10 flip sides from 1974 in honor of Goldmine’s 50th anniversary
Becoming a music journalist in the ‘70s, the decade of peak sales for vinyl singles and albums, was so much fun. Backstage passes to concerts were made of fabric, adhered to your jeans, but could be peeled off at the end of the night as a souvenir to stick on the album cover of the act who you reviewed and interviewed in person. There were also telephone interviews, long-distance calls for an extra charge from the phone company, where you could record the conversation using a suction cup microphone from Radio Shack, stuck on the phone’s receiver and connected to a cassette recorder, looking like a Watergate device. Album reviews, promoting new releases, had a tight deadline, listening and taking notes, followed by creating the review on a typewriter to submit. If you had a last-minute revelation, well, chances are it would be part of the end of the story because there was no time to start over. Music genres were varied and plentiful. Record collecting became a growing hobby, seeking out used and rare oldies from sellers on the pages of the new magazine, Goldmine. As we celebrate our magazine’s 50th anniversary this month, we look back on a diverse selection of 10 vinyl flip sides from 1974.
Paul McCartney & Wings: “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five” - flip side of “Band on the Run,” No. 1 gold single, Apple
Paul McCartney’s most successful post-Beatles album was Band on the Run, containing three Top 10 singles: “Helen Wheels,” “Jet,” and the title track with the album’s finale, the forward looking “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five” as its flip side, which also reprised the song “Band on the Run” at the very end of the recording. McCartney’s percussive piano carried the song along, with tempo changes showcasing the harmonies of Linda McCartney and Denny Laine.
Elton John: “Harmony” - flip side of “Bennie and the Jets,” No. 1 platinum single, MCA
While Paul McCartney & Wings achieved success with Band on the Run, Elton John and his band did the same with their double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, also containing three hit singles: “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” the title tune, and the unlikely “Bennie and the Jets.” John was looking forward to “Candle in the Wind” being the third hit single, but a soul station in Detroit, WJLB, began playing the album cut, which turned into a highly requested song, and Detroit/Windsor rival CKLW added the song, so the people at MCA decided to release “Benny and the Jets,” which lead to an appearance by John on TV’s Soul Train. “Candle in the Wind” would have to wait for its single release until 1997, with modified lyrics as a tribute to Princess Diana, as “Candle in the Wind 1997.”
Like “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five” from Band on the Run, the flip side of “Benny and the Jets” was also an album finale, “Harmony,” musically in line with the double album’s title song “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” with high harmonies from John’s band. While McCartney was hanging out with Wings, John and his band were hanging out with John Lennon. In his Goldmine interview, guitarist Davey Johnstone told Goldmine, “My memories are so strong and vivid on all the time we spent together with John Lennon from July 1974 through Thanksgiving of that year when he played with us at Madison Square Garden. We recorded several things together. We did ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and the flip side ‘One Day at a Time,’ which John also wrote, plus the songs we recorded live at Madison Square Garden, like the flip side ‘I Saw Her Standing There.’ He came as our guest to quite a few of our shows. He loved checking out how bands were working at that point live, because The Beatles hadn’t played live for about a decade at that point.”
Harry Chapin: “Short Stories” – flip side of “WOLD,” No. 36, Elektra
Between folk-rock storyteller Harry Chapin’s biggest Top 40 hits of the ‘70s, “Taxi” and “Cat’s in the Cradle,” was “WOLD,” a story about an aging disc jockey, “I am the morning DJ at WOLD, playing all the hits for you wherever you may be.” Those station call letters and rhyme were changed in his live performances to match a Top 40 station of that region. The flip side of the single was the album’s title song, “Short Stories.” The song was simply constructed, with a comparison of life to short stories, “Short stories, that’s what we live, short stories, just take what they will give.” The delivery seemed carefree until Michael Masters’ cello kicked in and the bridge unfolded with, “Don’t you know I need you near me, or my happy ending’s gone, and I see now so very clearly, that our story must go on, and on!”
Billy Joel: “You’re My Home” – flip side of “Piano Man,” No. 25 digital gold single, Columbia
Billy Joel debuted in the Top 40 in 1974 with “Piano Man,” with a wonderful combination of piano playing like Elton John and storytelling like Harry Chapin. This was also the year when four of Jim Croce’s songs were in the Top 40 posthumously. The flip side of “Piano Man,” called “You’re My Home,” sounded most in line with the acoustic guitar driven folk-rock sound of Croce, with piano only featured in the instrumental break.
Jefferson Starship: “Devils Den” – flip side of “Ride the Tiger,” No. 84, Grunt
1974 was also the debut of Jefferson Starship, led by former Jefferson Airplane members Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, along with latter JA members John Barbata, Papa John Creach, and David Freiberg, plus Craig Chaquico and Pete Sears. Their debut album Dragon Fly also had former JA member Marty Balin join the septet for one song, his composition “Caroline.” The album opened explosively with “Ride the Tiger.” In his interview with Goldmine earlier this year, Freiberg said, “1974 was the year of the tiger in the Chinese zodiac tied to the Chinese calendar. ‘Ride the Tiger’ is such a powerful number, just made to be an opening song, with lots of nice harmonies, and it keeps on driving.” Not only is the opening song on the album, but it is also, fittingly, the opening song for the group’s current 50th anniversary tour. Freiberg shared his feelings about his half-century in the band, “It’s more fun than it’s ever been.”
The flip side of “Ride the Tiger” was the opening number from the second side of the album, “Devils Den,” co-written by Slick and Creach, the powerful blend of Slick’s vocals and the creativity of Creach’s violin foreshadowed what would become the opening number, “Fast Buck Freddie” on the group’s most successful album to follow, Red Octopus.
