Little River Band’s biggest hit, “Reminiscing,” was more than just a major success on the charts. The 1978 yacht rock classic also has the distinction of being one of John Lennon‘s favorite tunes…and Frank Sinatra just happened to call it the best song of the ’70s.
Released as the second single from Little River Band’s fourth studio album, Sleeper Catcher, in the U.S., peaking at #3 on both the Billboard Hot 100. “Reminiscing” was the Australian band’s highest-charting song in the U.S.; in fact, it was honored by Broadcast Music International (BMI) for five million plays on American radio, the most for any Australian pop single up until that time.
In an interview with Guitar Player, guitarist Graeham Goble called it the band’s “pinnacle song.”
“It’s double any other song we’ve ever had in terms of listens,” he continued. “It’s been in a lot of movies, and a lot of soundtracks. Sinatra said he thought it was the best ’70s song in the world, though he never recorded it. But when John Lennon calls your song one of his favorites, does that really matter?”
As Goble went on to explain, Lennon played “Reminiscing” on repeat during his affair with former assistant May Pang.
“She wrote in her book, Loving John, that they would lay in bed listening to ‘Reminiscing,’ and he was asking her to play it again and again and again,” Goble said. “That was pretty amazing.”
If the lyrics for “Reminiscing” are any indication, Lennon must have been in a nostalgic, romantic frame of mind at the time:
That’s the way it began, we were hand in handGlenn Miller’s Band was better than beforeWe yelled and screamed for moreAnd the Porter tunes (night and day)Made us dance across the room, it ended all too soonAnd on the way back home, I promised you’d never be alone
“It was inspired by my love of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s musicals, ’cause I was 12 years of age when we got a black-and-white television in Adelaide,” Goble said. “The programs I immediately loved were all the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers, Rogers and Hammerstein musicals — all of that American romantic era. A lot of my songwriting, but particularly ‘Reminiscing,’ was about the life I wished I had, putting myself into those situations I saw in the movies.”
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According to Goble, the music for “Reminiscing” came to him rather quickly. Inspiration initially struck when the Little River Band in Melbourne for a TV appearance.
“We were in the green room, just playing our guitars,” Goble recalled. “The lead guitarist, David Briggs, was showing me some jazz chords, one of which was a C9 chord, a shape I never knew about. When I came home after the television show, I picked up my Martin 000-18 acoustic and played that chord. Immediately, I had this melody and lyric, all at the same time, almost like it was a spiritual download that just flowed through me. In about a half an hour, the whole thing was finished, and I had this very different song with key changes and quite a lot of jazz chords — quite a sophisticated piece!”
While Goble wanted Peter Jones to play the keyboards on the song, he wasn’t availble.
“So I was forced to pick another player, and it didn’t work. And then we did it with a second player and that didn’t work out, either,” Goble said.
“Then I heard Peter Jones had come back into town. So under protest from some of the guys, mainly from [vocalist] Glenn Shorrock, they reluctantly agreed to give it a third go. As soon as we sat down with Peter, the whole thing came together. Our guitarist Beeb [Birtles] played a syncopated riff from the third verse to the very end of the song, which I really loved. It was a lovely lift to the latter part of the record.”
Clearly, Goble wasn’t the only person who thought “Reminiscing” was lovely. Nearly five decades later, it’s still a soft rock radio mainstay and streaming hit, with close to 200 million streams on Spotify alone.
Related: 31 Years Ago Today, Frank Sinatra Performed This 1964 Hit for the Last Time Ever
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