N.W.A. – "Straight Outta Compton" (1988)

You are now about to witness

The strength of street knowledge!

In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine released a list entitled “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” which was based on  the votes of selected musicians, critics, and other industry members.  The Crystals’ 1963 hit, “Da Doo Ron Ron,” was #114 on that list.

Rolling Stone revised their rankings in 2010, adding 26 new songs and dropping 26 others.  “Da Doo Ron Ron” was one of those dropped.

Last week, the magazine issued another revised “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list.  “Da Doo Run Run” was added back to that list, coming in at #366.

I don’t care whether you love “Da Doo Ron Ron” or hate it.  But ranking it as the 113th best song of all time in 2004, deciding it doesn’t belong in the top 500 in 2010, and then restoring it to 366th place in 2021 makes you wonder whether Rolling Stone has a clue.

Yours truly has taken a close look at the updated rankings, and I can tell you that Rolling Stone mos’ definitely does NOT have a clue.

*     *     *     *     *

Before we get into the 2021 rankings, let’s first take a look at the original 2004 “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” (which really should be the “500 Greatest Records of All Time”).  

Here are the top ten records from the 2004 list:

1.  Bob Dylan – “Like a Rolling Stone”

2.  Rolling Stones – “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”

3.  John Lennon – “Imagine”

4.  Marvin Gaye – “What’s Going On”

5.  Aretha Franklin – “Respect” 

6.  Beach Boys – “Good Vibrations”

7.  Chuck Berry – “Johnny B. Goode”

8.  Beatles – “Hey Jude”

9.  Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

10.  Ray Charles – “What I’d Say”

If you ask me, that’s a pretty good top ten, despite the fact that it leaves out the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun,” which Rolling Stone ranks at . . . (gasp) . . . #122???  (ARE YOU ON DRUGS, ROLLING STONE?)

One thing I respect about that top ten is that every record on it is by a Hall of Fame-quality artist.  The body of work of each of these artists is quite impressive – there are no one-hit wonders here.

*     *     *     *     *

 The biggest omission from the top ten is probably Led Zeppelin – “Dazed and Confused” would be my pick – but I’ll gladly sacrifice Led Zeppelin in exchange for Rolling Stone’s leaving Elvis Presley, the Grateful Dead, and Bruce Springsteen out of the top ten.  (Standing ovation for Rolling Stone!)

Some people won’t agree with the decision to put “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the top ten, but it’s the only record on the list that was recorded after 1971.  While I love the “golden decade” of pop music (1964-1973) as much as the next guy, you need to throw at least one bone to generation X, or generation Y, or whoever it was who were teenagers in the nineties.  

If you wanted to accomplish that by replacing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with a rap record, I’m all for that – that would not only address the sixties-centric nature of the list but also acknowledge the significance of the hiphop genre (which was much greater than that of grunge).  

My replacement for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would be “Straight Outta Compton,” by N.W.A.  (The four members of N.W.A. all became platinum-selling solo artists after the group broke up – it was a supergroup in reverse.)

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The one record that I would eliminate from the 2004 top ten in a New York minute is John Lennon’s “Imagine.”  

I have never understood why everyone thinks “Imagine” is so great.  The music is terrible, but most people don’t care about the music – it’s the song’s lyrics that make so many people worship “Imagine.”   

If you ask me, the lyrics suck.  The author of the aptly-titled blog, Essays on Sucking, agrees:

“Imagine” is [Lennon’s] most famous song, a song I hear in grocery stores and laundromats, a song whose legacy has lived on thanks to Yoko Ono, who acts like Gandhi wrote the lyrics and has constructed a monument of bullsh*t and light to it [in Iceland]. . . .

Imagine Peace Tower 
(Reykjavik, Iceland)

“Imagine” could be the anthem of the ineffectual hippie movement, the people who “broke down barriers” by taking acid, listening to trippy music, and being promiscuous. The song fetishizes thoughts and fantasies and ignores direct action. 

