I Know We Can, I Know We Can, I Know We Can, I Know We Ca-an… ‘Getaway’!
(August 7, 2026) – Urgent horn blasts. Frenetic drum fills. Intense vocals courtesy of both Maurice White and Philip Bailey. The song was the Elements of the Universe at the peak of their powers.
And 50 years ago today, they were at the peak of the charts — No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Soul Singles chart (now Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs) dated August 7, 1976 (it would later reach No. 12 on the pop-focused Hot 100 and on Billboard’s newly launched National Disco Action chart).
“Getaway” — the first single released from Earth, Wind & Fire’s 1976 masterpiece Spirit — wasn’t just lightning in a bottle, it also sounded like it. With an unrelenting rhythm section featuring the youngest of the band’s three White siblings, Fred, on drums and the legendary Al McKay on rhythm guitar — plus vocalist Philip Bailey filling the gaps with congas — the song packed the energy of a runaway locomotive and the excitement of a band still in its ascendancy, but one who’d found its groove and was letting the world know it.
And those horns. Without them, “Getaway” would’ve been a shell of itself, not embodying any of the musical schizophrenia that, at its core, was the song’s main appeal. The EWF brass section — soon to become famous in its own right as the Phenix Horns — supplied much of that controlled chaos, augmented by a small army of additional horn players — along with band member Andrew Woolfolk — credited on Spirit.
But “Getaway” — one of two songs from Spirit that was written totally by non-EWF members — wasn’t just the LP’s first single released to radio and stores, it was also the album’s leadoff track, setting the tone and the standard for what was to follow with the album’s remaining eight tunes. Still, the urgency of “Getaway” was never matched by those songs, nor, arguably, by any other EWF track from any album.
Yet “Getaway” fit perfectly into their growing song repertoire. Its messages of escapism and transcendence — with the latter delivered more subtly than on EWF’s other spiritual campaigns — were exactly what the Elements were all about. And if simply getting away was your goal, listening to this tune gave you the feeling you had everywhere to go but nowhere to run to, like being trapped with everyone pulling at you at once.
“Getaway” felt hurried despite clocking in at a relatively modest 112 beats per minute — proof that tempo alone doesn’t determine a record’s sense of speed (although that tempo is what likely gave disco DJs permission to play what was otherwise a funk jam). This oxymoron meant you could just as appropriately do a cool sway back and forth on the dance floor as you could shake like a wild person doing backflips to its unrelenting rhythm section.
Even the song’s vocals didn’t follow tradition. Vocal arrangements normally grow in intensity, starting off calmly and building to a climactic finish. Right out of the gate on “Getaway,” Maurice White launches his verbal missive: “so you say you tried!?”— and he doesn’t let up. Only during the third verse does he seem to relent (“nothing exciting…it all seems boring”) before returning to his original urgency (“Make up your mind, which way to go about it!”).
Adding to the schizophrenia, If Maurice was the voice yelling Go!, Philip was the one asking whether you’d bothered to first check the road signs: “Watch for the signs that lead in the right direction. Not to heed them is a bad reflection,” he sings in the song’s second verse. After hearing all this, were we any more prepared to get away from this “troubled land” than we had been?
I know I wasn’t. In fact, as a ten-year-old kid in the summer of 1976, I wasn’t even sure what we were getting away from. All I knew was “I know we can, I know we can, I know we can, I know we can…”. That refrain, repeated during the first and third choruses as the music progressed through multiple chords, allowed me to understand that the urgency was message enough. Further enlightenment would come with age.
“Getaway” was written by Peter Cor Belenky and Bernard Taylor, and produced by Maurice White and Charles Stepney, the band’s frequent collaborator who died of a heart attack during the mixing of “Getaway” and the album’s other tracks.
Stepney’s death reportedly shook the band to its core, yet they finished Spirit and ultimately dedicated it to him (Maurice White wrote the title track in his honor).
Spirit had a great shot at becoming EWF’s third-consecutive No. 1 album after the earlier chart toppers That’s the Way of the World and Gratitude. Unfortunately for EWF, somebody named Stevie Wonder chose the very same day to release Songs in the Key of Life. Spirit had to settle for a No. 2 peak on the Billboard 200 that October.
But nothing could stop the momentum of “Getaway.” The band’s third million-selling single — of an eventual eight — spent one glorious week in August 1976 as America’s No. 1 soul song.
Fifty years later, nothing about it sounds like it has slowed down.
Listen to it here:
DJRob
DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff! You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.
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