Elvis Presley – "A Little Less Conversation" (JXL Radio Edit Remix) (2002)

Don’t procrastinate

Don’t articulate

Girl, it’s getting late

ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits is an Elvis Presley greatest hits collection released by RCA Records in 2002.  

It included the 18 singles that reached #1 on the Billboard “Hot 100,” plus 13 singles that made it to #1 in the UK but not in the U.S.  

You don’t need a calculator to figure out that 18 plus 13 doesn’t equal 30.  Elvis actually had 31 singles that reached #1 in either the U.S. or the UK.  

So why was the album titled 30 #1 Hits?

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In 2002, Dutch musician Tom Holkenborg (a/k/a JXL) remixed Elvis’s 1968 recording of “A Little Less Conversation.”  That remix hit #1 in the UK just before the 30 #1 Hits was scheduled to be released, so RCA decided to add it to that compilation.

God only knows why RCA didn’t change the title of the album from 30 #1 Hits to 31 #1 Hits.  (I’m guessing it had something to do with saving money.)

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I mentioned before that Elvis had 18 #1 singles in the U.S., and that 13 additional Elvis singles made it to #1 in the UK.

But six singles made it to #1 in both countries.

So Elvis actually had more #1 hits in the UK than in the U.S. – 19 compared to 18.

I find that very surprising.  I had no idea that Elvis was even more overrated in the UK than he was in the U.S.

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I’m featuring Elvis in the 29th and final of this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days” because I think he is unquestionably the most overrated recording artist of my lifetime.

Take a look at Elvis’s #1 hits sometime.  Most of them were released between 1956 and 1962 – a period of time when popular music was truly horrible.

The top selling records of those years included “Love Letters in the Sand” and “April Love” by Pat Boone, “Singing the Blues” by Guy Mitchell, “It’s All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards, “At the Hop” by Danny & the Juniors, and “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr.

Given the level of competition, it’s hardly a surprise that crap like “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” “Teddy Bear,” “Love Me Tender,” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” were so successful.

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The original version of today’s featured song – which was written by Mac Davis and “Wrecking Crew” member Billy Strange – may be my favorite Elvis song ever.

“Viva Las Vegas” is pretty good, too.

But after that, you fall right off the cliff.

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Click here to listen to Elvis Presley’s 31st #1 hit single.

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

Fleetwood Mac – "The Chain" (1977)

I can still hear you saying

You would never break the chain

Imagine if David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash left Crosby, Stills and Nash and were replaced by three other musicians and started playing heavy metal.  The band wouldn’t really be Crosby, Stills and Nash, now would it?

That’s sort of what happened to Fleetwood Mac in the early seventies – the band’s singers, songwriters, and guitarists were all replaced and the band started playing and recording a completely different style of music, but the band didn’t change its name.  (Luckily for Fleetwood Mac, it was named after its drummer and bassist, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, who stuck it out through all the changes.)  

It was sort of like if Coca-Cola had started putting Sprite in Coke cans.

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The new Fleetwood Mac – which was built around the singing, songwriting, and instrumental skills of Lindsay Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and Christine McVie – became one of the most successful pop groups of all time.  Its 1977 album, Rumours, has sold 20 million copies in the U.S., making it one of the dozen top-selling albums of all time:

(Do you know what the weird photo on the Rumours cover signifies?  Neither do I.)

The four other Fleetwood Mac albums released in the seventies and eighties also went platinum, and nine of the group’s singles were top-ten hits. 

Was the new Fleetwood Mac really that good?  I was a hater for a long time, but the group’s music started to grow on me a couple of decades after it was released.  

That doesn’t mean that I don’t think the new Fleetwood Mac isn’t overrated – just that it’s not as overrated as the Eagles and the Police.

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I was surprised to learn that today’s featured song was never released as a single.  (For me, no song says “new Fleetwood Mac” more than “The Chain” – the group often opened its live shows with the song.)  

Click here to listen to “The Chain.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Eric Clapton – "Blues Power" (1970)

Bet you didn’t think I knew

How to rock ’n’ roll

I play keyboards, not guitar – so I’m not qualified to judge Eric Clapton’s technical ability as a guitarist.

