group and the producers were. Just prior to ‘Back Stabbers’ three years later, group member Bobby Masssy left, leaving the group with its classic configuration: Levert, Walter Williams and William Powell. Then, things gloriously synched together.

After an extended introduction anchored by a rolling piano part by Huff and a guitar part by Norman Harris played in octaves à la Wes Montgomery or George Benson as well as strings swirling around urgent horns, the O’Jays collectively take tje start of ‘Back Stabbers’’ memorable refrain: “what they do / they smile in your face,” before Levert elaborates with, “all the time they want to take your place / the back stabbers.” The sweetness of Levert, Williams and Powell in harmony balances against Levert on lead. His voice is rich and commanding, his lines occasionally accented with bravado or a slight rasp. Williams provides additional counterpoint on the latter half of the verses, his voice slightly cooler than that of Levert’s.

What dominates on ‘Back Stabbers’ is the sharp lyrics, written collaboratively by Huff with Gene McFadden and John Whitehead (as the seventies ended, they scored a huge hit of their own with ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now’). Ostensibly about a guy certain his friends are prowling around solely to take his woman away from him and inspired by ‘Smiling Faces Sometimes’ (Levert sings a direct quote at the beginning of the fade), a Norman Whitfield-Barrett Strong number popularized by the Undisputed Truth, its message is direct and foreboding: Don’t. Trust. Anyone. The end of the first verse offers the song’s most chilling imagery: “a few of your buddies, they sure look shady / blades are long, clenched tight in their first / aiming straight at your back / and I don’t think they’ll miss.”

On its own, ‘Back Stabbers’ is one of the most evocative of the early-seventies soul cuts that married an apocalyptic message with a seriously danceable groove. On Back Stabbers the album, the O’Jays’ first on Gamble and Huff’s label Philadelphia International, it zooms in on the deep unrest of the album opener, ‘When the World’s at Peace.’ That’s a song that dreams of a better world where “there would be no need for our daughters and our songs / to march up and down the streets singing “we shall overcome”.” And yet, with the tough, guitar-driven beat laid down by members of MFSB, the aggregation of musicians powering the productions of Gamble & Huff, the song’s message is rooted in a problematic world that needs deliverance.

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In that sense, ‘Back Stabbers’ becomes a portrait of how societal ills infect the individual and consequentially, his or her personal relationships. Even so, Levert’s proclamations on ‘When the World’s At Peace’ that “love is not a state of mind, it’s a fact of life” and that “peace is what we need” are sentiments that will return before the end of the album.

‘Who Am I,’ which follows, narrows the perspective to the existential, the sudden loss of identity that attends the end of a relationship. There’s a deep vulnerability as Levert sings, “who am I / to think a man should never, never, never cry.” Each word he sings has a weight, a feeling of the stakes at play. This kind of interior desperation was something new in soul music. In addition to Levert, there was Teddy Pendergrass of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, another group in the Gamble & Huff stable. And orienting a group around this approach gave it an ardent centre that distinguished it from other groups of orchestral soul like the Stylistics, the Chi-Lites and the Spinners. What united them, no matter who was singing lead, was how their music—often slow and seductive—presaged the late-night aura of what came to be termed Quiet Storm. It’s there in Levert’s extrapolations on ‘Who Am I’’s extended, concluding coda.

The perspective shift of the first three songs on Back Stabber, from widescreen to a tight close-up, suggests an arc to the album. ‘When the World’s At Peace’ provides the theme and then follows a protagonist who moves from suspicion to heartbreak to being on the rebound on ‘(They Call Me) Mr. Lucky.’ Fervour remains. The eagerness to adopt such a devil-may-care moniker as “Mr. Lucky” suggests the rose-coloured view that often skews one’s perspective when new love has happily come to town. The good feeling continues with ‘Time to Get Down,’ a danceable cut with Williams on the lead—hear how his lighter touch gives the groove an extra bounce and how the group’s harmony captures the relief of even just a moment given to lay one’s burdens down.

Trouble returns on ‘992 Arguments,’ a variation Huff, McFadden and Whitehead wrote on ‘Back Stabbers.’ There’s another lengthy introduction, and the trading of lines between Levert and Williams on the verses. Here, the focus is on the souring of our protagonist’s new relationship, a feeling of the moment when two people realize they are reaching a point of no return. The chorus is sharp with its repeat of “I’m sick of you” but the verses focus on looming regret as Levert sings, “I don’t wanna let go / but I gotta tell how it is.”

Arguments have led to the affair of ‘Listen to the Clock on the Wall.’ Again, the emotions are heightened. The use of a clave symbolizes the tick-tock of the clock. The opening dominated by a flute line suggests shadowy corners and a recognition of illicitness. When Williams sings of the clock, that it’s “moving much too fast,” there is no mistaking that whatever ethics are at play here, these stolen moments are filling a very real need but not necessarily alleviating the emptiness that clouds the song. How could it in a world full of ‘Shifty, Shady, Jealous Kind of People’ that the O’Jays subsequently warn with a “watch out…watch out…watch out.”

Here is where Back Stabbers turns toward possible redemption. First, our protagonist may have found lasting love on ‘Sunshine,’ a power ballad before there was such a thing as a power ballad. And then, there is the grand finale, the ultimate payoff.

‘Love Train,’ with its vision of both people all over the world hand in hand and of a literal train travelling picking up passengers along the way echoes both Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and Curtis Mayfield’s ‘People Get Ready.’ Gamble and Huff’s comment on these sentiments results in a song that both impels movement—it’s hard not to move to the loping beat of MFSB—and has the relative restrain of Levert and Williams’ joint lead allowing its joy to organically bloom, its vision of the collective we slowly fading up to a redolent luminescence.

It’s a lot to take in and again, hearing it separate from the rest of Back Stabbers can make it seem glib when it is anything but. After the album’s examinations of how a society that is not at peace filters down to the individual, the possibility that instead, the world could actually be at peace—that we can overcome—is profound. As the O’Jays soar on the lines, “ride, let it ride / let it ride / let it ride” and MFSB ready for the return to the chorus, the transcendence of the moment is overpowering. Gamble, Huff and crew laid the groundwork for it to be so. It also reiterates that soul music is a universal music. It is both about and for brotherhood and sisterhood. That is the true context for ‘Love Train’ and for the O’Jays’ breakthrough album, Back Stabbers.

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