I like reading Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly (side note, Uncle Stevie — sorry but I let my subscription run out after 15+ years as a subscriber. Too much tabloidism now in the magazine and not enough industry coverage) and a couple of months ago I read Stevie’s Wonders which was King’s top 24 rock and roll songs.

The thing that got me was when I read the following paragraphs…

”Best rock songs of all time,” he says. ”That subject always starts arguments, especially if you don’t put ‘Stairway’ on there.”

I realized he was right. Especially since the idea of putting ”Stairway to Heaven” on such a list grosses me out. So I decided to take my biker buddy up on his idea. Twenty-four great songs, one for every hour of the day, picked by the Infallible Me.

I began by throwing out most of those Internet lists, because they’re full of ballads (”Tears in Heaven” as rock & roll? Oh, really?), soul (”When a Man Loves a Woman” is a great song but it’s not rock), and tunes that have been played to death. There’s also an amazing number of draggy songs on the lists, like ”Hotel California.” When would I like to hear that one again? Uh…how does never work for you?

As much as certain songs are classics — they are more pop than rock. “Hotel California” — that’s a folks rambler of a pop song (at least the live version, gotta listen to the original again but it’s soft rock if anything). “Tears in Heaven” is a ballad and not boot-stompin, shit-kicking rock. You know, the type of songs that make you want to groove your thing all over the place.

That got me thinkng of the Beatles a lot. Now, anyone who knows me knows that the Beatles have had a profound effect on me, so this should seem like only a natural conclusion. While there are plenty of songs in the Beatles library (under Lennon/McCartney, Harrison or Starkey) that could vie for a place on King’s list… It was the one song that is forever identified with the Beatles that made it: She Loves You.

King talks about how the song “gets in, does it’s business and gets out” as why it’s the top Beatles song and also shows King’s justification why a number of songs by a number of artists didn’t make the cut — they linger. They dwell. They overstay their welcome. She Loves You clocks in at 2:22. In, out, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.

Yet my opinion differs. I’ll add a little length in time to my selection versus Uncle Stevie’s choice in saying “She Loves You” ain’t the top Beatles rock’em, sock’em song. I could single out any number of songs that can be more than “She Loves You” but lets keep it the older fair simply because the Beatles of 1963 didn’t have multiple overdubs, double tracking and such. It was pure, it was simple, it was ruined by screaming fans when performed live.

At any rate, the one on my mind is more of a rock and roll classic than “She Loves You” IMHO. If “She Loves You” can be labeled a Beatles-only song (and from listening to it this morning, I couldn’t help but realize how it epitomizes the early Fab 4 with “Yeah Yeah Yeah” and the vocal harmonizing in their ooh’s), the one on my mind is the Rock God’s ode that ranks up there with classics from Berry, Holly, Little Richard, etc.

I Saw Her Standing There:

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 !

Well, she was just 17,
You know what I mean,
And the way she looked was way beyond compare.
So how could I dance with another (ooh)
And I saw her standin’ there.

Well she looked at me, and I, I could see
That before too long I’d fall in love with her.
She wouldn’t dance with another (whooh)
And I saw her standin’ there.

Well, my heart went “boom,”
When I crossed that room,
And I held her hand in mine…

Whoah, we danced through the night,
And we held each other tight,
And before too long I fell in love with her.
Now I’ll never dance with another (whooh)
Since I saw her standing there

Well, my heart went “boom,”
When I crossed that room,
And I held her hand in mine…

Whoah, we danced through the night,
And we held each other tight,
And before too long I fell in love with her.
Now I’ll never dance with another (whooh)
Since I saw her standing there

2:55 makes it a little long by Uncle Stevie’s standards but come on… This goes away from the banal love-love-love and brings you the pure primal urges of a cocky kid at a dance. Where you get stuck with the yeah-yeah-yeah’s in the refrain of “She Loves You”, the worst you suffer here is trying to figure out the answer “How could I dance with another girl / When I saw her standing there?”

Of course, “She Loves You” comes off more like a stampede in it’s delivery (just listen to Ringo Starr’s lead in on drums and that sets the tempo for the delivery of the entire song), “When I saw her standing there” comes at you raw but on target in the sense of a garage band who got recording studio time and made the most of it.

Isn’t that what Rock’s about? Get in, get out — I agree with King on this — but then you have that non-honed element that has gotta be there. Something like you’re enjoying yourself but you’re just wigging out, showing your feelings in what you’re singing. You listen to Paul telling you “She was just 17 / and you know what I mean” and you know what he means. Either if you are the guy or the girl.

Maybe you see my point, maybe you entirely disagree. Cast your vote below:

[poll=2]

You may also want to comment and leave your thought son things, that’s all right and good to. There are a ton of originals that the Beatles wrote and performed that could be listed but try not to go past 1965 if you want to list another song.

