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Rolling Stones 100 Greatest ARTISTS Ever

Marlon12

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lee-scratch-perry.jpg

100.
There are only a handful of producers who can make a band sound interesting and different no matter who they are, and Lee "Scratch" Perry is one of them. He was behind dozens and dozens of classic reggae and dub songs in the Sixties and Seventies, but even more important, he was the first mad-scientist producer.

Scratch could do gorgeous, straight-ahead songs, but he would also toss away verse-chorus-bridge structure. What matters are the emotions and ideas you get from the sound. If someone else was making a song about the city, he might add traffic noise, but Scratch would add a baby crying; he captures what's behind a song. One thing the Beastie Boys do when we are finishing tracks is make sure that there's a Lee Perry part: some weird detail that's not supposed to be there but somehow makes sense.

The early Bob Marley and the Wailers songs that Lee Perry produced, like "Mr. Brown," sound like punk records. They're truly raw — both sh!tty and beautiful at the same time, like a Modigliani painting. That's why punk rockers like the Clash wanted to work with him, because they can relate to the sparseness of the production.

I have videotapes of him in the studio. He's bugging out: screaming at the bass player, turning knobs, banging things. He blows smoke into the microphone so that the sound of the weed gets into the song. And, yes, that's stupid, but it's not. It's part of his ritual, and being in the studio is a ritual.

I had the pleasure of meeting Lee Perry a couple of times. The first was in Hong Kong. We were on tour, and for some reason he was there. He's a very little guy, like your craziest grandfather. He had on a shiny outfit with little things taped all over him: notes, a lot of pictures, studs, mirrors and bottle caps. Each thing had a meaning to it. He also had a video camera and was taping everything - the sky, the buildings, all of us — except he had no videotape in the camera.

We convinced him to play the second Tibetan Freedom Concert, in New York. Right after you played, there was this press tent where everybody would go and say their little something about the cause. Some journalist asked him, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" Lee Perry pulled down his pants and said, "Here's Jesus Christ!" Now that's punk rock.

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99.
If, in the late fifties and early sixties, you were drawn to that place on the AM radio dial where the rhythms, the grooves and the beautiful sounds of African-American soul were playing, you would have found Curtis Mayfield. Many of us first heard him as backing vocalist in the Impressions behind Jerry Butler, singing "For Your Precious Love," but he really came into focus in Butler's next big hit, "He Will Break Your Heart," which was written by Mayfield and features his strumming electric guitar to a saucy tango beat that you can hear echoing in Ben E. King's "Spanish Harlem."

After that he was front and center, singing the lead about a "Gypsy Woman" in an exotic brew of castanets and dark ascending minor chords. At one point after the lyric "She danced around and round to a guitar melody," he fired off an accent on his guitar that resonated for years for many of us who tried to emulate him — she cast her spell and he followed, with the rest of us close behind. You can clearly hear his influence in the monumental "Little Wing," by Jimi Hendrix.

But it was his voice that reached the higher ground. It burned with the abandon of the blues singer and an almost feminine longing, at once powerful and deeply personal. Women responded overwhelmingly to him, to his profoundly respectful and sensitive approach. When he sang "I'm So Proud" and "The Wonder of You," the vulnerability and passion got in real close. They knew he knew.

In the beginning, he made a gospel-like call to rise up, get on board and get ready. "I know you can make it," he exhorted to the slap of tambourines, hand-clapping and soul-stirring harmonizing. He later took on the voice of activism, calling out the diseases of urban America and again challenging people to see what was going on, a plea Marvin Gaye would take up, too — see what's going on and rise above it. The full range of Curtis Mayfield's powers can be heard in the soundtrack to Superfly. It hits you in waves: driving rhythms with brass and string orchestrations countered by down-in-the-alley funk.

He was a dynamic performer right up until he was disabled in an accident onstage in New York in 1990. I only met him once, after a show in San Francisco. He was funny, gracious to all, had a beautiful smile and a genuine way about him — a gentle and humble man at heart.

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98.
Roxy Music were a huge influence on both punk and New Wave: They anticipated the restraint and the coolness of the Eighties, but you wouldn't have had the xes Pistols without them, either. They made playing music look really cool and sexy, and they did it without being elitist virtuosos. They were very fresh, very modern — especially the electronics in their sound — but at the same time, their music was evocative of a romantic past, which England was obsessed with. On their first album, you hear strains of World War II music, of swing and Glenn Miller. But it was all mixed up in a way that made the music seem terribly new.

Bryan Ferry was obviously the songwriter and frontman. His lyrics were very thoughtful and arty but also very warm and full of feeling. In the early days you had Brian Eno, who was the Jimi Hendrix of the synthesizer. There were tremendous musical personalities in the band: Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay, Paul Thompson. You could get your teeth into everybody; this is a band whose solo albums were worth getting. They all had quite interesting voices. And they were a band that you could argue about; Paul Thompson had a tremendous fan club, and he's the least-known of all of them.

Also, it has to be said: You could never separate them from their look. I think Roxy had a lot of conversations about what the band should wear. You expect that kind of thing to happen when Britney Spears is being launched, but you don't expect it to happen within a band: finding just the right pair of shades for the guitar player, finding these jumpsuits for the sax player. They had great, very sexy album covers, too. But it wasn't like their sound was lagging behind.

Their best song may be "Virginia Plain." That's the manifesto. When I saw them play that song on Top of the Pops, I had to have it — I had to get on my bicycle and ride to the nearest record store. Another one is "In Every Dream Home a Heartache," from the second album, about a guy who has everything. He's got the beautiful house, he's got the car, all the modern comforts. But for love, he takes the inflatable doll out every night and makes out with it. "I blew up your body/But you blew my mind." You try and write a song about being in love with a blow-up doll and make it sound cool!

Imagine it's 1973, you're looking for something to do, and school isn't really working for you, and a band like Roxy Music comes along. You'd say, "That's what I want to do." What else could compare to making that kind of noise, wearing those kinds of clothes?

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97.
For twenty years — my whole career, really — all I have been doing is trying to discover another Diana Ross. I obviously still have my work cut out for me. She was gorgeous and skinny — and this was back in the Twiggy days, when skinny was new — and she had that big, beautiful hair. And, of course, she was glamorous: I remember all those furs, diamonds and early bling-bling. Everything about her — her mannerisms, her look, her aura — exuded stardom.

The Supremes were the epitome of the Motown sound. People look at Ross and say she had great songs, she was a good-looking girl, behind her she had Berry Gordy — who, in my book, is the greatest record man who ever lived — she had all these things. Holland, Dozier and Holland were amazing writers, just pure melody men. As we all know now, the unsung heroes were the Motown house band, the Funk Brothers. They could take those great songs and give them a sound. "Where Did Our Love Go," "Baby Love," "Come See About Me," "Stop! In the Name of Love," "I Hear a Symphony" — at the time, people thought those songs were disposable. And now we realize that they're true masterpieces. They're so alive. Everything about the songs was great, even the intros — every one of them had a distinctive, memorable intro, which was a hook in and of itself. And, of course, there were two other wonderful singers in the Supremes, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard.

But at the end of the day, Diana Ross' voice would come on the air and give you chill bumps. It had such presence, terrific tone, and was so identifiable. She didn't sing like Aretha Franklin — she wasn't a gospel singer — but she was a stylist, and you always believed her. She was captivating, romantic. When she asked, "Where did our love go?" she sounded like she was begging.

To this day, I believe that her voice could work on contemporary radio. She set the road map for the success of Janet Jackson, Madonna — anybody who could sing but wasn't a real crooner like Aretha or Patti LaBelle or Gladys Knight. I still ask artists in the studio to "sing this like Diana Ross would." So far, no one has.

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96.
The Vandellas never got the press that Diana Ross and the Supremes did. Diana Ross was posh and glamorous, but Martha had an edge — she was more soulful. Whether she was singing "Dancing in the Street" or "My Baby Loves Me" or "You've Been In Love Too Long," the accent was on the emotion. Singing in a church as a little girl, she learned how to really belt it out. She had the most powerful voice I'd ever heard — she really cut through me.

"Dancing in the Street" is my favorite single of all time — it just knocked me out as a kid walking around New Jersey with a transistor radio glued to my ear. It starts with a pounding drumroll, then the trumpets and then Martha's voice — which is like a horn. The lyrics invite everybody to get together for the best dance party going, and I didn't even pick up on the deeper meaning — that it was also a plea to stop the fighting during a time of riots. Martha could have been singing about sandwiches for all I cared.

That song made me a vinyl junkie: Any time a new Martha and the Vandellas record came out, I made my mother drive me to the A&P supermarket to get it. I couldn't find "Heat Wave," but I finagled it from a friend for fifty cents.

Those songs turned me into Mr. Party. At teen dances, everyone wanted to play slow music, and I was ready to bounce off the walls to uptempo soul. The B-52's are all party people — we started out at a party in Athens, Georgia, to entertain our friends.

I first met Martha when she was performing in Atlanta in the Seventies. She gave me an autographed photo and was such a doll. Years later, we became friends, and she asked me to induct the Vandellas into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Whenever we play Detroit, I give her a call, and she brings her son and daughter-in-law and they hang out backstage. She's a dedicated Detroiter, unlike most of the Motown groups who've moved out. I live in New York now, and she called me after 9/11 to make sure I was OK. It's nice when your idol becomes your friend.

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95.
In 1972, I was searching for a great three-chord band to produce. The radio was logjammed with progressive rock like you wouldn't believe: Yes; Pink Floyd; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Genesis; King Crimson. As a student of rock history, I knew it wouldn't be long before basic rock returned like the cavalry, and I wanted to be leading the charge, albeit behind the scenes.

And so, in 1972, I heard Lynyrd Skynyrd making their Atlanta debut at a very dangerous club on Peachtree Street called Funocchio's. They were playing a weeklong engagement, and each night I'd hear another great original song from them and knew I'd found the band I was searching for.

As I got to know them, I marveled at their work ethic. They had a shack on the swamp in their native Jacksonville, Florida, where they rehearsed constantly, honing their original material into polished, shining steel. They may have had three guitar players, but they understood restraint. Of all the bands I'd come across in my life, they were the finest arrangers. "Sweet Home Alabama" sounds like seasoned studio musicians twice their age.

Ronnie Van Zant was Lynyrd Skynyrd. I don't mean to demean the roles the others played in the group's success, but it never would have happened without him. His lyrics were a big part of it -- like Woody Guthrie and Merle Haggard before him, Ronnie knew how to cut to the chase. And Ronnie ran that band with an iron hand. I have never seen such internal discipline in a band. One example: These guys composed all of their guitar solos. Most bands improvised solos each time they performed or recorded. Not them. Ronnie's dream was that they would sound exactly the same every time they took the stage.

After three or four albums, Lynyrd Skynyrd transcended the Southern-rock tag. They became one of the greatest rock & roll bands in history. They feared no one. On their very first national tour, they opened for the Who. And got encores!

When Ronnie went down in that terrible 1977 plane crash, the forward progress of the band ended. After the survivors all healed, they miraculously reassembled. Ronnie's kid brother Johnnie took over, and you had to rub your eyes to make sure it wasn't Ronnie. But while the band could duplicate the majesty of past live shows (and still can), the heart and soul of the band was gone forever.

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94.
When the gods of nasty sounds tacked audition cards to the trees around town encouraging the brutes of industrial rock to brawl for the crown, a small lad with a tuba was probably not what they had in mind for a contender. His name was Michael Trent Reznor, and he also played sax and piano and learned early in life how to engineer a recording-studio console. He produced a terrific debut album called Pretty Hate Machine. Melodically oriented and, because of record-company contractual problems, supported by what became a three-year tour, it birthed the first real mainstream breakthrough for industrial rock, selling over a million copies.

Following Brian Eno's example, Reznor unpacked his synth and threw away the manual. In making The Downward Spiral, he encouraged the computer to misconstrue input, willed it to spew out bloated, misshapen shards of sound that pierced and lacerated the listener. As a companion piece to Baudelaire's "To the Reader" — the preface to his Flowers of Evil — and second to the Velvet Underground, there has never been better soul-lashing in rock.

I had a strange dream the other week. Lou Reed, myself and a friend known as Warren Peace were having dinner in one of those old-style Greenwich Village places where Pollock was supposed to have fought other painters. Our meal was served by one of the members of Einstúrzende Neubauten. I slowly became aware of the house music and that it was infuriatingly familiar. Our waiter, Blixa Bargeld, leaned in to me and whispered, "The music is a birthday surprise for Lou. Trent Reznor remixed this version of Metal Machine Music as a present."

As he said this, strands, splodges and blots from a Pollock early-Fifties "drip" painting materialized in front of our faces. While the music got louder, the paint hurtled around us faster and faster till we ran nauseous from the cafe, chased by infernal screaming lavender, blue and black snakes.

And that is it, really. Trent's music, built as it is on the history of industrial and mechanical sound experiments, contains a beauty that attracts and repels in equal measure: Nietzsche's "God is dead" to a nightclubbing beat. And always lifted, at the most needy moment, by a tantalizing melody.

I cannot believe that Spiral was released over ten years ago now. It is absolutely time for him to bring on his new work. And from what I know of him, it will be uncompromisingly effective, putting to shame and disqualifying most of what passes as chart fodder. And, no, no one ever calls him Mickey.

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93.
Booker T. and the MG's had that southern funk flavor. Motown took care of the North with their polished sound, but the MG's were gritty and raw, and they could really groove. You can hear their sound reverberating throughout the whole industry today -- especially since hip-hop guys sample so much of what they did back then. They were an integrated band -- half white, half black. There was a "cotton curtain" back in the Sixties: Bands were all segregated in Memphis. But the MG's were like a family. That integration was a sign of things to come.

The MG's made a name for themselves with all those great instrumentals, like "Green Onions," but they were the house band at Stax-Volt, so they had real adaptive ability. Otis Redding had his sound, Sam and Dave had theirs, Albert King had his own thing. But it was always Booker T. and the MG's playing. When I did my first sessions at Stax, I learned everything about record production from those guys.

In the MG's, Steve Cropper and Donald "Duck" Dunn were the rock & rollers, but they also had the country thing covered, as well as the blues. Most guitar players like to go crazy, but Steve picked his spots, and when he spoke it was profound. Duck was a great bass player, and very funny — one of them good old Southern beer-drinking boys.

Al Jackson's father was a drummer, so Al had a background of rhythm. Al had a little jazz flavor along with those R&B grooves. You know when I did "Shaft," with those sixteenth notes on the high-hat? That was actually a break Al played on Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness." That stuck with me.

Booker T. pioneered a lot of sounds on the organ. When you heard him play, you knew it couldn't be anyone else. I remember one time, Booker accidentally had two dates booked at the same time, so he took some other band and went somewhere in Kansas, and I went with the MG's to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I had to go pose as Booker T. Halfway through, some guy yells out, "Hey, man, that guy ain't no Booker T.! He ain't got no hair!" We said, "Oh, sh!t." But the groove took over, and that calmed them down.
 

Marlon12

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92.
Guns n' Roses revived our kind of rock. I remember someone handing me a copy of Appetite for Destruction and saying, "You've got to hear these guys — they're the new big thing." Bands like Bon Jovi and Whitesnake were big around then, but Guns n' Roses were different. They had dug down a little deeper into rock's roots. I heard a lot of Aerosmith in them, which meant I also heard a lot of bands that came before us. And I remember being a little jealous, because they were really hitting the nail on the head.

They opened up for us in 1988, and one of the things that impressed me was how much personality they put across, even when they weren't playing. Axl knew how to work an audience. They used to have to go out there and tape foam rubber around everything that Axl could touch — from his teleprompter to his mike stand — to make sure he wouldn't break anything, or hurt himself. I think people saw that he was basically just let out of the cage. Part of the thrill was wondering what he was going to do next.

They were called metal at the time, but they weren't: Metal isn't sexy, but rock is. To put it another way: You can have the rock, but you need the roll. Songs like "Paradise City" and "Welcome to the Jungle" were just simple enough; the chorus lines came right when you wanted them. Slash plays what's needed for the song, as opposed to trying to make a tune a showcase for his guitar technique. Guns n' Roses' music wasn't full of the overblown gymnastics that a lot of guys were doing back then — their stuff is just very tasty. Duff McKagan is like the bass player in AC/DC: His parts were fairly simple, but they made the band an unstoppable force. Izzy Stradlin was also an important part of that band. Guns n' Roses played as a gang, which is just what you want.

Guns n' Roses are still an example of how a band can move rock forward. Sometimes you think, "How can you top anything by the Yardbirds, or Zeppelin, or the Stones?" And then you hear Guns n' Roses, and it's inspiring. You can think that it's all been written, but it hasn't. There's another way to twist those three chords around, to make it sound new, fresh and rebellious.

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91.
Like untold millions of people my age, I grew up watching the Ozzie and Harriet show and seeing David and Ricky Nelson grow up on TV. Back then Ricky was David's kid brother — everyone's favorite smart aleck long before he turned into one of the first rock stars. Then, in my sixth-grade year, Ozzie and Harriet showed Ricky playing his version of Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin'." The flip side was "A Teenager's Romance," which I think became a legitimate million-seller. If Rick's career had only been "I'm Walkin' " and "A Teenager's Romance," you probably would have called it a phenomenon caused by the power of television. But then his records kicked in, starting with Be-Bop Baby. As I said to Sun Records founder Sam Phillips when I was asked to induct Rick at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, "You know, Sam, for a while there he gave you a run for your money." And it's true — that kid from TV grew up into something big.

To this day I consider Ricky Nelson one of the true pioneers of rock & roll. Rick's career started within months of Elvis Presley hitting the scene and making his own splash on TV. Rick was able to take the rockabilly thing from Sun and then add more of a pop vibe than Sam Phillips would have ever used. That combination really worked. Even on my little cheesy record player, Ricky's records sounded amazing.

If you really love rock & roll, Rick Nelson deserves to be taken very seriously. When he was putting out his big run of records, it was almost like there was a shootout between Rick and Elvis. And as far as I was concerned, when Rick put out "Travelin' Man" it was Round Fifteen, and Rick won. That's where he knocked out even the King.

The playing on those records was amazing. In those early days, Elvis had Scotty Moore on guitar, but Rick had the great James Burton. Eventually Elvis got James Burton playing with him, but Rick clearly had such great taste and style. And I respect the fact that he tried to keep moving as an artist into the whole country-rock part of his career. He had another big hit in the Seventies with "Garden Party" — a song about him refusing to become mere nostalgia. In 1978, I met Rick for the first time. He had management that seemed to want me to produce a record for him, but sadly I was in no shape or place to be able to be producing myself, let alone somebody else. Still, I loved meeting Rick.

When Rick Nelson died in a plane crash in 1985, he died a musician: He was the leader of a rock & roll garage band that just happened to be on TV. He just had it all -- the sound, the look. I've always regretted that I wasn't good-looking like Rick Nelson. Yes, he was beautiful, but let's not forget he was also very talented. I think what happened to Rick is what happens to your blond cheerleaders with brains. If you're that good-looking, sometimes you don't take you seriously.
 

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so you gone really post ALL 100?? i'm guessing you aint gotta woman/man to arch that back...
 

Marlon12

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90.
Carlos Santana's music is a family thing for Chicanos. It's what you listen to when you're all hanging out: Drinking some beers, listening to "Oye Como Va" and cooking some barbecue is the best thing in the world. His music hits right to the pump — right to the heart.

He's a pioneer of Latin rock & roll: His music was something new, but it was intertwined with everything else that was out there at the time — Sixties rock, Latin jazz and more. We're trying to do the same thing with Los Lonely Boys — make a lot of different types of music into something our own — but he did that first. He incorporated his culture into the music, and he mixed English and Spanish in the lyrics.

Everything on a song like "Black Magic Woman" works: the keyboards, the congos, the drums, the vocals. Carlos isn't the lead singer, but he is the maestro. Of course, the best thing about all his albums is his guitar. He's one of the greatest players who ever lived. His guitar has a very distinctive sound — it's like a fingerprint. His tone just bleeds through everything. His playing is both simple and complicated — he can communicate with just one or two notes. He speaks languages through his music that people can understand in any country, any language.

Those first three albums — Santana, Abraxas, Santana III — are really special to me. You could hear his ethnicity in his music — even when he's playing like some blues cat, he still sounds like Santana. And his music always has that rhythm. It makes you want to get your girlfriend and go to a dance in your lowrider. Some people were confused after that by his Seventies music, when he became jazzier. But he was just experimenting, learning more. And then his comeback with Supernatural just a few years ago shows how enduring his talent is.

People recognize that Santana has a really good message to send to the human spirit. He once said to us, "You want to be like emissaries of light. When you're up on that stage or when you record, you want to be a tool that light shines through to everybody."

Santana has this awesome light that you're drawn to. You don't want to dwell in darkness. You want to go toward the light. And Santana is the light.

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89.
Listen to "Somebody," a song I wrote for Aerosmith's first album: It's all from the Yardbirds. They were the sh!t to us, out of all the British bands in the Sixties. The Yardbirds were a bit of a mystery. They had an eclecticism — the Gregorian chant-ness of the vocals, the melodic diversity, the way they used guitar feedback. I loved that weirdness.

In the Sixties, I was in a band called Chain Reaction. We got to know the Yardbirds because they played at Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, in 1966. We had a friend, Henry Smith, who had been our manager for a while, and he had gone to school there. He called me and said, "Steven, the Yardbirds are playing here, and you can open up." It was the lineup with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, who was playing bass on that tour. We waited all day for them to arrive. I grabbed their amps, they grabbed ours. We carried each other's gear in, because back then, that's what you did. Hence began the rumor that I was a roadie for the Yardbirds.

