Have I told you about the time I was in a Grammy-winning U2 video? No? Well, pull up a chair and I’ll share it with you. It goes along with the story of one of rock music’s all-time most enduring songs: U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name,” the opening track from their 1987 album … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Where The Streets Have No Name →

Tramps, like us, we were born to run. Run where? Run toward something? Or away from it? Bruce Springsteen’s first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, each released in 1973, hadn’t connected with an audience despite an abundance of ambitious brilliance. None of his singles to … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Born To Run  →

“Let me forget about today until tomorrow,” Bob Dylan wrote one day in the opening stages of 1964. It was the final line of a song filled with lines — some poignant, some instructive, somewhat perplexing in the aggregate. From our vantage point today, it is tomorrow and thus the perfect time to remember this … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Mr. Tambourine Man →

There we were, in mid-December 1984, and Christmas songs were in heavy rotation everywhere. Sleigh bells, reindeer, Santa, and chestnuts roasting. ’Twas the season, and the season was jolly — until good tidings were suddenly being interrupted by a new Christmas song with a decidedly unjolly message of “clanging chimes of doom,” “bitter sting of … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Do They Know It’s Christmas? →

“Hold me close, young Tony Danza.” In a 1996 episode of Friends, Phoebe Buffay, the endearing knucklehead played by Lisa Kudrow, said that the most romantic song ever was the one Elton John wrote for the guy on Who’s The Boss. “Hold me close, young Tony Danza.” Never mind that Tony Danza, who first gained … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Tiny Dancer →

Roughly a thousand years ago, the elite class in Ireland began taking surnames that began with O’ — O’Sullivan, O’Brien, O’Connor —with the O’ translating to “grandson of.” Before we approach the complexities of “Baba O’Riley,” one of The Who’s — and, indeed, all of rock music’s — most lasting songs, it bears explaining the … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Baba O’Riley →

“I was f@#king around with this stupid little riff,” Slash has said of the origins of Guns N Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” That “stupid little riff” is, by the way, the riff that in 2004 Total Guitar magazine readers voted the greatest guitar riff of all time, beating out the opening riffs of Nirvana’s … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Sweet Child ‘O Mine →

“What song do you wanna hear?” singer Ronnie Van Zant asks the crowd before Lynyrd Skynyrd kicks into 14-minutes of “Free Bird” on their 1976 live album, One More from the Road. He was speaking rhetorically. By then, the whole world knew what song everyone wanted to hear at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. Hell, that’s … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Free Bird →

“He not busy being born, is busy dying.” There it was, hiding in plain view in one of Bob Dylan’s most memorable lyrics, released in the spring of 1965. “He not busy being born, is busy dying.” Dylan, 23 and a firmly established toast of the thriving folk scene, laid it all out there: stagnation … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Like a Rolling Stone →

“Scrambled eggs. Oh, my baby, how I love your legs. Not as much as I love scrambled eggs.” Paul McCartney once sang those words with Jimmy Fallon to the tune of “Yesterday” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, putting Fallon in rarified air singing the original lyrics with the man who wrote them. (If you … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Yesterday →

If you get to talking with the great songwriters, you’ll notice a common thread, a connecting theme, and you’ll hear it over and over. They generally have no idea where their songs come from. In 1965, a 21-year-old guitarist in a London band supersized that notion when he wrote a guitar lick for the ages. … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction →

Stairway to Heaven. Is this Led Zeppelin classic the greatest rock & roll song ever? Possibly. Who’s to say? It turns out that plenty of people have had something to say about it. To wit, “Stairway” was the most requested song on FM radio stations in 1970s America, despite never having been released as a … Continue reading Classic Rock Landmarks: Stairway to Heaven →