The song doesn’t advocate any action, it doesn’t detail any specific problems or solutions.  It just sort of drifts along and says, “Hey, wouldn't it be great if things were great?” 

Most of Rolling Stone’s readership consists of aging hippies, of course, so we may need to include a record that appeals to them.  How about “Bridge Over Troubled Water” instead of “Imagine”?  Can all you aging hippies live with “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”?  (It’s an infinitely better song than “Imagine.”)

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As noted above, Rolling Stone first revised their “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” in 2010, adding about two dozen songs from the oughts to the list.  But they didn’t make a single change to the top 25 in 2010.

By contrast, the magazine essentially tore the 2004 list up and started the ranking process over from scratch in 2021.    Half of the records in the 2021 top ten – including #2 and #3 – didn’t make the 2004 top ten.  “Like a Rolling Stone” fell from #1 to #4, and the Rolling Stones and Beach Boys dropped out of the top ten altogether. 

Instead of tearing Rolling Stone a new one over their latest updating in this post, I’m going to wait a few days and let my bile levels build up first.  But fear not: the new “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” will feel the wrath of 2 or 3 lines very soon.  (You’ll want to make sure the children have left the room before opening and reading that post.)

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“Straight Outta Compton” was the first track on N.W.A.’s debut album of the same name, which was released in 1988.  It became the first “gangsta rap” to go platinum despite receiving almost no radio play.  (Check out the lyrics to the album’s tracks and you’ll understand why that was.)

Click here to watch the official music video for “Straight Outta Compton” – which was banned by MTV.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Little Big Town – "Boondocks" (2005)

You can take it or leave it

This is me

This is who I am!

One of the many books I requested from my public library based on the late Larry McMurtry’s recommendation was Wallace Stegner’s memoir, Wolf Willow, which McMurtry called “a wonderful book.”  (He was right.)

Stegner was born in 1909.  He spent much of his childhood in a tiny and isolated farming town in Saskatchewan called Eastend.  

McMurtry grew up several decades later in Archer City, an equally obscure plains town in the Texas Panhandle that is 1500 miles from Eastend as the crow flies but probably wasn’t all that different culturally.  I’m sure Wolf Willow spoke to him in a very personal sense.  

From Wolf Willow:

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.  I can say to myself that a good part of my private and social character, the kinds of scenery and weather and people and humor I respond to, the prejudices I wear like dishonorable scars . . . the virtues I respect and the weaknesses I condemn, the code I try to live by, the special ways I fail at it and the kind of shame I feel when I do . . . have been in good part scored into me by that little womb-village and the lovely lonely exposed prairie of the homestead.

I grew up in a very different environment – the small city in Missouri where I spent my childhood in the fifties and sixties was very far removed from the isolated frontier village where Stegner lived a hundred years ago – but like Stegner, I know where I am from.

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More from Wolf Willow: 

Once I was comparing my background with that of an English novelist friend.  Where he had been brought up in London, taken from the age of four to the Tate and the National Gallery, sent traveling on the Continent for every school holiday, taught French and German and Italian, given access to bookstores, libraries, and British Museums, made familiar from infancy with the conversation of the eloquent and the great, I had grown up in this dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere, utterly without painting, without sculpture, with architecture, almost without music and theatre, without conversation or languages or travel or stimulating instruction, without libraries or museums bookstores, almost without books.  

My hometown wasn’t a “dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere.”  Unlike Eastend, it had a good public library that I took full advantage of, and there were a number of music teachers who taught piano and violin and other instruments – almost all of my childhood friends learned to play a musical instrument.  We also had movies and radio and television, which exposed us to the wider world.

Wallace Stegner

But while Joplin wasn’t as far culturally from New York City and Chicago as the prairie town where Stegner grew up, we still had a cultural inferiority complex.  Joplin had an airport serviced by commercial airlines and was situated on a major interstate highway, but I never flew anywhere until I was almost 18, and my family rarely used that highway to travel anywhere more than an hour or two away.