But what this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days” is about is whether a recording artist is overrated or underrated based on the quality of his or her recorded music – not on his or her ability as an instrumentalist or a singer or a songwriter.  

By that criterion, Clapton is clearly overrated – at least as a solo artist.

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Type “Eric Clapton overrated underrated” in a Google search box and you’ll see that a lot more people see him as overrated as underrated.

David Hayter of Guitar Planet magazine has written that the young Clapton “played with both an effortless sauntering swagger and a luscious melting tone that could pierce one moment and ooze seductively the next.”  

But Hayter thinks Clapton peaked a long time ago:

His glory lays in the distant, distant past.  [After] the halcyon days of youth, when his sound was a revelation . . . Clapton quickly began to wane, and Slowhand set about an arduous three and half decades of meandering jams, indulgent and unspectacular live performances, and innovation free LPs.

Many critics think Clapton was more of a borrower than a creator.  They give Clapton little credit for what the Yardbirds, Cream, Blind Faith, and Derek and the Dominoes accomplished.  “Left to Clapton, Cream would have played half-hour versions of Robert Johnson's ‘Crossroads’,” wrote Kieron Tyler of the Guardian.   “And the thrilling guitar on ‘Layla’ was played by Duane Allman.”

There’s little doubt that Clapton’s solo records are mediocre at best.  Most of his best-known covers (like “I Shot the Sheriff,” “Cocaine,” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”) are inferior to the originals, while his most successful originals (like “Lay Down Sally,” “Wonderful Tonight,” and “It’s in the Way That You Use It”) do nothing for me except make me change the channel when I hear them on my car radio.

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“Blues Power” – which was released on Clapton’s eponymous debut solo album in 1970 – was co-written by Clapton and Leon Russell.  It sounds like it’s 99% a Russell song, but I could be wrong.

The Eric Clapton album featured many of the same musicians who played on the Delaney & Bonnie & Friends album, On Tour with Eric Clapton, which had been released earlier that same year – Leon Russell, Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, drummer Jim Gordon, bassist Carl Radle, keyboard player Bobby Whitlock, and saxophonist Bobby Keys.

Click here to listen to “Blues Power.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Paul McCartney – "Smile Away" (1971)

I was walking down the street the other day

Who did I meet?

I met a friend of mine, and he did say

“Man, I can smell your breath a mile away”

I find myself still trying to come to terms with the Beatles more than fifty years after they broke up.

No group I know generated more good song ideas.  But few of those ideas were fully developed into a wholly satisfying final products.  (I know how they felt.  I get all excited whenever I come up with a good idea for a new 2 or 3 lines post, but all too often I do a half-assed job of executing that idea.  Rather than spending the time and effort necessary to realize my idea’s full potential, I just hit “publish” and move on to the next brilliant idea.)

The 16-minute-long, eight-song medley on side two of the Abbey Road album is the best example of the Beatles’ ability to come up with great song ideas and their lack of stick-to-it-iveness when it came to carrying those ideas across the finish line.  

The songs in the medley had nothing in common either musically or lyrically.  None of them could have stood on their own two feet – most of them were fragments that had been put to one side because the Beatles didn’t know how to turn them into fully-realized songs.

But sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that was never truer than with the Abbey Road medley.  

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If Paul McCartney and George Martin hadn’t figured out a way to meld those eight song ideas into a medley, Abbey Road might have ended up as a real train wreck. 

Almost everyone loves “Come Together” and “Something,” but I don’t think those tracks are anything special.  “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is one of the best Beatles songs ever, but the rest of the album’s tracks – “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Oh! Darling,” “Octopus’s Garden,” Here Comes the Sun,” and “Because” – are godawful.

But the medley makes you forget all of that.

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I think the Beatles as a whole are overrated – not because they didn’t record a lot of great and near-great songs, but because many people rate the Beatles so highly that it is almost impossible for them to be otherwise.  I’ve decided not to include them in the group of overrated recording artists featured in this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days” for two reasons.  First, there are a lot of other bands that are much more overrated than the Beatles.  Second, I don’t want to deal with all the caterwauling that would ensue if I did say they were overrated.