They did "Shapes of Things," "Beck's Boogie," among other songs. I was in such awe. They played like no other band. They weren't concerned with clothes or looks or hit singles. Their thing was "What do we do with these sounds?" They did things with harmonics — minor thirds and fifths — that created this ethereal, monstrous sound.

You hear it in every song — the way they could take the blues and turn it into a pop song like "For Your Love," then something psychedelic like "Shapes of Things," which has that weird middle. You can hear the click when Beck hits his fuzz box. Page, in the end, was the one who took those ideas all the way with Led Zeppelin. The two shows I remember where I just sat with my mouth open was that Yardbirds show, and Led Zeppelin at the Boston Tea Party in 1969.

As a singer, the thing I got out of the Yardbirds was that you don't have to have a great voice. It's all about attitude. Keith Relf wasn't great, but how he sang it made him a master. He was a white boy who pushed it to the max. And he was a great harmonica player. You never heard Jagger hanging out on a single note the way Keith Relf could.

The shame is, I know how great the Yardbirds were. But I don't think everyone else knows it. The Yardbirds' music is a gold mine waiting to be stumbled upon. Aerosmith did, because we grew up in that era. The riff in "Walk This Way" is just us trying to explore the blues in the Yardbirds model. What the Yardbirds did is something you don't hear in today's blue-plate-special, cookie-cutter music. Everything is so canned and sliced up now. This was back when a band was a band. You had all those personalities, and they were all truly playing together. And I don't hear that today. The day of those bands, that wild stepping out, is gone.

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88.
Miles Davis is beautiful, strange, cool, jazzy and unique. He is a classic, like Picasso, Basquiat or Beethoven. For my money, he was the first black superstar in America.

Miles found a way to vocalize black people's frustrations and anger through his attitude and his style of play. There's nothing in modern music that sounds like On the Corner. Jazz has stalled since he died.

For my sixteenth birthday, my mother bought me a copy of b!tches Brew. I had never heard anything like it. There was a song called "Sanctuary," which I'd listen to over and over again on my CD Walkman. Some say that b!tches Brew is a polarizing record, but I don't understand how anybody wouldn't like it. Sure, it can be dense and unapproachable, but like all of Miles' stuff, if you turn on your brain and your guts, you'll feel it.

Miles had a great belief in himself. He also had a great chin. Miles didn't stop when people thought he was crazy or imagined that his motivations were superficial or thought he was just trying to sell records. He was derided, but he was not deterred.

Miles doesn't have one or two classic albums — he has many: Kind of Blue, Filles De Kilimanjaro, b!tches Brew, In a Silent Way. He's unique in the sense that those who've never heard him know his name. He's the touchstone for an entire culture.

I have a video of Miles performing in Paris, toward the end of his career. He was in his sixties, wearing these big African pants, and he looks beautiful, like a painting. Whenever a member of his band took a solo, he'd hold up a cue card with the performer's name. It amazed me that he was bringing modern showmanship to jazz in that part of his career. He could have been the Kind of Blue guy, but he never rested on his laurels. He could have played ballads until the day he died and been even more revered. But he took chances, and that's what you have to do in life. You have to be honest to yourself.

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87.
Like I know the blues, Gram Parsons knew country music — every nuance, every great country song that was ever written. And he could express it all — the music from Nashville and Bakersfield, California, the stuff from Texas — in his singing and songwriting. But he also had intelligence and honesty. That's the kind of guy I like to hang with. Also, he loved to get stoned. At the time, that was an added plus.

I first met Gram in 1968, when the Byrds were appearing in London — I think it was a club called Blazes. I knew the Byrds from Mr. Tambourine Man on; the Stones had worked some shows in California with them back then. But when I saw them at Blazes with Gram, I could see this was a radical turn. I went backstage, and we hooked up. Then the Byrds came through London again, on their way to South Africa. I was like, "Man, we don't go there." The sanctions and the embargo were on. So he quit the Byrds, right there and then. Of course, he's got nowhere to stay, so he moved in with me.

Basically, we hung around together, like musicians do. We'd spend hours and hours at the piano, swapping ideas. Gram and I both loved the songs of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant -- the Everly Brothers stuff they wrote. We both loved that melancholy, high-lonesome sh!t. We were always looking for the next heart-tugger, looking to pull that extra heartstring.

As a songwriter, Gram worked very much like I do, which is knock out a couple of chords, start to spiel and see how far it can go. Rather than sitting around with a piece of paper and a pen, trying to make things fit neatly together, if you just get on the microphone, things come to you. Lines come to you that you wouldn't dream of, because they have to come to you in a split second. Gram liked to do that. But he would also work very hard -- harder than I ever did -- on honing it down.

It's difficult for me to pick one of his songs as a favorite. "Sin City," on the Flying Burrito Brothers' first album, is great. I love "I Can't Dance," on GP. But you'll never get a full portrait of him from one or two songs.

Mick and Gram never really clicked, mainly because the Stones are such a tribal thing. At the same time, Mick was listening to what Gram was doing. Mick's got ears. Sometimes, while we were making Exile on Main Street in France, the three of us would be plonking away on Hank Williams songs while waiting for the rest of the band to arrive. Gram had the biggest repertoire of country songs you could imagine. He was never short of a song.

The drugs and drinking — he was no better or worse than the rest of us. He just made that one fatal mistake — taking that one hit after he cleaned up, still thinking he could take the same amount. And it was too fµck!ng much. But he didn't get into dope because of us. He knew his stuff before he met us.

I think he was just getting into his stride when he died. His actual output — the number of records he made and sold — was pretty minimal. But his effect on country music is enormous. This is why we're talking about him now. But we can't know what his full impact could have been. If Buddy Holly hadn't gotten on that plane, or Eddie Cochran hadn't turned the wrong corner, think of what stuff we could have looked forward to, and be hearing now. It would be phenomenal.

In a way, it's a matter of lost love. Gram was everything you wanted in a singer and a songwriter. He was fun to be around, great to play with as a musician. And that motherfµcker could make chicks cry. I have never seen another man who could make hardened old waitresses at the Palomino Club in L.A. shed tears the way he did.

It was all in the man. I miss him so.

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86.
Every rapper who grew up in the Nineties owes something to Tupac. People either try to emulate him in some way, or they go in a different direction because they didn't like what he did. But whatever you think of him, he definitely developed his own style: He didn't sound like anyone who came before him.

My favorite Tupac album is Makaveli. It was recorded after he was shot and spent time in prison. It was like a doctor told him he was going to die, and he was trying to get it all down on paper. That's something the average rapper just could not do: build an entire album around that concept, and stay in that negative space. Everybody knows that they're going to die. But after you're in a life-threatening situation, you think about it a little more.

Tupac's aggressive records are my favorite. "Hail Mary" is just perfect: "Picture paragraphs unloaded/Wise words being quoted." Most artists now just aren't smart enough to write that, or honest enough to write a line like, "I ain't a killer but don't push me." These days rappers will just tell you, "I'll kill you."

Tupac was like a camera. It's incredible how much he wrote — how much he documented. To me, 'Pac was more of a poet than a rapper. You can always tell when you're hearing Tupac verse. He wrote those lyrics without any music. Notorious B.I.G. was more melody-driven — I'm sure he wrote his sh!t without a pen, and over the music -- but 'Pac was just hashing out his life. The thing was, he was doing that when the public eye was on him, and everything he was hashing out just expanded, and that's when things got out of control.

All of us on the East Coast loved Tupac. The music was all that mattered. That East Coast/West Coast feud was just personal beef. I didn't even believe he was really dead when he died, because he had been shot before. I thought, "He just got shot again, he'll be all right."

But now that he's not here, he's bigger than ever. I can still listen to two or three Tupac CDs straight — just throw them in the changer. Sometimes I build one CD with Tupac's best songs, and one with Biggie's best songs. Then I listen and get ready to go into my next project.

Laurence Fishburne told me once that he didn't like Tupac. I couldn't understand why. He told me it was because Tupac was so much smarter than everyone around him. He said he didn't like the way Tupac behaved because he knew that Tupac knew better. I understood what he meant. But I still gave him a look like he was bugging.

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85.
Black Sabbath are the Beatles of heavy metal. Anybody who's serious about metal will tell you it all comes down to Sabbath. Any hard-rock band that ever tried to write a crazy twelve-minute operetta owes them a debt. There's a direct line you can draw back from today's metal, through Eighties bands like Iron Maiden, back to Sabbath. Marilyn Manson is a great example of the baton being passed — of someone taking Sabbath's darkness even further.

All the compelling themes are on Black Sabbath's records: beauty, atrocity, the seven deadly sins. Their music can make you think of walking on the beach with your wife, or of locking yourself in your room with your big toe on the trigger of a shotgun — sometimes within the same song. The title song of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath has all of the stuff I'm talking about: It's rebellious and dark and wicked, but it's also gorgeous.

A lot of deep records — like Pink Floyd's The Wall or Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile — are dense, long journeys. Every time you listen to them you hear something new. Sabbath records do that for me, too, but they're simple. When Sabbath wanted to convey a different message, they didn't need to pick up an acoustic guitar or call in the London Philharmonic. They could do pretty much anything with just bass, drums, guitar and vocals.

Black Sabbath's rhythm section doesn't get enough props. If you listen to the way that Geezer Butler and Bill Ward play off of each other, that's the core of the heaviness right there. Add to that Ozzy's amazing voice and one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time, Tony Iommi, and it's an unstoppable force. They're a fµck!ng piece of the mountain coming down behind you, and you can't do anything about it.

I was eleven when I first heard Sabbath. Vol. 4 was the album, and it quickly became one of my favorites. At an early age I looked to music to take me out of my reality, and Sabbath does that better than any hard-rock act I know. In Jane's Addiction, we were into a groove that was very repetitive, riff-oriented and hypnotic — similar in a lot of ways to a song like "War Pigs," off of Paranoid (my favorite Sabbath album). And of course, both bands have a singer with a really high-end voice that cuts through all the chaos below. Sabbath are so deep in me that at thirty-seven I'm still coming up with stuff that is a complete and blatant rip-off. There's just no escaping them.

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84.
I sing to James Taylor before every show I do. I warm up in my dressing room to "Handy Man," "Sarah Maria," "Song for You Far Away," "Sweet Baby James," "Copperline" and about twenty other favorites. Then I go from James' bass-baritone to tenor singing with the Everly Brothers -- first Don, later Phil.

While I'm unisoning with James, my reverence rises; my heart and mind become engaged in the sober intelligence of the song and the beauty of the singing. James' accuracy of pitch is like a trader's honesty. To me, it has always been paramount in singing. There is an illuminating love of living things -- all of them here on earth -- that lies within the tenderness of his line readings (listen to his song "Gaia," from Hourglass). If vocal-cord vibration were like surfing off the swelling of the heart, James would be my favorite rider on the cusp -- a little in the air, sublime in the spray.

It's no accident that the Beatles' newly formed Apple Records signed James Taylor at its inception. He is the finest of us Americans. I know the "folk music" he must have listened to (I, too, had been wand'ring early and late...). I have experienced the thrill of collaborating with him numerous times as we have invited each other into our respective albums. I recall our trio arrangement of "(What a) Wonderful World" with my Paul — we met up at Paul's apartment (of course). It was '77. Two extraordinary artists were giving me the gift of their vocals and guitar parts for my album, Watermark. I must have done something right. What is memorable today is the ease and efficiency with which we three found our harmonies. There was a mutual musical sensibility and a serious mutual respect.

James is so fine. His exactitude with the Note is simple, impeccable musicianship. Call it his refinement or the civility of intelligent life. Hear the innate dignity of James' tribute song to Martin Luther King Jr. ("Shed a Little Light"). Some people have a hard time with the self-consciousness of perfectionism. But I think "perfect" is the best review.

I hope he reads this tribute of mine and recognizes what a great personal value his existence is to one of his colleagues. And I hope he breaks into another grin from ear to ear as he feels "that's why I'm here."
 

Marlon12

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83.
Rock & Roll is more about rebellion than guitars. N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton officially took that baton away from rock: It's the album that made hip-hop the new rock & roll.

In the process, they changed the face of modern-day hip-hop. The first three songs on Straight Outta Compton are the most dangerous introduction to the gangsta life I've ever heard. This wasn't Joe Pesci gangsta music; this was Robert De Niro: a little flat-footed, but scary. Even if you've never lived through all the gangbanging and police harassment they were talking about, you could tell there was truth there.

I was sixteen when I first heard them. Tariq, who would become Black Thought of the Roots, handed me his headphones in fifth-period chamber-orchestra class. The sheer novelty of them cursing just killed me. Of course, there was cursing in hip-hop — a well-placed motherfµcker on a Run-DMC record, for instance — but for all the rambunctiousness of the Beastie Boys, there wasn't one curse word on License to Ill. There were certain things that artists didn't do, and you just didn't say, "fµck the police." I ditched chamber orchestra and sat in the furnace room with a cheap-ass GE walkman and listened to that album from start to finish.

Ice Cube had the best voice in N.W.A and the most menacing lines ever. When he said, "The police are gonna have to come and get me off yo' ass," he was absolutely convincing. The weird thing is that now Cube is entering Bill Cosby territory. I was watching a preview for his latest movie, trying to explain to a kid next to me that twenty years ago his rhymes would have scared the bejesus out of you. Of course, Dre's production is incredible. He pioneered the "stop on a dime" break. There would be utter sonic confusion, and then, outta nowhere, the beats cut out so that either Eazy-E, MC Ren or Ice Cube could deliver the punch line. Check it out on "Straight Outta Compton," when each member introduces himself. No one else had done that in hip-hop.

And, yes, N.W.A's success proved again that controversy sells. They had no radio play, and that made their whole outlaw theme more appealing. When they got that threatening letter from the FBI, that was the jackpot. If the FBI sent me a letter today, I'd be like, "Word up! I'll call my publicist."

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82.
When Eminem and I did "Stan" at the Grammys four years ago, we got together to rehearse out in the Valley. We had never met or really spoken, so I was a little intimidated. When we started to do the song and Eminem made his entrance, I got goose bumps the likes of which I have not felt since I first saw Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, James Brown and Aretha Franklin. Eminem was that good. I just thought, "fµck, this man is amazing." There are very few performers who can grab you like that the first time — only the greats.

Eminem is a true poet of his time, someone we'll be talking about for decades to come. He tells stories in such a powerful and distinctive way. As a lyricist, he's one of the best ever. Eminem does for his audience what Dylan did for his: He writes how he feels. His anger, vulnerability and humor come out. That's why we look forward to listening to Eminem's lyrics and finding out where the hell he's headed next.

Eminem lives, sleeps and breathes music — he's a bit like me in that respect. He's pretty much of a recluse. I think he's enthralled with what he's doing; he's intimately involved with his art. There's a mystique about him — you don't know much about him. That's so unusual in today's marketplace, where we know everything about every fµck!ng person.

From the start, I've always admired Eminem's thinking. That's the reason I wanted to appear on the Grammys with him when I was asked, despite all the nonsense talked about his being homophobic and crap like that. Let the Boy Georges and the George Michaels of the world get up in a twist about it if they don't have the intelligence to see his intelligence.

Eminem has the balls to say what he feels and to make offensive things funny. That's very necessary today in America, with people being muzzled and irony becoming a lost art. Artists like Eminem who use their free speech to get a point across are vitally important. There just aren't many people in the world with balls that big and talent that awesome.

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81.
Over the years, the Drifters were a couple of different great groups and a whole bunch of wonderful guys. In a way, that upheaval may be part of the reason they recorded so many immortal songs over such a long period.

We were both fans of the Drifters even before we started writing, and later producing, for them. There was a real tradition of great singers in the group: Clyde McPhatter, Johnny Moore, Ben E. King and Rudy Lewis. Yet for all their fantastic records, the Drifters had the least stable lineup of any of the great vocal groups. They were in essence a group of hired guns, overseen by their management. Let's just say this wasn't necessarily a situation where guys were getting rich off the royalties.

Our first cut writing for the Drifters was "Ruby Baby," which Nesuhi Ertegun produced and Johnny Moore sang lead on, in 1955. We loved what they did with the song. Their management changed the lineup in 1958, and that's when the great Ben E. King came into the picture. The Drifters records that we're most associated with, including "There Goes My Baby," come from that era.

Ben E. King was this younger singer just coming up, yet he had this mature style that was so unusual. He was always wonderful to work with, and we had a truly great run together. People have said that "There Goes My Baby" was a very influential record because it helped set the stage for the Wall of Sound and Motown. Who are we to argue? Thanks to a great arrangement by Stan Applebaum, the song showed us how rock & roll and strings could really work together. When King left, we worked with him as a solo artist, and the Drifters kept on having hits too, first with Rudy Lewis as the new lead singer. Upon Lewis' death, Moore returned to the group in time for "Under the Boardwalk."

We wrote songs for the Drifters, but we also put the call out to all the best writers in our world. Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman came with perfect songs like "This Magic Moment" and "Save the Last Dance for Me." Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote "Up on the Roof," and we wrote "On Broadway" along with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. We also put the Drifters together with Burt Bacharach — who met Dionne Warwick at our office for a Drifters session.

Through it all, the Drifters always had this exquisite vocal blend. It was warm and round and full and dripping with chocolate. Since we were involved in the Drifters' career, it's probably not our place to declare their music immortal. But you have to say, they did pretty well.
 

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80.
Elvis Costello writes novels in three minutes. He gets inside your head, and he doesn't let go. I'd pay a great amount of money to audit a course taught by him. If you love Elvis Costello, it's because you love what he's thinking — the depth and breadth of his notice is astounding. Sometimes I wonder if he watches people on the Strand in London and makes up entire histories for them. ("This person didn't pass the bar and has thyroid problems. They're jogging because they just went through a breakup.")

When I was a teenager, it was a career aim for many of my friends to have a song written about them by Elvis Costello. His songs about women and girls are devastating, like arrows to the heart. There are very few artists who can depict a woman's life, her desires and her failings, like he can. Most rock songs about women are from the outside looking in: they say, "Babe, you're so hot, come sleep with me." Elvis' songs say, "I see you, and I know what you're doing." He catches us at our tricks, and that's thrilling.

He's a poet with a punk's heart. There's a Jerry Lee Lewis flavor to the way he just gets in there and lets it rip: His rocking stuff has a lot of raw power, a real physicality. Even when it's just him and a piano onstage, it's powerful. When I first heard him, I was blown away that someone could just spit those words out without even hitting the right notes, with no holding back and no shame. Of course, the Attractions were really important to his music — if you're going to cram a whole book into one song, it helps to have a steady groove.

Nobody sounds like him. People imitate Stevie Wonder or whomever, but how many people can do Elvis Costello? Not bloody many. His melodies weave in and out and all over the place, and you can tell they just spring out of him. Finally, Elvis is the definition of a career artist — he's always coming up with a different sound, always challenging himself. All of his music tells you: You could come along for the ride — but I'm not stopping.

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79.
The Four Tops are a one-in-a-million singing group. They were the best in my neighborhood in Detroit when I was growing up. When I was eleven or so, my first group was an early version of what would become the Miracles. Back then the Four Tops were called the Four Aims. We all used to sing on the corners, at school functions and at house parties. Sometimes we'd have talent competitions. But all the groups in the neighborhood knew that if the Four Aims were going to be there, you were going to be singing for second place at best.

They were the first group from the neighborhood that sang modern harmony: They could sing like a gospel group but then do R&B like no one else. I love singers whom you can identify the first second they open their mouth, and Levi Stubbs is one of those; he's one of the greatest of all time. He has that distinctive voice, and his range is staggering. The combination of Levi, Obie Benson, Duke Fakir and Lawrence Payton was truly awesome.

When they came to Motown and teamed up with Holland-Dozier-Holland, there was no looking back. They performed some of the most dramatic records ever written: "Standing in the Shadows of Love," "Bernadette," "Reach Out I'll Be There," "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" and "Baby I Need Your Loving." Later, when Holland-Dozier-Holland left, I co-wrote "Still Water (Love)" with Frank Wilson for the Four Tops.

They were always great singers and great guys. When the Four Tops first came to Motown, the Miracles and I were the mainstays of the label, and the Temptations had just gotten there. But all the guys were very, very close. You'd come back to town from a fifty-one-night tour, and the first thing you did was shower and head back to Hitsville. We'd be there playing cards and shooting pool together into the early hours.

Levi is sick and he can't perform right now, but the Four Tops are still great. Obie — who co-wrote "What's Going On" for Marvin Gaye — and Duke are still there, and you've got some great new guys with them. So if you see the Four Tops now, you are still going to be mightily entertained. The Four Tops will always be one of the biggest and the best groups ever. Their music is forever.

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78.
For me, the Stooges were the perfect embodiment of what music should be — of wanting it to be alive, riding the edge of control. Their music was total high-energy blues, with the contemporary freakout of Jimi Hendrix and the free-jazz spirit of John Coltrane. Iggy wanted the Stooges to be what he'd seen in Chicago as a young guy — these old bluesmen playing so hard that, as Iggy once said, the music drips off you.

I was fourteen when I first saw a picture of Iggy onstage: shirtless, with his body spray-painted silver. He was sweating — it looked like glitter sweat — and he had a chipped tooth. He looked young and on fire. But Iggy's parents were intellectuals — his father was an English teacher — and that gave him an edge. He had focus. Iggy believed what he was doing was important — this self-reliant, anti-establishment art form.