I read constantly.  But reading about England or France or Italy isn’t the same thing as being there.  And reading a Shakespeare or George Bernard Shaw play isn’t the same as seeing that play performed.

There are still dozens – perhaps hundreds – of place names and other proper nouns that I can spell and define, but am reluctant to speak in public out of fear that I will mispronounce them, which would reveal to my more sophisticated friends and associates that I’m a redneck hick.  (You don’t learn how to pronounce French aphorisms or the names of Tolstoy characters by reading books.)

*     *     *     *     *

Despite his very humble beginnings, Wallace Stegner eventually got a Ph.D., and taught at Harvard and Stanford.  He wrote a dozen-odd novels, a dozen-odd nonfiction books, and several collections of essays and short stories, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a National Book Award, and many other honors.

I’m guessing he was always of two minds about people like that English novelist friend.  On the one hand, he was probably somewhat intimidated by their sophistication and politesse.  But on the other hand, I’m sure he was fiercely proud and would have been happy to invite anyone who condescended to him to step outside.

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“Boondocks” was a 2005 hit for the very successful country music group, Little Big Town.

Little Big Town

It’s a great song, but I wish an edgier artist than Little Big Town had recorded it.  Nothing against them, but I think the song would from benefit if it was performed by someone who sounded like he had a big chip on his shoulder – someone who would happily take a swing at you if you gave him an excuse.  That would take the record to a whole ’nother level.

Click here to see the official music video for “Boondocks.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Sløtface – "New Year, New Me" (2020)

I keep holding

Books I’ll never read

As you can see from the screenshot below, I currently have 44 items checked out from my public library – ranging in length from the 126 large-fonted and generously-spaced pages  of Susan Sontag’s book about war, Regarding the Pain of Others, to the mind-boggling 1402 fine-print pages of an unabridged edition of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

Those numbers somewhat overstate the quantity of reading material that I’m hoarding.  For example, I’ve checked out several children’s books to read to my grandkids when they visit, plus I have a few DVDs of movies that aren’t currently available on Netflix.  

Also, there’s some duplication among my checkouts.  When I’m trying to get my hands on a new book, I will usually put a hold on its Kindle version and large-print edition as well as reserving the regular print edition of the book.  On occasion two or all three versions of the same book become available at the same time. 

So my 44 checked-out items represent about three dozen different adult titles.

*     *     *     *     *

Is there any chance that I will actually read all three dozen of these books?

Of course not.  I freely admit that even though it is now possible to hold on to them almost indefinitely.

The nominal time you are allowed to hold on a printed library book in my county is three weeks, but it is possible to renew a checkout up to ten times.  And our library has stopped levying late fines since covid-19 reared its ugly head – so there’s no real force behind return dates. 

By the way, e-books are supposed to disappear automatically from my Kindle on the due date.  But I’ve learned that I can hold on to a Kindle book indefinitely if I put it into “airplane” mode after downloading the book – scheduled deletions take place via the internet, and they can’t happen if you never connect your device to the internet.  (Which is why the screenshot above indicates that I have zero checkouts on my Kindle – the library thinks all those books have been returned, but I outsmarted them!)

*     *     *     *     *

Given that I almost certainly will not read that 1402-page unabridged Life of Johnson, why did I check it out?  Not to mention four Wallace Stegner novels (plus some works of nonfiction by that author), and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, and Susan Sontag’s essays, and Louis Menand’s weighty The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America?  (Just typing the title of that last book makes me want to take a nap.)

There’s something abnormal about my behavior.  Having so many library books at once is clearly a form of hoarding, and must be the result of some deep-seated psychological need.

I suspect it has something to do with my growing up in an environment of scarcity.  My family was not poor by any means – I never missed a meal, or was without suitable clothing and shoes – but my grew-up-in-the-Depression parents were extremely frugal, and were reluctant to spend money on anything other than the necessities of life . . . which certainly didn’t include books.