Paul and Linda McCartney in 1971

But I have no qualms about calling Paul McCartney overrated.  

That’s not really based on McCartney’s Beatles career, although he did write a lot of the Beatles’ crappiest songs.  On the other hand, he wrote some of their best ones.  (I can’t for the life of me comprehend how he came up with “Helter Skelter,” which is an astonishingly good record.)

McCartney gets the dreaded 2 or 3 lines “overrated” grade based on the twenty-odd solo albums he’s released since the Beatles crashed and burned.  (I’m counting the Wings albums in that number.)

I never bought a single one of them, and can’t claim to be all that familiar with their contents except for the two dozen of so singles that were top ten hits between 1970 and 1985.  (Lack of knowledge never stopped me from making grand pronouncements before, and it’s certainly not going to stop me pronouncing Sir Paul overrated today.) 

I always had a soft spot for “Maybe I’m Amazed” (from McCartney’s first album), and “Jet” and “Too Many People” are pretty good.  

But most of McCartney’s other well-known songs are crap – some (like “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and “Helen Wheels”) may be enjoyable crap, but most of the rest (including “Another Day,” “My Love,” “Live and Let Die,” “Band on the Run,” “Listen to What the Man Said,” “Hi, Hi, Hi,” “Silly Love Songs,” and “Ebony and Ivory”) are unlistenable crap.

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After writing this post, I had the brilliant idea of checking what legendary rock critic Robert Christgau had said about McCartney’s solo albums.  

Christgau repeatedly hit the nail on the head when it came to McCartney:

On McCartney (1970):  “Paul is so charming a melodist (and singer) that even though many of the songs are no more than snatches, fragments, ditties, they get across, like ‘Her Majesty’ extended to two minutes.” 

On Ram (1971): “[M]ost of the songs [on Ram] are so lightweight they float away even as Paulie layers them down with caprices.”

On Wild Life (1971): “McCartney is coming to terms with his own fluff – the overproduction sounds less cluttered this time – but it's still fluff, and not even goosedown.”

On Band on the Run (1973): “I originally underrated what many consider McCartney's definitive post-Beatles statement, but not as much as its admirers overrate it.  Pop masterpiece?  This?” 

On Tug of War (1982): “Most rock-and-rollers look like simps or cynics by the time they hit thirty-five.  Others retain the irrepressible exuberance of a Stevie Wonder, or . . . age gracefully into fresh-eyed wisdom, like Neil Young and John Lennon.  But no matter how serious and sensible he gets, McCartney's perpetual boyishness conveys the perpetual callowness of a musical Troy Donahue.”

On Pipes of Peace (1983): “I’ve finally figured out what people mean when they call Paulie pop – they mean he's not rock.  But to me pop implies a strict sense of received form whether crafted by the dB’s or Billy Joel.  McCartney's in his own world entirely, which is the charm of his music.  And of course, a reliance on charm has always been his weakness.”

(I could continue, but you get the picture.)

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I originally planned to feature “Long Haired Lady,” a song from McCartney’s Ram album that I heard for the first time last week on my satellite radio.

It’s a real stinker . . . and to make things even worse, it’s 5:54 long.

Life’s too short to waste 5:54 listening to “Long Haired Lady.”  (If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can click here to listen to it.)

Instead, I’m featuring “Smile Away,” another song from Ram.  

“Smile Away” is essentially a song fragment like the songs in the Abbey Road medley.  McCartney could have continued to work on it and develop it into a real song.  Or he could have made part of another medley.

But he did neither.  Instead, he stretched it out to 3:51 in length without coming up with any additional substance that would justify the song’s length – he just keeps repeating parts of the song until it was long enough to suit him.

I still like it, although I’m guessing that if I listened to it regularly, I would tire of it very quickly.

Click here to listen to “Smile Away.”

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

Bob Dylan – "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" (1975)

The cabaret was empty now
A sign said, “Closed for repair”

Lily had already taken
All of the dye out of her hair

She was thinking about her father
Who she very rarely saw

Thinking about Rosemary
And thinking about the law

But most of all she was thinking 
About the Jack of Hearts

Some of you are no doubt appalled that I’m including Bob Dylan on my list of overrated recording artists in this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days.”