The Stooges' sound was so evocative yet so simple. Scott Asheton played drums as if he was in an electric-blues band. On The Stooges and Fun House, while his brother Ron, the guitarist, was playing these loud bar-chord progressions, Scott was making the band rev and swing. And when I played with Ron for the soundtrack of Velvet Goldmine, the first week was a crash course on how to play Stooges songs. We went through those first two albums, and there was that Asheton swing again, the way he rocked the chord grooves.

Raw Power was made by a different band, with James Williamson on guitar and Ron on bass. It's the ultimate fµck-off. This is a band getting very strung out, putting so much blood and soul into what they're doing, and for the most part looked upon as trash. There's a damaged quality to David Bowie's original mix that is way ahead of its time.

Seeing the Stooges in reunion with Mike Watt from the Minutemen on bass was awesome. When they played their first gig, in 2003 at Coachella, the first thing Iggy did was start jumping in the air, flipping the bird to the crowd — "fµck you, fµck you and fµck you." Then Iggy turned to the side of the stage, where the elite were standing — Sonic Youth, Queens of the Stone Age, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the other all-access rock stars — and he gave us the jerk-off motion. It was great. After all this time, he's still at war.

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77.
In the early days of rap, the conventional wisdom was that only black people were supposed to like hip-hop and only white people were supposed to like rock. But it wasn't like that. In Run-DMC, we were rapping over rock beats. The Beasties were a punk band listening to hip-hop.

I met the Beastie Boys in Rick Rubin's dorm room at NYU. What bugged me out about the Beasties was that they knew everything about hip-hop — the Cold Crush Brothers, the Treacherous 3 and Afrika Bambaataa, all the old-school sh!t. In addition, they could rap, they could sing and they could play instruments.

Run-DMC wrote "Slow and Low" for the Beastie Boys. That was their first hit, and it was basically their blueprint. But then they started writing their own songs, and when Licensed to Ill came out, it went to Number One. They were writing songs we wished we had written, like "No Sleep Till Brooklyn." They put rock with rap like we did, but it made so much sense when they did it because they were already punk rockers.

The first time we toured with the Beastie Boys was the Raising Hell tour in 1986: Run-DMC, Whodini, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. We were playing the Deep South — Crunkville, before there was crunk — and it was just black people at those shows. The first night was somewhere in Georgia, and we were thinking, "I hope people don't leave when they see them." But the crowd loved them, because they weren't trying to be black rappers. They rapped about sh!t they knew about: skateboarding, going to White Castle, angel dust and mushrooms. Real recognizes real.

One of the most significant things about the Beasties is their longevity. They've been putting out genius records for twenty years, right through to To the 5 Boroughs. When Paul's Boutique came out, the critics said it wasn't up to par. But now people realize it's one of the best albums of the Eighties.

Each of the Beastie Boys has a different personality. Mike D is the examiner: He looks around, he takes in all the information, he's a little laid-back. MCA was always the mature one, but he could be a fool when it was time to be a fool. And Adrock is just full of life. He's approachable, affectionate and funny. But maybe my favorite thing about the Beastie Boys is that they're worldly. They taught me and many other people a lot about life, people and music.

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76.
The Shirelles had a "sound," a word that people from the Sixties vocal-group era use with a lot of reverence. Shirley Alston Reeves, who did most of the group's lead vocals, wasn't a gospel shouter like Arlene Smith of the Chantelles. Shirley was more sentimental and street. When she said, "Baby, it's you," you thought, "Baby, it is me."

They weren't the first girl group, but the Shirelles were the first to have many hits. They influenced everyone from the Ronettes and Motown girl groups like the Supremes to the Beatles, who covered "Baby It's You" and "Boys." The Shirelles were given some of the all-time greatest songs to sing: "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" "Soldier Boy," "Tonight's the Night," "Mama Said." But what's interesting to me is that they wrote their very first hit, "I Met Him on a Sunday," themselves, when they were still high school students in New Jersey. It was on this song that the group combined doo-wop with very accessible pop melodies: It began with the whole group singing, "Doo ron, day ron, day ron day papa, doo ron," then one of them would sing, "Well, I met him on a Sunday." It was the cutest thing.

The girl-group sound was everything to me. As a kid, I used to sit at home after school and just bang out those songs on the piano. Later in life, in the early Nineties, I witnessed a wonderful moment, when the Shirelles were honored by the Rhythm & Blues Foundation. The three living members of the group — Shirley, Beverly Lee and Doris Kenner — were at the awards ceremony. The fourth member, Addie "Micki" Harris, had died in 1982. I had heard that they hadn't seen each other in quite a while, so there was some apprehension when the three of them took the stage. They certainly hadn't planned to perform. But when Doris took her award in hand, she said, "This is dedicated to the one I love," and then they just started singing it.

They sounded fantastic. The band fell into place, and people in the audience just fell over. After that, Shirley, Beverly and Doris were having so much fun that they went into "Soldier Boy." This was a group that hadn't sung together in years, but they sounded heavenly. I was so inspired, I stood at attention and saluted. There was nothing else I could do.

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75.
The Eagles forever changed country and rock, but I just think of what they did as being great American music. It's amazing how one band could take all those influences — country and rock, of course, but also soul, R&B and folk — and still sound so distinctive.

The Eagles were a real band. After an album or two, Don Henley and Glenn Frey turned into one of rock's all-time great songwriting teams. But everyone contributed material and incredible musicianship to the effort: Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon, then Don Felder, and later Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit. They started out in the age of the sensitive singer-songwriter, and their music was as smart and sensitive as anyone's, but when they called upon it, they also had the power of a great rock & roll band.

The first song of theirs that I vividly remember hearing was "Take It Easy." Those lyrics — by Frey and Jackson Browne — could have been from any Merle Haggard or Willie Nelson song, but the instrumentation and energy were decidedly rock. The combination sounded so powerful.

I also remember being on a long cross-country family road trip as a kid, driving across the Texas desert at night. The only radio station we could get was a scratchy AM station from who knows where. The haunting opening strains of "Hotel California" came on the radio. My father thought that all of us kids were asleep; I immediately assumed that he would shut the radio off. But he didn't. He couldn't resist it any more than I could.

The Eagles provided the soundtrack to so many of my summers, and likely many of yours, too. Their melodies and harmonies have always been instantly familiar. "Desperado," "Take It to the Limit," "Tequila Sunrise" and "Best of My Love" are some of the best pop songs ever written. To this day, it simply doesn't get any better than that guitar riff from "Life in the Fast Lane."

When I sang backup for Don Henley in the early Nineties, it was a surreal experience, supplying vocals every night to Eagles songs that were such a part of my musical foundation. The audience's reaction to those classics cemented their value in my head. In my own way, I got to experience the power of the Eagles' music. But then again, we all have.

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74.
Hank Williams songs like "Lonesome Whistle" and "Your Cheatin' Heart" are wonderful to sing because there is no bµllsh!t in them. The words, the melodies and the sentiment are all there, precise, clear and true. It takes economy and simplicity to get to an idea or emotion in a song, and there's no better example of that than Hank Williams.

Hank had a voice that cut through wood. From his records, it sounded like he was projecting from a completely different place in his body. It was a voice that could play roadhouses without amplification; that could cut through barroom crowds, people drinking and talking. The places he played were so tough that he hired a wrestler, Cannonball Nichols, to be his bass player. Hank lived what would have been a rock star's life -- full of touring, drinking and woman troubles.

I bought a ten-song Hank Williams collection on vinyl for $4.99. It was like I unlocked a box: His music spoke to me. His records are enormously important to country music, but I think I responded to them because they sounded so exotic, like nothing else I had ever heard. It's significant that Hank learned to play guitar from an elderly black musician: Hank is the ultimate hillbilly, but there's other stuff going on. For a while he was my only reference point; I've covered his songs for years, and recently I made a conscious effort to try to make the songs on Sea Change as direct as Hank's.

I see more and more people getting into his music today. When I played his songs early on, I used to get really sick of everyone in the crowd yelling "yee-haw" all the way through. But I've noticed that over the last ten years or so, there's been a rediscovery of the haunting quality of Hank Williams' music. When I pull those songs out now, I get taken the right way. People are listening.

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73.
Every time I buy a Radiohead album, I have a moment where I say to myself, "Maybe this is the one that will suck." But it never does. I wonder if it's even possible for them to be bad on record.

It belittles Radiohead to describe their music as having "hooks." Their music talks to you, in a real way. It can take you down a quiet street before it drops a beautiful musical bomb on you. It can build to where you think the whole thing will crumble beneath its own weight — and then Thom Yorke will sing some melody that just cuts your heart out of your chest. There's a point on the album Kid A where I start feeling claustrophobic, stuck in a barbed-wire jungle — and then I suddenly fall out and I'm sitting by a pool with birds singing. Radiohead can do all of these things in a moment, and it drives me fµck!ng crazy.

My reaction to Radiohead isn't as simple as jealousy. Jealousy just burns; Radiohead infuriate me. But if it were only that, I wouldn't go back and listen to those records again and again. Listening to Radiohead makes me feel like I'm a Salieri to their Mozart. Yorke's lyrics make me want to give up. I could never in my wildest dreams find something as beautiful as they find for a single song — let alone album after album. And every time, they raise their finger to the press and the critics and say, "Nothing we do is for you!" They followed their most critically acclaimed record, OK Computer, with their most radical change, Kid A. It's not that they're indifferent: It's that the strength of character in their music is beyond their control.

Seeing them perform makes me even angrier. No matter how much they let go in their shows, they never lose their clarity. There's no point where Jonny Greenwood or Ed O'Brien will suddenly look up and say, "Where the fµck are we?" There are no train wrecks in Radiohead; every album and performance is wrenching. God, these guys have suffered, or they can fake it like nobody else.
 

Marlon12

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72.
When I was in junior high in 1979, my classmates all liked Led Zeppelin. But I loved AC/DC. I got turned on to them when I heard them play "Problem Child" on The Midnight Special. Like Zeppelin, they were rooted in American R&B, but AC/DC took it to a minimal extreme that had never been heard before. Of course, I didn't know that back then. I only knew that they sounded better than any other band.

For AC/DC, rock began with Chuck Berry and ended around Elvis. They poured their lifeblood into that groove, and they mastered it. Highway to Hell is probably the most natural-sounding rock record I've ever heard. There's so little adornment. Nothing gets in the way of the push-and-pull between the guitarists Angus and Malcolm Young, bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd. For me, it's the embodiment of rock & roll.

When I'm producing a rock band, I try to create albums that sound as powerful as Highway to Hell. Whether it's the Cult or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I apply the same basic formula: Keep it sparse. Make the guitar parts more rhythmic. It sounds simple, but what AC/DC did is almost impossible to duplicate. A great band like Metallica could play an AC/DC song note for note, and they still wouldn't capture the tension and release that drives the music. There's nothing like it.

The other thing that separates AC/DC as a hard-rock band is that you can dance to their music. They didn't play funk, but everything they played was funky. And that beat could really get a crowd going. I first saw them play in 1979, before their singer Bon Scott died and was replaced by Brian Johnson. They were opening for Ted Nugent at Madison Square Garden. The crowd yanked all the chairs off the floor and piled them into a pyramid in front of the stage. It was a tribute to how great they were.

I got the chance to work with AC/DC on the 1995 album Ballbreaker. The best thing was the return of Phil Rudd, who had left the band in 1982. To me, that made them AC/DC again. You can hear it in how he drags behind the beat. It's that same rhythm that first drew me to them in junior high.

I'll go on record as saying they're the greatest rock & roll band of all time. They didn't write emotional lyrics. They didn't play emotional songs. The emotion is all in that groove. And that groove is timeless.

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71.
In the early years of Phish, people often said we were like "Frank Zappa meets the Grateful Dead" — which sounds very bizarre. But Zappa was incredibly vital to me, as a composer and guitarist. I think he was the best electric-guitar player, other than Jimi Hendrix. Zappa conceptualized the instrument in a completely different way, rhythmically and sonically. Every boundary that was possible on the guitar was examined by him.

I'll never forget the first time I saw him live, in New York, when I was in high school. He would leave his guitar on a stand as he conducted the band. He would get the keyboard player doing a riff, get him in key, while he was smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, pacing around as he got this groove going. And he would not pick up the guitar until everything was totally together. There would be this moment — this collective breath from the audience — as he walked over, picked it up and started playing the most ripping, beautiful solo. When he played, he was in communion with the instrument.

Another thing that was very cool: His interplay was always with drummers. In a lot of jam-style guitar playing, the drummer sets off a groove, and the guitarist riffs off another guitarist or keyboard player. I saw Zappa at Memorial Auditorium in Burlington, Vermont, on his last tour, in 1988. He did this guitar solo in "City of Tiny Lites" where everybody in the band dropped out except drummer Chad Wackerman. I was in the balcony near the side of the stage. When Zappa turned his back on the audience to play with Chad, I saw this huge smile on his face. They were ripping together, and he was blissed out.

But it says so much about Zappa that this was also the guy who did orchestral pieces like The Yellow Shark. It's hard to believe somebody could do so many different things in a lifetime.

Zappa was a huge influence on how I wrote music for Phish. Songs like "You Enjoy Myself" and "Split Open and Melt" were completely charted out — drums, bass lines, everything — because he had shown me it was possible. And when I went to Bonnaroo two years ago with my ten-piece band, we did two covers, Charlie Daniels' "Devil Went Down to Georgia" and "Sultans of Swing," by Dire Straits. In both songs, I had the horn section play the guitar solos, note for note. I never would have thought of doing that if I hadn't seen Zappa do "Stairway to Heaven" in Burlington, with the horns playing Jimmy Page's entire guitar solo, in harmony.

That's not what people are doing these days. I'm making a new album, and the producer I'm working with told me that there is a whole generation of musicians coming up who can't play their instruments. Because of stuff like Pro Tools, they figure they can fix it all in the studio. Whereas with Frank, his musicians were pushed to the absolute brink of possibility on their instruments, at all times. Phish tried hard to do that too: to take our four little instruments and do as much as we could with them. I would not have envisioned those possibilities without him.

Zappa gave me the faith that anything in music was possible. He demystified the whole thing for musicians in my generation: "Look, these are just instruments. Find out what the range is, and start writing."
 

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70.
Oscar Wilde said that an artist has succeeded if people don't understand his work but they still like it. By that standard, the Police were a huge success. Their songs are universal — they're part of all of our lives. You hear them on both pop and classic-rock stations, and they'll be played on the radio in Germany 100 years from now. At the same time, everything they did was really smart and worked on a few levels; you could love a particular song, then realize a year later that you had totally missed the meaning.

Take "Every Breath You Take." It's a great trick — it's impossibly catchy, people play it at their weddings, but it's a stalker song. "Roxanne" is blatantly about a hooker — it's not about how Sting loves her and broke her heart, it's just about how she's a hooker. People don't realize how unique that is. All of us are lucky to have heard songs as good as "Message in a Bottle," "Walking on the Moon" and "King of Pain" on the pop charts. Sting already had a career and a degree when the Police made it; he wasn't afraid of sounding like a grown-up.

My favorite is "Don't Stand So Close to Me," the one about the teacher and the young girl. That kind of storytelling has fallen out of pop music, for the most part. "Don't Stand" would be great to listen to no matter what the lyrics were — it could have just been about some girl — but the story makes it spooky and powerful. My favorite line is "Wet bus stop/She's waiting/His car is warm and dry" — he communicates the entire song with those eleven words.

Of course, the Police were amazing musicians. They were professionals who came up during the punk era and found their messages later on. I'm a big fan of how they used reggae. Bands like the Clash had already mixed it with punk, but the Police did it flat-out — it was like reggae for music geeks. Sting played bass and sang, which you don't see very often. He commanded both the rhythm section and melodies in the band. Stewart Copeland is a great drummer — you have to be to give songs like "Roxanne" and "So Lonely" their drive and also throw that reggae in there. Andy Summers has both great technique and rhythmic sense — a rare combination. It's amazing how many rock bands with serious grooves are made up of skinny English dudes.

The Police matured really quickly. All bands should pay attention to that — don't be afraid to change. You'd always hear stories about Sting and Stewart Copeland going at it, but it wasn't a terrible thing — it kept them moving forward. I can only hope that my band, the Killers, will be just as fearless.

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69.
Carl Perkins' songs will outlive us all. on tracks like "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Honey Don't," he took that country-picking thing into the rock world. He was an amazing guitar player: If you want to play Fifties rock & roll, you can either play like Chuck Berry, or you can play like Carl Perkins.

Considering how important he is to rock history, many people don't know about him. But the right people did. The Beatles covered five of Carl's songs on record. Carl was actually there in the studio when the Beatles cut some of them. Listen to the guitar break in "All My Loving": That solo could not have existed without Carl Perkins. George Harrison told me that the Beatles would study the B sides of Carl's records to learn everything they could from him.

Carl was the real deal — a true rockabilly cat. He told me about picking cotton when he was a kid and learning the blues from an older black field hand he knew. Carl would go home from the fields, be practicing a Roy Acuff country type of thing on his guitar, and then he would start bending the notes. He told me his father would actually get mad, saying, "Play that thing right, boy, or don't play it at all." But it was organic with Carl. He took it to the *****-tonks — the real *****-tonks where people would be drinking out of a jug. It sounds like a cliche now, that rock music was born out of cornfields and *****-tonks, but with Carl it was all true.

He didn't get the breaks he deserved; hard luck seemed to follow him around. He had a terrible car crash on the way to the Ed Sullivan Show when "Blue Suede Shoes" was breaking really big. Elvis ended up covering the song and took a lot of the glory there. Carl once told me a story about how Sam Phillips had a big press conference and gave Carl a Cadillac when he had the big hit. Then Carl found out the car was billed to his royalty account. Some people might not know that he played guitar with Johnny Cash for ten years on the road. At a certain point in the Sixties, things got tough for Carl — he had a drinking problem, which he eventually overcame — and he went back into the lead-guitar business.

Carl himself was a very bright guy, and very funny. He once told me, "Tom, I like you so much — if I lived by you, I'd cut your grass." I think that warmth and wit came through in the music. He was not the kind of guy to blow his own horn; he was very humble. When we did a long stand at the Fillmore in the late Nineties, I talked Carl into sitting in with us. Backstage, Carl was very nervous about coming out with us. He said, "They may not know who I am." I was like, "Carl, they're going to know who you are, and they're going to love you." When Carl hit the stage, he just ripped the room apart. Neil Young was there that night, and he was shaking his head because he couldn't believe Carl Perkins. He was that good.

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68.
Jackie Wilson was key in helping bridge the gap between an old-style R&B and a new incarnation of soul. Even Elvis Presley knew why Wilson was called "Mr. Excitement": Elvis once said that seeing Wilson perform made the King want to "hide under the table." I tried to see Wilson live whenever I could.

The most spectacular Jackie Wilson show I ever saw was at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater, around 1960. The theater was so crowded that there wasn't even standing room. When he took the stage, adorned in a magnificent white suit, he spread his arms open wide, as if trying to embrace the entire room. He started singing the opening notes of his song "Doggin' Around." The audience broke into screams. Even the way he casually held his hands while singing was hypnotic. His dancing was spellbinding — twists and splits that left me in total disbelief. Quickly soaked in sweat (nobody knew how to sweat as good as Jackie Wilson), he took off his jacket and pretended he was going to throw it to the crowd — and he knew exactly what he was doing — creating a pure xesual enchantment. In the audience were not just teeny-boppers but real women: women who wanted it and knew where they could get it. And what they all wanted and needed that evening was Jackie Wilson.

He seemed destined for such greatness, and yet his life ended up playing itself out like some cheap B-grade film noir. There were xes scandals — a jealous lover once shot him — as well as tax problems, drugs, divorce and mob associations that made demands he couldn't refuse. While performing at the Latin Casino, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, he had a massive coronary and hit his head hard as he fell. At the hospital, he lapsed into a coma. He remained in that state for eight years, unable to communicate except by blinking his eyes, as the people around him fought over his estate, before he died in 1984.

I had the honor of inducting Jackie Wilson into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. As I waited backstage to present my speech, I was approached by three women. They were arguing with one another as to who should be the one to go onstage and claim the award that was to be given to Jackie. Their fighting turned ugly and threatening. Even after death, there was something haunting and restless. Mr. Excitement would still not have peace.

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67.
I was on holiday with my parents in the late sixties when I heard "I Wish It Would Rain." I lived in England, where it fµck!ng rains all the time, so it was appropriate. But that's also when I fell in love with David Ruffin's tenor — it jumped out of the speakers and ravished my soul.

Whether it was Ruffin or Dennis Edwards or Eddie ********s or Paul Williams singing lead, the Tempts were always an all-star vocal band. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, the Tempts had an unprecedented string of hits: "My Girl," "The Way You Do the Things You Do," "Ain't Too Proud to Beg," "Just My Imagination." Later on, they broke ground with the psychedelic soul of "Cloud Nine." I remember listening to the high-hat rhythms on that record over and over with the guys in the Jeff Beck Group. We'd try to change every one of our songs to try and capture their drumbeats.

When I got home from holiday, I immediately bought Wish It Would Rain. At that time I was very much into folk music and turning the corner into R&B, and I'll never forget seeing that cover, with all the Tempts dressed as Foreign Legionnaires, singing in the desert. Their outfits were wonderful — I blame them for teaching me to wear loud colors. They also came up with the cutting-edge dance routines. Nobody moved like the Tempts.