*     *     *     *     *

The late Larry McMurtry wrote several dozen books (including Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove) during his lifetime but enjoyed reading more than writing.  He became a very successful used and rare book dealer – at one time his inventory consisted of some 400,000 volumes.  More importantly for my purposes, he had a personal collection of 20,000 books in his home.

Larry McMurtry

When McMurtry was in his seventies, he wrote three short autobiographical books – Books (about his career as a rare book dealer), Literary Life (about his career as a prolific novelist and nonfiction author), and Hollywood (about the many film adaptations of his books and the many screenplays he wrote).  

In the course of his life, McMurtry read an astonishing number of books, and he mentions quite a few of them in his memoirs.  Most of the dozens of library books sitting in my home or residing digitally on my Kindle are books that McMurtry endorsed – not only the writings of Stegner, Sontag, and Waugh mentioned above but also the novels and short stories of John Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon (all of whom I was infatuated with when I was an English major at Rice).

*     *     *     *     *

McMurtry grew up in a tiny Texas town, miles away from the nearest bookstore, but he never bothered getting a library card:

I didn’t want books I had to bring back.  I wanted books to keep, books that I could consider . . . before I read them.  My approach to books was slow – I might seize them quickly but wait awhile to read them.  War and Peace, for example . . . . I kept it around, looked at it, puzzled over the names, dipped in here and there, a process that went on for perhaps a year before I sat down and read the book.

From the first I was attracted to the look and feel of books – I liked to enter . . . the aura of reading, which involved mental preparation and was a way, I guess, of savoring the experience ahead.  This time of anticipation is one of the pleasures of having a personal library.

I understand how McMurtry felt.  For example, I bought the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell years ago.  I love Orwell, and I love seeing those four volumes on my bookshelf – even though I’ve never torn open the cellophane wrapper that set of books came in, much less read them:

But I became a denizen of my local public library at a very young age.  My hometown didn’t have a real bookstore, so I got in the habit of getting books from the library rather than buying them.  

That habit has persisted until today.  I’ve bought a lot of records in my day – libraries never had much in the way of rock albums – but own relatively few books.  When a book is easily available from the public library, why buy it?

*     *     *     *     *

I’ve written a lot about Larry McMurtry since his death in March, and I’m probably not done with him yet.

McMurtry went to the same college I attended – Rice University in Houston – and he taught creative writing at Rice my freshman year.  I was very aware of McMurtry because the movie adaptation of his book, The Last Picture Show, was released to widespread acclaim when I was at Rice.  

But I never met McMurtry.  While I took creative writing as a senior, I was more occupied with basic classes my freshman year.  And it would never have occurred to me to drop by his office for a chat.

By the time I graduated from law school and moved to Washington, DC, McMurtry had opened a used and rare bookstore called “Booked Up” there.  I passed by his bookstore a number of times, but never went in and struck up a conversation with him.  That would have seemed like bad form to me – akin to seeing a famous athlete or musician at a restaurant and interrupting his dinner to ask him to pose for a selfie with me.

Now that McMurtry’s dead, I have to let go of the fantasy I had about meeting him some day, talking to him about books and movies, and learning that we shared so many opinions that we became friends.  

I have a lot of other fantasies.  Most of them involve women who aren’t dead, but might as well be for purposes of those fantasies.

*     *     *     *     *

Sløtface is a Norwegian band that formed in 2012.  According to Billboard, their music has “won praise from the blogosphere and tastemaker music press for their brash mix of nagging pop hooks and garage punk aesthetic.” 

Sløtface used to call itself Slutface but changed their name in hopes of avoiding what they have called “social media censorship.”

Sløtface

“We have in no way changed our political and feminist message,” the group said when they adopted the new moniker in 2016.  “We just hope to reach more people with our lyrics and message by changing one silly letter of our name and thereby avoiding censorship.”

I don’t know about that, but I do know that I couldn’t pass up a song that had lyrics that were so perfectly suited for this post.  