Dylan has written and recorded some truly great songs – Rolling Stone magazine picked “Like a Rolling Stone” as the greatest song of all time, and you can’t really argue with that choice.

But just because you’re a great artist doesn’t mean that you’re not overrated.  To wit, the Beatles.

I thought long and hard before deciding not to label the Beatles as overrated.  That’s not because I don’t love their music.  But a lot of people would tell you that the Beatles are the greatest group in history by a wide margin, which I don’t agree with.  (They are the greatest boy band in history by a wide margin – no doubt about that.)

Bob Dylan’s reputation is such that he was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Sorry, Bob, but I’m not buying it.  Dylan’s lyrics rarely stand up when they are read without musical accompaniment – he may have written some great song lyrics, but I don’t think he wrote great poetry.

I can only explain the Swedish Academy’s decision as an attempt to generate publicity.  (You can’t blame it.  Many of its recent choices for the Literature prize – Herta Müller?  Elfriede Jelinek?  Dario Fo? – have generated only yawns.) 

Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh – his best-known novel is Trainspotting – had this to say about the choice of Dylan:  

I’m a Dylan fan, but this is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.

I agree with Welsh, although I wonder why he left senile, gibbering female hippies off the hook.

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Like the Beatles, Bob Dylan recorded a lot of stinkers.  

Bad Beatles songs tend to suffer from silly or trite lyrics.  (I’m thinking of songs like “Yellow Submarine,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”)

Bad Bob Dylan songs – like today’s featured song, which was released in 1975 on the Blood on the Tracks album – usually have pompous or obscure lyrics.

Click here to read all 15 verses of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.”  If you can make sense of them, you’re a better man than I am.  (The lyrics of the song are so scattershot that you often can’t be sure what character Dylan is referring to when he uses a pronoun.)

Click here to listen to today’s featured song.  Warning: it’s eight minutes and fifty-one seconds long.  (By coincidence, I’m typing these words at 8:51 PM.)

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Drake – "Started from the Bottom" (2013)

I'ma worry ‘bout me

Give a f*ck about you

Hip-hop has been the world’s dominant musical genre for years.

So I would be remiss if I didn’t include at least one overrated or underrated rapper in this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days.” 

Yes, I know that I did write about the grossly overrated Hamilton.  But Hamilton is hip-hop “lite’ – hip-hop for white people, if you will.  So it doesn’t really count. 

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I am a fan of rap music, and know more about it than you would expect an old white guy to know.

For example, I was the only person on my millennial-dominated trivia team to know what the title of Wu-Tang Clan’s 1994 “C.R.E.A.M.” – one of their greatest rap songs ever – meant.  (Those letters stand for “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” of course.)

But to be honest, my knowledge of rap/hip-hop is limited – I am far from being an expert.

So I turned to the NegusWhoRead website for help identifying overrated and underrated hip-hop artists, and found a post by Michael Harriot titled “The Ten Most Overrated Rappers of All Time” . . . just what I was looking for!

One of Harriott’s choices was Drake, the Canadian-born rapper who is currently the most popular hip-hop artists in the world.  

Drake

Drake has sold over 170 million records worldwide.  He has placed an astonishing 205 songs on the Billboard “Hot 100” – more than any solo artist in history – and in July 2018, he had seven songs in the Billboard top ten at the same time, which is simply mind-boggling.  (Drake had a record total of 12 top ten songs in 2018, one more than the Beatles had in 1964.)  Given the extent of his popularity, he is almost per se overrated.

:

Here’s what Harriott had to say about Drake:

Drake raps light skinnededededed.

I’m not referring to this sensitive raps or his atonal crooning.  I’m talking about his voice.  When black people try to imitate how white people sound, they do Drake’s voice.  Drake’s voice is made of lukewarm herbal tea flavored with warm milk and melted snow.  It is like natural gas – colorless and odorless. . . . I know his lyrics make women ovulate and men reminisce about their ex-girlfriends, but they are just solid. . . .

