Mark Farner, guitarist and songwriter, himself does not explicitly state what the song is about, and indeed prefers that listeners be able to use their own imaginations when listening to songs in general. Nor did the other band members have any real idea of what Farner was getting at; Drummer Don Brewer has said, "I think it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people." Mark Farner wrote the lyrics of this song before he wrote the music, which was opposite of how he usually composed most of his songs. He explained to Nightwatcher's House of Rock: I had gone to bed and prayed. Our mother had taught us kids to pray the 'Now I lay me down to sleep,' so I finished that part of the prayer, and put a P.S. at the end of it, and I asked the Creator to give me a song which would reach and touch the hearts of people that he wanted to touch. With love, because I just felt the love. I just felt for my good friends, my high school buddies who had died in Vietnam. I saw their parents, and I saw their families, and I think that's what inspired it. It came in the middle of night to me as words, and I didn't even realize it was a song, because I write words all the time. In fact, my wife has a file that she has where she's picked up napkins and notes here and there that have all these words that come out. At least we have a place to start putting them together, like a puzzle. But I grabbed those words in the morning, because I was playing my guitar in the kitchen of the farm. I was sipping on my coffee, had my feet kicked up in the chair, and I had my flattop guitar. As I was strumming the intro chords to 'I'm Your Captain,' I went, 'Hey man, maybe this is a song.' So I went and got the words, and started constructing the song out of it. I took it to rehearsal that day and the guys said, 'Man, this song's a hit.' And, lo and behold they were right. Approaching the rest of the band, drummer Don Brewer and bassist Mel Schacher, Farner had the "I'm Your Captain" part of the song fairly completed. The idea of extending it came about as they rehearsed it the first few times. Don Brewer, in a Songfacts interview, explained: We used to rehearse at a place called The Musicians Union Hall in Flint, Michigan. We used to work all of our stuff out there. Mark came in one day with basically the beginning of the song, the 'I'm your captain part.' We always worked out everything with a jam - he would have an idea, somebody would have an idea for a bass part of whatever, and we'd just kind of work on these things and jam out. For a day or two we worked on this song and it just didn't go any place, that was about as far as we could get with it. One day, coming out of a jam that we were working on, we fell into that half time part, and that's when Mark came up with the lyrics, 'I'm getting closer to...' So we had that, and we all felt, 'Oh man, that's great, we'll put that piece together with that, and that's going to work,' then we said, 'What are we going to do from there?' So we got into the guitar part where it breaks into full time again. Then we had a brainstorming session, 'What are we going to do for the rest of the song?' At the time, rock bands had experimented with orchestras, and we said, 'Let's put an orchestra on this thing, we'll just play endlessly, and we'll get Tommy Baker, our friend down in Cleveland, to write the score for it, and we'll put an orchestra on it. It was a new thing for us, kind of new for the day - there hadn't been too many bands using orchestras. When we recorded the song in Cleveland, we didn't have the orchestra there, we didn't know what the final outcome was going to be, we hadn't even recorded the string arrangements, we just recorded the end of the song on and on and on over and over, knowing they were going to come in and put an orchestra on it later. When we finally heard the song about two weeks later, it just blew us all away. It was a religious experience. Inspired by groups like The Moody Blues, they came upon the idea of using an orchestra, and hired Tommy Baker, an arranger and trumpet player who was working on the Cleveland television series Upbeat. He suggested they extend the ending so that his orchestral score would have space to develop in, so the band extended the jam on it. Producer Terry Knight brought in the Cleveland Orchestra to record it. The band members never heard the full version until Knight played it for them back in Flint. Farner nearly cried when he heard it, and Brewer has said of their reactions, "We were just like, 'Wow!'" and "Oh my God, it was magnificent." Some stations played an edited version that was cut to about 5 minutes, eliminating most of the fadeout. This truncated version of the song was a modest hit single when first released, but the track achieved greater airplay on progressive FM rock radio stations as they tended to play longer, more involved tracks. It has become a classic rock staple and has appeared on several audience-selected lists as one of the best rock songs of all time. In 1988, the listeners of New York rock station WNEW-FM ranked it the 71st best song of all time, while twenty years later in 2008, New York classic rock station Q104.3's listeners ranked it the 112th best song of all time and by 2015 listeners of the same station had voted it up to being the 9th best of all time. We weren't concerned with FM radio, we knew FM radio could play 7 or 8-minute songs. It wasn't a matter of being confined to anything, so we knew it could get airplay - that wasn't a restriction. Capitol wanted to cut it and do an edited version for a single, and we said, 'No, you can't edit that song, just leave it alone.' In promotion of the song the band bought a 60-foot Times Square billboard advertising Grand Funk’s 1970 "Closer to Home" album that cost an estimated $100,000. The stunt unexpectedly benefited from a New York City workers strike that caused the billboard to stay up several months after it should have been taken down.