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!