This is the second part of the piece that Nathan and I did a few years ago. No order. Open for all kinds of debate. Here is his list.

Bad Brains – Big Takeover

From the opening drum build of Big Takeover, you know something bad is coming and it’s probably going to involve you taking an ass beating. You get one second to catch your breath before the boot hits your face. At that point you have two options—(1) Let the music take you, hope you can ride it out (2) Get run the hell over. People often credit Bad Brains with starting the hardcore punk movement. Their influence is undeniable in the bands that followed (best chronicled in the amazing documentary American Hardcore). This is a band that makes you take notice. Rastafarians. A lead singer that pinballs around the stage. Jazz trained musicians playing at a hundred miles an hour. Crazy enough to work in rock ‘n roll.

Bad Company – Bad Company

A good rock n’ roll song can make you feel tough. A great rock n’ roll song can—on a neurological level—rewire your brain to make you dumb enough to prove it. You start repeating the right lyric enough times it becomes your mantra and you start believing that you’re some mash-up incarnation of Clint Eastwood and James Dean. It’s a good trick to get you through a bar fight or a meeting with the boss or a breakup with your old lady that you’d rather not think about until you’ve got something else lined up. In this complicated media world of mixed messages it seems everybody loves an anti-hero. That’s all this song is about. From the beginning piano line and primitive wailing, the genie is on the way out of the whiskey bottle. The bullets are chambered. Something is going down tonight. The song is epic in its set-up, making everything it touches bigger than it really has any right to be.

Bruce Springsteen – Born to Run

I’m not a Springsteen guy. I don’t own any records of the guy’s work. But I might be pushed to say that Born to Run is the best rock n’ roll song of all time. There are so many issues at play—love, class, youth, fast cars, sex, hatred of the workplace. It’s timeless. Could be 1950. Could be 2008. It’s fully Jersey, but if you take out highway 9 and put in the place you live, it could be your town. It’s universal without sacrificing intimacy. Perhaps never have vulnerability and invincibility been so beautifully set to song. It moves along like a tidal wave, building until it’s some 40 foot monster towering above us all. Poised to crash and pull us under. And when it does, for just a second we wonder if we’ll make it out the other side. When we do, the song kicks into fifth gear, even more defiant, making deathbed promises to love, and delivering for the last time such a great rock n’ roll line—“Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Fortunate Son

Rock n’ roll is, in its purest form, a protest music. It knowingly or unwittingly helped create dividing lines along generation, race, and class since its inception. It’s given a voice to the people who are otherwise muted by those more powerful. Part of the problem with music today (and to an old sonofabitch like myself, there are many problems with it) is that nobody is actually saying anything when you listen to the radio. It’s all inconsequential talk about 24 inch rims, champagne, ambiguous odes to missing lovers—meaningless bullshit over the top of overproduced and overwritten compositions that drag on for four minutes. John Fogerty took less than two and a half minutes to extend his middle finger to every moneyed chicken hawk pushing the neighbor’s kid into Vietnam. Before war was a video game or a thirty second spectacle on the evening news, real kids were being drafted into the military to fight a controversial war in Southeast Asia. Fogerty wraps up the disillusionment and the anger of a generation of kids who couldn’t get a deferment and were disenchanted with what the country had become. Lyrically this song is so smart, and biting and confrontational and rings as loud today as it ever did.

David Allan Coe – Long Haired Redneck

Coe is one of rock n’ roll’s great boogeymen. A true outlaw with a sketchy past. The kind of guy that you might see at a party, but hope that nobody actually introduces you, because you’re worried that he might be as crazy as you heard and that he drags you either willingly or unwillingly into something suitably crazy. Though he’s known more as a country singer (he would later record the seminal working man’s anthem “Take this job and shove it”) Long Haired Redneck fully captures rock n’ roll’s defiance of commercialism and embraces its confrontational attitude. He takes on radio. Hippies. And even lets the presumably dirtball patrons of whatever dive bar he’s singing about know that he’s ready to fight.

Loudmouth in the corner is getting to me
Talkin’ ‘bout my earrings and my hair
I guess he ain’t read the signs that say I’ve been to prison
Someone ought to warn him before I knock him off his chair

Dead Boys – Sonic Reducer

One way of measuring the effectiveness of a rock n’ roll song is seeing how much it stirs you to fight or fuck. This song is a big, swaggering song–a revenge fantasy with a three chord backdrop and pounding drums that makes you want to punch everybody that ever did you wrong right square in the teeth. At the heart of it, Sonic Reducer is a loner’s anthem. Right from the beginning you’re reminded of that.

