Recently, I was reminded of what a great year 1974 was for music, and I have a 1974 playlist for you with a lot of that great music.
For example, each of the Beatles had a solo hit in 1974, and the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Suzi Quatro, Big Star, and Patti Smith (among others) all released great rock and roll.
Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Charlie Rich, George Jones, and Dolly Parton (among others) all released great country music in 1974.
Great R&B from that year included Ann Peebles “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” Billy Preston’s “Nothing from Nothing,” Jackson 6’s “Dancing Machine,” and George McCrea’s “Rock Your Baby,” among many others, as funk headed toward disco.
Celia Cruz’s first album for Fania Records was among the great salsa, psychedelic cumbia, and other Latin music released in 1974.
Elis Regina and Tom Jobim’s classic duet album and Jorge Ben Jor’s beloved A Tábua de Esmeralda were only two of the great 1974 Brazilian LPs.
1974 jazz music included releases by Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Joe Pass, Stanley Clarke, and many more great jazz artists.
And Bob Marley’s album Natty Dread came out in 1974 too! It doesn’t get much better than this.
I was 13 years old in 1974, an avid listener of top 40 radio—shout out to CKLW, the great Windsor, Ontario radio station all of us 13-year-olds listened to back then. I had my Bar Mitzvah that year, and I attended Bar Mitzvah dance parties most weekends, where Detroit Bar Mitzvah DJ Joe Cornell* spun the latest hits.
When I recently read through Billboard’s top 100 from 1974, almost every song was burned into my memory, for better or worse. I can sing along with all the words to songs like Jim Stafford’s “Spiders and Snakes”, Blue Magic’s “Sideshow,” David Essex’s “Rock On,” Golden Earring’s “Radar Love,” and Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boys Room,” all included on this playlist.
I did spare you the most annoying hits of 1974, even if it distorts the picture of 1974 a bit. So I omitted “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” “The Night Chicago Died,” and “The Streak.” You are welcome.
I did leave on a couple of songs that are probably more of historic interest than current listening pleasure: Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” ABBA’s “Waterloo,” Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff”(which was tragically a bigger hit than Bob Marley’s original), and John Denver’s “Annie Song.” That is why God invented the skip button. But truly, the vast majority of the songs on my 1974 playlist are great to listen to.
These are the rules I set for myself.
First, to be on the playlist, a song must have been released in 1974 or on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1974. Some 1974 top hits were released in 1972 or 1973, but did not chart until 1974. I included most of them on this playlist. Conversely, Kung Fu Fighting was released at the end of 1974, but wasn’t a big hit until 1975. I included this Carl Douglas song in this playlist because of its 1974 release, rather than leave it for the 1975 playlist that I am unlikely to ever make. I made this playlist by feel, what felt right for my memory of 1974, consistency be damned.
I included only one song from each artist, even though many artists had more than one hit and/or great song in 1974. My exception to this rule is Dolly Parton. If you release two songs as historic as “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same 1974 album — written on the same day! — then you deserve two songs on my 1974 playlist. One footnote: I considered duet artists, like George Jones and Tammy Wynette, as an artist distinct from each of the individuals in the duo.
Finally, 1974 jazz and other music with artistic pretentions presented a problem to me. They favored very long songs, and I was not willing to include a 32-minute-and-32-second song on this playlist — I am looking at you, Miles Davis. So my choices of jazz and some other music genres from 1974 were limited. Luckily there was an edited, 3:16 version of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (aka “Theme from The Exorcist”), because I was not going to include the unedited 26:01 version (and that was only Part 1!). Long songs were not my favorite 1974 trend.
Like so many of my playlists, this one is long. It is meant to be listened to on shuffle play. If you listen on shuffle play, as recommended, you will hear different great music from 1974 each time you put the playlist on (as I write, this “Lady Marmalade” by LaBelle has segued into Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets”).
So enjoy your musical time travel back to the year 1974.
*Only for people who were teenagers in the Detroit metro area in the 1970s and 1980s: Though he went to more Detroit-area Bar/Bat Mitzvahs than anyone else, Joe Cornell was not Jewish. He was Italian and just fell into the Bar/Bat Mitzvah circuit. He started as a dance instructor for Arthur Murray Studios and then traveled to give lessons at resorts. He opened his own dance studio in Oak Park in the mid-1950s. Joe Cornell passed away at 90 years old in 2020. He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, but flew back to Detroit for his DJ/dance lesson gigs (I wish I had known — I would have looked him up here). He sold his business to two Detroiters, who worked for him as teenaged “junior instructors” in 1991. Some corporate thing called “Star Trax Event Productions” bought the business in 2015, but kept the name “The Joe Cornell Experience.” You can book your next Detroit-area bar/bat mitzvah party at https://www.joecornell.com/. Now, everybody: snowball!