Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Greatest Songs Ever, Definitively Ranked


1. The Long Run, Eagles
2. Daydream Believer, Monkees
3. December 1963, Four Seasons...
4. Be My Lover, Alice Cooper
5. Beast of Burden, Rolling Stones
6. Standing on the Moon, Grateful Dead
7. Still Doin' Time, George Jones
8. I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver, Merle Haggard
9. He Stopped Loving Her Today, George Jones
10. I Just Called to Say I Love You, Stevie Wonder


652. 10 minutes of an alarm clock going off
653. The Complete Michael Jackson Collection

That's it, that's the list!

Not Ranked: 'Brickhouse' by The Commodores, and 'Keep on Dancing' by The Gentrys and anything by Journey, Foreigner and Hall & Oates.


I had never heard of The Long Run by the Eagles until I started giving Ben baths at night.  While trying to wrangle him into the tub, I would listen to 96.1's 70s at 7 and that song would come up every so often.  In the past I had enjoyed Desperado and Take It Easy, but I was never a major fan of their work.  Well that all changed with The Long Run.  The music, the sound, the message of the song was right up my alley.  So of course, that pushed me to the rest of their music and eventually the History of the Eagles documentary that aired on Showtime.  That was clearly my favorite 3 hour documentary on the history of a single band that I've ever seen, and now the Eagles have edged out the Rolling Stones as my favorite musician(s).  All that, even with the band sharing a name with the shitty football team.




The Monkees were my first favorite band.  My mom likes to tell stories about me walking up and down the driveway listening to a Monkees tape on my old brown Fisher Price cassette player.  Later, my cousin Peg gave me a Monkees greatest hits vinyl record that I wore down to nothing.  They have a lot of great songs that I remember playing but none were better than Daydream Believer.

I also remember watching Jeopardy sometime around 1985 and the Final Jeopardy question was about music.  Literally all I knew was the Monkees and I yelled it out.  My mom thought I was just being cute, but it ended up being the answer.  I'll never forget it, I was so excited.  I've also never stopped watching Jeopardy since.

Be My Lover by Alice Cooper always reminds me of driving back our home town New Castle, Pennsylvania to visit family.  My dad has a habit of listening to the same songs on trips home over the years, so that one always pops up.  I might have issue with listening to most of the songs 1000 times, but never with that one. 

If you would have told me 10 or even five years ago that I would enjoy the Grateful Dead or any country musician like George Jones or Merle Haggard I would have strongly urged you to quit doing drugs/alcohol.  But one day I thumbed up a Johnny Cash song on Pandora and here we find ourselves.  Jones' He Stopped Loving Her Today is the greatest sung song of all time, if that makes sense.  No one is ever going to do a better job singing a song than he did with that.  And the Possum was probably drunk off his ass doing it at that.

The Grateful Dead is another anomaly.  All I ever heard was how great it was to hear them jam live.  I still don't think they sound all that great live, but I love the studio versions of certain songs.  That's sure to get me ostracized from the Dead Heads but it works for me. 

The Complete Michael Jackson collection can be completely panned in my mind and Brick House and I Keep On Dancing are my least favorite songs of all time, without question. 

If I can excise them from the catalogs of each and every radio station in perpetuity, the world can be a better place.

So that is the list of my favorite songs, and when I say my favorite, I mean the Greatest Songs Ever.  Even if my bozo friends on Facebook were universally horrified. 
 

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