My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #160-151

Let's see...it's Monday today, so here's my next ten-song installment in my weekly-unraveling list of my 500 all-time favorites.  These ten are all from the last century and thus give away my advancing age...here are my reactions to them...

160 FALL OF THE PEACEMAKERS...Molly Hatchet
Not generally a fan of this Southern rock band, Molly Hatchet to me was spot-on with this 1983 protest song against the madness of senseless murder...focusing on the tragedy of John Lennon's assassination in December, 1980.  The song's title should have been "Stop the Madness", for this mantra is repeated a number of times throughout its first half...it concludes with a beautiful, lengthy guitar jam reminiscent of Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1974 classic Free Bird.  Fall of the Peacemakers is a bittersweet tribute to an individual...as flawed as he was...whose music I loved as I grew up...

159 OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY...Led Zeppelin
Although I had previously heard this track from Led Zeppelin's 1972 Houses of the Holy album a number of times on album rock radio back when I lived in South Florida, it wasn't until I was working in the late 1980s at the downtown Gainesville post office as a letter sorting machine operator...sitting for long stretches keying mail as my Sony Walkman headset radio was tuned to Rock-104...that I began to take a real liking to it.  This song would eventually spur me to listen to the band's box set that was released and played on the radio in late 1990, resulting in my near-fanatical following of a group that had disbanded ten years earlier...

158 DOCTOR ROBERT...the Beatles
In the USA the 1966 song Doctor Robert was on the Beatles' Yesterday and Today album...for most of the rest of the world it was on Revolver.  No matter, I was nine-going-on-ten at the time and fortunate to have as parents big-time Beatles fans...they snapped up both albums and played them a lot at home.  At the time Doctor Robert wasn't one of my favorites but sometimes when you grow older you can hear more in a song...musically it was a great vocal collaboration between John and Paul while the lyrics covertly speak of a shady "medical" figure always ready and willing to supply drugs to his wealthy clients...

157 WISH YOU WERE HERE...Pink Floyd
Widely considered to be a tribute to Pink Floyd's original lead singer and creative lyricist Syd Barrett, who suffered a debilitating mental breakdown seven years earlier that was aggravated by drug abuse, this title track to their 1975 Wish You Were Here album has David Gilmour playing one of the greatest guitar pieces ever while singing unforgettable lines such as "Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?" While song co-writer and bassist Roger Waters had reportedly stated that the lyrics were open for interpretation, I just enjoy sitting back and grooving to the song's mood and virtuosity...

156 SECRET MESSAGES...Electric Light Orchestra
When ELO released their Secret Messages album in 1983 they had every reason to expect another success in a long series of successes, but it didn't chart as well as its predecessors...including the title song, ushering in this great band's decline.  Still, I always liked Secret Messages, and the very campy video accompanying it is unintentionally funny.  Jeff Lynne is there as always, singing to a danceable beat with words like "Those secret messages that spill into the air from far away, so far away...a flowing river of illusion running with confusion, never gone, it goes on and on"...I love mysterious lyrics...

155 WHAT'S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH?...R.E.M
Back in the summer of 1994 I was eagerly anticipating the release of R.E.M's new album Monster, which I expected to be another craftily-produced, polished work along the lines of its predecessors Out of Time and Automatic for the People.  Instead, what came out was more of a hard rock album with raucous, dissonant songs prevailing.  What's the Frequency, Kenneth?,  whose title was based on a madman's rantings when he attacked newscaster Dan Rather one day, was the first release from Monster and is dominated by an intense, constant guitar background...I was shocked at first to hear it but later embraced it and many of the album's other tracks, including another that I have ranked higher on my list...

154 TIME IS ON MY SIDE...the Rolling Stones
One of the Stones' early singles hits...from 1964...this was a slow blues-based song, as were many of theirs at this time, with a really soulful lead guitar by Keith Richards reminding me a little of B.B. King and Mick Jagger providing his colorful, ragged singing.  They recorded two versions of this song...I preferred the earlier one but the later version became the standard one played on oldies radio and their greatest hits albums...

153 LIVE TO TELL...Madonna
For the three years before Live to Tell came out in 1986, Madonna had built her exploding career around catchy dance tunes with suggestive lyrics and her often just-as-suggestive videos.  But this song was entirely different...it's a slow, pensive ballad showcasing her singing range and ability.  Back then I picked it as my "song of the year" and it is still wildly out of place in contrast to her other works during this period...although the following year I did like her La Isla Bonita, I wouldn't again be impressed by her music until more than a decade later...

152 WE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE...the Animals
This iconic song from 1965 is my favorite from this Newcastle, England-based blues-rock group, that is before they broke up and frontman Eric Burdon later formed a new "Animals" band around himself.  I've read that it was very popular among soldiers serving in the Vietnam War, for obvious reasons, but it has a universal appeal to anyone who finds themselves stuck in an oppression, negative situation: that's certainly been the case for me.  Like Song #154 above, they made two versions: the original singles release is much grittier and better with Burdon delivering an epic vocal performance.  Unfortunately, unlike the Beatles and Rolling Stones, the Animals weren't adept at writing their own songs and were largely left to cover others' compositions, this one included...

151 TOO MUCH TIME ON MY HANDS...Styx
Within the American progressive rock band Styx during their heydays in the late 70's and early 80's there always seemed to be a sort of creative, directional tension between guitarist Tommy Shaw and their main lead singer Dennis DeYoung...the former more "rock" and the latter more "progressive".  With Too Much Time on My Hands from 1981, we get a great rock song with Shaw belting out the lead vocals.  It's also very applicable to a lot of boredom-prone people in our current COVID-19 era of shutdown and stay-at-home policies...

Next week: #150-141...