I had to stop talking to a friend because he told me he cried listening to a Drake song.

I don’t have any false ideas of masculinity, but if Drake songs make you teary-eyed, you aren’t built for the struggle. 

Also, he's Canadian.

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Click here to listen to Drake’s 2013 hit, “Started from the Bottom,” which reached #6 on the Billboard “Hot 100” and #2 on the Billboard “Hot Rap Songs” charts.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Original Cast of "Hamilton" – "My Shot" (2015)

Burr, check what we got

Mister Lafayette, hard rock like Lancelot

I think your pants look hot!

We’ve reached the midpoint of February.

Since you are still reading “29 Posts in 29 Days,” you must not have been too riled up by my “overrated” and “underrated” choices so far.

Perhaps I need to try a little harder.

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It is hard overstate how much love the public and the critics have given to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 “hip-hopera,” Hamilton.

Referring to the sky-high ticket prices for the wildly popular musical, Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote that “I am loath to tell people to mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets to a hit Broadway show.  But Hamilton . . . might just about be worth it.”

Hamilton won no fewer than 11 Tony Awards in 2016, plus the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  Earlier this month, it was announced  that Disney had agreed to pay a record $75 million for movie rights to the show.  (The Hamilton movie will hit theaters in October 2021.) 

People were so crazy about Hamilton that the Department of the Treasury cancelled plans to replace Alexander Hamilton’s image on the $10 bill with that of Harriet Tubman.  Treasury Secretary Jack Lew decided instead to put Tubman on the $20 bill in place of the politically incorrect Andrew Jackson.

Given all that, do you really think there’s any chance that I’m going to say Hamilton is underrated?

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A lot of historians think Hamilton got Hamilton all wrong.  He was far from being a progressive, and he wasn’t pro-immigrant.  And it’s likely he was a slave owner (like many of the Founding Fathers) – at the least, he married into a slaveowning family.

But fans of Hamilton – especially upper-middle-class white fans of Hamilton – couldn’t care less about that.  For many of them, gushing over Hamilton is an easy way to virtue signal – sort of like voting for Barack Obama in 2008.  

Someone I know said back then that Obama was appealing in part because he was black, but not too black – voting for him was a convenient, low-cost way for white people to demonstrate that they weren’t racists.   

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Larry David made a similar point about Hamilton after seeing it on Broadway: 

I have a feeling there are a lot of white people who are saying they are completely blown away even though they didn’t really understand half of the things the people on stage were saying.  They just want to solidify their liberal bona fides and how cool they are: “Yeah, I love Hamilton. Yeah, I get it, I’m hip.”

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Progressive Alex Nichols wrote an article in Current Affairs magazine in 2016 titled “You Should Be Terrified That People Who like Hamilton Run Our Country” 

As Nichols pointed out, Hamilton was beloved by politicians of all persuasions:

The Obamas were not the only members of the political establishment to come down with a ghastly case of Hamiltonmania.  Nearly every figure in D.C. has apparently been to see the show, in many cases being invited for a warm backstage schmooze with Miranda.  Biden saw it.  Mitt Romney saw it.  The Bush daughters saw it.  Rahm Emanuel saw it the day after the Chicago teachers’ strike over budget cuts and school closures.  Hillary Clinton went to see the musical in the evening after having been interviewed by the FBI in the morning.  The Clinton campaign has also been fundraising by hawking Hamilton tickets; for $100,000 you can watch a performance alongside Clinton herself.

Nichols snipes at Michelle Obama for lauding Hamilton as the “best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life,” which he says “raises disquieting questions about the level of cultural exposure offered in the Princeton undergraduate curriculum.”

But what really bothers Nichols is that the first African-American president was so effusive about a play that ducked the question of slavery:

The more troubling questions about the country’s origins are instantly vanished, as an era built on racist forced labor is transformed into a colorful, culturally progressive, and politically unobjectionable extravaganza.

