My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #460-451

This week's selected songs span the early 1970s to the late 1980s...keep in mind that I'm in my early sixties!  Yet further down the line as this ascending personal top 500 list progresses you'll notice quite a few songs that are relatively recent.  But not this week...here's the next ten on the list...

460 I KNEW YOU WERE WAITING FOR ME...Aretha Franklin and George Michael
Back in the late 1980s Aretha Franklin was making a career comeback (remember Freeway of Love?) and George Michael had catapulted into superstardom after a string of hits with Wham and then as a solo artist.  I wouldn't have paired these two together with a song, but as it turned out their collaboration was perfect...simply beautiful with Aretha wailing her best at the end.  I recognized each of their individual musical talents but still never took to their songs...until this one came out.  It saddens me that both giants in the industry have passed on...George in 2016 and Aretha just last year...

459 THE BED'S TOO BIG WITHOUT YOU...The Police
More than anything, the Police...who produced five excellent albums from 1979 through 1983 and then broke up...were a reggae rock band, with the emphasis on "reggae".  This deep track from their second album Regatta de Blanc is perhaps their most reggae song...as well as being very relentless.  Slow-paced and dreamy, I detect a little of frontman Sting's jazz origins in his singing as well.  Definitely a great mood piece...

458 CHEESEBURGER IN PARADISE...Jimmy Buffett
A very happy 1978 tune during the summer of that year, Cheeseburger in Paradise is a celebration of dietary political incorrectness as Jimmy lays out the lyrics describing his big love..."I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and French fried potatoes, big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer, well good God almighty which way do I steer?".  I love cheeseburgers, too...the funny thing is I remember when I was about five and my grandmother visited us from Georgia.  We sat at the local Walgreens diner on Taft Street in Hollywood and she ordered a cheeseburger...I was revolted: how could she ruin a perfectly good hamburger put putting cheese on it?

457 W-O-L-D...Harry Chapin
This is one of those common examples of a song from my past conjuring up a vivid, associated memory that has nothing to with the song itself.  Chapin was a masterful storyteller with his songs...you may have heard Cat's in the Cradle or Taxi.  W-O-L-D was a minor radio hit late in 1973, but for some inexplicable reason I associate it with running the elevated dirt path, designed for horse riding, stretching west of my high school's (Nova in Davie) track alongside SW 39th Street for a few hundred feet. So I'm listening to this tune about a has-been middle-age disc jockey and I'm transported to my old running course...go try to figure the sometimes odd workings of the mind...

456 RAEL...the Who
Sometime back in the mid-1990s I visited Hyde and Zeke Records across from UF on University and found the Who's first four albums in vinyl...and bought them all at a steal.  Rael is the final track on their third, titled The Who Sell Out (and one of their very best albums) and is a precursor to the Tommy era with the actual Underture theme from that rock opera dominating the song's second part.  When I first heard the abrupt transformation midway through Rael I was impressed...still am.  There's another version of this song floating around, but my favorite is from the original album...

455 WE CAN WORK IT OUT...the Beatles
Reconciliation and working out problems together stand as the message of this Beatles singles song from the mid-sixties, the flip side of their hit Daytripper.  Unfortunately, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who composed it, ultimately didn't take their own words to heart and the band bitterly dissolved in 1970.  I always thought that they had a way out of their disagreements, but when you're in the middle of all the turmoil it's sometimes difficult to see that while you're holding on to your positions and "rights" as tightly as possible and looking upon the others as the "enemy".  Still, I always liked the song's message and the music, another example of Lennon and McCartney each giving their creative input in a collaborative spirit...

454 BULLET THE BLUE SKY...U2
There are two versions of this song...I much prefer the original studio recording from U2's 1987 Joshua Tree album over their live Rattle and Hum version.  It's a different kind of U2 song, painting a trance-like dystopian tour of a wild, out-of-control America as singer Bono tended to see our country at that time...before 9/11 and his subsequent embrace of the Bush administration. I tended to disagree with his politics back then...including his support of the Sandinistas...but this song is simply mesmerizing and I also believe that expressing one's criticisms of the United States doesn't necessarily mean that they hate my country...on the contrary I think folks like Bono and his band loved America and were fascinated by it...

453 CONVOY...C.W. McCall
Citizens band radio, originally designed for licensed operators acting in the public service especially for times of emergency, exploded on the popular scene in the mid-1970s as just about everyone had to get a CB radio in their car or truck as well as invent their own special "handle" and subscribe to the activity's special lingo.  McCall glorifies it all in Convoy, the movement's unofficial anthem, spouting out one incomprehensible term after another while playing the role of a truck driver in a massive convoy determined to get past the "Smokeys".  I wonder whether Burt Reynold's Smokey and the Bandit movie series would have ever happened had this song never come about...

452 MY SHARONA...the Knack
I really disliked this song when it began as a monster number #1 radio hit during the summer of 1979, but later came to realize that it played a positive role in helping to push back the suffocating presence of disco that had dominated radio for years and restore good ol' rock n' roll music to supremacy.  The guitar riff is unique and unforgettable...I'm not so keen on the lyrics, which to me border on the misogynistic, but the music grew on me through the years.  The Knack is an example of a band that laid out one great tune and weren't able to successfully follow up on it.  Still, God bless 'em for helping to bring down disco...

451 STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU...Stealers Wheel
I'm standing there after school one late afternoon in  April 1973 during high school track practice and somebody's got a radio there...loudly playing this song by Stealers Wheel. It's another example of a song that immediately provokes a specific, vivid memory.  Gerry Rafferty, who passed away eight years ago, was the lead singer in this band and later went on to solo success with Baker Street and a couple other singles.  I've always felt that he had the potential to become a major superstar but circumstances apparently conspired against this along with Rafferty's aversion to performing live.   In the mid-nineties Sheryl Crow had a hit in All I Wanna Do, which brazenly ripped off Stuck in the Middle With You...

Next week: #450-441...