Love – "A House Is Not a Motel" (1967)

And the water’s turned to blood

And if you don’t think so

Go turn on your tub

Love’s Forever Changes, which was released in 1967, is one of the few albums – perhaps the only album – that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

The “Forever Changes” album cover

Yet Forever Changes peaked at #154 on the Billboard 200 album chart in February 1968.  

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Here are some of the other albums that were listed ahead of Forever Changes on the Billboard 200 that week:

#153 – Clear Light (by Clear Light)

#152 – A Kind of Hush (John Davidson)

#138 – Valley of the Dolls soundtrack

#129 – Encore! More of the Concert Sound of Henry Mancini 

#125 – The Best of Herman’s Hermits, Volume III 

[NOTE: The only two songs I recognize that are on that album are “There’s a Kind of a Hush (All Over the World)” and “No Milk Today,” which both suck donkey d*ck.]

#122 – Bill Cosby Sings/Silver Throat  

#104 – Hawaiian Album (Ray Coniff)

#101 – Groovin’ with the Soulful Strings

#92 – My Cup Runneth Over (Ed Ames)

#62 – Please Love Me Forever (Bobby Vinton)

#46 – Snoopy and His Friends (Royal Guardsmen)

#41 – Clambake (Elvis Presley)

#12 – It Must Be Him (Vikki Carr)

#10 – The Last Waltz (Engelbert Humperdinck)

I could go on, but I’ve probably beaten that dead horse quite enough for one night.

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Actually, let me beat it just a bit more and make absotively, posilutely sure it’s dead.

Can you believe there were no fewer than eight different Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass albums listed ahead of Forever Changes that week?

One of the eight

(I like “The Lonely Bull” and “A Taste of Honey” as much as the next guy, but EIGHT albums ranked ahead of Forever Changes?)

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Love’s biggest hit single, “7 and 7 Is” – which is the quintessential stick-of-dynamite record – topped out at #33 on the Billboard Hot 100.  It was the group’s only top 40 “hit.”  (No Love single ever charted in the UK.)

Today’s featured song was the B-side of “Alone Again Or,” the only single from Forever Changes to chart in the U.S. – if you can call peaking at the #123 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 “charting.”

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Love’s admirers included Robert Plant, Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors.  

Arthur Lee with Jimi Hendrix

“Love was one of the hottest things I ever saw,” Ray Manzarek of the Doors told an interviewer in 2017. “The most influential band in L.A. at the time, and we all thought it was just a matter of time before Love conquered America.”

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“A House Is Not a Motel” (and most of the other songs on Forever Changes) was written by the group’s lead singer, Arthur Lee.  Lee was all of 22 years old when the album was released.  (He died of leukemia in 2006, when he was 61 years old.)

A lot of musicians and critics thought Arthur Lee was a genius.  I hope Lee believed them, and that the praise they lavished on him made up at least in part for the total lack of public recognition and commercial success that he achieved in his lifetime.

Lee and Love are clearly underrated.  In fact, Love may be the most underrated group of all time.

Click here to listen to “A House Is Not a Motel.”  

Click here to read what 2 or 3 lines had to say about “You Set the Scene,” the best song on Forever Changes.  (“A House Is Not a Motel” is tied for second place with all the other songs on the album,)

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

Rutles – "Ouch!" (1978)

Ouch!

Don’t desert me!

Ouch!

Please don’t hurt me!

In 1978, NBC aired a brilliant “mockumentary” about the Rutles, a fictional British Invasion band whose music bore more than a passing resemblance to that of the Beatles.

All You Need Is Cash – which featured guest appearances by Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, George Harrison Mick Jagger, Bianca Jagger, Bill Murray, and Paul Simon (among others) – had the lowest ratings of any primetime network show that aired that week, but quickly achieved legendary status.

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The soundtrack of All You Need Is Cash contains fourteen songs that not only are dead-on parodies of well-known Beatles songs, but in many cases are actually better than the originals that they are based on.

Neil Innes

The All You Need Is Cash songs were written by Neil Innes, who died only a few weeks ago at age 75.  Innes often collaborated with the six members of the Monty Python comedy troupe – he was sometimes called “The Seventh Python” – and was a member of the avant-garde Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (which appeared in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour movie).