I'd later become friends with David Ruffin — when our bands would play in Detroit, Ruffin would come to every show and we'd sing "(I Know) I'm Losing You," a Temptations cover off my album Every Picture Tells a Story. His voice was so powerful — like a foghorn on the Queen Mary. He was so loud.

My children absolutely love the Temptations, and we try to see them every time they come to town. They always pick me out of the audience with a spotlight, trying to get me up to the stage. But I never do. I'm too frightened.

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66.
I was in my third year of classes at a place in London called the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture, which is where I met Nick Mason and Rick Wright. At the end of each term we would have a show, and this time we had Cream —- in a small hall where I had once played Happy Loman in Death of a Salesman, which is beside the point.

The curtain drew back and the three of them started playing "Crossroads." I had never seen or heard anything like it before. I was simply staggered by the amount of equipment they had: by Ginger Baker's double bass drum, by Jack Bruce's two 4-by-12 Marshall amps and by all of Eric Clapton's gear. It was an astounding sight and an explosive sound.

Two-thirds of the way through their set, one of them said, "We'd like to invite a friend of ours from America out onstage." It was Jimi Hendrix, and that was the first night he played in England. He came on and did all that now-famous stuff, like playing with his teeth. That ticket cost about a pound or so. It might have been the best purchase I ever made.

After that, Pink Floyd started to go professional, and we would run into Cream on the road. They affected so many people. Jimmy Page must have looked at Cream and thought, "fµck me, I think I'll do that," and then put together Led Zeppelin. Along with the Beatles, they gave those of us entering the business at that time something to aspire to that wasn't pop, but was still popular.

I remember Ginger Baker was insane back then, and I'm sure he still is. He hit the drums harder than anyone I've ever seen, with the possible exception of Keith Moon. And Ginger hit them in a rhythmic style all his own that was extraordinary. Eric Clapton we don't have to talk about — it's obvious how amazing he is. Then there's Jack Bruce — probably the most musically gifted bass player who's ever been.

Cream were very innovative within the context of all the music coming from the West Coast of the U.S. at that time, from bands like the Doors and Love. Apart from being a great blues band, Cream had a real good go at so many other styles, even if some of it sounds a little silly now. There are songs on all the Cream albums that amaze me still, like "Crossroads," "Sunshine of Your Love," "White Room" and "I Feel Free." They were desperately trying to write material that was truly progressive and original. And they achieved that. That's why the work has lasted so long and so well. And that's why it was impossible to get a ticket to the upcoming Cream shows in London. I expect my eyes to be popping out of my head again when I see them at the Royal Albert Hall.

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65.
Al Green has helped overpopulate the world. He's got some serious babymaking music. But what makes him such an inspiration is the raw passion, the sincerity and the joy he brings to his music. People are born to do certain things, and Al was born to make us smile. You hear his voice and it lights everything up. Every time one of his songs starts playing — whether it's "You Oughta Be With Me," "Spending My Time," "Love and Happiness" or, of course, "Let's Stay Together" — when the stomp starts and the guitar comes in, you know you're in for something full of sweet love. His songs weren't as political as those by singers like Marvin Gaye and Donnie Hathaway. But if those guys were speaking to you, Al Green was speaking for you.

Al Green's voice will always remind me of driving the back roads of Memphis with my parents, listening to cassette tapes. Hearing Al as a kid made me want to become a singer and showed me that it was OK to have a softer, more falsetto voice. I really related to that, because I never had a big, boisterous, American Idol showstopping voice. Al, he was a crooner. The way he would squeeze out a note is something that can't be trained and it can't be imitated.

Behind him was this incredible, soulful band. On songs like "Tired of Being Alone," the horns are somehow tasteful and restrained but completely funky. I always loved the way the mistakes were kept in on his albums, like the way the band is almost out of sync at the beginning of "Love and Happiness." Even his messes are beautiful.

Eventually I found out this man I idolized lived five minutes down the street from me in my hometown. Then I went to the White House back when Clinton was in office — the good ol' days — and Al was there performing. He sang Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," and the audience wept. After I released my album, I was doing a TV special in Memphis in a small club, and I called him and asked if he'd grace us with his presence. We sang "Let's Stay Together" on that stage, and it was a milestone in my short, unimportant career. And I learned something incredible from that experience: These days, everything is about the show. But Al Green is the show, and when you watch him perform, you get to see something honest and soulful and amazing.

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64.
I 've got pretty much every note the Kinks recorded on my iPod — certainly everything through 1980. And it all sounds good. The Kinks are the only major band from the Sixties I can think of that didn't go psychedelic, didn't do any of that crap that all of the other big bands did at the time. When everyone was writing about Eastern mysticism, Ray Davies was writing about a two-up/two-down flat in some suburb of London. Ray wrote songs about the things that were important to him. He invented his world and gave it life. And in that world, people weren't wearing Nehru jackets, smoking pot and jamming for twenty-four hours a day. The Kinks created a different world — and I'm glad for it.

When I first heard Village Green Preservation Society, in 1971, I got this picture in my head of small-town English life: village greens, draft beer. But when R.E.M. went to England in 1985, I drove through Muswell Hill — and it certainly wasn't romantic-looking. From "Waterloo Sunset," I had this picture of a gorgeous vista — when it's really a grimy train-station area. I realized these songs were all acts of imagination, that Ray was commemorating an England that was slipping away. There is a great air of sadness in those songs.

I am amazed at how great the Kinks' records sounded — even though, when you listen closely, there is very little going on in them. Village Green is the best example: There are two or three instruments in each song. And yet the songs are perfectly realized, well arranged.

I read that Ray wrote "You Really Got Me" on piano. Then he gives it to his brother Dave, this teenage maniac, who turns it into a demented guitar part. An interviewer once asked Dave if he thought the Kinks had gone heavy metal in the Eighties. He said, "It wasn't called heavy metal when I invented it." When R.E.M. started, Dave's solo on that song was the only solo I knew. So whenever I had to do a solo, I'd play that.

The Kinks slipped into rock history through the back door. All of those great albums that we talk about now, like Face to Face and Village Green — nobody bought those records in the Sixties. But those of us who love those records — and a lot of us are musicians — have loved them for more than thirty years.
 

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Sorry Marlon but FCK rolling stone. I am so tired of these lists they put together that are so one sided and just plain wrong. SMH Curtis Mayfield in the 90's!
 

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63.
There are three kinds of record producers. The first kind is the documentarian — someone like Leonard Chess, who goes into a bar on the South Side of Chicago, sees Muddy Waters with a six-piece combo, then pulls him into the studio the next day and says, "Play what you played last night." The second is the type who serves the artist; I would be so brash as to include myself in that category, along with John Hammond, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, and Bob Thiele — music fans who try to develop great singers.

Then there's the producer who does it all. Phil Spector could be the greatest of these. For Spector, the song and the recording were one thing, and they existed in his brain. When he went into the studio, it came out of him, like Minerva coming out of Jupiter's head. Every instrument had its role to play, and it was all prefigured. The singer was just one tile in this intaglio. Songs such as the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" and Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High" had wonderful singers, but they were tiles. Phil would get the track ready, then call upon the artist and say, "OK, now sing." There were songwriter-producers before him, but no one did the whole thing like Phil.

When I first met him, he was very young, sleeping on the couch at the Atlantic Records offices and using the switchboard after hours. He was brash, cocky and talented. I remember that if I would vouchsafe an opinion about something when we were together in the studio -- a snare drum on a bridge of a song, or whatever — Phil would say, "Oh, man, I came here from California to make hits." It meant, "Shut the fµck up and get out of my face." But like Dizzy Dean used to say, "If you can do it, it ain't bragging," and Phil can do it: play piano and guitar, compose and produce.

We grew very close in subsequent years. One thing that has always amazed me about Phil is that he didn't go to college. He came right out of Hollywood High with that little song about his father, "To Know Him Is to Love Him." That launched him at age seventeen. But Phil is a very literate man; he's an autodidact. I have letters from him that are absolute models of polished syntax and phrase. I'm a pretty tough consumer of literature, but he writes beautifully. His writing is impeccable, like his music. Where it comes from, I don't know.

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62.
Etta James is simply one of the best singers I've ever heard. She's ferocious — sassy and incredibly sexy. Not sexy in a conventional, dolled- up way like, say, the Supremes. Etta is earthy and gritty, ribald and out-there in a way that few performers have the guts to be. From the first time I heard her as a teenager, with songs like "Tell Mama," "At Last," "I'd Rather Go Blind" — there was just something about that ache I heard that got me bad. Still does.

There's a lot going on in Etta James' voice — a lot of pain, a lot of life but, most of all, a lot of strength. Etta has struggled through a few lifetimes of personal heartache and somehow came out the other side. Her autobiography Rage to Survive is an amazing book. Her story is a testament to survival and the difficulties that seem to come with the territory for female singers — drugs and alcohol, money and weight — and, of course, trouble with men. Maybe that's why she could slay you with that phrasing from such a young age: She had the heartbreak to back it up.

Etta has clearly influenced people like Janis Joplin and me, and now people like Susan Tedeschi and Joss Stone. Anybody who has a bluesy side to what they do can point to Etta James as the bridge between R&B, blues and pop singing. You can't overestimate her influence. And she's continued to stretch and grow as a singer, creating an incredible body of work for six decades and counting. Check out her gorgeous versions of those Billie Holiday songs, or the Eagles' "Take It to the Limit," or "Sugar on the Floor" — there's just nobody better.

A few years ago, she got an award from the Blues Foundation at the House of Blues in L.A. She came out onstage and said something like, "I know the difference between a diva and a beaver, and there's a lot of beavers out there but only a few divas." It was classic, and she could get away with it because she's packin' — she's got the goods to say whatever she wants. She has an incredible generosity and warmth of spirit, but she also doesn't take any sh!t from anybody. It's that dignity and warrior spirit that have pulled her through. Over the years, Etta's been a real hero and role model to me and, since the early part of my career, a real friend, too.

There's a comparison with Etta and Ray Charles that goes way beyond addiction in their personal lives. Like Ray Charles, Etta brought the passion of gospel, R&B and gutbucket raw soul music into the mainstream in a way that very few people have ever crossed over. They were both musical revolutionaries. They're both one of a kind. I can only hope someday we'll be seeing movies about Etta, and Ruth Brown, too. And let's do it while they're alive.

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61.
Tina Turner has become more than just a musical superstar and xes symbol, though she is definitely both of those things. For me — and I imagine for millions of others — Tina now stands as an enduring symbol of survival and of grace. Her music is a healing thing.

Remember that famous introduction to "Proud Mary," when Tina talks about liking things "nice and...rough"? We all know that she faced some rough times in her life. Yet the reality is that life never threw this woman anything that she couldn't handle. One of Tina's big hits is called "We Don't Need Another Hero." Yet the truth is we really do need heroes, and Tina has become a heroic figure for many people, especially women, because of her tremendous strength. Personally, Tina doesn't seem to have a beginning or an end in my life. I felt her music was always there, and I feel like it always will be.

The story of Tina's rise and fall with Ike Turner is well-known, and you can see what it was like in the movie What's Love Got to Do With It. But now I believe it's time to put the Ike story to rest. The truth of the matter is that when Tina came back in the Eighties, she became much bigger than she ever was the first time around. Ultimately, Tina's story is not one of victimhood at all but one of incredible triumph.

In the beginning, Tina's music was based on hard times, hard truths and harsh realities. Think about a song like "Nutbush City Limits." That was her story. But over the years her story changed, and her music reflected those changes beautifully. Tina has the ability to dream, get out, get over and get on with it. She's transformed herself into an international sensation — an elegant powerhouse. But wherever she may be, whether it's in Spain, Asia or Egypt, she's never forgotten her humble beginnings. Tina Turner knows who she is, and to this day, she remains one of the true greats. In every sense, the woman has legs.
 

Marlon12

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Sorry Marlon but FCK rolling stone. I am so tired of these lists they put together that are so one sided and just plain wrong. SMH Curtis Mayfield in the 90's!

Rolling Stones are just posting the results. The votes are made by panel of fifty-five top musicians, historians, industry executives and critics, selected by the editors of Rolling Stone. Voters were asked to pick, in order of preference, the twenty artists they deemed to be the most significant and influential of rock’s first fifty years, those whose work continues to have an impact today. More than 125 artists were named. The ballots were tabulated according to a weighted point system that was overseen by the international accounting firm Ernst & Young.
 

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They're always making a 100 greatest artist/singers list and it always ends the same with the Beatles or Elvis in the top spots, screw this list and every other Rolling Stones list.
 

Marlon12

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60.
Joni Mitchell is a bigger icon than she is a star. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards became famous in such a worldwide way that they became stars and icons. But Joni is still quite unknown to a lot of people. The impact she had wasn't big and flashy. But she influenced people who became stars.

I remember a friend in high school playing me "A Case of You," from Blue, and me liking it — a lot. I could tell that Joni was a painter by the way she wrote lyrics. She describes smells and sounds to translate what is happening in her songs, using fewer words to transmit more feeling. Her melodies are all about shapes. The singing lines are slow, steep plateaus. One of the things that I learned from Joni, and that I love about her: If you can tell the story right and keep things moving, you don't need to return to the chorus on time.

Joni never tries to make herself more perfect in her lyrics. What she writes is closer to journalism: On Blue, you hear everything she experienced, the highs and the lows. It's such a lonely album: not in the "I don't have any friends" sense but in the sense that you're a little bit removed, and always watching. And it takes a lot of courage to be that honest, especially as a woman — to talk about love and other intimate things so frankly. When she first did it, it was a very fluffy time — pretty girls singing about pretty things.

Joni had an edginess that not many women expressed then. Most women singers had strong vibratos and a lot of mascara. Joni Mitchell never made a big deal out of being a woman. She had such a strong sexuality, but she didn't feel the need to deny that part of her in order to be taken seriously. She also didn't play it up — although many of her songs are about xes.

I met her only once, at a Vanity Fair photo shoot. It sounds like a pathetically feeble Hollywood story, but Stevie Wonder introduced us. He took my hand — I guess I led him to her — and he said, "Joni, I'd like you to meet Jewel." I just shook her hand and tried to swallow. I didn't have anything to say to her. Her influence on me is so obvious. I hope she can hear it.

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59.
I used to be so upset because I came to America too late to see King Oliver's band and because I never got to see Bix Beiderbecke or Bessie Smith live. But I heard Louis Jordan many times. He was one of the greatest entertainers I have ever seen. When you heard him with his band, the Tympany Five, you were transported. The rhythm would start, and boom! You would go.

B.B. King, Chuck Berry and all of the other early rock & roll and R&B stars were influenced and inspired by Jordan. And as time passed, he actually got hipper. Jordan started off as a jazz musician -- I first saw him playing as a sideman in Chick Webb's band in the mid-Thirties -- and he was a great saxophone player. He had a strident tone, very infectious and extremely rhythmic, that was very different from the tone of the jazz saxophonists of the day, like Johnny Hodges, Willie Smith and Benny Carter. Jordan had this raspy, soulful tone.

But Jordan hit a strong chord with black audiences because he had this shuffle rhythm, this undeniable groove, that was on so many of his great records like "Saturday Night Fish Fry," "Caldonia" and "Blue Light Boogie." The rhythm of his band was so engaging — it was unbelievable. And Jordan had a fabulous sense of humor. He found songs that could reach a wide public. Jordan was really one of the first crossover artists. "A Chicken Ain't Nothin' But a Bird" — that's a black folk song. But he put that shuffle in there. And he used it in a lot of his train-type songs, too, like "Choo Choo Ch' Boogie."

There were certain black artists, like Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, who were criticized for not helping the race, so to speak, because of their clowning, the way they would take a kind of Negro attitude to make entertainment for white people — a continuation of minstrelsy. Now, Louis Jordan was an intelligent man. He may not have had a formal education, but he was extremely well-spoken, and he realized he could make money by making jokes about being black, on songs like "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" and "Salt Pork, West Virginia," which pokes fun at Southern blacks. Racial jokes abounded in his songs. But in a lot of those songs, it turns out that everybody goes to jail. At the end of "Saturday Night Fish Fry," they all wind up in jail. Everybody is having a good time, then the cops arrive. That's a powerful statement about racism, too.

The artist that Jordan influenced the most was Ray Charles. Everybody talks about Ray Charles being influenced by Nat "King" Cole and Charles Brown. But when Ray Charles was growing up, the music he heard down home was Louis Jordan. Some of Jordan's lesser-known recordings became very famous as Ray Charles hits. "Let the Good Times Roll" — the Ray Charles version — is an exact copy of Jordan's record. Jordan also had a ballad, one of the few he recorded, that became a hit in the ghettos of America: "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying." Ray Charles went on to do a fabulous version of that, with a big orchestra.

Jordan's sound was hard to imitate. At Atlantic Records, we used that boogie-woogie feel on some of the jump numbers we recorded with Joe Turner. But the main thing was the sound of Jordan's voice, the way he sang. It was a kind of talk-singing. He's actually talking the lyrics in "Saturday Night Fish Fry." Jordan was really a precursor to rap. Back then, they used to call it Harlem rhyming jive. Rap didn't just come out of nowhere.

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58.
The xes Pistols released just one album — Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the xes Pistols — but it punched a huge hole in everything that was bµllsh!t about rock music, and everything that was going wrong with the world, too. No one else has had that kind of impact with one album. You can hear their influence everywhere from Joy Division to Guns n' Roses to Public Enemy to the Smiths to Slayer. Never Mind the Bollocks is the root of everything that goes on at modern-rock radio. It's just an amazing thing that no one's been able to live up to.

It's a myth that these guys couldn't play their instruments. Steve Jones is one of the best guitarists of all time, as far as I'm concerned — he taught me how a Gibson should sound through a Marshall. Paul Cook was an amazing drummer with a distinct sound, right up there with Keith Moon or Charlie Watts. There are bands out there still trying to sound like the xes Pistols and can't, because they were great players.

The difference between John Lydon and a lot of other punk singers is that they can only emulate what he was doing naturally. There was nothing about him that was contrived. As far as the bass player goes, I don't think it was necessarily a mistake to replace Glen Matlock with Sid Vicious. Matlock was cool, but Sid was everything that's cool about punk rock: a skinny rocker who had a ton of attitude, sort of an Elvis, James Dean kind of guy. That said, there's nothing romantic about being addicted to heroin. He was capable of playing his instrument, but he was too fµcked up to do it.

The things that Lydon wrote about back in '76 and '77 are totally relevant to what's going on right now. They paint an ugly picture. No one ever had the guts to say what they said, to talk about someone getting an abortion. The only person who did anything similar to it was Bob Dylan, and even Bob Dylan was never that blunt.

When I first heard them, I was fourteen or fifteen and into a lot of heavy-metal and hard-rock music. I think I was at a girl's house. I remember hearing those boot stomps to "Holidays in the Sun." And then the guitar came roaring through like thunder. By the time Lydon's vocal came in, I definitely wanted to destroy my past and create something new for myself. That's sort of the impact that they always had on me and my music. Anytime that I'm trying to create something, I always refer to the xes Pistols, because it shows you what the possibilities are as far as music. You don't have to emulate what the xes Pistols do, but thanks to them, you can take it anywhere.

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57.
I don't think this generation has a clue what classic Aerosmith was all about. But they were the template for what I do, as well as plenty of bands that came after Guns n' Roses: Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam all owed a serious debt to old-school Aerosmith.

My big awakening happened when I was fourteen. I'd been trying to get into this older girl's pants for a while, and she finally let me come over to her house. We hung out, smoked some pot and listened to Aerosmith's Rocks. It hit me like a fµck!ng ton of bricks. I sat there listening to it over and over, and totally blew off this girl. I remember riding my bike back to my grandma's house knowing that my life had changed. Now I identified with something.

The key to Rocks is the first two songs — "Back in the Saddle" and "Last Child." That combination just ripped my head off. But my favorite song on the record has always been "Nobody's Fault," which is the second song on the B side. Aerosmith had an aggressive, psychotic, drugged-out vibe, but at the same time they had a Stones-y blues thing going on. There was just nothing cooler than Aerosmith coming out of America at that point. What else was there? Foghat?

When I was learning to play the guitar, Aerosmith gave me the shove. I identified with Joe Perry's image, both visually and soundwise. He was streamlined in a way that reminded me of Keith Richards, was always wasted and had a careless guitar style that was really cool. But I was also totally into Brad Whitford's guitar solos, and he had a more direct influence on the way I play than anybody realizes. And anyone who sings needs to be exposed to Steven Tyler.

My first Aerosmith concert was in 1978. They were playing at a festival with Van Halen — they were incredibly loud and I barely recognized a note, but it was still the most bitchin' thing I'd ever seen. Soon after that they broke up, which to me marked the end of Seventies rock. The next time I saw them was when they got back together six years later, and they were amazing. When Aerosmith are in the groove, they're just rock-solid. Not too long after that Guns n' Roses were asked to open for Aerosmith on their Permanent Vacation tour. We went to their manager's hotel room, and while he was in the bathroom we ordered $1,500 worth of room service and trashed the place. But they must have liked us a lot, because they put us on the bill anyway, and I've known them ever since.

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56.
When I was going out in the Eighties, you could get your ass kicked if you put on Parliament's "(Not Just) Knee Deep" at a house party. Some DJs wouldn't play that song or "Flash Light," because a fight would start: The crazy motherfuckers at parties would become real crazy. "Knee Deep" was their coming-out music. At damn near fifteen minutes, it was so long and so good, it made you feel like now was the time. For whatever. George Clinton showed me that anything goes: You do what you feel.