Nichols isn’t surprised by Obama’s blind spot when it came to Hamilton because he doesn’t think Obama’s presidency really moved the needle when it came to advancing progressive causes:

Contemporary progressivism has come to mean papering over material inequality with representational diversity.  The president will continue to expand the national security state at the same rate as his predecessor, but at least he will be black.  Predatory lending will drain the wealth from African American communities, but the board of Goldman Sachs will have several black members.  Inequality will be rampant and worsening, but the 1% will at least “look like America.”  The actual racial injustices of our time will continue unabated, but the power structure will be diversified so that nobody feels quite so bad about it.  Hamilton is simply this tendency’s cultural-historical equivalent; instead of worrying ourselves about the brutal origins of the American state, and the lasting economic effects of those early inequities, we can simply turn the Founding Fathers black and enjoy the show.

Obama once told an interviewer that Hamilton was “the only thing that Dick Cheney and I have agreed on during my entire political career.”  

Hamilton fans Obama and Cheney

But Nichols calls bullsh*t on that statement:

That is, of course, false. Other points of agreement [between Obama and Cheney] include drone strikes, Guantanamo, the NSA, and mass deportation.

In closing, Nichols reiterates the point:

Barack Obama deported more immigrants than any other president and expanded the drone program in order to kill almost 3,500 people  – but he gave patronage to a neoliberal nerdcore musical.  God bless this great land.

You can click here to read Nichols’s contrarian take on Hamilton in its entirety.

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My real problem with Hamilton is the music, which purports to be hip-hop but really isn’t.  To paraphrase something I said above, the music in Hamilton is hip-hop – but not too hip-hop.

It’s not bad music, it’s just not very authentic.  It’s a little like the Beatles covering Chuck Berry songs – the Fab Four’s version of “Roll Over Beethoven” isn’t bad, it’s just very far removed from (and inferior to) the original.  

Click here to listen to “My Shot,” from Act I of Hamilton.

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

Police – "Don't Stand So Close to Me" (1980)

Wet bus stop

She’s waiting

His car is warm and dry

BMI is a performing rights organization that annually distributes over a billion dollars in copyright royalties to the 900,000 songwriters it represents.

In May 2019, BMI announced that “Every Breath You Take” by the Police had overtaken the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” to become the most performed song in the BMI catalogue, which includes over 14 million compositions.

Horribile dictu!

Author Neil Gaiman once said, “There's no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.”  The day that “Every Breath You Take” became the most popular recording in the world may not represent a big apocalypse, but it certainly was a little one.

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“Every Breath You Take,” which was released in 1983 on the group’s fifth and final studio album, Synchronicity, was a #1 hit in both the U.S. and the UK.

Synchronicity sold eight million copies in the U.S., where it topped the album charts for no fewer than 17 weeks.  (It was also a #1 album in the UK.) 

All told, the Police’s five studio albums have sold over 75 million albums worldwide.  They won six Grammy Awards, were named “Best British Group” at the BRIT Awards, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility.   In 1983, Rolling Stone said the Police were “possibly the biggest band in the world.”`

I knew that the Police were overrated, but I didn’t appreciate just how overrated they were until today.

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I’m not sure if any other recording artists released five albums that sold more copies than those five Police albums, but I am sure that no other artists ever released five albums with more pretentious titles.

Outlandos d’Amour, Reggatta de Blanc, Zenyatta Mondatta, Ghost in the Machine, Synchronicity.  Really?

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Today’s featured song is “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” which is about the only Police song I can stand to listen to.  

Sting was inspired to write the song by his experiences as a schoolteacher:

I wanted to write a song about sexuality in the classroom.  I'd done teaching practice at secondary schools and been through the business of having 15-year-old girls fancying me – and me really fancying them!  How I kept my hands off them I don't know.

(That’s really creepy, but at least he was honest.)

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Click here to listen to “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.”

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

Grateful Dead – "Truckin'" (1970)

Lately it occurs to me

What a long, strange trip it’s been

Have you heard the old joke about the Grateful Dead?  

Q: What does a Deadhead say when the drugs wear off?  

A: This music sucks!

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The Grateful Dead recorded a few good songs – I think today’s featured song is their very best one.  But most of their music blows.

They are overrated, overrated, OVERRATED!

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Click here to listen to “Truckin’,” which was released in 1970 on the Dead’s fifth studio album, American Beauty.

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