Posted on 09/13/2024 12:25:03 PM PDT by Alberta's Child
Day #18 of the Top 50 songs on my iTunes playlist -- ranked in reverse order by play frequency from #50 to #1 and presented here on a series of FR threads. I'm posting them here on a new thread that compiles the growing list one day at a time over the next couple of months. I only post them on weekdays and may miss a day or two here and there, so it will take at least ten weeks to do this.
And to show my gratitude to the FR management for giving us all a forum to post vanity threads like this, I'll be making a contribution for the current AND next quarterly fundraisers. I would encourage everyone on these threads to do the same! :-)
Have fun with this, folks!
#34 -- "Copperhead Road" by Steve Earle ... Click Here (Rumble version)
#50T -- "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel
#50T -- "Fly Over States" by Jason Aldean
#49 -- "Sara" by Fleetwood Mac
#48 -- Bagpipe Medley by the Simon Fraser University Pipe Band (2009 World Pipe Band Championships)
#47 -- "How I'll Always Be" by Tim McGraw
#46 -- "Midnight On The Interstate" by Trampled By Turtles
#45 -- "Your Love" by The Outfield
#44 -- "Ventura Highway" by America
#43 -- "Like A Rock" by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band
#42 -- "The World I Know" by Collective Soul
#41 -- "Dance the Night Away" by Van Halen
#40 -- "The Gael" from The Last of the Mohicans
#39 -- "Stand Or Fall" by The Fixx
#38 -- "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits
#37 -- "Midnight Rider" by The Allman Brothers Band
#36 -- "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" by Procul Harum
#35 -- "Gathering Crowds" from This Week in Baseball
#34 -- "Copperhead Road" by Steve Earle
Let me know if you’d like to be added or removed from the ping list!
Good song.
The ‘rules’ to your tune list are a little bit confusing, but I won’t worry about it.
I will just offer another tune for you to consider.
“Listen To The Music” by The Doobie Brothers, 1972.
Most excellent
There are no "rules," really.
I just took all the songs in my iTunes directory and ranked them from #50 to #1 based on the number in the "Plays" column. The closer you get to #1 on this list, the more frequently the song has been played on my computer or iPod over the years.
These aren't necessarily the best 50 songs in my opinion -- though there is a correlation between this list and a list of my favorites. These are just the ones that have been played most frequently.
I've come to figure out that there seem to be FOUR reasons why songs are ranked on this list (or ranked higher on this list than they would be if it were a rank of my favorites):
1. I've had the song in digital format for a long time, and it's just been played many times.
2. I like the song, so I rarely skip over it if it comes up while I am driving.
3. The song is on multiple playlists that I've set up, so it gets played a bit more often than others. "Midnight Rider" by The Allman Brothers Band, for example, shows up in playlists I've set up for classic rock songs, great highway tunes, and legendary guitarists (Duane Allman and Dickey Betts).
4. I've finally figured out that short songs tend to get played more frequently than long ones. That's because the iTunes play counter doesn't add another "Play" to the count unless the song is played to the end ... and longer songs are just a little more likely to be cut off in progress when I have to shut off the stereo.
That’s a great Doobie Brothers tune, by the way. It’s not on my Top 50 list but might be on my Top 100.
Here's a live version with two extra verses plus a video with lyrics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIWCSrG1d-Y
This is due to iTunes re-releasing albums either remastered or with a "deluxe" version featuring more tracks. I then delete the current version of the album and downloading the new and improved versions, resetting my play count on those tracks back to zero.
For example, you had "Sara" by Fleetwood Mac earlier in your list. Now "Tusk" is my alltime favorite Fleetwood Mac album and "Sara" definitely would have ranked high, along with "Sisters Of The Moon", "I Know I'm Not Wrong", the title track, and others. However, there is now a titanic 85+ track deluxe version of "Tusk" that I have downloaded, erasing all the play counts of earlier versions.
Anyhow, my #34 most played song deserves to be there and it is one of the first songs I remember growing up with back in the early 1970s. There is a personal and creepy story regarding this song that I have posted at length in earlier Free Republic postings over the years but will recap down below.
The Doors - Riders On The Storm (1971)
What makes this song creepy for me? Read on.
I was just 8 years old when this song was released in the summer of 1971. I was growing up in Revere, Massachusetts at the time. A few blocks away from my home was the Ritz restaurant, hard by the Boston and Maine railroad tracks on Revere Street, about a half mile from Revere Beach.
The Ritz (now a Chinese restaurant) at the time was a rather run-down Italian themed restaurant. Revere at the time was mostly a Roman Catholic Italian community and The Ritz was a place to go to get a spaghetti and meatball dinner for just a couple of dollars with all the Italian bread you could eat. I remember going there with my family and wiping my plate clean with that bread. It was more of a bar though, a rough kind of bar where bikers used to go on the way or from the nearby beach.
They also had pizzas that you could take out. When my mother was not in the mood for cooking, she would give me a few dollars to go down to the Ritz to order a couple of cheese pizzas to take home. In those days, you did not phone your order in and there was no such thing as online, obviously. You had to go to the restaurant to place your order and wait for it to get done. If it was before 4PM (when the dining room opened), you had to order at the bar and sit there.
Now in those days, even 8 years olds like me at the time could plant ourselves at the bar and order pizzas to go. Which I did frequently back then.
On this particular day back in 1971, it was one of those very hot, humid days in August and my mother did not want to cook. So my dad gave me a $5 bill to go get a couple of pizzas. As I walked the couple of blocks over there, I noticed that the sky to the west was very dark and there were low rumbles of thunder off in the distance. Seems a cold front was about to come through with a line of thunderstorms.
I arrived at The Ritz and as it was early afternoon and the dining room was not open yet, I had to order at the bar. It was a very dark "dive" bar and I planted myself at a stool in the corner. The usual daytime drunks were there, sipping on their drinks. The bartender was extremely obese, in a wife-beater T-shirt, unshaven and sweating. Air conditioning was still mostly non-existent in those days.
The bartender took my order and slid me a complimentary Coke while I waited for the pizzas to get done. He kept staring at me which was already starting to unnerve me.
As I sat at the bar, the storm began approaching outside and I could hear the thunder get louder and louder. The jukebox was playing, likely something by Creedence Clearwater Revival or Three Dog Night, which were both very popular at the time. Then came "Riders On The Storm" by The Doors, a song I was already familiar with.
By now, the thunderstorm was directly overhead and the thunder from the Doors song was overlapping the actual thunder outside. The dim lights in the bar started flickering and for a short time went out completely. The obese bartender sidled up to me and I could hear his heavy breathing and smell his bad breath as he practically hovered over me. He was probably just looking to protect the one child at the bar but I was totally creeped out just the same. With the power out, the music temporarily stopped and I could hear the pounding rain on the roof as well as the thunder.
After a minute or two, the lights came back on and "Riders On The Storm" resumed playing on the jukebox. My pizzas from the kitchen came out and the bartender slid them over to me with a gap-toothed smile.
I grabbed the pizzas and hustled out of there. The rain had mostly stopped, the sky to the west was brightening, but I still remember running home down the rain-slicked streets while carrying the pizzas and having that "Riders On The Storm" song running through my head.
Good song for #34 on the list, too!
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