Obviously, he had great musicians on those albums: Bootsy Collins on the bass; Bernie Worrell, the best keyboard player I've ever heard. Clinton would pull in people like James Brown's saxophone player Maceo Parker and anyone else he could find. The arrangements are so unpredictable: high-pitched synthesizer sounds you never heard before, followed by straight-up beautiful music. He could turn the corniest things into funk.

My uncle Jerry was a DJ and introduced me to all the P-Funk records when I was a little kid: The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, Mothership Connection. I loved them because they reminded me of cartoons, but they were crazy and psychedelic, and the superheroes were black men. To this day they still have the best album covers I've ever seen; they would sustain you as much as a video would today. I remember just sitting and staring at the cover of Motor-Booty Affair; there was that picture of Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk with a big-ass bird breathing down his neck. My favorite characters were Star Child and Sir Nose, even though Sir Nose was a sucker who didn't swim and didn't like the funk. I was too young to go to the concerts, but I'd hear about them from my older brothers and sisters — about the huge stage shows, and one story about a fan who stripped off all his clothes and ran the length of the arena. That bugged me out.

In the end, nobody described George Clinton's music better than the man himself: It is "Cosmic Slop," it is funkadelic — funky and psychedelic. You feel a mothership connection. Clinton was a great marketer, in the best sense possible: He delivered what he promised. He was no Geraldo Rivera — he was Muhammad Ali or LeBron James. His music never went away on the West Coast, and you can still hear his mark all over music today, from OutKast on down. Parliament and Funkadelic are done, but they're still thirty years ahead of their time.

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55.
I didn't grow up a deadhead. I didn't become a big fan until 1989. I first saw the band in 1979 — I was nineteen — but my head was somewhere else at the time. My wife, Stephanie, was a Deadhead, though, and after we met, in 1989, we'd go to see them every chance we'd get. One night, at Madison Square Garden, Bruce Hornsby — who was playing keyboards with them — pulled us up onstage and sat us behind his piano. We were ten feet from Jerry Garcia, and you could see how that audience zeroed in on him. He was the focus of everything. There was a synchronicity between the Dead and the crowd, and it was mesmerizing to watch Jerry, in his own understated way, steering that ship — knowing it was a big ship that could barely be steered, but if anybody could steer it, it was him.

Obviously, most of today's jam bands are influenced by the Dead. But what disappoints me about a lot of current music is that you don't hear any history in it. The Dead were aficionados of folk, acoustic blues and bluegrass — particularly Garcia. In the songs he wrote with Robert Hunter, and in Bob Weir's stuff too, you're also hearing music from forty, fifty years ago. Everyone focuses on the magic of Jerry's guitar playing and the vulnerability of his voice, but his sense of melody and chord changes was unbelievable. The ballads especially connected with me: "Loser," "Wharf Rat," "Stella Blue." My song "Lay of the Sunflower" on the Gov't Mule album The Deep End has a lot of Garcia's melodic sensibilities.

Before I joined the Dead last year, I played with Phil Lesh for about five years. He is one of the most unique bass players ever. His background was in classical music; he looks at the bass guitar as a piece of the orchestra, like a low-pitch brass instrument. His job isn't just holding down the root notes — he and the drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, are moving all over the place. A lot of the magic in the Dead's music came from Phil and Jerry learning how to play together, combining Phil's approach with Jerry's unique blend of influences.

Jerry is still one of the few guitarists where as soon as you hear him, you know instantly who it is. As a guitar player, that is the thing I strive for: the distinct, recognizable personality that comes out in every note. There was a humanity in Jerry's guitar work as well as his singing that drew you in. He was a very personal guitarist; he played with more heart and soul than technique. And to me, that's what the best music is made of.

As a band, the Dead also redefined success. They created this following that grew and grew, and they did it without compromising themselves. They survived in a world where survival didn't seem possible. They bucked the system and encouraged their fans to do the same: to be free thinkers. There are a lot of Deadheads who were completely different people before they connected with the Grateful Dead.

The Dead still believe in that message. When I'm with the Allman Brothers, the band always leaves it up to me how much of Duane's influence I should show. The Dead are like that too. They're never going to tell me, "Play it more like Jerry" or "less like Jerry." It's always, "Do what you think is right."

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54.
Do hip-hop producers hold Dr. Dre in high esteem? It's like asking a Christian if he believes Christ died for his sins. Dre has a whole coast on his back. He discovered Snoop — one of the two greatest living rappers, along with Jay-Z — and signed Eminem, 50 Cent and now the Game. He takes artists with great potential and makes them even better. I wonder where I'd be right now if Dre had discovered me.

I remember hearing Dre's music before I really knew who he was. I had a tape of Eazy-E's Eazy-Duz-It when I was ten years old (until my mother found out it had curses on it and confiscated it). I didn't know what "production" was back then, but I knew I loved the music. The more I learned about producing hip-hop, the more I respected what Dre was doing. Think about how on old N.W. A records the beat would change four or five times in a single song. A million people can program beats, but can they put together an entire album like it's a movie?

When I was learning to produce, working in a home studio in my mother's crib, I tried to make beats that sounded exactly like Timbaland's, DJ Premier's, Pete Rock's and, especially, Dr. Dre's. Dre productions like Tupac's "California Love" were just so far beyond what I was doing that I couldn't even comprehend what was going on. I had no idea how to get to that point, how to layer all those instruments. The Chronic is still the hip-hop equivalent to Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life. It's the benchmark you measure your album against if you're serious. But it's "Xxplosive," off 2001, that I got my entire sound from — if you listen to the track, it's got a soul beat, but it's done with those heavy Dre drums. Listen to "This Can't Be Life," a track I did for Jay-Z's Dynasty album, and then listen to "Xxplosive." It's a direct bite.

I just met Dre for the first time in December — he asked me to produce a track ("Dreams") for the Game's record. At first I was starstruck, but within thirty minutes I was begging him to mix my next album. He's the definition of a true talent: Dre feels like God placed him here to make music, and no matter what forces are aligned against him, he always ends up on the mountaintop.
 

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53.
Eric Clapton is the most important and influential guitar player that has ever lived, is still living or ever will live. Do yourself a favor, and don't debate me on this. Before Clapton, rock guitar was the Chuck Berry method, modernized by Keith Richards, and the rockabilly sound — Scotty Moore, Carl Perkins, Cliff Gallup — popularized by George Harrison. Clapton absorbed that, then introduced the essence of black electric blues — the power and vocabulary of Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddy — to create an attack that defined the fundamentals of rock & roll lead guitar.

Maybe most important of all, he turned the amp up — to eleven. That alone blew everybody's mind in the mid-Sixties. In the studio, he moved the mike across the room from the amp, which added ambience; everybody else was still close-miking. Then he cranked the fµck!ng thing. Sustain happened; feedback happened. The guitar player suddenly became the most important guy in the band.

Intellectually, Clapton was a purist, although there was little evidence of it in the beginning. He supercharged every riff he knew, even things I remember as note-for-note tributes, like Freddy King's "Hideaway," on John Mayall's Bluesbreakers With Eric Clapton. When he soloed, he wrote wonderful symphonies from classic blues licks in that fantastic tone, with all of the resonance that comes from distortion. You could sing his solos like songs in themselves.

I first saw Clapton with Cream, at the Cafe Au Go Go in New York in 1967 — sort of. I stood outside. It was sold out. I couldn't get in. But you could see them — the band was right in the window. And it was loud, even outside. In those days, musically, Clapton was a total wild man. He stood there, not moving a muscle, while he issued the most savage assault you had ever experienced, unless you were at the debut of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" and your seat was in front of the cannon. And when his creativity, passion, frustration and anger all came together, it was frightening. His solo in "Crossroads" on Wheels of Fire is impossible: I don't know how he kept time while he played.

I've never said more than a casual hello to Eric, so none of this is inside information. But I believe that his guitar playing changed radically in the early Seventies because singing and songwriting became more important to him, and Robert Johnson had a lot to do with that. Clapton was so moved by Johnson's music that he wanted to write and sing with the same passion, clarity and truth. You hear the frustration — of not being able to do that — in his Sixties guitar work. The first time I heard real anger and aggressive sexuality expressed in guitar playing was on that Mayall record. If the solo in "Have You Heard" isn't the sound of a cock ripping through trousers on its way to the promised land, I don't know what is.

Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes and the Band's Music From Big Pink started a move back to American traditional music, and those recordings were a big influence on Clapton. Around the same time, Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett were encouraging him to write and sing. You can hear how good he is at both on Eric Clapton, the album he made with them, as well as his change in tone from Gibson-dirty to Stratocaster-clean.

Layla was, for me, the last time everything — the singing, songwriting and guitar playing — were all at the same high intensity level. It's Clapton's most original interpretation of the blues, because the hellhounds on his trail had a face: unrequited love. But Clapton's guitar playing is still terrific. The thing is, he had seven years of the most extraordinary, historic guitar playing ever — and thirty-five years of doing good work. Being the best has got to wear you out. So he pulled back, like Dylan and Lennon did. The sprint is cool — the marathon is better. Clapton has followed in the footsteps of his mentors: He's become a journeyman.

Anyone who plays lead guitar owes him a debt of gratitude. He wrote the fundamental language, the binary code, that everyone uses to this day in every form of popular music.

The day may come, if you're a young rocker, when you'll hear one of Clapton's mellow, contemporary ballads on the radio and think, "What's the big deal?"

Put on "Steppin' Out." And bow down.

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52.
In a way, their name says it all. It wasn't just about the fact that Duane and Gregg Allman had the same parents. The Allman Brothers Band was a true brotherhood of players — one that went beyond race and ego. It was a thing of beauty. The Allmans were without question the first great jam band, and they took the jam to heights that it had not previously reached. They played traditional blues mixed with their own unique brand of rock & roll, and there was nothing but strength in that group.

Duane Allman played what he wanted to hear. There have been bottleneck-guitar players forever, from the Twenties through the Sixties, but Duane began doing things no one had ever done before. He had a tone and a style that were uniquely his. He was just a stunning and singular musician who was gone way too soon.

Then there was his kid brother, Gregg. His singing and keyboard playing had a dark richness, a soulfulness that added one more color to the Allmans' rainbow. The Allman Brothers had respect for the roots of this music. They learned from the blues, and they continued to interpret the form in their own manner. They took something old and made something new.

I was lucky enough to see the Allmans up close in the beginning. I first became aware of them when they were breaking out of Macon, Georgia. They had played Austin and made a tremendous noise down there. Word spread very quickly in those days. The next thing we knew we were on the road with these guys, opening up for them and Quicksilver Messenger Service, and witnessing music history.

We would linger by the stage after our set and listen to Duane and Dickey Betts play guitar together. It was like they were weaving a beautiful piece of cloth. Dickey was remarkable in his own right. Yet in the beginning, no one in that band — Duane, Dickey, Jaimoe Johanson or Butch Trucks — outshined the others.

There are a couple of moments on At Fillmore East that defy description — where the Allmans take the music to places it had never been. That extended version of "Whipping Post" is the all-time end-all for me. It still gets to me all these years later. The Allmans were the great Southern-rock band, but they were more than that. They defined the best of every music from the American South in that time. They were the best of all of us.

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51.
That man was the natural stuff. When I first heard Howlin' Wolf's records, I thought that deep, scratchy voice was a fake voice, just the way he sang — until I met him. He said, "Hello," and I thought, "Uh-oh, this isn't fake. This is for real." Wolf's conversation was the same as his singing. Matter of fact, the first time I met him, I started tapping my feet as he was talking.

His first big records, like "Moanin' at Midnight" and "How Many More Years" — I'd hear them on the radio when I was still in Louisiana, on WLAC out of Nashville. We had an old battery-powered radio, and we'd listen to this half-hour program that came on at night. I'd hear the man's voice and try to picture what he looked like. I thought he was a big, light-skinned guy. Then I went up to Chicago — September 25th, 1957. The next year, I was meeting all of the great blues musicians: Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf. And when I saw Wolf, yes, he was a big guy. But he wasn't light-skinned at all. Boy, was I wrong.

And he used to put on such a show. He would get down on the floor, crawl like a wolf and sing in that voice: "I'm a tail dragger." They've got some film on him. They taped him when we were doing the American Folk-Blues Festival tours in Europe in the 1960s, and the Rolling Stones got him on the rock & roll television show Shindig [in 1965]. He would do this boogie-woogie thing, around and around -- like the kids used to do with the hula hoops, where you had to go around and around at your waist, to keep the hoop going. That was the kind of sh!t he was doing. I'd see that and think, "Man, there goes the Wolf."

He was so exciting to be on a show with. Wolf was a big man, but he could really move. It was like when the Chicago Bears had that player the Refrigerator. People think football players can't move when they're that big. And people expected the Wolf, because he was such a big guy, to just sit in a chair and belt it out. No, man, he had all that action. He had everything you wanted to see. He'd crawl around, jump around. His fists were as big as a car tire. And he would ball that fist up. When I started getting calls to come and play on some cuts behind him, I'd think, "Oh, sh!t, I better play right." I'd heard he was mean. I was told that. But, you know, I never had a cross word with the man the whole time, right up to when he passed away.

The reason I got a chance to play on sessions with him — on songs like "Killing Floor," "Built for Comfort" and "300 Pounds of Joy," and a lot of musicians better than me didn't get those dates — was because they would come in thinking, "This is my opportunity to blow the Wolf offstage." There was no way I could say that. This was my opportunity to learn something from the Wolf. But Wolf was not a demanding person. If you played something that made him smile, he would look back at you with that smile. When he did, to me, I was getting paid.

I played with Muddy, too, and it was so great to play with both of them. I heard a rumor that Wolf and Muddy didn't get along -- I never saw that. Jimmy Rogers, who played in Muddy's band, used to laugh and joke about what Wolf had to say about Muddy and what Muddy would say back. But all of them talked bad about each other, calling everyone "motherfµcker." That was their thing. With musicians, "motherfµcker" was the love word. And when Wolf said, "motherfµcker, you can't play," what he was really saying was, "I'm gonna fire your ass up. If I tell you you can't play, then you're gonna bring it on." This is the way Wolf treated you. That would signify for you to show your sh!t.

Everything you wanted was right there, touchable to me, in that voice -- even when Wolf wasn't singing. We used to have these Blue Mondays in Chicago that would start at seven o'clock in the morning. That's when we'd all get together after playing and just do a conversation, man. I would sit and listen to Wolf talk. It didn't have to be about music. He loved fishing, he loved sports. To me, it all sounded like music from heaven.

People don't know him the way they should now. When Muddy died, they interviewed me on television, and they asked me, "What should be done?" I said most cities with famous musicians, like Chicago -- they end up naming a street or something after them. And they got the street that Muddy lived on most of his life named after him. But it never happened for Wolf. And the younger generation coming up now — if you don't talk about the music or the artists, they don't know them. My children didn't know who I was until they were twenty-one and were able to come in the clubs and see me.

We got to go back and do some digging. We have to let people know that Howlin' Wolf — and Muddy and Little Walter and all these cats — made Chicago the world capital of the blues. Chess Records is a landmark. But who made Chess Records? What about those people we done forgot about, like Wolf?
 

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50.
I've used the band as an example for my career. When I first tried to get record deals, nobody knew how to market me, because my sound didn't necessarily fit into any stereotypes. But the Band did a little bit of everything.

I remember when Music From Big Pink came out, in 1968. I was living in Arkansas at the time. You couldn't categorize the Band's sound, but it was so organic — a little bit country, a little bit roots, a little bit mountain, a little bit rock — and their vocal styles and harmonies totally set them apart. Each band member brought something, because they were all consummate musicians.

Their work as the Hawks on Dylan's 1966 tour is some of the best rock & roll ever made, with Robbie Robertson playing just amazing guitar. The Band let Dylan branch out stylistically. In his writing, Dylan was getting away from those heavy, metaphorical songs on Blonde on Blonde and writing cool little tunes.

Their songs are uncoverable — who can pull off Richard Manuel's incredible high voice? — but we tried. Any time we sat around singing songs, someone would inevitably pull out a version of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and drunken and stoned singalongs of "The Weight." My favorite song was "It Makes No Difference," from Northern Lights-Southern Cross. The sentiment of it is so heart-wrenching, and the performance is so honest. This guy is saying that his lover has just left him, and he's totally devastated. It's one of the most beautiful melodies I've ever heard.

There is an element of sadness about the Band. The Last Waltz, despite its wonderful music, was sad to see because they had so much more to give. Richard Manuel's death was really tragic. I got to meet Garth Hudson — he played on a demo I did back in the mid-Eighties. I just remember he was really quiet, soft-spoken and real sweet. And he played like an angel.

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49.
Elton John defines himself as a rock star, and he really lives it. More like a Roman aristocrat rock star. I've noticed when we've toured together that backstage you'll see young men with togas, dressed as centurions, with little fig leaves around their heads. Inside Elton's dressing room there are a thousand pairs of sunglasses, a hundred pairs of shoes and about fifty Versace suits laid out. He's fµck!ng royalty, and I love it. My dressing room looks like the back of a deli. I have one of those meat platters that sea gulls circle around.

Elton kicks my ass on piano. He's fantastic — a throwback to Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino and Little Richard. His spontaneous, improvisational playing always challenges me. And that is his contribution to rock & roll and pop: his musicianship. Before him, rock was a bunch of James Taylors — guitar-based singer-songwriter stuff. Elton brought back fantastic piano-based rock. Elton knows what his instrument is capable of. The piano is a percussion instrument, like a drum. You don't strum a piano. You don't bow a piano. You bang and strike a piano. You beat the sh!t out of a piano. Elton knows exactly how to do that - he always had that rhythmic, very African, syncopated style that comes from being well versed in gospel and good old R&B. Elton and Bernie Taupin did some brilliant songwriting during the first part of his career, from Elton John to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

The first time we met we were in Holland, at a hotel in Amsterdam. It was in the mid-Seventies, and he was at his peak — it was the height of the Elton John era — and I was just starting out as the "Piano Man" guy. We went into a private room and we just talked. I told him what a fan I was, and he said he knew my stuff. I thought this was so cool: There were a thousand guitar players, but there were only two of us. The English piano player and the American piano player. And, seminally, rock & roll was not just guitar. Elton gave a funny-looking guy like me — and so many others — an opportunity to be a singer-songwriter. When Elton was in his first band, Bluesology, he never thought he could be a rock star. Same as me. I didn't look like Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney or Jim Morrison. Sure, we thought we'd be piano players for big rock bands, but funnily enough he ended up with big, silly glasses and crazy outfits, and I ended up with my dopey stage behavior, both of us rock stars. To this day we laugh about that. And he keeps going on and on. I haven't written a song since 1993, and he asks me, "Billy, why don't you write some new songs?" I say, "Elton, why don't you write less new songs?" At $200 a ticket, you can't shove new stuff down people's throats. So much of his stuff is amazing, though: "Rocket Man," "Crocodile Rock," "Bennie and the Jets," "Tiny Dancer," "Your Song" and "The b!tch Is Back." That's what they want to hear.

Any melodic songwriter owes a debt to Elton John, the supreme melodist. John Mayer, Five for Fighting, Alicia Keys. Christ, I don't know sh!t about new bands, but anybody who plays the keyboard and likes melody must give a nod to Elton. Like Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Carole King and the Beatles, he carried on the rich tradition of writing beautiful melodies.

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48.
Run-DMC were the Beatles of hip-hop — Run and DMC were Lennon and McCartney, and Jam Master Jay was George and Ringo rolled into one. Raising Hell was the first true rap album, a complete work of art as opposed to a collection of singles or a novelty item. It's my favorite album of all time. It incorporated rock, but on rap's terms — the rap wasn't underneath, it was on top. Jay-Z, OutKast, Black Star, the Roots — everyone in hip-hop today can be traced back to Run-DMC.

They had a whole new energy that revolutionized hip-hop. Older artists like Grandmaster Flash wore disco-style outfits, were from the Bronx and had a different kind of appeal. Run-DMC were from Hollis, Queens, about fifteen minutes from where I lived. Hollis was a suburban, not urban, environment, but Run-DMC dressed more like cats off the street — and twenty years later, most rappers still dress the same way.

When I was doing college radio at WBAU on Long Island, we helped break Run-DMC. They were a model for Public Enemy in that we both made loud, blasting records for arenas, not clubs. They had to yell, because their beats and guitar riffs needed it. You couldn't rap in a low tone over a blaring guitar in an arena.

I was at home a year ago last fall, and I happened to turn on the TV. Some newscaster said that Jay had been shot and murdered, and I went into shock. Black musicians are not immune to the ills that afflict our community. It's not popular to say, but it's the truth, and we must address it to prevent these tragedies in the future.

One little story: In 1984, I told Jay that I was coming to the Spectrum in Philadelphia to check out the first Fresh Fest Tour. When I got to the back gate, I sent a message and asked, could he meet me there? And sure enough, in the middle of a concert in front of 20,000 people, he took time out to walk down the ramp, past security and hit me off with two tickets. He gave me some good seats, too. I was forever grateful. That's who Jay was. He was the type of cat who didn't forget you. And I will never forget him.

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47.
I was about nineteen when I first heard a Patti Smith record. It was Horses. I remember sitting there, very taken by the sound of her voice, this ferocious delivery. Later I was struck by how literate her lyrics were, how intellectual and political. I loved how, in her songs, she talked about anything other than the love in her heart for a man. And I loved her image: this non-glam look with the chopped-off hair, looking like a skinny boy. She was the complete opposite of the images that were pumped into me as a child, of what I was supposed to aspire to in a woman.