Innes was friends with the Beatles, Eric Clapton, and other superstars of that era.  Their fame had made most of them miserable – Clapton once told Innes that “It’s too much for anyone to take all this idolatry” – and Innes decided he would stay out of the limelight as much as possible.

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The songs in All You Need Is Cash cover the Beatles gamut – there are parodies of the Fab Four’s early boy-band hits, later songs like “Get Back,” and everything in-between.  

The one Rutles song that isn’t arguably better than the original is “Piggy in the Middle,” which was inspired by “I Am the Walrus.”  That’s not because “Piggy in the Middle” isn’t a great song – it mos’ definitely is – but “I Am the Walrus” may be the best Beatles song of all.  (It’s certainly in the top three.) 

Today we’re featuring “Ouch!” – a parody of “Help!” 

Click here to watch the music video for “Ouch!”

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

Sonic Youth – "100%" (1992)

I’ve been around the world a million times

And all you men are slime

I can’t explain why Sonic Youth is the best rock group of all time, but they are.

Their music is often loud and dissonant – the band favored cheap guitars and alternative tunings – and I take exception to many of the political sentiments expressed in Sonic Youth’s lyrics. 

Sonic Youth

Then there’s bassist Kim Gordon’s painfully (and intentionally) off-key singing.  Not to mention the group’s obsession with Karen Carpenter and Madonna – two artists who don’t rank among my favorites.

Sonic Youth is the best example ever of the whole of something being greater than the sum of its parts.

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I think I first became acquainted with Sonic Youth’s music through the 1992 edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide, which collected and summarized thousands of Rolling Stone album reviews.  I bought that book to smooth my transition from LPs to CDs – I went through it and noted all the four-star and five-star albums that I didn’t already own, and went searching for them in used record stores.

The 1992 edition of the
“Rolling Stone Album Guide”

I ended up with over a dozen used Sonic Youth CDs.  I once owned a similar number of Rolling Stones LPs, but I have no interest in ever listening to any of the ones released after 1974 or so.

That’s not true of my Sonic Youth albums.  Pick any one of them and I will happily sit down and listen to it.

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A lot of critics are as ga-ga over Sonic Youth as I am.  But their fan base is quite small.

One writer has estimated that each band member earned on average only about $30,000 per year from record sales during the almost 30 years the group was together.  They probably made somewhat than that more from live performances.

I think I bought only one new Sonic Youth CD – their 1998 album, A Thousand Leaves.  I bought it the day after I saw Sonic Youth perform live at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC – Washington was the first stop on their tour in support of that album, and it wasn’t available in local record stores before the show.

I’m someone who usually needs to hear new music several times before I start to respond to it, so I got very little from that 9:30 Club show (which I went to with my 15-year-old son) because Sonic Youth played almost nothing but A Thousand Leaves tracks that night.

Eventually A Thousand Leaves became one of my favorite albums – legendary critic Robert Christgau gave it an A+ rating, and he’s not the only critic to rate it among the best of Sonic Youth’s albums.  

I wish I could take a short trip back to 1998.  That concert would have been infinitely more satisfying if I had had a week to familiarize myself with the album before seeing Sonic Youth that night.

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If there’s another group more underrated than Sonic Youth, I don’t know who they are.

The band’s 15th and final studio album, The Eternal, reached the #18 spot on the Billboard album chart – making it their highest-charting album ever.  (That album was released two years before Sonic Youth founding members Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon split up after 27 years of marriage – which marked the end of the band.)

Today’s featured song, “100%,” was Sonic Youth’s biggest hit single.  It made it all the way to #4 on the Billboard “Alternative Songs” chart in 1992.  (Four other Sonic Youth singles made it on to the “Alternative Songs” chart, but the group never charted on the Billboard “Hot 100.”)

The “Dirty” album

Click here to listen “100%,” which was released in 1992 on Sonic Youth’s Dirty album.

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

Roxy Music – "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" (1973)

You float in my new pool

Deluxe and delightful

Inflatable doll

My role is to serve you . . .

