So I was surfing around the other day and I came across this Rolling Stone article from 2008 that listed their opinion of the Top 500 rock songs of all time. Which made me wonder how many of those songs were in my collection. Only one way to find out, so here we go. There will be a bunch of these.
1. Smells Like Teen Spirit – Tori Amos (#9, orig. Nirvana)
2. What’d I Say – Ray Charles (#10)
3. My Generation – The Who (#11)
4. Blowin’ In The Wind, A Female Perspective – The Chenille Sisters (#14, parody of Bob Dylan)
5. I Want To Hold Your Hand – The Beatles (#16)
6. Kodachrome/Maybellene – Simon and Garfunkel (“Maybellene”, #18, orig. Chuck Berry)
7. Born To Run – Bruce Springsteen (#21)
8. God Only Knows – Petra Haden (#25, orig. Beach Boys)
9. A Day In The Life – Big Daddy (#26, orig. Beatles)
10. Layla – Eric Clapton (#27, orig. Derek and The Dominoes)
OK, so a few points of interest. Obviously, I’m including covers. That gave me a lot more entries, and is more fun, too. In some cases, I will have multiple cover versions, and will note all the artists. If I have the original artist as well, I’ll just note that in the list but will comment on it after; in this case, I also have Frankie GOes To Hollywood’s version of “Born To Run”. In general, I will not list parodies like the one here, but as I didn’t settle on that rule till farther along, I left this one as is. You’re going to see a lot of Big Daddy, and a lot of The Beatles, as their two-disc Anthology is full of covers. Finally, the Clapton version of “Layla” is from his Unplugged CD. Any questions?
Entire song list report: Started with “The Queen and The Soldier”, by Ceili’s Muse. Finished with “The Rhythm Of Love”, by Yes, song #4222. That’s 113 songs this week. The last Q song was “Quick”, by Eddie From Ohio, the live version from their “Three Rooms” CD. The first R song was either “R.O.C.K. In The USA”, by John Mellencamp, or “Race Car Ya Yas”, by CAKE, your choice.
I went through the list to see what % of the songs I had of at least the Top 100 and was a bit surprised to see 39 of them on there. But a lot of that is due to having a healthy catalog of The Beatles and Elvis on hand. I didn’t think to include covers, which would add another handful – not the least of which is Tori Amos’ vast improvement on a grunge classic.
Unlikeliest inclusions are probably “Crazy” by Patsy Cline and “(Sittin on) the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding. The first is due to being raised on old-school country as a child (Cline was well before my time, but was a big influence on Loretta Lynn, who was very much ‘my time’ as a kid) and the Otis Redding song being a classic recorded a few weeks after my birthday – in addition to just being a great song.
Anyone want some new music from Bruce Springsteen?! November 16th, check out brucespringsteen.net for more info
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