She is a folk artist, in the way that Bob Dylan is. I loved that she was a poet involved in visual art. It wasn't just about the music for her. It was everything. And she knew how powerful her image was — that she was really sexy — and how to manipulate that for her art. What Madonna does today, Patti was doing from the beginning. Except Madonna was into selling, period. I felt that Patti's goal was to use her art to bring comfort and grace — to me, personally. The opening lines of "Revenge," on Wave, give me the chills to this day: "I feel upset/Let's do some celebrating."

Garbage played a festival with Patti in Athens four or five years ago, and she signed a set list for me: "Power to the people, Patti Smith." It's a cliche. But cliches, she understands, can work. I was talking to a young man recently who was refusing to utilize his right to vote, out of principle. As much as I understood his point, I believe individuals are important. One person can make a difference. When Patti sings "People Have the Power," it moves me, because I know I am not the only person out there feeling these things. I can only imagine there are millions of people out there who she is singing to, who feel like me. And when you add up those millions of people, it's worthwhile.

She is a soldier. She will not be defeated. I look at today's charts, at the women who are selling the most records, getting the most column inches, and I'm terrified by how they are all controlled by a male corporate idea of what women and rebels should be. When Christina Aguilera is taken seriously as a rebellious figure, we have a huge problem. I'm just glad that Patti is still willing to get up there and fight. It makes me feel less alone.

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46.
Janis Joplin was absolutely abarnstormer and a complete groundbreaker. She wasn't just a great woman in rock — at the time she was the woman in rock. Janis really created this wholeworld of possibility for women in music: Without Janis Joplin, there would be no Melissa Etheridge. Without Janis, there would be no Chrissie Hynde, no GwenStefani. There would be no one.

I was a freshman or sophomore in high school when Janis first connected with me. Pearl was the first record I bought. I remember that I was kind of scared. I think that if Joni Mitchell gave me the idea that a woman could write about her life in a public forum, Janis gave me the idea that a woman could live a wild life and put that out there in a public forum, too. At the time, I was this very proper Catholic girl, and Janis was a frightening presence. But being scared didn't stop me from buying Janis' records, and it didn't stop me from wearing a black armband to school the day she died.

It's hard to imagine now the extent to which Janis was so completely shocking at the time. There had been blues singers who were wild and unrestrained -- but even they tended to be a little more buttoned-down than Janis. She always seemed on the verge of being totally out of control. Last summer, I watched the Monterey Pop Festival film for the first time in ages, and I was absolutely stunned by Janis. She had this focus that was relentless. She was a spectacle, like some kind of nuclear being bearing down on the crowd. In the film, you see Mama Cass at the end of Janis' performance just shaking her head, standing up and applauding, like, "Oh, my God, what just happened?"

She had an unshakable commitment to her own truth, no matter how destructive, how weird or how bad. Nothing else seemed to matter. She was such an individual in the way she dressed, the way she sang, the way she lived. She loved her whiskey and made no bones about it. This was a full-blown one-of-a-kind woman — no stylist, no publicist, no image-maker. It was just Janis.

The beauty and the power of Janis Joplin as a singer is her complete lack of fear. She held nothing back. She went to the edge every time she opened her mouth. She sang from her toes and from her soul. She could also destroy you when she got vulnerable, like on "Me and Bobby McGee," where you saw the little girl underneath. But through it all, Janis never lightened up. She didn't live long enough to lighten up. She was a very fierce, very beautiful bright light that burned out way, way too quickly.

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45.
The Byrds are immortal because they flew so high. For me, they're still way, way up there. They left a huge mark. First off, the Byrds were the first credible American answer to the British Invasion. All of folk rock — for lack of a better term — descends directly from the music the Byrds made. They were certainly the first to introduce any sort of country element into rock music. As if all that wasn't enough, the Byrds spurred on a good degree of Bob Dylan's popularity, too. And not to be too shallow, but they also were just the best-dressed band around. They had those great clothes and hairdos. That counted for something even then.

I'll never forget hearing "Mr. Tambourine Man" for the first time on the radio -- the feeling of that Rickenbacker twelve-string guitar and those incredible harmonies. Roger McGuinn told me he took that guitar sound from A Hard Day's Night, but McGuinn was a banjo player, and he played the Rickenbacker in this rolling, fingerpicking style — no one had really tried it before. George Harrison admitted that "If I Needed Someone" was his take on the Byrds' "The Bells of Rhymney." The Byrds were the only American group that the Beatles were friendly with and had a dialogue with. Those original Byrds really changed the world in that short time they were together.

In some ways, they were an unlikely group to become rock & roll stars. Chris Hillman was from the bluegrass world. McGuinn had been in folk groups like the Limelighters and the Chad Mitchell Trio, as well as playing with Bobby Darin. David Crosby came out of the coffeehouse scene, too. Gene Clark played with the New Christy Minstrels. McGuinn once told me that the Byrds had to get together and really learn how to play rock & roll as a group. That was their first quest. Imagine a bunch of recovering folkies trying to learn how to make people dance.

The Byrds represented Los Angeles as much as the Beach Boys, except that the Byrds were the other side of the coin — they were L.A.'s whacked-out beatnik rock group. They're part of what drew me to Los Angeles and made me want to be in a band. I got to see the Byrds once at the West Palm Beach pop festival on the same bill with the Rolling Stones. In the beginning, that was the original blueprint for the Heartbreakers — we wanted to be a mix of the Byrds and the Stones. We figured, "What could be cooler than that?"

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44.
No one has been able to approach the political power that Public Enemy brought to hip-hop. I put them on a level with Bob Marley and a handful of other artists — the rare artist who can make great music and also deliver a political and social message. But where Marley's music sweetly lures you in, then sneaks in the message, Chuck D grabs you by the collar and makes you listen.

I remember the first time I heard "Rebel Without a Pause": We were on tour with Run-DMC, and one day Chuck D put on a tape they had just finished. It was the first time they used those screeching horns along with this incredibly heavy beat — it was just unlike anything I had ever heard before. It blew my wig back. Later I remember listening to "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" over and over again on headphones after It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back came out. The premise of it — that the current U.S. prison system has many parallels to slavery — blew my mind, and the music is incredible: that Isaac Hayes sample and Chuck D's rhymes about a jailbreak. Like a lot of their songs, it's like watching a movie.

PE completely changed the game musically. No one was just putting straight-out noise and atonal synthesizers into hip-hop, mixing elements of James Brown and Miles Davis; no one in hip-hop had ever been this hard, and perhaps no one has since. They made everything else sound clean and happy, and the power of the music perfectly matched the intention of the lyrics. They were also the first rap group to really focus on making albums — you can listen to Nation of Millions or Fear of a Black Planet from beginning to end. They aren't just random songs tossed together.

To me, Chuck D is the most important MC in hip-hop. On a strictly MC'ing-skill basis, I rank him up there with the best: His power and cadences on lines like "Yes/The rhythm, the rebel/Without a pause/I'm lowering my level" is unmatched. Then if you take into account what he's actually saying, it puts him on a different plane from any other MC. The combination of him and Flavor Flav is incredibly effective: Chuck is so straight and direct, and Flav brings this wild randomness to it. They complement each other perfectly.

Public Enemy made hip-hop that was more than entertainment. They inspired a lot of people who believed that you can effect change through music, and they're still inspiring to me.
 

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43.
Sly and the Family Stone didn't have to say, "Why can't we all just get along?" Looking at the band members and listening to their shared sound made the statement. On the early Sly and the Family Stone records, there was just no acknowledgment of race; they're truly utopian. A real idealism comes across loud and clear on songs like "Everyday People" and "Hot Fun in the Summertime," and people need messages like that. Those albums have tremendous optimism and real conviction. The band itself was like Noah's ark: They had blacks and whites, men and women. Seeing this group that was blind to ethnicity and that embraced so many elements of society sort of drew you in as an extended family member. This was a joyous noise and a joyful vision.

On musical terms, the Family Stone was an amazing band, but there was no doubt Sly Stone was the leader. He is a singular funk orchestrator; Duke Ellington is probably the best reference point. No one had taken elements of funk and combined them the way Sly did. Sly orchestrated those early records in very advanced ways — a little guitar thing here that would trigger the next part that would trigger the next part. Then, as time went on, Sly started using some more dissonant colors; he became like the CÉzanne of funk. It's like he took these traditional James Brown groove elements and started putting orange into the picture.

Somewhere along the way, around the time of There's a Riot Goin' On, Sly got disillusioned. I think he discovered that the utopian worldview worked in his band, but when he got out in everybody else's world, he still couldn't walk into a bar in Mobile, Alabama, without getting into a fight. That will change you. Fresh is from a guy who realizes that nobody — not Sly Stone, not the Rothschilds — nobody can mess with the forces of history. Que seá será.

Fresh is a very deep piece of work. It's the sound of a guy who has hit the pinnacle and is free-falling in the realization that he's not really in charge. Why is Sly singing "Que Sera Sera" on the album? Because he's got no fµck!ng control. The understanding that when the magic hits, it's a gift that can go away just as quickly as it came is a hard thing to carry around. This is a guy who is facing some hard truths and finding his solace by chemically drowning out reality.

Without Sly, the world would be very different. Without him, there's no George Clinton, there's no Prince. Every R&B thing that came after him was influenced by this guy.

The so-called revolution that was coming at the end of the Sixties: We might have lost that one, but Sly won his own personal revolution, musically and in the minds of the audience. I just hope he knows that, and maybe he's OK with it. I hope he's not sitting around with any kind of remorse. Because by any real criteria that you measure success, this guy is a titan.

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42.
Back in 1968, the Boston Tea Party was the premier club for rock bands. My band, the Hallucinations, composed of art-school dropouts heavily drenched in R&B and Chicago blues, used the club as a rehearsal hall whenever it was available. The music we played could be described as primal, raw and heavy on attitude. We were in the midst of rehearsing one day, getting ready to open for the great bluesman Howlin' Wolf, when something caught my eye, and I looked over to see a stranger looming in the doorway. I had no idea who he was or what he was doing there, so I went over to find out what he wanted. In a thick brogue, he asked about places to play in Boston.

Once I figured out who it was, I was both excited and perplexed. Excited because I'd known and admired Van's work from his debut on the charts with his group Them. Perplexed because he seemed so lost and adrift. Despite the recent Top Forty success of his song "Brown Eyed Girl," he'd been having difficulty establishing his identity as a solo artist, but that couldn't account for the bleakness of his mood.

As we talked, it became clear that we shared a passion for the same kind of music. Van gradually loosened up, and we made plans to get together again. He started dropping by the FM station where I used to do an all-night radio show. Soon we began to hang together, going out carousing in the night and sometimes getting into more mischief than we bargained for.

Van was living in a small, street-level apartment in an old wooden house on Green Street in Cambridge. He, his new wife, her young son. They were flat-out broke. The place was bleak and barren, with little more than a mattress on the floor, a refrigerator, an acoustic guitar and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. They had no phone and little food. It was hard times: He was in exile, with a family to feed, no money, no band, no recording contract and no promise of any safe or legal way out. Even the reason he moved to Boston remained a mystery.

Whenever Van had to make business calls, he would walk several blocks to my place to use the phone. It seemed that my apartment also offered him a break from the near-despair of his complicated and unresolved life. He would spend endless hours going through my records. Over and over we would listen to what he called "the gospel" of Jackie Wilson, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, Louis Jordan, Billy Stewart, Elvis and John Lee Hooker. "They're the real deal," he'd say. He played Gene Chandler's live version of "Rainbow '65" so much, I had to get a new needle for my turntable.

Many nights were spent checking out different clubs, but few people knew who Van was. Sometimes he would show up at my band's gigs. One night, as we started the intro to his song "Gloria," I called him onstage even though he was reluctant to sing it. When he came up, he went into a brilliant scat that rivaled King Pleasure himself. Unfortunately, the audience didn't want this "unknown" singer changing the familiar delivery of a song that was fast becoming a true rock classic.

Eventually, Van managed to assemble a two-piece acoustic band and booked himself at a coffeehouse/jazz club that could only be described as subterranean. It was located three stories below a pool parlor and was deep, damp and dark. Egyptian motifs were painted on its yellow smoke-stained walls. The club justly deserved its name, the Catacombs. I borrowed a tape machine to capture the evening's music. What he performed that night later turned out to be the song cycle that made up the groundbreaking Astral Weeks. Though only a handful showed up, when Van finished playing, there was no doubt that the few present had witnessed something extraordinary.

As I stood at the side of the stage last summer and watched Van perform for an ecstatic audience of several thousand, I saw the same raw power and passion that he had displayed more than thirty years ago in the long-forgotten Catacombs. Once again, I admired the strength and mysterious ability to transcend the despair and chaos that could have so easily trapped and overwhelmed him. Mastering his art, he has created a body of work that reflects without imitation. It embodies the exaltation of the spirit. The gospel according to Van. "Turn it up, turn it up, a little bit higher. . . . You know it's got soul . . . and it's too late to stop now!"

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41.
Jim Morrison said it best: "All the children are insane," and he meant it like I mean it. We are children revolted by the banality of what people think is sane. When Jim rambled, quite profoundly, "Rock & roll is dead," and "Hitler is alive. . . . I slept with her last night," he knew then what we are choking on now. You can't change the world, and if you try, you just end up destroying it. We love all things to death. We leave the lights on, turn everything up to ten and fµck everything we fear.

In tenth grade I was told to read No One Here Gets Out Alive, the biography of Jim Morrison. Everything I'm interested in now got started with that book. It made me want to be a writer, and I started with poetry and short stories. We don't know what was really going on in Morrison's head, but I liked trying to piece it together. The immortality of his words, the mystery of his existence appealed to my sense of fantasy. I found "Moonlight Drive" — particularly when accompanied by "Horse Latitudes" — scary and xesually mystifying, like Happy Days told by Ted Bundy. I read the poem in front of my tenth-grade English class, and it was as awe-inspiring then as it is now. Words like mute nostril agony and carefully refined and sealed over always stung in the corners of my eyes.

I think the Doors still fit in because they never fit in in the first place. They didn't have a bass player. The music often had nothing to do with Morrison's words. The keyboard held everything together. Most bands can get through a show if the keyboardist breaks a finger. Not the Doors. Robbie Krieger played very odd guitar parts if you compare him to Jimmy Page or Keith Richards. Yet all this combined into something unique that grabbed people's attention.

Morrison's voice was a beautiful pond for anything to drown in. Whatever he sang became as deep as he was. He had the unnameable thing that people will always be drawn to. I've always thought of the Doors as the first punk band, even more than the Stooges or the Ramones. They didn't sound anything like punk rock, but Morrison outshined everyone else when it came to rebellion and not playing by anyone's rules. There are a lot of bands that seem to want to sound like the Doors filtered through grunge or neogrunge -- whatever it is. But it's all just ideas pasted on ideas, faded copies of copies. If you want to be like Jim Morrison, you can't be anything like Jim Morrison. It's about finding your own place in the world.
 

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40.
I remember when my older brother Alex and my youngest brother, Hugh, both brought home Simon and Garfunkel albums. The music stood by itself, quite apart from anything else around at the time. Simon and Garfunkel brought something new to music: They brought themselves. Through it all — whether they were together or not — they've remained a force in American music and culture. Their impact has been huge. To use a hackneyed phrase, they scored some of the most meaningful years of our lives. Think of how their songs worked in The Graduate — these were songs that spoke to a generation, in a motion picture that also spoke for a generation.

Paul Simon has just always been one of our best songwriters. Paul's breakthrough came at a time when there was so much in the air, and many of his songs were picked up as anthems. He creates an unusually rich and full world, and he has such a broad palette, from basic and elemental folk music, like "Scarborough Fair," to later songs with far greater sophistication and more worldly approaches on solo work, like "Something So Right" and "Still Crazy After All These Years." And Art Garfunkel is one of those great, rare voices. I would know it anywhere at the drop of a hat, in half a bar. Over the years, I've been able to work with Paul and Art — the first time was with Art on a song of mine called "A Junkie's Lament." Art inhabits the songs like Louis Armstrong did — you don't just get his version of a song, you get his take on it.

It is moving to see them sing together now after all these years. That kind of partnership is like a marriage, only more difficult and more public. You have two very strong, very willful individuals sharing this tight space. I was around Apple Records as the Beatles were disintegrating, and you realize that it's not an uncommon pattern. And perhaps because it wasn't something that came easy, it's all the more inspiring and reassuring to see Paul and Art pull off a tour like this last one.

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39.
David Bowie's contribution to rock & roll has been wit and sophistication. He's smart, he's a true musician and he can really sing. He's got such a big range: I like the Ziggy Stardust voice, but he's got a lot of different voices. He's got his crooner voice, when he wants to. And he has a melodic sense that's well above anyone else in rock & roll. Most people could not sing some of his melodies. He can really go for a high note. Take "Satellite of Love," on my Transformer album: There's a part at the very end, where he goes all the way up. It's fabulous.

There had been androgyny in rock from Little Richard on up, but David put his own patina on it, to say the least. He thought hard about that Ziggy character; he'd been studying mime, and he didn't do it just for laughs. He was very aware of stagecraft. He made an entire show out of that character — and then he left it behind. How smart can you get? Can you imagine if he had to keep doing Ziggy? I mean, if you listened to what critics and audiences say, you'd be playing four songs over and over again. David set himself up to do other characters, like the Thin White Duke. And his take on American soul music, on albums like Young Americans, was incredibly good; the original material he wrote was great.

I can't pick a favorite record. It depends on my mood — any of the dance records; Ziggy Stardust; I always liked "Bewlay Brothers," that track on Hunky Dory. And the albums he did with Brian Eno, like Low and Heroes, are phenomenal. He's always changing, so you never get tired of what he's doing. And I mean all the way up to now: "The Loneliest Guy" on his latest album, Reality, is a great song. Yet another one.

We're still friends after all these years, amazingly enough. We go to the occasional art show and museum together, and I always like working with him. I really love what David does, so I'm happy that he's still doing it and that he's still interested. I saw him play here in New York on his last tour, and it was one of the greatest rock shows I've ever seen. At least as far as white people go. Seriously.

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38.
I loved the Beatles' music growing up, but I didn't become aware of John Lennon's solo music until I was making my first album, Let Love Rule. There was this guy who was going to manage me; when he heard the raw tapes of my early songs, like "Be," he said, "Have you ever heard John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band? Because your stuff sounds like him."

So I bought Plastic Ono Band, and I listened to it over and over for months. It's a monumental work of genius. I was blown away by how minimal it was, and how expressive it was. Lennon had just finished doing primal-scream therapy, and he was just unloading all this stuff, about his mother leaving him, about the Beatles and about who he was.

A lot of people identify themselves by their success instead of who they are as people. Lennon showed us who he was as a person. He had just come from being in the biggest group on the planet; most people in his position would say, "How do I keep this up? I don't want to come down off this pedestal." He didn't care; he got butt-naked on the cover of Two Virgins, with his dick hanging out.

On Plastic Ono Band, he stripped it down musically: He went into a studio with just a guitar, a bass, a piano and drums, and he made a raw record. The attitude and emotion of that album are harder than any punk rock I've ever heard. And the honesty of that music is why I became an enormous fan of his solo work, maybe even more than what he did with the Beatles. It inspired me and made me want to go deeper with my own songwriting.

As a guitarist, Lennon had a great feel — something that can outshine a guy with a million chops. He's not a virtuoso, he's not Jimi Hendrix, but if you listen to those early Beatles records, there are some serious guitar intricacies going on between him and George Harrison. One of my favorite Lennon solo tracks is "How Do You Sleep?" — the guitar is incredibly funky. Not many people remember that Lennon co-wrote "Fame" with David Bowie; he had a really cool funky side. If he were around today, I think he would have gotten interested in hip-hop. He'd have wanted to blend the different things going on in our culture.

Lennon was more than a musician; he was like a prophet. He stated his political point of view and spoke out against war, even when that meant he was being followed and hassled by the government. "Imagine" is one of the greatest songs ever. It's like a church hymn, and it states his beliefs quite clearly. And more than anything, Lennon was an icon for peace. That's hard to find these days.

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37.
I've always compared Roy Orbison to a tree: passive and beautiful yet extremely solid. He maintained a sense of humility and sensitivity and gentleness uncommon to his era. He wasn't effeminate but extremely gentle. He was someone you felt entirely safe with, whether you were listening to his records or being around him. It wasn't like Elvis: It wasn't like your loins were on fire or anything like that. It's more like Roy was a private place to go — a solace or a refuge.

He broke the mold of the Fifties tough-guy thing, and even the style of his music was a kind of fine art for somebody from Wink, Texas. It was cosmopolitan in a mysteriously soft and romantic way.

Roy Orbison was like a folk opera singer. I think he was influenced by Spanish opera in structure and in feel. He also loved to express his voice in this upper range, in falsetto. He was vulnerable and strong at the same time. He was extremely earnest in his voice and his appearance, and yet he had this veil of mystery to him.

In 1987, Roy and I recorded a version of "Crying" for a movie called Hiding Out. We ended up recording "Crying" in Vancouver, which is where I lived. I walked into the studio, and it was like staring at the huge image of the Marlboro Man on Sunset Boulevard — so immediately ominous and present. We were rehearsing the song in the studio with the band, and Roy and I happened to be sharing a mike. When we got to a part where we were singing at the same time, we both leaned into the mike and our cheeks touched. His cheek was so soft, and the energy was so amazing. Not xesual but totally explosive, like the chemistry of some sort of kinship. I'll never forget what that felt like. I can hear that voice right in my ear. His vibrato was sort of fast and had a small waver within it, and that's what gave him the vulnerable sound. That voice.

