My All-Time Top 500 Favorite Songs: #430-421

This week's slice of my 500 all-time favorite songs is a blast from the distant past: all but the last entry are from the sixties and seventies.  Half are from Britain, half are American acts.  And the opening song below belongs to its own special category: songs with extremely long titles, something I might look into down the line on this blog...

430 EVERYBODY'S GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE EXCEPT FOR ME AND MY MONKEY...the Beatles
Back in the early Beatlemania years they'd come out from time to time with a strong rocker with Lennon screaming his lungs out, songs like Bad Boy, Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Money, Slow Down, Rock n' Roll Music, and Twist and Shout...many of them covers of other artists.  This track from disc two of their 1968 "White Album" would have fit in nicely with those, only 2:25 long but strikingly intense, abruptly following on the album the languid McCartney song Mother Nature's Son.  This would be a good wake-up song on somebody's alarm...

429 LOVES ME LIKE A ROCK...Paul Simon
Recorded with the gospel singing group Dixie Hummingbirds as backup vocals, this song has an evangelistic flavor to it while the ultimate punchline is directed squarely at then-President Nixon, who at the time was thick in the middle of the Watergate scandal.  I associate it with running massive quantities of laps in the early evening on the one-eighth-mile track at Hollywood's Apollo Middle School, very close to my home, in August and September of 1973...it's a very catchy tune that stuck in my mind as a never-ending song while my feet pounded the pavement and around and around I went...

428 I'M A LOSER...the Beatles
My parents were big Beatles fans in the early years and bought nearly all of their albums through Revolver as they came out...this song is from their American-released album Beatles '65 and I've heard it countless times on our phonograph.  It's clearly a song the band worked hard together on, with John singing very compelling lyrics that reveal his own vulnerability..."and I'm not what I appear to be"...as he masks his anguish over a lost love...

427 DON'T BRING ME DOWN...Electric Light Orchestra
In between Electric Light Orchestra's brilliant classical/rock fusings of their earlier years and their ill-advised venture into crass disco hits stands this pure, classic rock song from 1979...no strings or dance beats here.  I wish this was the direction that Jeff Lynne had taken the band...I think their popularity would have endured longer than it did if they had steered away from the disco crap.  Don't Bring Me Down, for some reason, has a Dave Clark Five sound to it that gives me a sense of nostalgia for that simpler, more direct kind of rock from the mid-sixties...

426 KENTUCKY RAIN...Elvis Presley
Kentucky Rain I associate with the spring of 1970...I was only thirteen then but was formulating much of what my personality now constitutes, including a cynical but realistic view of basic human nature... not that I knew this at the time.  Many of the songs from this period are deeply etched within me, and Elvis...no longer the dashing rock n' roll rebel from the fifties and not yet the sickly Las Vegas caricature in years to come...delivered what I believe to be his sweetest and best performance with this single...

425 MR. ROBOTO...Styx
The radio DJs didn't know what to make of this strange song which hit the airwaves in early 1983. Lead singer Dennis DeYoung apparently wanted it to be part of an onstage rock opera that the rest of the group...especially guitarist Tommy Shaw...objected to, leading to the group's breakup for a few years until they later reunited, seeing the Styx trademark as a cash cow they could make a lot of money touring under.  I thought Mr. Roboto was a kind of commentary on the fear then sweeping parts of the country that the Japanese, with their automatized manufacturing techniques, were responsible for the recession and loss of American manufacturing jobs at that time.  Doomo arigatoo, Mr. Roboto...I couldn't get enough of listening to it then and I still like it now...too bad DeYoung couldn't put a brake on the theatrics and keep the group together...

424 DON'T STOP...Fleetwood Mac
When I first moved to Gainesville, Florida in the late summer of 1977 this was the big non-disco song I liked to listen to on the radio.  What a great song of optimism, not so different in character than Florence and the Machine's Dog Days are Over, which appeared earlier on this list. It's also the first Fleetwood Mac song I would take a strong liking to, although it certainly wouldn't be the last...more from this talented band to come...

423 MY SWEET LADY...John Denver
Some artist whose name I can't recall had a minor hit with his cover of John Denver's song during the spring of 1974...I moderately liked it.  But Denver's original version from his 1971 Poems, Prayers and Promises album is by far the better.  It's a tenderly sung, slow love ballad with the closing words "and I swear to you our time has just begun"...

422 ISN'T LIFE STRANGE...the Moody Blues
The Moody Blues were one of those rare groups in which everybody in it had a hand at composing their music.  John Lodge wrote and sang lead on this one, off their 1972 Seventh Sojourn album at the time of its release in the spring of that year. Also, their Nights in White Satin, from back in 1968, was resurgent at the same time and played a lot on the radio...during a very pensive period in my fifteen-year old life, the last half of the tenth grade in high school.  I associate Isn't Life Strange with this time when it never seemed to stop raining, both on the outside and the inside...

421 I WILL WAIT...Mumford and Sons
And here's a song that's much more recent...I picked it as one of my favorite songs of 2014 after hearing it played quite a lot on my local alternative radio station.  My estimation since then has only grown of this song from a British rock band, a piece whose lyrics and singing style might fit on an old Chuck Wagon Gang gospel music album and whose instrumentation, complete with wild banjo picking, would stand up well on the Grand Ole Opry stage in Nashville...yet it was a big alternative rock hit!

Next week: songs #420-411...