Click here to listen to “New Year, New Me,” which was released on the band’s 2020 album, Sorry for the Late Reply.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Great White – "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" (1989)

I got there in the nick of time

Before he got his hands across your state line

One of the characters in the novel I’m currently reading (Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety) is “trying to get through Jules Romains’ Men of Good Will.” 

Men of Good Will – its title is Les Hommes de bonne volonté in the original French – consists of no fewer than 27 individual volumes totaling 7892.  It’s what the French call a roman-fleuve, or “river novel.”  

I don’t know if it’s more accurate to describe it as 27 related novels with overlapping plots and recurring characters, or as one humongous novel published in 27 parts.  

Volume 27 of Men of Good Will

But I do know that it is extremely unlikely that I will ever read it.

*     *     *     *     *

A roman-flueve that I do hope to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (or À la recherche du temps perdu).

Proust’s masterpiece is a mere seven volumes and 3031 pages – child’s play compared to Men of Good Will.

Given my advanced age, I probably should get started on In Search of Lost Time sooner rather than later.  After all, it took me about seven weeks to get through David Foster Wallace’s1104-page monstrosity, Infinite Jest, earlier this year.

It took me a lot less time to get through the late Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show and its four sequels – one of several “river novels” that the prolific McMurtry wrote before dying in March of this year.  Infinite Jest is slow going compared to McMurtry’s books, and I have a feeling Proust is going to be even harder to digest than Wallace was.

*     *     *     *     *

 In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond, Larry McMurtry writes that the books he chose to read while recovering from a 1991 heart attack and the quadruple-bypass surgery he underwent shortly thereafter were In Search of Lost Time and the five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries.  

But shortly after finishing those books, he underwent a radical personality transformation:

From being a living person with a distinct personality I began to feel more or less like an outline of that person – and then even the outline began to fade . . . . I became, to myself, more and more like a ghost, or a shadow. . . . [T]he self that I had once been had lost its life. . . .

I didn’t feel like my old self at all, and had no idea where my old self had gone. . . . I felt spectral – the personality that had been mine for 55 years was simply no longer there.

Larry McMurtry at age 77

The most unsettling aspect of this loss of personality was that McMurtry became incapable of reading for pleasure.  Reading had been “the stablest of all pleasures” for McMurtry – he had read every day of his life since he was a boy. 

In the third year after his surgery, McMurtry slowly began to enjoy reading again – and he read many books in the two-plus decades he lived after that.  But the Proust and Woolf works remained McMurtry’s favorites.

I love Larry McMurtry’s writing, and have great respect for his judgment when it comes to other authors.  His high opinion of In Search of Lost Time is reason enough for me to get serious about diving into it.  

But despite his praise of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I’m not so sure I’ll be reading them.  I’ve tried to read Woolf in the past, and it didn’t turn out well.  (Once bitten, twice shy.)

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“Once Bitten, Twice Shy” was written by ex-Mott the Hoople frontman Ian Hunter, and released in 1975 on his eponymous debut album.

I’m featuring Great White’s 1989 cover of the song because the music video for the Great White version is simply too fabulous for words.  For one thing, it has mass quantities of oh-so-1989 bleached-blonde hair that’s teased to within an inch of its life – and I’m just talking about the guys in the band.

No hair band ever deserved the moniker more than Great White:

Click here to read my original post featuring this record, which was published on April 12, 2015.  It’s a very impressive effort, if I do say so myself.

Click here to watch the “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” video.

And click below to buy the record from Amazon.  (Come on . . . you know you want it!)

Derek and the Dominos – "Tell the Truth" (1970)

Hear what I say, ’cause every word is true

You know I wouldn’t tell you no lies

[NOTE: If you need any more proof that one great guitar riff is more than enough of a foundation to support a great six- or seven-minute-long rock song, I give you today’s featured song – “Tell the Truth,” by Derek and the Dominos, which is now, and ever shall be, world without end, a member of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME. Below is an edited version of my original August 30, 2019 post about “Tell the Truth.”]

