I gotta go with this, too. SNF was a juggernaut that went beyond just being a BGs record but that's still 3 years in the future so I won't say another word about it.
My parents only listened to country radio when I was kid in 1974, and "I Can Help" was in heavy rotation (it hit #1 country as well as pop). I liked it then and I like it now... a cool retroish song with a kind of Jerry Lee Lewis feel. Interestingly, it shares several of the same backing musicians as Elvis' "Suspicious Minds"... Bobby Emmons, Mike Leech, and Reggie Young. And of course Elvis covered it just a few months later.
Whenever I hear this song, or others like it (it is the organ that does it for me) I can see the harvest gold and brown shag carpet, the red shaded table lamp, and the vinyl cigarette pack holders my aunts used to have. No matter how good the song may be this organ sound puts me in a place that is not so great, unfortunately.
Absolutely correct. I think a lot of the other stars, like Frampton, still would have failed. Bee Gees were still putting out quality music and that’s what people care about. And I wonder, did that many people even bother to see Pepper anyway? Will be fun to talk about all this later!
I think they were harmed by it - it was a huge dud and it made them look ridiculous. But they were so huge it wasn't career-ending. That would come later. More when we get there in a few months.
I've always kinda liked this song, and kinda found it annoying. I'm surprised it got this high on the charts. It disappeared from oldies radio pretty quickly - I seldom if ever heard it by the '80s.
Well, and it would be pretty easy to argue Tusk and The Long Run were not as good as the previous albums and didn’t deserve to sell quite as well. Bee Gees are my favorite band and imo none of their albums before or after SHF were as strong from beginning to end (Main Couse is awfully close) and in most cases not nearly as good, so it deserved to be their best seller. We’re going to get creamed for talking about all this way too early, but I had to comment.
Gaynor's interesting - she pretty much rang in the peak disco era with "Never Can Say Goodbye", while "I Will Survive" was a monster hit right before the end of it. But she never cracked the pop Top 40 even once between those two singles, in spite of considerable success on the dance charts. It's like she existed solely to ring the opening and closing bells of the disco era. Proof that even with just two big hits you can make a lasting impact.
Yup...they don’t get much better or as iconic. That one deserves it’s legendary status. I like the genre, but being objective it didn’t produce all that many genuinely great songs like this one. Too many disco songs, while being very successful, teetered awfully close to novelty songs, like YMCA imo.
Number one...really? Didn’t know that. Sounds more like a fun novelty song to me, not one people would listen to enough times to push it to the top. Always been a bit meh about it; I don’t skip it though it’s hard to avoid on any 70’s comp album.
Ahem! It's 1974 again! WooHoo! Listening to it on the car radio in 1974 on the AM band, the thing that stood out the most for me is that organ. I love it! It's also a cool little song a guy could play for a woman with a kid he's interested in.
The dancing banana should tell you how happy I am that we are actually discussing 1974 again! Youse guys must really hate the next few years coming up or else you wouldn't be constantly skipping over them.
Nothing else of its era sounds quite like "I Can Help." Probably the closest we got to the fifties nostalgia that was in at the time getting to the top of the charts. Which is to say not very, but it does wink at it nicely.
I enjoyed I Can Help then and I still do. Nice groove, laid back country twang and a killer organ running through the whole shebang. If there had still been a roller rink in these parts, this is the kind of song I'd expect to be playing.
I Can Help. Annoying as hell. The only thing I like about it is the guitar solo in the middle. Billy doesn't sing very well, the organ sounds cheesy and the arrangement is corny country. It does have a swinging vibe going for it, but that and the guitar solo are not enough to save this one from the dog pile. I was amazed at how popular it was - I figured people had to be buying multiple copies of it just to smash them to bits. However, in my area of the world, country music has always reigned supreme, so this song being a monster hit at the end of 1974 should really have been no surprise. Swan was originally from the bootheel of Missouri, so bringing that up in his publicity package also helped boost his popularity around here. I recall DJs saying "LOCAL BOY DOES GOOD" even though its a good 200 miles from here to there. Not the worst #1 of the year, but it will rank pretty low in the year-end wrap-up.
Well i'm a mid-s70's radio fan for sure. Still love hearing those Casey Kasem replays. So i'm happy to be in 1974. ....and I really like 'I Can Help'...can't remember who's band Billy Swan came from...but this is one of those songs forever linked to my teenage years.
He was part of Kris Kristofferson's band a time or two and also Kinky Friedman's. The story goes that Billy was working as a recording assistant / janitor at Columbia Records and when he quit he recommended Kris to replace him. That led to Kris breaking into the business, and he repaid the favor by giving Billy a slot in his band. Another fun fact: Mr. Swan produced "Polk Salad Annie" for Tony Joe White. And years earlier, wrote the song "Lover Please", which Clyde McPhatter took to #7 in 1962! Clyde got the song from Bill Black, who Billy Swan was staying with in Memphis. During that time, Billy got to know Elvis' uncle Travis Smith, who watched the gate at Graceland and even had him fill in a few times. And of course Elvis covered "I Can Help" in 1975.
One of the first songs that piqued my interest in pop music. As a three year old, I was probably drawn in by the groove as well as the organ part. Listening to it now, I hear a single that has a retro late 50's feel to it yet it fits in perfectly with where top 40 radio was in 1974.
I've long enjoyed this record, which appears to be the last #1 ever for Monument Records (their others were by a chap we last heard from at the top of the summit a decade before - Roy Orbison). At this point, Monument were distributed by CBS Records. Originally issued in late July, it was one of the first issued after the price increase in singles which explains in this case the "sunburst" symbol at upper right as well as the ZS8 (formerly ZS7) prefix. Mr. Swan himself had an interesting career. He had written Clyde McPhatter's last big hit, "Lover Please," as well as producing Tony Joe White's swamp-rock classic "Polk Salad Annie" (he is the one heard saying "four" before the song starts). (As @Black Thumb, in a different way, had noted above.)
Monument had had a #1 country hit the previous year: "Why Me" by none other than Billy's old pal Kris Kristofferson. It spent an (at the time) astonishing 19 weeks on the Pop Top 40 despite only getting to #16 there.