Immortal and life-sized

My breath is inside you 

Take a look at the following list of recording artists and tell me what they all had in common:

David Bowie, Chic, Kraftwerk, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine, Devo, Talking Heads, Spandau Ballet, Human League, Ultravox, Duran Duran, Morrissey, U2, Nirvana, Garbage, Blur, Pulp, Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, and . . . Bill Murray?

According to Tim de Lisle of the influential British newspaper The Guardian (formerly the Manchester Guardian), all of those artists were either fans of Roxy Music, influenced by Roxy Music’s records, or both.

Roxy Music

“The most influential of all British groups is clearly the Beatles,” de Lisle wrote in 2005.  “Who comes second is more debatable: the Stones, the Who, the [Sex] Pistols, the Clash . . . but have any of them had wider repercussions than Roxy?”

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A couple of the names on the list above deserve further comment.

Let’s start with Devo and the Talking Heads – two of the most interesting American bands of the seventies and eighties.  Both were devotees of Brian Eno, the musical genius who was one of the founding members of Roxy Music but who left the group after the release of its second album to pursue a solo career and to produce records for others (including Devo and the Talking Heads). 

U2 also collaborated with Eno and Chris Thomas (who produced some of the early Roxy albums).  When they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, U2 drummer Larry Mullen said in his acceptance speech that “The Sex Pistols, Television, Roxy Music, Patti Smith – these people are in our rock and roll hall of fame.”  (Three out of four ain’t bad.)

Garbage drummer Bruce Vig – who produced Nirvana’s Nevermind album – was a huge Roxy fan.  “I was president of the Roxy Music fan club at the University of Wisconsin,” Vig told de Lisle.  “We used to hold ‘Roxythons’ once a month where we would play their albums non-stop.”  How many people turned up for those events?  “Seven or eight,” Vig said.  “A small but loyal following.”

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What is Bill Murray’s connection to Roxy Music?

Do you remember the scene in the movie Lost in Translation where Murray goes to a karaoke bar with Scarlett Johansson?  The original plan was to have him sing Elvis Costello’s “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding.”

Murray and Johansson

But when Murray and director Sofia Coppola realized that they both loved Roxy’s music, they decided to have Murray sing “More Than This,” which was released in 1982 on Roxy’s eighth and final studio album, Avalon.

Click here to watch the Lost in Translation scene of Johansson and Murray singing karaoke.  (She sings a song by the Pretenders – another underrated group.)

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“Love Is the Drug” was Roxy’s only top-40 hit single in the U.S.  While Avalon went platinum here, it took 10 years.

But while the rest of you boobs underrated them, I didn’t.  I bought their first five albums while I was in law school, and played them loudly and incessantly (to the dismay of some of my dormitory neighbors).

“Liking them was an act of rebellion,” according to Tim de Lisle.  Rebel’s my middle name, boys and girls – no surprise that I was a big Roxy fan.   

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Bruce Vig's University of Wisconsin band used to cover today’s featured song, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” which was released on Roxy’s 1973 album, For Your Pleasure:

“It’s guaranteed to freak out an audience when you’re playing a midwestern bar,” Vig said.  Given the subject matter of the song’s lyrics, that’s a fact, Jack! 

In Genesis, God formed man out of dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

In the lyrics of today’s featured song, the singer orders a life-sized inflatable sex doll and creates the perfect companion by blowing her up.  “My breath is inside you,” he sings.

Click here to watch a mesmerizing live performance of “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” on British TV. 

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Mott the Hoople – "Marionette" (1974)

They gambled with my life

And now I’ve lost my will to fight

Oh God, these wires are so tight

It’s interesting that I associate several of the underrated recording artists I’ve featured in this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days” with other artists who aren’t underrated.

For example, Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello were contemporaries who have several things in common – but Costello is much better known than the underrated Jackson.

Texan Doug Sahm and Oklahoman Leon Russell were eclectic and versatile musicians who played rootsy music.  You could certainly make a case that Russell was underrated, but he played with a number of superstar musicians – including Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, and George Harrison – and so he achieved a much higher degree of fame than Sahm, who spent the last decade of his life recording Tex-Mex-style music that few non-Texans ever heard.