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I’ve known for a long time that Dave Mason is a pretty big deal in the world of classic rock.

But it didn’t hit me until recently that Dave Mason’s a REALLY big deal in that world.

Dave Mason in 1970

Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake.

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Anyone who knows anything about the history of rock music knows that Dave Mason was a founding member of the sixties supergroup, Traffic.  He went on to have a very successful solo career.  (Five of his solo albums went gold or platinum, and his 1977 single, “We Just Disagree,” was a big radio hit.)

But let’s see how much you really know about Dave Mason.

1.  True or false: Dave Mason was a close friend of Jimi Hendrix, and played 12-string guitar on “All Along the Watchtower” (which was Jimi’s highest-charting American single).

Dave Mason with Jimi Hendrix

2.  True or false: Dave Mason played the shehnai (an Indian reed instrument) on the Rolling Stones’ 1968 record, “Street Fighting Man.”

3.  True or false: Dave Mason and Eric Clapton toured with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, and performed on their classic live album, On Tour with Eric Clapton.

4.  True or false: Dave Mason recorded an album with Mama Cass Elliott that was released in 1971.

5.  True or false: Dave Mason played guitar (along with Eric Clapton and George Harrison) on “Beware of Darkness” – the best song on Harrison’s hugely popular solo album, All Things Must Pass.  

6.  True or false: Dave Mason wrote the song “Feelin’ Alright” for Traffic, which has been covered by (among others) Three Dog Night, the Jackson 5, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Grand Funk Railroad, Isaac Hayes, Lulu, Lou Rawls, Rare Earth, and – most famously – Joe Cocker.

7.  True or false: Dave Mason was an original member of Derek and the Dominoes.

*     *     *     *     *

Time’s up, boys and girls – put those pencils down!

Here are the correct answers:

1. True

2. True

3. True

4. True

5. True

6. True

7. True

So how did you do?

*     *     *     *     *

“Tell the Truth” is my favorite song from the one and only Derek and the Dominos album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.  

What you may not know is that the version of “Tell the Truth” that is included in that album isn’t the original Derek and the Dominos recording of that song.  

In June 1970, the band – which included Dave Mason – played “Tell the Truth” at its first concert, which took place in London.  A few days later, the song became the first one that Derek and Dominos ever recorded.  

The band was unhappy with that version of the song – which Phil Spector had produced – and decided to re-record “Tell the Truth” for the Layla album.  (Spector had them record the song at an insanely speeded-up tempo – his version sounds like a 33 rpm record being played at 45 rpm.)  By then, Dave Mason was no longer part of Derek and the Dominoes.

The “Tell the Truth”single

But someone forgot to tell the band’s American record company, Atco Records, which released the original version as a single in the U.S. just two weeks after the new version was recorded.  (Atco quickly pulled the single.)

Click here to listen to the original Derek and the Dominos recording of “Tell the Truth,” which features Dave Mason on guitar. 

Click here to listen to the version released on the Derek and the Dominos album, which does not feature Dave Mason on guitar.  

Click on the link below to buy that version of the song from Amazon:

Creedence Clearwater Revival – "Ramble Tamble" (1970)

There’s garbage on the sidewalk

Highways in the back yard

Police on the corner

Mortgage on the home

[NOTE: “Ramble Tamble” is no doubt the least familiar song in this year’s group of inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.  (Even I was unfamiliar with it until fairly recently.)  I’m not sure why I picked it over Creedence Clearwater Revival’s other great five-minute-plus albums tracks – like “Born on the Bayou,” or Suzie Q,” or “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” – but I did.  So just get over it, OK?  What follows is a slightly edited version of my February 8, 2020 post about “Ramble Tamble.”]

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You may wonder why I consider Creedence Clearwater Revival to be an underrated band.

After all, the group released five top-10 albums in two years – two of those albums made it to #1 – and had a bunch of hit singles as well.  

Drake agrees!

But while CCR had five #2 singles (plus one #3 and one #4), it never had a #1 single.  That fact cries out UNDERRATED to me.