I don’t need anyone
Don’t need no mom and dad

You’re also reminded that the protagonist is carrying a powerful weapon and he’s tired of your taunts and bullying. He’s done living in anonymity and he’s about to do something about it. The days of being a victim are over.

Then I’ll be ten feet tall
And you’ll be nothing at all

Guns n Roses – Welcome to the Jungle

Depending on the day and my willingness to spout hyperbole as fact, I might say that Guns n’ Roses was the most important rock band of the eighties and the nineties. In an era that was dominated by absolutely atrocious bands like Cinderella, Trixter, and Slaughter, Guns n’ Roses stepped onto the scene and absolutely obliterated them all. They were bloated. They were unabashedly about the spoils of their war. Women. Drink. Drugs. But that isn’t what set them apart. No, what made GnR special was that they fused punk rock roots with the size of 70’s era rock. They didn’t just have one larger than life personality. There was Axl Rose, serpentine like dancing across the stage, his neurosis on display for all. There was Slash, a mixture of hat, hair, and brown bagged liquor effortlessly playing his ass off. The mix was volatile. By the early 90’s in-fighting, substance abuse, double albums, and personality clashes effectively blew the band to pieces. Even still it’s a band that has a mythic quality, a legend, the modern day gold standard for how to be rockstars.

Joan Jett – Bad Reputation

Every couple of years the marketing department at major record studios trot out a bad girl-punk rock chick hoping to capture the teenage girl market and to get a little crossover appeal with horny 30 something dudes who live in their parents’ basements. The problem with these acts is that they have no credibility. Any girl from the mall can be dressed up in a torn mini skirt and jammed into a t-shirt with some teasing/tough talk on it and be called Avril. The next chick coming out of the Gap can get a heavy dose of black eyeliner and be pushed out on stage to play bass for Good Charlotte. It’s just a job and a chance to make money. It’s also horribly transparent. Joan Jett is the real deal. From her time Cherry Bombing with the Runaways to her time with the Black Hearts, Jett has been rocking with authentic punk attitude. Nothing sums that up more than Bad Reputation.

I don’t give a damn about my reputation
You’re living in the past, it’s a new generation
Now a girl can do what she wants to do
And that’s what I’m going to do

I only wish that when Ashlee Simpson got busted lipsynching that Joan would have come out of the shadows and busted Ashlee in the mouth. And when the record execs came out to save their prized pig, Joan could have busted them all, too.

Lynyrd Skynyrd – Free Bird

Rock n’ roll has always been about excess. Sex. Drugs. Whatever else that could be done in bulk was best done in bulk. Freebird is a song of excess, especially if you’re listening to the live version from One More from the Road or watching the mind meltingly beautiful version on Youtube. What makes it so excessive? Well, to start, there are THREE guitarists, a bassist, a pianist, and two sets worth of drums and cymbals. Mix in the ultimate southern rock singer, the late Ronnie Van Zandt and then let the damn thing percolate for over ten minutes, building and heaving into the most epic, drawn out finish to a song ever, and you’ve got one helluva a specimen of rock.Some people might wonder—are you being ironic? The answer to that question is an emphatic HELL NO. For every hipster hoping to score funny points with a FREEBIRD~! request at a Strokes show, please know that your sad legacy—the sum total of your life—will never touch as many people as this song touches in any given day. No matter how cheesy the references have become to this song, it has a genuine, emotional core that’s been there since the day it was recorded. It survived half the band dying in a plane crash, it will most certainly survive your attempt at being cool.

Neil Young – Hey Hey, My My

I initially wanted to include this song because I think Neil Young is 110% about the music and sings the line:

Hey hey my my
Rock n’ roll will never die

And then I wanted to see if I could catch a live version somewhere that fully captures the strength and the spectacle of the man and this particular song. This is rock n’ roll. Guitar driven. Sung from the throat and the gut like every word might be the last. When the song was initially recorded Young was battling relevancy issues– Crosby, Stills, and Nash were gone, punk was hitting and mocking the older generation. Elvis had just died. Hey hey My my has the feel of last ditch, gloves dropped fighting. The cagey veteran who isn’t afraid to bust out the eye gouge to teach the young kids a lesson. Young and this song were instrumental in inspiring grunge and noisecore, updated rock n’ roll for the next generation. In Kurt Cobain’s “suicide” note he quoted another lyric from this song:

My my hey hey
Rock n’ roll is here to stay
It’s better to burn out
than to fade away

Hell, that’s powerful.

Quiet Riot – Metal Health

Back in the early 80’s I lived my days in a working class neighborhood where the older boys chewed tobacco and beat the crap out of each other without fear of adult interference. Quiet Riot often played in the background of these slugfests, most of the time, overwhelming whatever boombox it was coming out of. The lyrics to the song are crazy, nonsensical, but somehow manage to be menacing. The cover of this album had a dude in a hockey mask and straight jacket that kinda looked like it was made by Members Only. It didn’t make sense, but it scared the hell out of me and made my mother nervous. Rock n’ roll? Works for me.