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36.
I'm sorry, but I'd rather meet Madonna than the president of the United States. Madonna has this thing about her that you can't explain — the thing that makes somebody a star. When she walks into the room, you just have to take notice. She's so comfortable withherself, and she's not afraid to live life to the fullest and to say whatever she feels, no matter what anyone thinks. There's something kind of childlike about that; it's a beautiful, amazing thing.

Madonna was the first female pop star to take control of every aspect of her career and to take responsibility for creating her image, no matter how much flak she might get. She's proved that she can do so many different things — music and movies and being a parent, too. Her music has become iconic: Songs like "Holiday" or "Live to Tell" are timeless — not just disposable hits. They feel like home. She has her spells of being moody and vibey and spiritual, but her words are so easy to relate to. She's a diva and does what she wants, but she's a loving person.

The first time I met her was when I flew to visit her at one of her shows in 2001. I walked into her dressing room, and her daughter, Lola, was there, and I felt really nervous. I said to Madonna, "Can I just hug you?" I was so stupid! But she was so nice about it. I would definitely not be here, doing what I'm doing, if it wasn't for Madonna. I remember being eight or nine years old, running around my living room singing and dancing and wanting so much to be like her. All my girlfriends still listen to her stuff. We're all mesmerized by her. Madonna's stage presence has inspired so many artists — you can see her influence in some of the younger generation like Kelly Clarkson and Shakira, who have picked up some of her moves.

As part of the generation that's coming up, you look at Madonna and you don't want to let her down. That's such a motivation for me. I lovedoing what I do, but when Madonna comes around — like when we were making the video for "Me Against the Music" — it's like, "Everybody get your act together — the godmother is here."

Madonna has done so much, and she's been around so long, and the b!tch still looks good! She's spent years in the public eye, and that can be really hard for anyone to deal with. But she dug deep and started writing from her heart, and that's therapy to keep you going. Madonna has so much light inside her, and she's so much more noticeable than all of the rest of us. She stuck to what she believed in and did what she felt, and that was part of her art — to just be herself.

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35.
Michael Jackson is the world's greatest entertainer. One of the most explosive performances I've ever witnessed was Jackson sliding across the stage at the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary show. Just watching that made us all know: That's what greatness is, and anything that doesn't measure up to that is beneath greatness. Before him there were the Beatles and Elvis and Frank Sinatra; Michael Jackson takes his place right alongside those greats.

I'm almost the same age as Michael, and I was one of the original fans. I first saw him at the Ohio State Fair, when I was very young; the Jackson 5 were performing with the Commodores. Michael came on, and that voice of his rang over the whole fairground. I was deeply touched by that voice from the very beginning.

"Billie Jean" is the most important record he's made, not only because of its commercial success but because of the musical depth of the record. It has more hooks in it than anything I've ever heard. Everything in that song was catchy, and every instrument was playing a different hook. You could separate it into twelve different musical pieces and I think you'd have twelve different hits. Every day, I look for that kind of song.

Michael has influenced so many artists, some of whom are picking up on the grandeur and showmanship of his live performances. You can see his influence in his sister Janet, in Justin Timberlake, Usher, Britney Spears, and in Jennifer Lopez and Mariah Carey. You can see his influence in the dance moves -— the syncopated choreography — that a lot of young artists use. And a lot of them have picked up his work ethic. When you look at a Britney Spears production or a Justin Timberlake production, or if you look at an Usher production, you really see that they took a page out of Michael's book; they went to rehearsal, and they must've worked eight hours a day, because their shows are flawless, as Michael's shows were flawless.

There are many, many people who think of Michael as a spectacle, and it's sad. All of it has taken away from our ability to see him for the artist he really is. A world without Michael Jackson would be a very, very different world. And I think we should all feel very blessed that an artist of that caliber came into our lives, because he has enriched our lives.

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34.
There's a rare contradiction in Neil Young's work. He works so hard as a songwriter, and he's written a phenomenal number of perfect songs. And, at the same time, he doesn't give a fµck. That comes from caring about essence. There can be things out of tune and all wild-sounding and not recorded meticulously. And he doesn't care. He's made whole albums that aren't great, and instead of going back to a formula that he knows works, he would rather represent where he is at the time. That's what's so awesome: watching his career wax and wane according to the truth of his character at the moment. It's never phony. It's always real. The truth is not always perfect.

I can't say enough about how much I love Crazy Horse. The sound is so deep, the groove is so deep — even when they're off, it still sounds great, because they feel it so much. I don't usually go for that approach. I like Sly and the Family Stone, Miles Davis and Mingus. I like consummate steady musicianship. I grew up on jazz. I didn't listen to rock music until I played in my first rock band when I was in high school. I went from progressive to Hendrix to funk to full-on L.A. punk. That's when I had the realization that emotion and content, no matter how simple, were valuable. A great one-chord punk song became as important to me as a Coltrane solo, and I've had the same feeling about Neil Young. He changed the way I thought about rock music. As a bass player, I used to be into very boisterous, syncopated and rhythmically complex songs. After hearing Neil, I appreciated simplicity, the poignancy of "less is more."

My favorite Neil album is Zuma, with "Pardon My Heart" and "Lookin' for a Love": "But I hope I treat her kind/And don't mess with her mind/When she starts to see the darker side of me." And "Tell Me Why," on After the Gold Rush -- when he says, "Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself/When you're old enough to repay but young enough to sell?" it feels like me. I know I'm not alone. Tonight's the Night is probably the greatest raw rock record ever made, on a level with the Stooges' Fun House or any Hendrix album. It's such a mess, with stuff recorded so loud that it distorts. The background vocals are completely out of tune. And I wouldn't change a note. It's the spirit of what rock music is, and it's the reason to play rock music.

Neil is the guy I look at when I think about getting older in a rock band and still having dignity and relevance and honesty. He's never, ever sold out, and he's never pretended to be anything other than what he is. The Chili Peppers get offers all the time to sell songs for commercials and tour sponsorships, and our manager says it's not considered selling out anymore. It's the smart move, he says. Maybe we could hoe ourselves out for the right price someday. I don't know. But I always think, "Would Neil Young do this?" And the answer is no. Neil Young wouldn't fµck!n' do it.
 

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33.
The roots of the Everly Brothers are very, very deep in the soil of American culture. First of all, you should know that the Everly Brothers were child stars. They had a radio show with their family, and their father, Ike, was an influential country guitar player, so he attracted other significant musicians to the Everlys' world — among them, Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, who was instrumental in getting the Everlys on the Grand Ole Opry. They were exposed to extraordinary country-roots music, and so they brought with them the legacy of all the great brother groups like the Delmore Brothers, the Louvin Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys into the Fifties, where they mingled with the other early rock pioneers and made history in the process. Perhaps even more powerfully than Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers melded country with the emerging sound of Fifties rock & roll.

The Everly Brothers' impact exceeds even their fame. They were a big influence on John Lennon and Paul McCartney — who called themselves the Foreverly Brothers early on — and, of course, on Simon and Garfunkel. When we were kids, Artie and I got our rock & roll chops from the Everlys. Later, as Simon and Garfunkel, we put "Bye Bye Love" on Bridge Over Troubled Water, and much later, Phil and Don both sang on the song "Graceland."

Before the Everly Brothers joined Artie and me on the road last year, Phil and Don had actually quietly retired three years earlier. They basically came out of retirement for us. I said, "Phil, look, if you're going to retire, you might as well come out one more time and take a bow and let me at least say what it is that you meant to us and to the culture."

You know, the Everlys have a long history of knocking each other down, as brothers can do. So in a certain sense, it was hilarious that the four of us were doing this tour, given our collective histories of squabbling. And it's amazing, because they hadn't seen each other in about three years. They met in the parking lot before the first gig. They unpacked their guitars — those famous black guitars — and they opened their mouths and started to sing. And after all these years, it was still that sound I fell in love with as a kid. It was still perfect.

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32.
I used to go to the Motown revues, and the Miracles always closed the show. They were that good, andeverybody knew it. Not flash at all. The Supremes had bigger hits. The Temptations had the better dance moves. The Miracles did it with pure music.

Back then the radio played the rougher stuff, like "Do You Love Me," by the Contours, only at night. Smokey Robinson — they played him all day. Everybody loved his songs, and he had a leg up on all the other singers, with that slightly raspy, very high voice. Smokey was smoky. He could rasp in falsetto, which is hard to do and perfect for a sad ballad like "The Tears of a Clown" or "The Tracks of My Tears."

Smokey wrote his own stuff, so he had an originality or individualism that maybe the other Motown greats didn't. He was a lyric man as well as a melody man, a musicians' musician. It's kinda like Hollywood, where you have the star, and then you have the actors' actor. Gene Hackman — when was the last time that guy gave a bad performance? Smokey was the Gene Hackman of Motown.

I grew up in the black neighborhoods of Ann Arbor, Michigan, so I didn't think in terms of black music or white music. It was all just music to me. Smokey's first hit, "Shop Around," was one of the first records I bought. Later on when my brother went into the service and I was the sole support of my mother, I was playing bars six nights a week, five forty-five-minute sets a night. This was '63-'67, and I could make the most money playing in a trio. We had a medley of six Smokey songs that we played at least twice every night: "You've Really Got a Hold on Me," "Shop Around," "Bad Girl," "Way Over There" and a couple of others. It was a survival move — the people demanded it. Also, if you were after a girl in the audience, it was always a good idea to do some Smokey.

Smokey was also known as the nicest guy at Motown, which you hear in his voice. I used to do a Canadian television show called Swingin' Time, and everyone from Detroit would show up: the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations. All of them nice people, but Smokey was particularly a gentleman. I saw him again around '87 at an awards show. I was able to tell him how much I appreciated his writing, and all the money I made playing his songs in bars. I have great memories. Thank you, Smokey.

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31.
Johnny Cash was a biblical character. He was like some old preacher, one of those dangerous old wild ones. He was like a hero you'd see in a western. He was a giant. And unlike anyone else I've known, he never lost that stature. I don't think we'll see anyone like him again.

Of course, the first thing he'll be remembered for is the originality of his music. The first time I heard Johnny Cash was when he released "I Walk the Line" in 1956. It was unlike anything I'd ever heard. Elvis had had a lot of hits by that point, but "I Walk the Line" was completely different. It didn't sound much like any of the country music that was popular at the time, either. There was a kind of dark energy around John. My first hero, when I was a kid, was Hank Williams, and he had a similar energy. You could tell they were both wild men.

As a songwriter, I've always loved his lyrics. At the beginning of his career, John released a bunch of powerful songs in a very short time. For me, the best one was always "Big River." It's so well-written, so unlike anything else. The lines don't even seem to rhyme. "I met her accidentally in St. Paul, Minnesota/And it tore me up every time I heard her drawl." His imagery was so powerful: "Then you took me to St. Louis later on, down the river/A freighter said she's been here/But she's gone, boy, she's gone/I found her trail in Memphis/But she just walked up the block/She raised a few eyebrows, and then she went on down alone."

The first time I saw John live, I was on leave from the Army, visiting Nashville. He was playing the Grand Ole Opry, and I was watching from backstage -- and he was the most exciting performer I'd ever seen. At the time, he was skinnier than a snake, and he was just electric. He used to prowl the stage like a panther. He looked like he might explode up there. And in fact, there were times when he did. A couple of nights at the Opry, he knocked out all of the footlights. I think they banned him for a while after that. But they banned Hank Williams, too. They were a pretty conservative crowd.

The main thing about John, though -- the thing that everybody could sense -- was his integrity, the integrity of his relationship with his music, with his life and with other people. He stood up for Bob Dylan when everyone in the music business was criticizing Dylan's move from folk to electric. And he did the same for me, in the Eighties, when I was taking a lot of criticism for going down to Nicaragua. Once I was opening for him in Philadelphia, and I dedicated a song to Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on death row there. After I got offstage, they told me the police had gone ballistic and that I'd have to go back out and apologize. John heard about it and said, "You don't have to apologize for anything on my show." That's the kind of guy he was. Throughout his entire career, he stood up for the underdog.

I thought the last album John did, The Man Comes Around, was terrific. I remember driving on my tractor mower and listening to it on my headphones and just weeping. His version of "Danny Boy" kills me every time.

I think he'll be remembered for the way he grew as a person and an artist. He went from being this guy who was as wild as Hank Williams to being almost as respected as one of the fathers of our country. He was friends with presidents and with Billy Graham. You felt like he should've had his face on Mount Rushmore.
 

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30.
The Clash, more than any other group, kick-started a thousand garage bands across Ireland and the U.K. For U2 and other people of our generation, seeing them perform was a life-changing experience. There's really no other way to describe it.

I can vividly remember when I first saw the Clash. It was in Dublin in October 1977. They were touring behind their first album, and they played a 1,200-capacity venue at Trinity College. Dublin had never seen anything like it. It really had a massive impact around here, and I still meet people who are in the music business today — maybe they are DJs, maybe they are in bands — because they saw that show.

U2 were a young band at the time, and it was a complete throw-down to us. It was like: Why are you in music? What the hell is music all about, anyway? The members of the Clash were not world-class musicians by any means, but the racket they made was undeniable — the pure, visceral energy and the anger and the commitment. They were raw in every sense, and they were not ashamed that they were about much more than playing with precision and making sure the guitars were in tune. This wasn't just entertainment. It was a life-and-death thing. They made it possible for us to take our band seriously. I don't think that we would have gone on to become the band we are if it wasn't for that concert and that band. There it was. They showed us what you needed. And it was all about heart.

The social and political content of the songs was a huge inspiration, certainly for U2. It was the call to wake up, get wise, get angry, get political and get noisy about it. It's interesting that the members were quite different characters. Paul Simonon had an art-school background, and Joe Strummer was the son of a diplomat. But you really sensed they were comrades in arms. They were completely in accord, railing against injustice, railing against a system they were just sick of. And they thought it had to go.

I saw them a couple of times after the Dublin show, and they always had something fresh going on. It's a shame that they weren't around longer. The music they made is timeless. It's got so much fighting spirit, so much heart, that it just doesn't age. You can still hear it in Green Day and No Doubt, Nirvana and the Pixies, certainly U2 and Audioslave. There wasn't a minute when you sensed that they were coasting. They meant it, and you can hear it in their work.

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29.
The Who began as spectacle. They became spectacular. Early on, the band was in pure demolition mode; later, on albums like Tommy and Quadrophenia, they coupled that raw energy with precision and desire to complete musical experiments on a grand scale. They asked, "What were the limits of rock & roll? Could the power of music actually change the way you feel?" Pete Townshend allowed that there be spiritual value in music. They were an incredible band whose main songwriter happened to be on a quest for reason and harmony in his life. He shared that journey with the listener, becoming an inspiration for others to seek out their own path — this while being in the Guinness book of world records as the world's loudest band.

Presumptuously I speak for all Who fans when I say being a fan of the Who has incalculably enriched my life. What disturbs me about the Who is the way they smashed through every door of rock & roll, leaving rubble and not much else for the rest of us to lay claim to. In the beginning they took on an arrogance when, as Pete says, "We were actually a very ordinary group." As they became accomplished, this attitude stuck. Therein lies the thread to future punks. They wanted to be louder, so they had Jim Marshall invent the 100-watt amp. Needed more volume, so they began stacking them. It is said that the first guitar feedback ever to make it to record was on "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere," in 1965. The Who told stories within the confines of a song and, over the course of an entire album, pushed boundaries. How big of a story could be told? And how would it transmit (pre-video screens, etc.) to a large crowd? Smash the instruments? Keith Moon said they wanted to grab the audience by the balls. Pete countered that like the German autodestruct movement, where they made sculpture that would collapse and buildings that would explode, it was high art.

I was around nine when a baby sitter snuck Who's Next onto the turntable. The parents were gone. The windows shook. The shelves were rattling. Rock & roll. That began an exploration into music that had soul, rebellion, aggression, affection. Destruction. And this was all Who music. There was the mid-Sixties maximum-R&B period: mini-operas, Woodstock, solo records. Imagine, as a kid, stumbling upon the locomotive that is Live at Leeds. "Hi, my name is Eddie. I'm ten years old and I'm getting my fµck!ng mind blown!" The Who on record were dynamic. Roger Daltrey's delivery allowed vulnerability without weakness; doubt and confusion, but no plea for sympathy. (You should hear Roger's vocal on a song called "Lubie [Come Back Home]," a bonus track from the My Generation reissue. It's top-gear.)

The Who quite possibly remain the greatest live band ever. Even the list-driven punk legend and music historian Johnny Ramone agrees with me on this. You can't explain Keith Moon or his playing. John Entwistle was an enigma unto himself, another virtuoso musical oddity. Roger turned his mike into a weapon, seemingly in self-defense. All the while, Pete was leaping into the rafters wielding a Seventies Gibson Les Paul, which happens to be a stunningly heavy guitar. As a live group, they created momentum, and they seemed to be released by the ritual of their playing. (Check out "A Quick One," from The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.)

In Chicago recently, I saw Pete wring notes out of his guitar like a mechanic squeezing oil from a rag. I watched as the guitar became a living being, one getting its body bashed and its neck strangled. As Pete set it down, I swear I sensed relief coming from that guitar. A Stratocaster with sweat on it. The guitar's sweat.

John and Keith made the Who what they were. Now they're different, but still the Who. Roger's a rock. And at this point Pete has been through and survived more than anyone in rock royalty. Perhaps even beyond Keith Richards, who was actually guilty of most things he was accused of. Drummer Zak Starkey played me a new song a while back, "Real Good Looking Boy." It was beyond moving.

The songwriter-listener relationship grows deeper after all the years. Pete saw that "a celebrity in rock is charged by the audience with a function, like, 'You stand there and we will know ourselves.' Not 'You stand there and we will pay you loads of money to keep us entertained as we eat our oysters.' " He saw the connection could be profound. He also realized the audience may say, "When we're finished with you, we'll replace you with somebody else." For myself and so many others (including shopkeepers, foremen, professionals, bellboys, gravediggers, directors, musicians), they won't be replaced. Yes, Pete, music can change you.

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28.
Prince was forbidden in my closed, Christian household. He was somewhere between Richard Pryor — whom we absolutely couldn't listen to — and a stash of pδrn. In junior high, my parents would put thirty or forty dollars in an envelope, and that would buy a card that would cover a month of school lunches. It was November of 1982, and I took my thirty-six dollars and purchased Prince's 1999, What Time Is It?, by the Time, and the Vanity 6 album. I starved that whole month.

"Little Red Corvette" from 1999 was one of the first regularly played songs by a black artist on MTV; Prince crossed boundaries like that all the time. In the first five songs on Sign 'O' the Times, he sprawls across James Brown, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, the Beatles and Curtis Mayfield in five easy swoops and maintains his own identity. But it's Purple Rain that was a crowning achievement, not only in Prince's career but for black life — or how blacks were perceived — in the Eighties. It's the equivalent of Michael Jordan's 1997 championship games: He was absolutely just in the zone, every shot was going in. "When Doves Cry" is one of the most radical Number One songs of the past twenty years. Here's a song with no bass line in it, hardly any music. I hear people speak of the Neptunes all the time, like, "Oh, man, this is some new sh!t!" "When Doves Cry" is a precursor to the Neptunes' one-note funk grind, a masterpiece of song with just a drum machine and very little melody. Anyone who saw 8 Mile, if they're over thirty, the first words out of their mouth are, "Oh, I liked that film the first time I saw it. It was called Purple Rain."

Prince must be one of the most bootlegged artists of the rock era -- on a weekly basis I listen to a bootleg called The Dream Factory, which would later be known as Sign 'O' the Times. His ability to create on the spot is mind-boggling. Like a hip-hop MC freestyling, he executes ideas off the top of his head in a very convincing manner. But there must be at least twenty ways to prove that hip-hop is damn-near patterned after Prince, including his genius, blatant use of sexuality and the use of controversy as a way to get attention. I don't think any artist before had used that level of xes to get in the door and be accepted by the mainstream. I wonder what his mind state was in 1980, standing onstage in kiddie briefs, leg warmers and high heels without a Number One hit. That was a risk. Also, Prince created the image of what we now know as the video ho — he was a pioneer of objectifying and empowering women at the same time. Jay-Z often talks about ghostwriting for other artists; Prince is notorious for ghostwriting. Not only that, but he invented different aliases for himself in a way that rappers have adopted — he was Jamie Starr, or Joey Coco, Alexander Nevermind or the Starr.

I met Prince in 1996, and I was prepared for the grasshopper voice, the one that he always uses at award shows, but he was totally normal. Just like you and me, except he's Prince. We played together a few times, and one of my hero moments of all time is after a concert in New York when me, him and D'Angelo got onstage and played for about a half-hour. His silence in the last two or three years has bothered me. It's really a shame that his fight for independence from the labels was a David and Goliath battle that he had to fight alone, and he's still fighting it. But judging from his performance with Beyonce at the Grammys, I'm happy to say that he hasn't lost a step in his twenty years of doing it. He seemed as young and as in charge as ever. He definitely seized that moment. In case a few people counted him out, he's got a few trump cards up his sleeve.

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27.
The first time I heard Nirvana, it was a classic record-store experience, which is something that's becoming increasingly rare these days. I walked into Rocks in Your Head in New York and asked the woman behind the counter, "What's new?" She put on "Smells Like Teen Spirit." I thought, "Wow. Somebody managed to combine R.E.M. and Metallica." I had never heard the term grunge, and I didn't know that it was going to be a phenomenon. I just knew that I was listening to something profound: a great piece of music.