*     *     *     *     *

CCR’s music was as respected by the critics as it was popular with the public – that’s a rare combination.  

Legendary rock critic Robert Christgau wrote this about CCR in a 1969 review of Willy and the Poor Boys, which was the third of those five consecutive #1 albums: “Creedence’s ecumenical achievement is almost unbelievable: this is the only group since the Beatles and the Stones to turn out hit after hit without losing any but the most perverse hip music snobs.”

I’m guessing that not many people think of CCR as being up there with the Beach Boys when it comes to picking who deserves the “Best American Band Ever” crown.  I give the edge to the Beach Boys, but it’s close.

Given the significance of California in the American psyche, it’s no surprise that the two best American bands ever came from there.  The Beach Boys embodied the babes-beaches-and-hot-rods culture of sunny Southern California, while CCR represented the plaid-shirt-wearing folks from the farm towns and forests of not-so-sunny Northern California.  (NOT including San Francisco and the Bay Area, of course.)

The Beach Boys’ greatest records featured the dazzlingly complicated musical constructions of a true genius, Brian Wilson.  Wilson was the master of the recording studio – he threw everything but the kitchen sink into his recordings.

CCR’s John Fogerty was a musical genius, too, but his genius was his ability to strip rock ’n’ roll down to its essential elements.  He kept only what was necessary, and mercilessly discarded everything else.

Fogerty wrote a lot of great two-and-a-half-minute rock ’n’ roll songs.  But his special talent was turning two-and-a-half-minute rock ’n’ songs into seven-minute, eight-minute, or even eleven-minute album tracks.  

Don’t tell me that CCR’s covers of “Suzie Q” (which was 8:37 long) or “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (which clocked in at 11:05) are too long.  If anything, they’re too short.

*     *     *     *     *

The same is true of the CCR song that I believe ranks behind only the absolutely perfect “Fortunate Son” – one of the top ten singles of the golden decade of rock music (1965-1974) – in their oeuvre.

You may never have heard of “Ramble Tamble,” which was the first track on the Cosmo’s Factory album.  I don’t think I heard it until forty-plus years after its 1970 release.

In 2007, AV Club write Steven Hyden proclaimed “Ramble Tamble” to be “the most rockin’ song of all time”:  

Why?  Because “Ramble Tamble” is like two super rockin’ songs in one.  It starts off as a suped-up, proto-punk take on Sun Records rockabilly.  Then, about a minute and a half in, it slows down to a crawl and then dies for just a split-second, starting back up again as a slowly simmering psychedelic blues number anchored by a cascading guitar riff best-described as Abbey Road-esque.   Just as drummer Doug Clifford seems spent from pounding the relentless jam into submission, the Sun sound comes back even faster and angrier than before for the closing minute and a half.  A perfectly satisfying rock tune that meets all the rockin’ criteria more completely than any song I can think of right now, “Ramble Tamble” essentially is a seven-minute mash-up record encompassing the history of blues, country, punk, and psychedelia.  Until I fall in love with a different rockin’ song, I can't imagine anything out-rockin’ it .

(I won’t bother listing all of the criteria Hyden applied in making his decision.  Suffice it to say that one of his criteria for a rockin’ song is that it makes you drive fast – HE GETS IT!)

By the way, the middle four minutes of “Ramble Tamble” consists of a four-measure, four-chord riff (Am, C, G, D) that’s repeated (with some variation, but not a lot) exactly 25 times – for a total of 100 measures (if my count is correct).

I like “Hey Jude” as much as the next guy, but I’m ready for it to be over by the time it ends.  “Ramble Tamble” is a different story – it could go on for another 100 measures (or even another 200) and I wouldn’t complain.

The same is true of “Born on the Bayou,” “Suzie Q,” and especially “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”  (How Fogerty ever thought that “Grapevine” would be a good song for CCR to cover is beyond me.  But he was right.)

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Click here to hear all seven minutes and nine seconds of “Ramble Tamble.”

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