Paul Anka: “Papa” – flip side of “(You’re) Having My Baby,” No. 1 gold single, United Artists
1974 was a successful year for Canadian artists Terry Jacks, Andy Kim, Gordon Lightfoot, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Guess Who, Joni Mitchell, Anne Murray, all in the U.S. Top 10, along with Paul Anka, for a major comeback of three consecutive Top 10 hits beginning with “(You’re) Having My Baby.” His prior string of Top 10 hits had been in 1959 through 1960, beginning with the No. 1 gold single “Lonely Boy.”
Anka’s mid-‘70s string of hits were duets with R&B singer Odia Coates. The flip side of “(You’re) Having My Baby” was “Papa,” with Anka singing alone on a tender tale of family life lessons and tragedies. His rich male vocal captured the adult contemporary sound of the time also heard late that year by Al Martino with “To the Door of the Sun (Alle Porte del Sole).”
Steely Dan: “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” – flip side of “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” No. 4, ABC
From 1972 through 1981, the jazz-rock group with the nucleus of Donald Fagen, who continues to tour with Steely Dan, and Walter Becker, who passed away in 2017, were in the Top 40 ten times, with their highest charting hit beging 1974’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” with “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” on its flip side. This flip side became popular on FM radio in the ‘70s and on a 2010 episode of CBS’ Cold Case, from season seven, called “The Runaway Bunny,” the song the producers chose to match the sound of 1974, this flip side was chosen.
More recently, the title “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” was also referenced in the lyrics of a song Goldmine shared by singer-songwriter Lisa Burns about her and her husband, bassist and author Sal Maida’s son Dylan Maida called “Jamming with Walter.” In her Goldmine interview, Burns shared her thoughts about heaven, “Sal came up with that title. I asked him, ‘What do you think Dylan is doing now?’ He said, ‘Jamming with Walter.’ Of course, I knew who Walter was because Dylan was a huge Steely Dan fan as were all of the people who were in the jazz program when he attended The City College of New York. All the students became Dan Fans, and he was a Dan Fan before that as he had seen them many times. About two months before he passed, he was in a lot of pain, but bought me a ticket to Donald Fagen’s show, because I had never seen Steely Dan and it was just Donald Fagen at that point as Walter was already gone. I remember asking him how he was going to make it with his leg hurting. He said, ‘We have got to go.’ We took the train and went to The Beacon Theatre and he and his friend and I saw the concert, for my first Steely Dan experience. It was awesome and we talked about it for days. It was the first song that I wrote for my tribute EP to Dylan, My Boy.”
Eagles: “Ol’ ‘55” - flip side of "Best of My Love,” No. 1, Asylum
On the final weekend of 1974, the Eagles harmony driven “Best of My Love” debuted in the Top 40 and became their first of five No. 1 singles eight weeks later. The flip side was fellow Asylum labelmate Tom Waits’ composition “Ol’ ‘55” with Al Perkins joining the group as a guest steel guitarist on the country-rock song. Perkins shared a few years ago, “As we began to record, producer and engineer Bill Szymczyk took two or three passes with me playing the pedal steel. In the final mix, they decided to use two tracks of steel simultaneously. Amazingly enough, they seemed to complement each other, rather than becoming a train wreck!”
Donna Fargo: “Just a Friend of Mine” – flip side of “You Can’t Be a Beacon (If Your Light Don’t Shine),” No. 57, Dot
In addition to country-rock hits in the era, there were country crossovers in the pop Top 100, including Donna Fargo’s fifth No. 1 country single that decade, “You Can’t Be a Beacon (If Your Light Don’t Shine)” with “Just a Friend of Mine” on the flip side, written by Fargo and produced by her husband Stan Silver. Fargo shared with Goldmine, “Stan and I were always just as careful to put what we thought were great songs on the flip sides as well as the A sides because, back then, the DJs might play the flip sides of those 45s too. I was inspired to write the song for my oldest brother who died when he was seventeen, serving our country in the Korean War. I was the youngest of four children, and I always regretted being too young to know him better. I just remember that he had such a gentle spirit and how his loss affected my mother. She never seemed the same afterwards. I think the story drove the title, or maybe it was just a universal idea that can relate to the raw feelings the character in the song was feeling. When a loved one dies, we miss the whole person: spirit, soul, and body.”
Gloria Gaynor: “We Just Can’t Make It” – flip side of “Never Can Say Goodbye,” No. 9, MGM
Gloria Gaynor was at the beginning of and at the peak and end of the ‘70s disco era, most famously spending three weeks at No. 1 in 1979 with the anthem “I Will Survive,” but before that, her Top 40 debut came in 1974 with a disco version of The Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye,” which reached No. 9. She wrote the flip side “We Just Can’t Make It” about a struggling relationship. The tempo and style of the song sounds fitting for the genre known in the Southeast as beach music, still popular today, and is evidence of one of many gems buried among Gaynor’s recordings. She told Goldmine, “While I think it was a good song with good lyrics, it’s probably not a song you’re going to find anyone covering anytime soon. If you go through my albums, you will find lots of songs that I wish would have been released as singles. There were so many great songs through the years that never got a chance because the people at the record companies just refused to promote more than one single per album.” Goldmine is planning on promoting new music from Gaynor coming out early next year.
Related links:
Goldmine Elton John flip sides - Davey Johnstone interview
Goldmine Jefferson Starship flip side interview
Goldmine Lisa Burns interview - Steely Dan tribute to son
Goldmine Donna Fargo flip side interview
Goldmine Gloria Gaynor flip side interview
Fabulous Flip Sides is in its tenth year
goldminemag.com/columns/fabulous-flip-sides
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