My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #75-71

Here are my reactions to five more songs on my 500 all-time favorites list as it gradually approaches the very best...these here, though, are all "champions" as far as I am concerned...

75 EIGHT MILES HIGH...the Byrds
By early 1966 I already knew of the Byrds from the previous year with their big hits Hey Mister Tambourine Man and Turn Turn Turn that they performed on the Ed Sullivan show and which my local station WQAM would play...still, I kind of felt, even back then in my nine-year old mind, that they seemed too preachy.  But then Eight Miles High came out with its out-of-this-world guitar jamming and spaced-out lyrics and I was pleased to finally come across something of theirs I liked a lot.  Looking back, this was one of the very earliest psychedelic songs to come out, a year before the movement took off with the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album and the ensuing Summer of Love.  But although imitators of this genre now sound stale, Eight Miles High is the "real McCoy" and is as fresh today as it was 54 years ago...

74 TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME...Supertramp
This song of personal desolation appropriately was popular at the exact time of my own personal desolation: late in 1979, the worst part of the worst year in my life...sometimes you go through valleys, and then there are trenches.  It's from their wonderful Breakfast in America album and features Roger Hodgson's high-pitched, plaintive lead vocals and a killer harmonica and piano interaction.  The intro and closing to Take the Long Way Home are among the best ever that I've heard, and the lyrics tear at the heart: "When the day comes to settle down, who's to blame if you're not around...you took the long way home"...a truly chilling song...

73 STRANGLEHOLD...Ted Nugent
No, I don't dig Ted Nugent's politics...if others do then good for them, leave me out of it all.  Stranglehold, from 1974, is Nugent's signature masterpiece...although while the guitar magician works numerous wonders on it the lead singer is Derek St. Holmes.  Still, Nugent contributes his own singing as well in the unforgettable line near the end: "Sometimes you want to get higher, and sometimes you gotta start low...some people think they're gonna die someday: I got news, you never got to go".  When Stranglehold first came out I didn't like it...only years later did I learn to appreciate how it built up musically...

72 AMERICA...Simon and Garfunkel
In retrospect, Simon and Garfunkel's 1968 album Bookends to me was their best and one of the greatest in history...although at the time I knew little of it.  It wouldn't be until seven years later that I really took to America, one of its tracks.  The lyrics describe a Greyhound trip a young man and his girlfriend are taking cross-country, my favorite line being "Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces, she said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy.  I said be careful, his bowtie is really a camera". Although it came out years earlier, I closely associate S&G's America with what was going on with my life in late 1975...

71 BE GOOD JOHNNY...Men at Work
Men at Work was a talented Australian band from the early 1980s who came out with funny hits like Who Can It Be Now? and Down Under and even goofier videos to accompany them.  Be Good Johnny was a minor hit between their bigger ones, and although they also hammed it up here both in the song and video, it contained an underlying theme that strongly resonated with me then and still does: we're all different and each of us has a right to our own individuality...and furthermore it's up to each to us to assert that individuality without having to wait for anyone else's permission.  Pretty heady for a group that at the time was often derided as being too shallow.  Be Good Johnny's music was pretty awesome, too...

Next week: #70-66...