Mott the Hoople in 1973

Today’s featured artist – Mott the Hoople – was closely associated with David Bowie, who certainly wasn’t underrated.  Bowie liked the band, and offered them “Suffragette City” to record when he heard they were about to break up.  Amazingly, they rejected Bowie’s offer – but he turned the other cheek and wrote “All the Young Dudes” for them.  

The members of Mott weren’t stupid enough to reject a second great Bowie song, and “All The Young Dudes” became their biggest hit.  It made it all the way to #3 on the British pop charts, but barely cracked the top 40 in the U.S.

That pattern held for the rest of Mott’s career – they had four other top 20 hits in the UK, but never came close to the U.S. top 40 again.

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The group broke up after releasing its seventh and most successful studio album, The Hoople, in 1974.  Today’s featured song, “Marionette,” was released on that album. 

It’s a very theatrical song – it certainly puts anything Queen did to shame.  (So does "All the Young Dudes," and "All the Way to Memphis," and a couple of other Mott songs.  Yet Queen became one of the best-selling acts in the world, and inspired a Broadway musical and a major motion picture, while Mott the Hoople's success was modest indeed.  Go figure.)

Click here to listen to “Marionette.”

Click below to listen to the song on Amazon:

Troggs – "Feels Like a Woman" (1967)

You move, you groove

You love like a woman

You feel like a woman to me

So far, this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days” has alternated between overrated and underrated recording artists.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to maintain that every-other-one pattern until the end of the month.  It’s much easier to find overrated groups than underrated ones – and it’s much more natural for me to trash someone than to praise someone.

So don’t be surprised if you start seeing back-to-back (or back-to-back-to-back) “overrated” posts.

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A lot of Americans think of the Troggs as a one-hit wonder.  “Wild Thing” was a huge worldwide hit in 1966, and made it all the way to #1 on the Billboard “Hot 100.” 

A year later, “Love Is All Around” – a truly lovely song – was a #7 hit single for the Troggs.  But it couldn’t be more different than “Wild Thing” – I wonder how many people realize both songs were recorded by the same group.

The Troggs were a pretty big deal in the UK in the mid-sixties.  The first two singles they released after “Wild Thing” made it to #1 and #2 in the UK, and the next three were top 20 hits.  But other than “Wild Thing” and “Love Is All Around,” the Troggs didn’t make a dent in the U.S.  (It probably didn’t help that their first American tour didn’t take place until 1968, when those two singles were out of sight, out of mind.)

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The Troggs may not belong on the Mt. Rushmore of British Invasion bands – they’re certainly not up there with the Beatles, Stones, Who, and Kinks.

But their musical oeuvre is head and shoulders above that of the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Herman’s Hermits, and nearly all of the other British Invasion groups.

The Troggs

In my book, the Troggs are clearly underrated – especially when you look at the list of artists who were fans of their music (which includes Iggy Pop, MC5, the Buzzcocks, and the Ramones).. 

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I would have underrated the Troggs were it not for Steven Lorber, who regularly featured Troggs records on his “Mystic Eyes” radio show.  (Steven is still playing Troggs records.  When I appeared as a guest on his current radio show last year, his playlist included a very odd Troggs cover of “Good Vibrations.”)

One of the songs I heard on “Mystic Eyes” was “Feels Like a Woman,” today’s featured song.  It was the B-side of a 1972 single that failed to chart in the U.S. or anywhere else.  (God only knows how Steven tracked it down.)

It’s an uberromantic song – perfect for February 14!

Click here to listen to “Feels Like a Woman,” which was written by Troggs frontman Reg Presley.  (Presley died from lung cancer in 2013.)

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

Doug Sahm – "Poison Love" (1973)

And I know this love

Is surely not for me

The late Doug Sahm made his radio debut at age five and released his first record when he was 11.  He was on stage with Hank Williams, Sr., in Austin, Texas, for Hank’s final stage performance on December 19, 1952.  (Williams died in the back seat of a car less than two weeks later.)  

Doug Sahm with Hank Williams, Sr.

The story goes that Sahm was offered a chance to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry a few years later, but that his mother said no – she wanted him to finish junior high school.