I was taking a Zogby poll the other day and a question surfaced within the poll that actually made me freeze and think long and hard before I cast my vote. It’s soemthing that can come up in idle conversation at any time and you might throw out an immediate answer but I took this question real serious…

What dead rockstar best epitomizes the spirit of rock and roll

Jim Morrison (The Doors)
John Lennon (the Beatles)
Janis Joplin
Jimi Hendrix
Stevie Ray Vaughn
Freddie Mercury (Queen)
Duane Allman (The Alman Brothers)
Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)
Jerry Garcia (The Grateful Dead)
Frank Zappa
Buddy Holly
Ronnie Van Zandt (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
Elvis

It really mad eme stop and think — I’m not sure why. I mean, the first thought i had was Lennon but John — for all the good he gave to the world as a musician just didn’t feel like the guy who represented Rock in life and death. One could say Elvis but he didn’t liv efast and die young…

I thought of Jim Morrison and his glory days that people remember him for and Jimi Hendrix and how he was the genius on guitar that everyoen strives to be. I thought of Kurt Cobain who wrote and sang, lived fast and died young leaving the beautiful corpse — and how his insecurity (a traight with almost all musicians) was a profound attribute to his personality.

Just who best eptomizes Rock?

I was flipping through the cable channels this evening and came across ESPNews, which was reporting a trade between the New York Knicks in the NBA and another team. I started thinking about the Knicks name, which is short for Knickerbockers, and how classy/traditional the name is in a sense that it just seems totally old school…

It then occured to me that any or every NBA player has to ask themselves what the hell a Knickerbocker is. They also probably wonder why the team is keeping such a lame name…

Welcome to the NBA.

You look at the other professional sport leagues and not only are names with non-modern/urban undertones in existence, but there are traditions stacked upon traditions in each league. The NHL has the hat trick — which leads to caps thrown onto the ice. Major League Baseball has the 7th Inning Stretch. The NFL has the coin flip, gatorade dousings and individual traditions (as do MLB and teh NHL) such as the Lambeau Leap and the Thanksgiving Day games involving the Cowboys and the Lions….

What does the NBA have?

The NBA has rapists, drug abusers, teenagers who skipped College for the money and shoe deals with Nike. The NBA has arrogance and individualism. The NBA tries to be one big highlight reel of slam dunks….

And people wonder why I don’t follow the sport?

While fans in Detroit are tossing Octopi onto the ice at Joe Louis Arena to celebrate a Red WIngs goal, and while Yankee fans are dancing to Rock and Roll Part Two (the Hey song) or YMCA between innings, NBA fans have mascots doing basketball tricks and players bitching at each other and making threats. While the Buccaneers have their pirate ship firing after a touchdown (a relatively new tradition), the NBA has gimmick slam dunks that everyone tries to imitate.

Michael Jordan is not the norm of the NBA — he’s just the most imitated player.

You know, I was just going through something or other on the web and I came across a little factoid that just hit me a certain way that made me laugh and think at the same time about a poem I wrote a few years ago (song Poem) and how true the lyric is, in a sad way…

The song-poem was Java Jungle which I wrote at Palm Harbor’s “Java Jungle” coffee shop years ago when I was still very much a lyricist and poet. The song is just rambling verse that makes sense to me and probably me alone in some of it’s meanings but has a little niftiness to itself… if you can find the rhyme scheme and what could have been the beat or what the music could have turned into with the song…

At any rate, I’m going to post the lyrics now – then I will tell you more about that “ironic and funny” little meaning I didn’t intend that I just found out about…

Sally-man say:
“Who led the way,
“Across the Great Red Sea?”
Way back,
The long way back,
Back home

© 1997 John P. Fontana

So what’s the big deal? Well, I could break down the meaning of each stanza and verse to you but some of it is boring and some of it – as I already alluded to — should make sense only to me (Mickey and Brand across the great land, for instance, is a reference to friends of mine who used to come down to be with family here in Florida, I would see them every summer).

The lyric that I found funny is one of the closing lines… I talk about Easter Day and St. Jude’s Parade and then make a reference to “Lennon Lad”. This is all talking about Julian Lennon. “Jude” being direct reference to “Hey, Jude” which was written by Paul McCartney for Julian during the time John Lennon was divorcing Cynthia Lennon.

The entire line was actually supposed to be reference to St. Crispian’s Day, I believe I had seen Renaissance Man not very long before I had written this poem and I was very fond of Shakespeare at the time after a year of his works being passed on to me through Ms. Ciccone at East Lake High School.

Well, St. Jude got worked in there and the reference to Julian was made — “The kingdom’s yours to have” and silence abounds… That’s saying that Julian could have easily followed John Lennon’s footsteps and gone to the top of Rock and Roll but failed to do so… Of course, Julian is still involved with music and still battles demons involved with his father and his childhood… That being said, there are reason the kingdom was never entirely inherited by him or by Sean Ono Lennon for that matter.

The ironic – funny twist that I keep making reference to is St. Jude. I didn’t know who St., Jude was nor did I ever think to find out… I just threw the name out there for the rhyme and for the reference (Jude, Jules, Julian) and only recently (reading another Rick Reilly article) found out who St. Jude is:

The Patron Saint of Lost causes.

So, Lennon Lad, the kingdom may be yours to have but from what the Java Jungle tells you, it’s a lost cause trying to inherit it…