The Replacements – Bastards of Young

There’s a reason this song has been covered by every Alter Native band to ever sprout from Midwestern dirt. It’s undeniably an anthem of the post-high school/now what the hell am I going to do crowd? It captures the spirit of youth movement early 80’s flyover country—prospects grim with Reagan in the White House. Russia and the U.S. dancing the Mutual Destruction at the YMCA. And who gives a shit about the long haired rocker kids? Let’s get drunk and hope when we wake up the radiation is strong enough to kill us all. No. That’s not right. It’s bigger than that and less theatrical. It’s a straight ahead riff. It’s an earnest search for making sense of youth and the future. That’s rock n’ roll, but delivered with so much weight that when Westerberg finally gets around to delivering the last verse, mixed in with the instrumentation, it breaks your damn heart.

The ones who love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest
And visit their graves on holidays at best
The ones who love us least are the ones we’ll die to please
If it’s any consolation, I don’t begin to understand them

We are the sons of no one, bastards of young

Rolling Stones – Gimme Shelter

The fact that this song still holds is as haunting as it is, forty years after its release is a testament to just how damn spooky it is. The beginning sets the tone, captures the uncertainty of the time when it was written. Sparse instrumentation from unusual culprits add to the song’s exotic feel. Whatever Keith Richards was on must have made him feel like it was the end of the world. The lyrics are vague and creepy enough as done by Jagger. But when the woman in the back of the studio starts screaming about rape and murder and makes it all sound like it’s right around the corner, it’s enough to send chills up your spine. It’s the ability to create such a primitive emotional response that truly makes this song what it is—a parallel to rock n’ roll as a whole. In the years that have passed since Gimme Shelter was recorded we’ve seen Alice Cooper, three incarnations (at least) of Ozzy, Marilyn Manson, and a host of lesser known people who have, on some level, played the crazy card. Our senses should be dulled, but this song still hits the same nerve raw.

Social Distortion – Ball and Chain

This song could have been written in 1958, 1988, or 2008. That makes it timeless as far as this list goes and it’s not only because of the rockabilly roots, it’s because Mike Ness captures it all—the self-destruction with guarded optimism, the unobtainable girl, the fight to keep getting up even when the odds are long. There’s a big, catchy sing-a-long chorus, a few false stops, and this driving rhythm section. A knock against Social Distortion is that all of their songs follow a predictable formula, and there may be a little truth to that. But where I think people fail to give the band their proper respect is that they’ve been able to successfully blend rock, country, rockabilly, punk and put down an original stamp on the world. Ball and Chain is a standout selection from the catalog especially the live version from the Live at the Roxy album because Ness is in full rock n’ roll showman mode, working the song and the crowd for everything they’re worth.

Thin Lizzy – The Boys are Back in Town

Phil Lynott was an Irish poet who just happened to front a big ass rock n’ roll band. Thin Lizzy influenced a lot of bands that influenced a lot of bands that influenced a lot of bands that are playing today. I think they’re a little more anonymous than they should be, but a song like The Boys holds up. Lyrically, Lynott borrows from standard threads—namely the blue collar release of Friday nights spent going back and forth between fighting, fucking, and drinking your body weight in beer while the jukebox blares something else that rocks. But Lynott writes and sings about it in a style all his own, giving his own spin to a tried favorite. The other thing about this song is that the riff is SOOOO big. It’s a larger than life wall of amps and strings, capably driven by Lynott’s bass line. It’s a song filled with trouble and regret, but somehow maintaining its fun heart. Unfortunately, Lynott lived the gimmick and would ultimately die from complications due to years of substance abuse.

The Who – Baba O’ Riley

The foundation for Baba O’ Riley (aka “that song from American Beauty”) comes in the form of the ultra fast keyboard loop. It’s my brain. It’s your brain. It’s the frenetic, unfulfilling pace of 9-5. It’s a shaky relationship. It’s the uncertainty of what comes next. All computing at one hundred miles an hour. Right when you’re brain starts preparing for Operation Shutdown this big piano line—simple and resonant—starts in followed by the hard hitting drums of one of rock n’ roll’s certifiably craziest bastards, Keith Moon. The layers take hold in time for Townsend’s power chords to give a glimpse of what could be possible even in the face of impending doom. So much loaded language follows. Teenage Wasteland. I Don’t Need To Be Forgiven. This is all about standing up to the bring me downs and kicking your way out of the shackles that have kept you living scared of consequence and the promise of futures never delivered.