As rock royalty goes, there’s Elvis and the Beatles, and then comes Bob Dylan, not far behind. He’s their match in terms of being a spokesman for a generation, and when it comes to songwriting, he’s the best. But for purposes of this list, what matters is he has one song that is absolutely defining, a song that my law firm librarian tried to convince me was the all-time #1, and it’s hard to argue against. It also does well in the stick-to-the-end test. Back in 1965, when this was first a hit, AM radio tended to play a shortened version, much to my disappointment. So as soon as I heard the record continue, “You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns,” I considered it a good day. And just listen to those internal rhymes, which, along with the elliptical meaningful meaninglessness of his lyrics in general, convinced me that Dylan was the best poet of my time. After all, who knew anyone who was seriously writing poetry in the late ‘60s? If Robert Frost were born 50 years later, wouldn’t he have been a folk singer? ’64 to ’68 in Cambridge (as on many campuses) was a time of rejecting the Establishment, discovering that things weren’t as they seemed, feeling lost, without a purpose, with no direction home. Whoever that princess on the steeple was, we could identify in some small way. Prep school and college wasn’t leading us to Wall St. after all. We were going to Vietnam, or somewhere to avoid Vietnam, and Wall St. really wasn’t where it’s at, anyway. (And if you were doing drugs, it was probably magnified.) Dylan hardly qualifies as a vocalist, but his nasal, anguished-but-not-emotional voice was perfect here: how does it fee-ee-lll? Sing along in the ultimate rock anthem of disillusionment.

 

B Side: Dylan’s Oeuvre

No one in the Rock Era has written more songs performed in a greater variety of styles to better effect than Bob Dylan. (And of all the opinions you will find scattered over this list, that is undoubtedly the least open to challenge.) Start with Blowin’ in the Wind by Peter, Paul & Mary (pure folk), Mr. Tambourine Man, You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere, My Back Pages, the Byrds (western rock), Don’t Think Twice, the Four Seasons (pop), Mighty Quinn, Manfred Mann, I Shall Be Released, Tremeloes (British Invasion), All Along the Watchtower, Jimi Hendrix (psychedelic), It Ain’t Me Babe, Turtles (top 40), Boots of Spanish Leather, Nancy Griffith (urban folk), Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, (metal), Tomorrow Is A Long Time, Forever Young, Rod Stewart (blue-eyed soul/schmaltz). And those are just songs that were #1 on my personal chart when I first heard them. Then there are the songs that Dylan made his own that I loved just as much: Visions of Johanna, Just Like A Woman, I Want You, She Belongs to Me. How many artists have a Greatest Hits Volume II worth the vinyl it’s printed on? Dylan’s Volume II is two discs, and at least 20 of the 22 songs are gorgeous classics. After recording all these songs, Dylan then comes out with what may be my all-time favorite album, Blood on the Tracks. It was such a milestone, if I remember correctly, that Rolling Stone devoted its entire Reviews section to it, something not done before or since. A decade after Blowin’ in the Wind, Dylan comes up with song after song that no one since has dared to cover: Tangled Up in Blue, Simple Twist of Fate, Shelter from the Storm, Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts and perhaps my favorite, You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, plus five others – all on the same album! Pete Hammill’s liner notes are evocative: “Dylan sings a more fugitive song: allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and ellipses, and by leaving things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him…Dylan’s art feels, and invites us to join him.”

You can consider this the coda to “The Sixties” (it came out in 1971), or you can consider it timeless, perhaps depending upon whether you are a realist or a hopeless optimist (there’s a trick of the English language Lennon might have appreciated). As for me, this is the final song I want played at my funeral. Like a Buddha, Lennon has captured the most profound thoughts in simple words and a simple tune. There is nothing tricky to the two-note lone piano riff that starts the song, or the naked drum that enters midway through the first verse and builds the intensity before soaring strings fill out the orchestration. And Lennon’s voice, which we all know can be biting and sarcastic, comes through with a sincerity that would be naiveté if it weren’t, well, Lennon. In three short minutes Lennon decries religion, nationalism and materialism as causes of conflict in the world. What was true in 1971 is just as true – think 9/11, think Iraq – today. Is it still possible to dream, to imagine, or was that just a delusion?

 

B Side: The Beatles

When someone asked, how could I choose out of all the Beatles songs, I answered, I wasn’t, I didn’t like the Beatles. When “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” et al., arrived in America, they were too “pop” for my taste. I preferred the harder edge of the Rolling Stones and the Who. Plus, they kept my then-favorite group, the Four Seasons, out of the number one spot. I think “Dawn” was #2 for about 17 straight weeks – or maybe it was #3 if the Beatles had two songs out. Then there were all sorts of old farts who had never acknowledged rock’n’roll, like Leonard Bernstein, who pronounced themselves Beatles fans – interloping shamelessly on my territory. The undifferentiated success of all Beatles recordings was another turn-off: they could put out a nursery rhyme (Yellow Submarine), or a song with no melody(Get Back), and it would race to the top of the charts. In the end, there are probably as many Beatles songs I like as those I don’t, and I could easily compile a whole album that would be a minor classic. But they filled the airwaves for so long with so many dogs – Twist and Shout, Ticket to Ride, Paperback Writer, Lady Madonna, etc. – that I never became a fan.

The best thing I ever heard about New Jersey was when they made this the official State song. I don’t know if it still is, and I don’t think “the Boss” lives in Jersey anymore, but the grungy image of that state, deserved or not, is the perfect petri dish for the characters and sounds rising out of Springsteen’s world. It’s not a world most of us would admit to, and certainly not aspire to, but it’s a world we recognize and comes with emotions that are honest. (None of this passive-aggressive stuff!) First comes the urgency, with a drum machine pounding away in split time, a beat that keeps on going. Then a seven-note riff, maybe not as memorable as My Girl’s opener but just as totemic, stresses the importance of what’s to come. We’re pouring out our hearts in this one, baby, the music seems to say, and a xylophone(?) and all sorts of orchestral sounds add to the pounding. The lyrics are the quintessence of Springsteeniana. The first verse establishes the Tough Guy in a tougher world: “this town rips the bones from your back/ it’s a death trap, a suicide rap.” In the second, love, with its softening and hope, arrives in the guise of Wendy and double entendres: “Just wrap your legs ‘round these velvet rims and strap your hands ‘cross my engines.” The pounding slows, we move to a more universal perspective and the narrator switches to the third person, as “girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors/ and boys try to look so hard.” Clarence Clemons’s slightly flat sax solo restores the urgency, we wait for the Boss to return, then, always one bar after I expect it, comes “1-2-3-4” and we arrive at the crashing climax, and it’s a dream, a hopeful dream, echoing the elegiac ending of West Side Story’s “Somewhere.”  “There’s a place for us” becomes “Someday girl I don’t know when/ We’re gonna get to that place…and we’ll walk in the sun.” But never forget who you are, who we are: “tramps like us, Baby we were born to run.”

 

B Side: The Boss’s Magic

How to write about Bruce Springsteen, the subject of far greater minds than mine; and how not to get lost in the crowd when crying, I loved him at Greetings from Asbury Park, long before the rest of the world awoke to find him on the cover of Time and Newsweek the very same week! He was hailed as the “new Dylan” – one of many in those years – largely because they were on the same label and Asbury Park was, maybe, over-lyricked. “Madman drummers, bummers, Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat” did sort of recall the words Dylan threw together in Rolling Stone, or Positively Fourth Street. But by the time of Born to Run, it was clear that Springsteen was something more than a wordsmith: his best songs had a power, a drive, the ability to rock your soul, that Dylan wasn’t interested in. The Boss was just as much the voice of a generation, but it was a different generation. The hippy, arty, change-the-world hopefulness of the ‘60s was gone. Nixon-Watergate-Vietnam had produced an air of defeat, of desperation, and this is where Springsteen went for his powerful stories: Jungleland, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Hungry Heart. By celebrating the gritty, the real, Springsteen connected his words, his world, to the listener; but at the same time the anthemic chords, the pulsing beat gave an uplift. Instead of making you depressed, his music made you feel stronger. It’s no coincidence that Born in the USA was used as a political theme song by Republicans who didn’t notice the anti-war, downer lyrics. It’s that combination of “life is tough,” but “you don’t have to feel bad about it” that is the Springsteen miracle, that makes his music such a touchstone to so many people, including me.

Unlike other artists whose work I consistently bought (see TK sidebar, above), Meat Loaf burst onto the rock scene like a Bat Out of Hell with one transcendent, explosive, almost-perfect record, so good you felt there was nothing more to say. Sure, Meat (or should I say Mr. Loaf) bowed to commercial interests and put out Bat 2, Bat 3 and maybe more, but this seven-song monster was “it,” and of the seven, one stood head and shoulders above the rest. There are other great songs that tell the story of a relationship over the years – John Cougar’s Jack and Diane, Billy Joel’s Scenes from an Italian Restaurant spring to mind – but none are as raw or as closely married to the music as Paradise. The title itself – by the Dashboard Light –  sets the scene: it’s a makeout session in the car. We follow the boy around the metaphorical makeout bases – more on that later – until they’re about to “do it,” when, all of a sudden we hear the girl: “Stop right there; before we go any further, do you love me, will you love me forever…will you make me your wife.” What a dilemma! But the passion is too strong, he foolishly makes his commitment to love her till the end of time…And now, he’s praying for the end of time, “so I can end my time with you” – a phrase that can be read in two ways, but is bleated with such despairing urgency that the singer’s meaning is clear.

            That’s just the story. The music is similarly operatic, as it progresses through three acts, nine rhythm changes and the aforementioned dialogue between Meat and backup singer Ellen Foley. Numerous Jim Steinman lines are classics: “We were barely seventeen, and we were barely dressed”; “It was long ago and it was far away, and it was so much better than it is today.” But what made Paradise hit not just a home run but a grand slam with me was its interlude featuring Yankees broadcaster Phil Rizzuto. The Scooter’s inimitable style was one of the things that made writing Diary of a Yankee-Hater such a pleasure for me, and when he called me a “huckleberry” on the air I was in my own paradise. On-air he was so straight, so old-school about controversial topics like sex: what was he thinking when he recorded the saga of “this boy” going from first base to second base to third base to “holy cow, I think he’s gonna make it!” It was delicious to think that maybe the record producers didn’t even tell him that there would be sounds of panting in the background! Then there was the issue of the baseball analogy’s not even being correct: if there are two outs when the batter bunts, the defense wouldn’t bother with a play at the plate; a suicide squeeze wouldn’t be called and wouldn’t work. Oh, the levels of analysis afforded by this eight-minute rock epic, the only song for which I ever interrupted a dinner party to play for our guests.

 

Sidebar: Personal Connections

Phil Rizzuto was not the only connection that perhaps elevates Paradise to a higher spot in my pantheon than it might occupy in someone else’s. Shortly after Bat’s emergence I discovered Meat Loaf’s role as Eddie the biker in what became my all-time favorite rock movie, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I do mean “discovered,” because when I walked into a midnight show at New York’s Beacon Theater I had no idea what was coming. And a more significant discovery was how I came upon the album: a tip from People Magazine’s rock writer Roger Wollmuth. Buying the record before I’d heard it on the radio and it became a hit gave me a personal investment, familiar to rock fans who, say, adopt a group when they’re only playing in clubs and follow them to the heights. I first heard about REM’s Life’s Rich Pageant traveling in Assisi, Italy, when we ran into a younger couple from California, whom I instinctively recognized as hipper than me. From then on, I felt a personal connection with REM, even as their songs became ubiquitous on the airwaves.

            Something of the same sort occurred when we moved to Minneapolis. The workmen who helped us remodel our basement guestroom told me about the Gear Daddies and Uncle Tupelo, two recently defunct bands who had never made it out of the Midwest. The Gear Daddies became an instant all-time favorite, undoubtedly helped by the fact that I knew about them and my friends back East didn’t. I didn’t warm up to Uncle Tupelo as much, but my insider status led me to buy subsequent Son Volt and Wilco records, which finally paid off with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I had a soft spot for David Bowie and Elton John because I “discovered” them on BBC International when I was in Libya, before they got to America. Ultimately, the songs on this list stand or fall on their own merits, of course, but there’s a lot of room for taste, and one’s personal connections do have an influence.

I first heard this song on New York island radio in 1976, adopted it as my own in a little incident in Antigua that winter, and have never heard it since without, first, smiling, and by its end, feeling I’m a better person. Of course I’m not, but that’s the effect Bob Marley has had on millions all around the world. Who knows what the words mean, above all the patois title, but the message of reassurance comes through: “everythin’s gonna be alright; everythin’s gonna be alright.” The organ in the background establishes the hymn-like context, and the minor progression of four downward half-notes, with a syncopated jump to the last one, establishes the most relaxed mood that carries through the song, however long it lasts. The organ trills above, to add beauty, not urgency. And then, only then, does our hero the singer join in, with his plaintive reverie, “I remember, when we used to sit – trala-lala-lala-la…” Maybe we can’t honestly identify with the Jamaicans huddling around their campfire, but the sentiments and the music are universal. “Good friends we’ve had, good friends we’ve lost” – even more poignant after Marley’s death in 1987 – but somehow, we’ve got to push on through. The music rolls on, and whether the version you hear is four minutes, six minutes, ten minutes, I never want it to end, I never want to leave that government yard down in Trenchtown.