Sahm was a jack of all trades – his music is a mix of rock ’n’ roll, country, blues, R&B, and Mexican conjunto music, and that eclecticism is the essence of Texas popular music.  Texas is a great big melting pot of musical cultures and styles, and Sahm’s records epitomized that.

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Maybe Sahm would have been a bigger commercial success if he had stuck to one style of music.

In the sixties, he moved to San Francisco after forming the Sir Douglas Quintet, a faux British Invasion band that had two hit singles – “She’s About a Mover” and “Mendocino.”  

I found the group’s first album in the cutout bins at Grandpa’s, a long-gone-but-not-forgotten discount store in my hometown that made Walmart look like Nieman-Marcus.  It was in the three-for-a-dollar section, and I figured that was a fair price for the two aforementioned hit singles.  But the album turned out to be a gem.

Sahm recording with Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, who was another fan of that album, once said, “Look, for me right now there are three groups: [the Paul] Butterfield [Blues Band], The Byrds and the Sir Douglas Quintet.”

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After the Sir Douglas Quintet broke up, Sahm moved back to Texas and was signed to an Atlantic Records deal by famed producer Jerry Wexler.  His Atlantic albums – which consisted of equal parts country songs and blues tracks – featured guest appearances by Bob Dylan, Dr. John, and the Creedence Clearwater Revival rhythm section (Doug Clifford and Stu Cook).

Sahm’s seventies albums sold poorly, and he spent much of the eighties touring and recording in Europe (he had a hit album on a Swedish label) and Canada.  

In 1989, Sahm formed a Tex-Mex supergroup, the Texas Tornados, who released seven albums and won a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Record.

Sahm died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Taos, New Mexico, in 1999.  He was 58 years old.

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Sahm was kind of the Texas version of Oklahoma’s Leon Russell.  Both were multitalented musicians who sounded good no matter what style of music they were playing.  And both were underrated by the public – although not by the many superstar recording artists they performed with.

Click here to listen to Sahm’s 1973 cover of “Poison Love,” a country song that was first recorded in 1950.  It’s an excellent example of Sahm’s eclecticism – the instruments backing Sahm on this track include mandolin, dobro, honky-tonk piano and Tejano-style accordion.  (It’s sloppy as hell in places – Sahm has only a tenuous grasp on the song’s lyrics – but sloppiness ain’t all bad.)

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Joe Jackson – "It's Different for Girls" (1979)

What the hell is wrong with you tonight?

I can’t seem to say or do the right thing

Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello have a lot in common.  Both are British, and both are almost the same age – Costello is exactly two weeks younger.  

Both initially had success with new wave music before moving on to make more sophisticated, jazz-influenced records.  

And both are critically-acclaimed songwriters who have achieved only middling commercial success.

Joe Jackson in 1979

The biggest difference I see between them is that Costello is much more famous than Jackson – or, at least, that’s my perception.  (I can’t point to anything that definitively proves that, but I’m fairly confident that it’s true.)  

The music of both men got roughly the same amount of attention for the first decade or so of their careers.  But while Costello has remained in the public eye since then – he won an Academy Award for a song he co-wrote for Cold Mountain, composed orchestral works, and appeared in several American television series (including Sesame Street) – the records Jackson released over the past 25 years (with the exception of his newest, 2019’s Fool) haven’t gotten much notice. 

The bottom line is that I wouldn’t say that Costello is underrated as an artist.  But I don’t think Jackson has gotten his due.  

Jackson’s first few albums – Look Sharp!, I’m the Man, Beat Crazy, and Night and Day – are full of remarkable songs.  None of his contemporaries wrote better ones.  

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“It’s Different for Girls” – which was released in 1979 on Jackson’s I’m the Man album – was a #5 hit single in the UK, but failed to crack the top 100 in the U.S.

It’s a terribly sad song – as are “Breaking Us in Two,” and “One More Time,” and several other of my Joe Jackson favorites.

But even Jackson’s clever songs – and no one has ever written a more wickedly clever pop song than “Biology” – are terribly sad.

Click here to listen to “It’s Different for Girls.”

Click below to buy 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

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.

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

As 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.

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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 – so 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 CCR ever thought that “Grapevine” would be a good song for it to cover is beyond me.  But they were right.)

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

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: