The early 1970's was a golden time in the emergence of rock and roll music as us boomers came of age. That music flipped the world on its head. Sweet Pain came together at the offices of producer Frank Slay. The members of what would become Sweet Pain who met there included Frank Demme, Carl Johnson, Bob Spalding ,Marty Foltz, D. Riordan and JC Philips. The group came together very quickly, toured and recorded an album for United Artist Records. Every member of Sweet Pain went on to do many more projects of note in the music biz after the group broke up. Bob Spalding joined the Ventures and played and wrote songs for them for 30 years. Frank Demme and Carl Johnson went on to record their Rock Rose album for Columbia Records and then solo ventures after that, Marty Foltz played with rock flutist Tim Weisburg for years and D. Riordan recorded four more albums including his solo album on Capitol Records.
These Sweet Pain demo recordings found in the music archives of D. Riordan had been made towards the end of the group in 1972. None of these songs were on the original Sweet Pain album. They were for all intensive purposes... "the lost tapes" recorded at the old Liberty Records studio in LA. They were rough demos of new material the group was working on extensively rumored about on YouTube over the years.
D. Riordan had recorded a cover of "Let Love" when he was getting ready to do his solo album for Capitol Records. The song was apparently used as a warm up for those sessions and just popped into existence in all the fun. The musicians and background singers backing up D. Riordan on that cover were very much like the Sweet Pain lineup. One rumor had ex-members of Sweet Pain actually playing on the session. The recording included here was recovered from that original 1974 cover recording of "Let Love" found in 2024 in the same archive file as the other four Sweet Pain songs sparking the rumors of Sweet Pain members involvement. These recordings have been extensively cleaned up and enhanced using 2026 neural net technology.
