Time spent going down internet rabbit holes is pretty much time wasted. Still I do it, and every once in a while I come across something worth watching. Recently I found two YouTube videos in which Neil Young and Paul McCartney each described the five songs that they considered the greatest of all time.
I won’t go into their top fives (the websites are listed below), but their comments got me to thinking about the songs that are most important to me. I cannot do what Young and McCartney did, which was to describe the songs that they thought most influenced rock ‘n roll. I am not a musician nor am I a music historian, and I have no idea what songs most changed music. I can, however, list the songs that meant the most to me over the years.
Below are my top five. These are the songs that popped into my head as I watched the Young and McCartney videos. Not coincidentally, there’s a Neil Young and a McCartney song on the list. I am sure that if I sat down one morning and reflected more carefully, the list would be different. Most of these songs aren’t even among my favorites. Rather than the history of music, they are the history of me.
I Want to Hold Your Hand
If you asked me today to name the greatest song of the early rock era, it would be Johnny B. Goode. I, however, was born in 1954 and was too young to appreciate that song when it first came out in ’58. Instead my introduction to rock ‘n roll was early Beatles. When my parents needed a babysitter, I wanted them to call Debbie Manders. She always showed up with a stack of Beatles 45s.
Ohio
Ohio represents an early awareness that I might not be a Republican. I grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and everyone in my neighborhood, as far as I knew, was conservative. The incident at Kent State hit me hard, and it was Neil Young’s opening line more than the famous photograph that sticks with me today. My political transformation did not really happen until my freshman year in college (i.e, Watergate), but “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming…” got me started.
American Pie
Saying that my politics began to shift with Ohio does not mean that I was the least bit political in high school. My teen years were all about football and girls. Everything during my senior year was fun, and American Pie represents those good times. Today I do not think of American Pie as a dance song, but I have a vague memory of twenty kids partying in someone’s basement and dancing to it over and over again.
Two Hangmen
If American Pie captures my high school years, Two Hangmen represents college. During the fourth year of my five-year plan, one of my roommates and I went out for a brat and a beer every Wednesday and Thursday night after studying. The bar where we went was called the Brathaus, and the cooks there split their brats lengthwise before tossing them on an open fire. Most nights the same two folk singers performed on a small stage, and one time they asked Dave and me which song from their repertoire we wanted to hear. We simultaneously shouted out Two Hangmen. From that night on, the musicians played Two Hangmen every time we walked in the door.
Wild Horses/The Weight
It is cheating a bit to include two songs instead of one, but I can’t choose one over the other. Both are here for the same reason. I have a Top 100 playlist that I use during workouts. One hundred is a somewhat arbitrary number, but it also approximates the number of songs I go through in a week if I visit the gym every day. Whenever I add a song to the list, I remove a song that I’ve grown tired of. Wild Horses and The Weight were on the list when I first created it three years ago, and among the songs that have survived all culling, they remain the most fresh.
After listing these songs, I googled each of them for their release dates. Except for I Want to Hold Your Hand, all came out between 1968 and 1971. No surprise there. The music of a person’s teen years is the music of his or her life. Also, in my biased opinion, my teen years represent rock ‘n roll at its peak, and those times produced some of the best music that’s ever been.
Neil Young’s comments can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QchG8ehh_Sg, McCartney is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIz0CQ8yWnE.
Recent Comments