My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #350-341

What a joy it is listening to these great old songs...and old most of them are.  Even the two most recent ones from todays' entries are 14-15 years old...man, does time pass quickly or what? Well, here are my comments about the next ten from my top 500 favorites..

350 MY WIFE...the Who
The Who's bass guitarist John Entwistle usually contributed a song or two for each of their albums...in this respect he was like the Beatles' George Harrison, although Harrison's music was by far consistently better.  Entwistle's songs usually had lyrical themes that were a little off-center, like for example Boris the Spider and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In My Wife the singer finds himself in trouble with his better half after he drank too much one night and got thrown into jail...and now she's coming after him!  A little sad and very funny...Entwistle not only played bass and sang on it but also performed the piano and horn parts: definitely his best work ever...you can hear it on their 1971 Who's Next album.  Sadly, John passed away in 2002...

349 ROCKIN' IN THE FREE WORLD... Neil Young
This was one of my favorite songs in 1989, the year after George Bush (before needing to add "H.W." to his name) won a bitterly fought election for president against Michael Dukakis.  I think the dirtiness of the campaign must have angered Young, who co-opted two of Bush's campaign slogans as well as his war service record in the song's line, "We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man, we got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand".  Since I had wanted Dukakis to win, I flowed with the lyrics...later I discovered that, at least in the media, America only seemed to have a terrible homeless problem whenever a "heartless" Republican happened to be president...

348 WALKING WITH A GHOST...Tegan and Sara
In 2004 my music listening was narrowly defined and clear: alternative rock, for which I got my share by listening to my local station WHHZ/100.5 "The Buzz".  Strong in its rotation during this time was Walking With a Ghost, a very catchy tune with limited lyrics and a strong feeling of abruptness about it ...Tegan and Sara are identical twins who made a string of successful albums together.  Their songs seem to be largely about relationships and the problems arising from them...this song was about one that went to "ghost" stage...

347 SOMEONE SAVED MY LIFE TONIGHT...Elton John
It takes a great deal of skill to record a very slow song and get away with it...perhaps the slowest one of all time (that was worth listening to, that is) was Led Zeppelin's The Rain Song.  Elton John put a lot of feeling into this piece, which came out in 1975 but which for some reason I didn't really get into until the following year...so I tend to associate it with what was going on with my life down in South Florida during 1976, mostly pretty good stuff...

346 I CAN'T GO FOR THAT...Hall and Oates
Without getting into the details, I was in a very positive, constructive stage of my life during the closing months of 1981 and when this awesome song by Hall and Oates was released as a single during that period I quickly bonded with it...it's a song about boundaries and being reasonable with others without letting them walk all over you.  The whole song, with the instrumentation, lyrics, and lead and backup singing clicks together as a masterpiece of pop music production.  I still dig it 38 years later...

345 THE BOXER...Simon and Garfunkel
Although The Boxer, from Simon and Garfunkel's great and final album Bridge Over Troubled Waters, came out in 1969, it was the following year when I grew to fully appreciate what a beautiful song it was...the summer of 1970 always brings sweet memories and feelings to me and since we owned the album it was easy to just slide it out of its sleeve and lay the phonograph needle on this wonderful track over and over again.  My favorite line? "Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest"...

344 DECATUR...Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens' 2005 album Illinois is, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest albums of the 21st century...heck, let's just say of all time.  It was the follow-up to his excellent 2003 Michigan album...Stevens had resided in both states and decided to pay tribute to them with songs about their locales and history while filtering through them autobiographical and spiritual themes.  Decatur is about a city in Illinois and you get a little history lesson listening to it...but it's also about the singer's childhood and serves at the end as a praise song.  Sufjan Stevens is a multi-instrumentalist and featured banjo and harmonica on this folksy, clever song...

343 I GET BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM BY FRIENDS...the Beatles
I got used to listening to this second track from the Fab Four's 1967 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album as combined with the opening song, titled after the album...it's logical since that track's ending introduces this song, with Ringo Starr as "the one and only Billy Shears".  Starr then delivers a stunning lead vocal, alternating his lines with the other Beatles harmonically posing him questions: "Do you need anybody? I need somebody to love.  Could it be anybody? I want somebody to love."  Although Ringo sang less on the Beatles' songs than the other three, I find that his voice tended to more resemble other rock singers than did Paul, John, or George...

342 THE GREEN DOOR...Jim Lowe
Although The Green Door was originally a hit back in my birth year of 1956, its popularity endured and I often heard it played in the 1960s on my local Miami rock station 560/WQAM.  The piano work on it is upbeat, jazzy, and a little ragtime...apparently meant to mimic the music played in the illegal "speakeasies" during the Prohibition era where alcohol...and partying...was furnished but only to those who could gain admission.  The singer here is annoyed by all the noise going on next to his room, but when he bangs on their "green" door, they won't let him in.  Good, we got a great song out of his rejection.  Jim Lowe probably had a lot of good music in his catalog...maybe I should check it out...

341 WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES...the Doobie Brothers
This song was a big hit throughout 1979 and rightfully won the Grammy Award for best song the following year...and it was my own personal "song of the year" for 1979 as I lived through it, not one of the most pleasant of years for me, to put it lightly.  Since by this time Michael McDonald had pretty much transformed this resilient and talented band, it's hard to connect his songs with their output from the early-to-mid 1970s.  But to me they're all good, and while enjoying McDonald's singing on What a Fool Believes I also dug the lyrics: "What a fool believes, the wise man has the power to reason away" is brilliant...

Next week: #340-331...