1974 · Behind the Songs
A twenty-year-old Toto-to-be wrote it, Jimmy Bowen produced it, and Glen Campbell took Houston’s name to the charts.
In the spring of 1974, Glen Campbell named an entire album after a promise: Houston, I’m comin’ to see you. The song was the title track of his twenty-sixth studio album, released on April 30, 1974, on Capitol Records — and it was written by David Paich, a young keyboard player who would go on to found Toto and write “Africa.” Produced by Jimmy Bowen and recorded at Hollywood Sound Recorders in Hollywood, California, the single ran three minutes and twenty-one seconds and carried Campbell to No. 20 on the Hot Country Singles chart, No. 68 on the Hot 100, and No. 13 on Easy Listening. The album itself reached No. 12 on the Billboard Country Albums chart. It was not the biggest hit of Campbell’s career. It was something rarer: a title track that named a city, a promise, and a moment.
The kid who wrote it
David Paich was barely out of his teens when he wrote “Houston (I’m Comin’ to See You)” — the son of arranger Marty Paich, raised in the Los Angeles studio world, already playing keyboards like a veteran. Within a few years he would co-found Toto, and within a decade he would co-write “Africa,” one of the most-played songs in radio history. But in 1974 he was a young writer with a melody and a city, and Glen Campbell — who had built a career on other writers’ songs, from Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” to Allen Toussaint’s “Southern Nights” — heard something in it. The irony is neat: Marty Paich, David’s father, arranged the Campbell recording of his son’s song, alongside “Honestly Loved.” The family business, conducted at the highest level.
Jimmy Bowen’s Hollywood
The album Houston (I’m Comin’ to See You) was produced by Jimmy Bowen, one of Nashville’s and Hollywood’s sharpest studio minds, and cut at Hollywood Sound Recorders with engineer John Guess. The personnel was the cream of the Wrecking Crew era: Hal Blaine on drums, Joe Osborn on bass, Larry Muhoberac and the young David Paich on keyboards, Dean Parks on acoustic guitar — and Campbell himself on acoustic and electric guitars, plus the bagpipes he loved to surprise people with. Dennis McCarthy served as arranger. It was a Los Angeles country record in the truest sense: Nashville songs, Hollywood players, and a singer who belonged to both worlds.
The album around it
The LP that carried the song was a portrait of Campbell in transition. Side one opened with the title track and moved through “Too Many Mornings,” “Lovesick Blues,” “Yesterday, When I Was Young,” and “Lovelight”; side two offered “No Love at All,” “Honestly Loved,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” “If I Were Loving You,” and “A Beautiful Love Song.” It was Campbell’s twenty-sixth studio album — a staggering number for a man still in his thirties — and it reached No. 12 on the Billboard Country Albums chart. The era of the crossover colossus was cooling; the era of the country survivor was beginning. “Houston” sat right on the hinge.
The chart journey
As a single in 1974, “Houston (I’m Comin’ to See You)” did respectable business without setting the world on fire: No. 20 on the Hot Country Singles chart, No. 68 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 13 on Easy Listening. It was a radio record, not a phenomenon — the kind of single that kept Campbell on the air between the giant hits. And there is something touching about its modesty: a song about coming to see someone, sung by a man who spent his life on the road, landing softly in the middle of the charts like a postcard that arrived a day late and was loved anyway.
Why Houston
Why does a song named for a city work? Because a city is a promise you can sing. Houston in 1974 was booming — oil money, the Astrodome, a skyline climbing out of the flat Gulf prairie — and Campbell’s record caught the city’s forward motion in three minutes and twenty-one seconds. The “I’m comin’ to see you” of the title is both a love song and a homecoming, and Campbell sings it with the easy confidence of a man who had played Houston a hundred times and meant it every time. The song never had to be a No. 1. It had to be a welcome. It still is.
What to listen for
Listen for the young David Paich on keyboards, playing on a song he wrote as a kid and would outgrow into a legend. Listen for Hal Blaine’s drums and Joe Osborn’s bass — the Wrecking Crew pulse underneath a country arrangement. Listen for Marty Paich’s arrangement on the title track, a father framing his son’s song. Listen, finally, for the bagpipes — Campbell’s secret weapon, the instrument he played when he wanted to remind everyone that the smoothest man in country music had a wild streak. And listen for Campbell’s guitar: before he was a television star, before he was a household name, he was one of the great session guitarists in Los Angeles, and you can still hear the session man in every clean, unhurried line.