My favorite song on Nevermind was "Lithium." Kurt Cobain tapped into something in the culture that nobody had given a voice to before: passionate ambivalence. "I'm so ugly, but that's OK/'Cause so are you." He captured the idea of having incredibly powerful feelings about not having feelings.

Cobain changed the course of where the music went. There are certain people where you can see the axis of musical history twisting on them: Hendrix was pivotal, Prince was pivotal, Cobain was pivotal. (I'm hoping that Andre 3000 of OutKast will turn out to be pivotal, but it's going to take a couple more albums to tell.)

And Cobain was a terrific guitarist. I said that to a big Joe Satriani fan, and he got really upset with me; he didn't think Cobain had enough chops. You can't say Cobain was a great songwriter but not a great guitarist — because he couldn't have written those songs without the guitar. You can't separate out his Big Muff guitar playing — it was essential to the music he made, and his altered tunings were incredibly influential. Just like body piercing really took off as a trend after the first Lollapalooza, I think altered, tuned-down guitars were much more prominent in the music after Nirvana.

When I think about Nirvana, I think about the Bad Brains and the xes Pistols. All those bands seem radical and edgy and outside the box and loud, but the tunes are incredibly melodic. They all wrote great songs with a core of emotion, loneliness and human feeling -- the same things that Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote songs about.

After the breakup of Living Colour, I put out a solo instrumental record called Mistaken Identity, which included a song called "Saint Cobain." I'll never forget the day I heard that he had committed suicide. Success on the level that Nirvana had is traumatizing. People win the lottery, and after all the money's gone, they turn around and say, "You know, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me and my family." And everyone who hasn't gotten that phone call can't understand. They say, "Man, you just got $5 million — what are you talking about?" I wish Kurt Cobain was still around to make music and confront George Bush. Can you imagine the song he would have written about reality TV?

Something else happened to Cobain that I think was a shame: Because Nirvana became popular, he had to confront this notion that he had sold out and establish this sense of purity. It's one thing to consider purity if you're judging an emerald or a pearl, but with people, purity is a dodgy concept. It can often be dangerous: Just consider the notions of artistic purity or racial purity. But I do believe Cobain was perfect, in a way: He was perfectly flawed.

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26.
Every rock & roll generation needs reminding of why it picks up a guitar in the first place, and four non-brothers from the borough of Queens had a concept that was almost too perfect. Their look — ripped jeans, tight T-shirt, high-top sneakers, bowl haircut and a black motorcycle jacket — was a cartoon version of rock's tough-guy ethos. When they first started, they played what they knew how to play, which wasn't much, and worked it to their advantage. They opted for speed rather than complexity, they aspired to be the Beach Boys, Alice Cooper and the Bay City Rollers, and their rotational three chords and headlong lunge kept them skidding through the simpleton catchphrases of their singalongs.

They posited themselves unashamedly against the enigmatic mind games of progressive rock, the long solos, the Ring Cycle lyrics and symphonic synthesizers. Not for them the miscegenation of other musics; the Ramones were pure, unadulterated — and hardly adult, in their adolescent concerns of sniffing glue and beating on brats with a baseball bat, even if the brats were themselves. Their only-child sibling rivalry meshed like any television reality show, clocking in at under half an hour, with a ready-made laugh track. Johnny was the stern older brother, disciplined, military; Dee Dee was the blunt instrument, the Ramone who took it to the corner of Fifty-third and Third; Tommy was the producer, familiar with the byways of the music business, and like any good producer, he knew that you build a great track from the drums out. Joey was the beating heart.

The Ramones had their act so together that they would change it only in increments for two decades after they took it out of the CBGB nest in 1975. They were easily understood, translatable. When the band got to England on Independence Day 1976, returning the favor of the English Invasion in a fun-house mirror, the die was cast, punk rock and anarchy tangling, a frontal assault on here-we-go-again pop subculture.

The Ramones always believed in their music's message of self-deliverance. They celebrated rock & roll, patriotic flag-wavers, simultaneously harking backward and forward. Their music wasn't angry, though it did have firepower and relentless energy. If anything, the Ramones affirmed that if they could do it, you could do it; just be resolute. Count to four.

They've all left the band or left the planet by this time, and this is a say-hey to Joey and Dee Dee, who are now immortal in more ways than one. But when I think of a Ramones moment, I remember not the early years — when the bands played for each other on the Bowery and each was like a different world -- but a late afternoon in May, somewhere in New England, a daylong festival, maybe the early Eighties, sun shining, a holiday weekend. I'm standing backstage with Johnny, and we're talking about nothing much, where we've been, guitars we've known, the Red Sox, and finally the conversation stops, and we just look around, quiet in the midst of electric noise, seeing where rock & roll has brought us on this beautiful afternoon, playing the music we love.
 

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25.
After John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Fats Domino and his partner, Dave Bartholomew, were probably the greatest team of songwriters ever. They always had a simple melody, a hip set of chord changes and a cool groove. And their songs all had simple lyrics; that's the key. There are no deep plots in Fats Domino songs: "Yes, it's me, and I'm in love again/Had no lovin' since you know when/You know I love you, yes I do/And I'm savin' all my lovin' just for you." It don't get no simpler than that.

Even when Fats Domino did songs by somebody else, it was still Fats. He could really lock in with his band and play those hard-driving boogie shuffles — it was pre-funk stuff, and it was New Orleans, and he did it all his way. One thing that most people miss, which he did on some of his biggest records, like "Blueberry Hill": He could do piano rolls with both hands. A couple of guys, like Allen Toussaint, could do Fats to a T, but not the rolls. He was like Thelonious Monk that way. You can always tell when it's Monk and when it's somebody trying to play like Monk.

When they recorded "Blueberry Hill" in 1956, I'm sure none of the players knew the bridge to that song: "The wind in the willow played love's sweet melody/But all of the vows you made were never to be." Fats didn't know the chords, and the guys in the band made up a beautiful riff. He played the wrong chords, but they really fit him, and they grooved. Whenever he did somebody else's great song, he just changed the chords to suit himself. Sometimes it wasn't even what the rest of the band was playing. But it worked.

I give a lot of credit to Dave Bartholomew, Fats' producer and songwriting partner. He had the sense to go with the best-feeling take when they were recording. People would have missed something great about Fats if they had just heard the more "correct" takes - the ones without that extra off-the-wall thing that Fats would bring.

You can't hardly hear the bass on some of Fats' early records. Later, they started doubling the bass line with the guitar, and it made for a very distinctive sound. That became standard with Phil Spector, who would have two or three basses and some guitar all doubling the bass line. I don't know if Phil picked it up from Fats or from somebody who picked it up from Fats, but it started with Fats. You can hear a lot of Fats in Jerry Lee Lewis. Anytime anybody plays a slow blues, the piano player will eventually get to something like Fats. I can't tell you the number of times I played sessions and was asked specifically to do Fats. Eighty kajillion little bands all through the South -- we all had to play Fats Domino songs. Everybody, everywhere. That spread his influence, too.

Fats is old school to the max — he loved to work the house, do looooong shows and push the piano across the stage with his belly. He's still living in the same house where he grew up, customized to his taste. He built his family a beautiful pad next door. That innocence is there in his music. He's a good man, and people respond to that goodness.

When all the payola scandals were happening and it looked bad for rock & roll, Fats did an interview in some magazine. He said, "I don't know what all the trouble is about us being a bad influence on teenagers. I'm just playing the same music I played all my life." That's what Fats was about. He didn't look on what he did as special or different. He just did what Fats did.

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24.
I'd be curious to know how many pianos Jerry Lee Lewis went through in his lifetime. Whoever was responsible for keeping the piano in tune and making sure it didn't fall apart at Sun Studio must have wept every time he showed up to play. You think of the piano as a conservative, staid instrument, and in the last twenty years it has almost disappeared from rock & roll. But the way he played, it was just so percussive. You can hear the hammers slamming against the strings. If he were growing up now, they would probably just paralyze him with Ritalin and eliminate sugar from his diet. As it was, he turned the piano into an orchestra. He had these profound bass lines and amazing lead parts, all in perfect time. Apparently he just had too much adrenaline. I don't know what switch got flipped in his brain when he was born that compelled him to play so fast and so hard, but I'm glad it got flipped.

Nowadays, white music and black music mix pretty freely and happily. Back then, there was no precedent for a white musician to sound like that. Even more remarkable, Jerry Lee grew up in a conservative Christian environment. There's a perhaps apocryphal story that when he and his cousin, the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, were children, they went to a roadhouse and listened through the window to some amazing R&B band. Jimmy Swaggart supposedly said, "This is the devil's music! We have to leave!" But Jerry Lee just stood there transfixed and couldn't tear himself away. He was an evangelist for the devil's music.

If you listen to his records, they sound more punk rock than just about anything any contemporary punk band is doing. His records sound faster than they actually are, and they sound louder than they actually are. If you listen to them on a crummy little stereo on low volume, they still sound like they're exploding out of the speakers.

Whether it's Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard or Gene Vincent, these guys were dripping anarchy and xes. Their records all have a sense of abandonment, like they had given up all hope of commercial success or ever being respected, so they just wanted to play crazy music and get laid. That's what stuns me, the way Jerry Lee Lewis gave himself over to that libidinous energy as no white musician had ever done.

With most contemporary artists, being sexy is a matter of wanting to sell records. I consider Jerry Lee to be more in the tradition of Iggy and the Stooges or Black Flag. They had the same chaos without consequences. I also hear Jerry Lee in Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" or the xes Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." or Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

If I had a daughter, I wouldn't let her date a musician, because most of them are just too dumb. In Jerry Lee's case, if he were coming over for dinner, I would literally lock her up. The story of him marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin is unbearably sad. Elvis had just been drafted, Jerry Lee was about to tour England for the first time, and the scandal broke. He was never able to ascend to the throne that was rightfully his. And the piano faded because it was too big and too hard to mike. The beauty of the electric guitar is that it's small, portable, loud and easy to mike.

"Great Balls of Fire" and "Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On" are the iconic singles. But if you really want to understand Jerry Lee Lewis, find some videotape performance of him doing "Great Balls of Fire." It's pure, narcotic rock & roll excitement — and those moments have been few and far between.

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23.
In many ways, Bruce Springsteen is the embodiment of rock & roll. Combining strains of Appalachian music, rockabilly, blues and R&B, his work epitomizes rock's deepest values: desire, the need for freedom and the search to find yourself. All through his songs there is a generosity and a willingness to portray even the simplest aspects of our lives in a dramatic and committed way.

The first time I heard him play was at a small club, the Bitter End in New York, where he did a guest set. He had this descriptive power — it was just an amazing display of lyrical prowess. I asked him where he was from, and he sort of grinned and said he was from New Jersey. In those days people used to joke about New Jersey. There was this collective complex that people from New Jersey had about what it meant to be from there, and he just smiled because he knew where he was from.

The next time I saw him play it was with his band, the one with David Sancious in it. I'd never seen anybody do what he was doing: He would play acoustic guitar and dance all over the place, and the guitar wasn't plugged into anything. There wasn't this meticulous need to have every note heard. It was so powerful, and it filled that college gym with so much emotion that it didn't matter if you couldn't hear every note. It was drama, his approach to music, something that he would expand on many times over, but it was there from the beginning.

A year or so later I saw him play in L.A., with Max Weinberg, Clarence Clemons and Steve Van Zandt in the band, and it was even more dramatic — the use of lights and the way it was staged. There were these events built into the music. I went to see them the second night, and I guess I expected it to be the same thing, but it was completely different. It was obvious that they were drawing on a vocabulary. It was exhilarating, and at the bottom of it all there was all this joy and fun and a sense of brotherhood, of being outsiders who had tremendous power and a story to tell.

Bruce has been unafraid to take on the tasks associated with growing up. He's a family man, with kids and the same values and concerns as working-class Americans. It runs all through his work, the idea of finding that one person and making a life together. Look at "Rosalita": Her mother doesn't like him, her father doesn't like him, but he's come for her. Or in "The River," where he gets Mary pregnant and for his nineteenth birthday he gets a union card and a wedding coat. That night they go to the river and dive in. For those of us who are ambivalent about marriage, the struggle for love in a world of impermanence is summed up by the two of them diving into that river at night. Bruce's songs are filled with these images, but they aren't exclusively the images of working-class people. It just happens to be where he's from.

Bruce has all kinds of influences, from Chuck Berry and Gary "U.S." Bonds to Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. But he's also a lot like Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean -- people whose most indistinct utterances have been magnified to communicate volumes. Bruce has always had enormous range in terms of subject and emotion, as well as volume — his quietest stuff is as quiet as you will ever hear anyone sing, but at his loudest he is, well, he's the loudest. But he's always worked on a very large scale, a scale that is nothing short of heroic. He is one of the few songwriters who works on a scale that is capable of handling the subject of our national grief and the need to find a response to September 11th. His sense of music as a healing power, of band-as-church, has always been there, woven into the fabric of his songs. He's got his feet planted on either side of that great divide between black and white gospel, between blues and country, between rebellion and redemption.

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22.
I don't buy weekend tickets to Ireland and hang out in front of their gates, but U2 are the only band whose entire catalog I know by heart. The first song on The Unforgettable Fire, "A Sort of Homecoming," I know backward and forward — it's so rousing, brilliant and beautiful. It's one of the first songs I played to my unborn baby.

The first U2 album I ever heard was Achtung Baby. It was 1991, and I was fourteen years old. Before that, I didn't even know what albums were. From that point, I worked backward — every six months, I'd get to buy a new U2 album. The sound they pioneered — the driving bass and drums underneath and those ethereal, effects-laden guitar tracks floating out from above — was nothing that had been heard before. They may be the only good anthemic rock band ever. Certainly they're the best.

What I love most about U2 is that the band is more important than any of their songs or albums. I love that they're best mates and have an integral role in one another's lives as friends. I love the way that they're not interchangeable — if Larry Mullen Jr. wants to go scuba diving for a week, the rest of the band can't do a thing. U2 — like Coldplay — maintain that all songs that appear on their albums are credited to the band. And they are the only band that's been around for twenty years with no member changes and no big splits.

It's amazing that the biggest band in the world has so much integrity and passion in their music. Our society is thoroughly screwed, fame is a ridiculous waste of time, and celebrity culture is disgusting. There are only a few people around brave enough to talk out against it, who use their fame in a good way. And every time I try, I feel like an idiot, because I see Bono actually getting things achieved. While everyone else is swearing at George Bush, Bono is the one who rubs Bush's back and gets a billion dollars for Africa. People can be so cynical — they don't like do-gooders — but Bono's attitude is, "I don't care what anybody thinks, I'm going to speak out." He's accomplished so much with Greenpeace, in Sarajevo, at the concert to shut down the Sellafield nuclear plant, and he still runs the gantlet. When the time came for Coldplay to think about fair trade, we took his lead to speak out regardless of what anyone may think. That's what we've learned from U2: You have to be brave enough to be yourself.

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21.
The first time we saw Otis was in 1962, and he was driving a car for Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers out of Macon, Georgia. They had a moderate hit, an instrumental called "Love Twist," and they wanted to record a follow-up in Memphis with my band, Booker T. and the MG's. I saw this big guy get out from behind the wheel and go to the back of the truck and start unloading equipment. That was Otis. And we had no idea he was also a singer. In those days, instrumental groups always carried a singer so they could play the songs on the radio that the kids wanted to dance to.

We had a few minutes left at the end of the session, and Al Jackson, our drummer, said, "This guy with Johnny, he wants us to hear him sing." Booker had already left for the day, so I sat down at the piano, which I play only a little for writing. Otis said, "Just gimme those church things."

We call them triplets in music. I said, "What key?"

He said, "It don't matter."

He started singing "These Arms of Mine." And, man, my hair stood on end. Jim [Stewart, co-owner of Stax] came running out and said, "That's it! That's it! Where is everybody? We gotta get this on tape!" So I grabbed all the musicians who hadn't left already for their night gigs, and we recorded it right there. When you hear something that's better than anything you ever heard, you know it, and it was unanimous. We almost wore out the tape playing it afterwards. "These Arms of Mine" was the first of seventeen hit singles he had in a row.

Otis had the softness of Sam Cooke and the harshness of Little Richard, and he was his own man. He was also fabulous to be around, always 100 percent full of energy. So many singers in those days, with all due respect, had just been in the business too long. They were bitter from the way they were treated. But Otis didn't have that. He was probably the most nonprejudiced human being I ever met. He seemed to be big in every way: physically, in his talent, in his wisdom about other people. After he died, I was surprised to find out I was the same age as he was, because I looked up to him as an older brother.

When I wrote with Otis, my job was to help him finish his songs. He had so many ideas that I'd just pick one and say, "Let's do this," and we'd write all night long. "I Can't Turn You Loose" was just a riff I'd used on a few songs with the MG's. Otis worked it up with the horns in about ten minutes as the last thing we did one night in the studio. Just a riff and one verse that he sings over and over. That's all it is. With Otis, it was all about feeling and expression. Most of his songs had just two or three chord changes, so there wasn't a lot of music there. The dynamics, the energy, the way we attacked it — that's hard to teach. So many things now are computer-generated. They start at one level and they stop at the same level, so there isn't much dynamic, even if there are a lot of different sounds.

I miss Otis. I miss him as much now as I did after we lost him. I've been to the lake in Madison, Wisconsin, where they have the plaque. The best explanation I've read is that his plane missed the runway on the first approach and it circled around over the lake when the wings iced up. That was December 10th, 1967. It's been difficult for me to listen to Otis since then. It brings back too many memories, all great except for the end.
 

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20.
Bo Diddley's music is enormous. It's deeply moving. It has the sultry, xesual power of Africa. There's all sorts of mystery in that sound. People listen to Bo Diddley recordings and think, "Oh, you can just go bonk-de-bonk-bonk, de-bonk-bonk, and you got a Bo Diddley beat." But it isn't that easy. He played really simple things but with incredible authority. I first heard him on a Rolling Stones album, on their cover of "Mona." It was such a great song; I looked at the credits and it said "Ellas McDaniel," and I thought, "Who the hell is that?" But when I wanted to get into songwriting, he was the key for me. I didn't have a lot of vocal range, and I didn't know a lot of chords on the guitar. So I was looking for a way to write, and there he was, writing very complete, very memorable songs without a lot of fuss. They weren't florid. He never bothered to change the chord, for one thing — which is very heavy-metal! It's hypnotic. And, of course, there's the attitude, a chin-up, chest-out sort of thing. He was a bull; he had a bullish quality. Vocally, he reminds me of gutbucket Delta blues: Muddy Waters, but brought to town, rocked up. And his voice is so damn loud. It's just a huge voice, and he's got a big, deep shout.

Then there's the way he played the guitar. First of all, Bo's hands are about a foot long from the wrist to the tip of the finger. He really controls his guitar. Bo plays his instrument, and the way the rhythm clicks is unique. What seems to pass for guitar more and more now is some wimp with a fuzz box. Somewhere around Hendrix, the line was crossed. Hendrix had both: He had the hands, and he had the fuzz box. Now all they have is the fuzz box — a lot of them.

Bo Diddley had a huge impact on Sixties rock. The Stones covered Bo Diddley, and the Yardbirds did "I'm a Man," and the Pretty Things did his song "Pretty Thing." My band in high school, the Iguanas, did a few of his songs, including "Road Runner," and you can hear a bit of him in the Stooges. You can be damn well sure that Jack White hasstudied Bo's records.

I've had a little personal experience with Bo. I worked with him in Vegas once, and I kept running into him on airplanes in the Eighties and Nineties — always in first class, always alone, always with a roll bag, his police hat and his sheriff's badge. I think Bo and Chuck Berry have both suffered the trivialization of people who are covered too much. Their influence is everywhere, but their personal careers could use a boost. Some car or jeans company needs to put a track of his in a commercial so a lot of young dudes and dudettes can go, "Whoa — that's rockin'!"

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19.
When you listen to a classic-rock station today, why don't they play the Velvet Underground? Why is it always Boston and Led Zeppelin? And why are the Rolling Stones so much more popular than the Velvets? OK, I understand why the Stones are more popular. But there is also a part of me that has always felt that it should have been the other way around. The Velvet Underground were way ahead of their time. And their music was weird. But it also made so much sense to me. I couldn't believe this wasn't the most popular music ever made.

Listening to those four studio albums now is like reading a good book that takes place in a distant time. When I hear The Velvet Underground and Nico or Loaded, I feel like I'm in Andy Warhol's Factory in the 1960s or hanging out at Max's Kansas City. The way Lou Reed wrote and sang about drugs and xes, about the people around him — it was so matter-of-fact. I believed every word of "Heroin." Reed could be romantic in the way he portrayed these crazy situations, but he was also intensely real. It was poetry and journalism.

A lot of people associate the Velvets with feedback and noise. White Light/White Heat is the kind of record you have to be in the mood for. You have to be in a sh!tty bar, in a really sh!tty mood. But the Velvets created some very beautiful music, too: "Sunday Morning," with John Cale's viola; "Candy Says"; "All Tomorrow's Parties" — I can't imagine that song without Nico singing it, although I thought Maureen Tucker had a cool voice, as well as being a really cool drummer. She had a femininity. I thought she sounded hotter than Nico.

In the beginning, the Strokes definitely drew from the vibe of the Velvets. I listened to Loaded all the time when we started the band, while I was writing my first songs. For four solid months, it was just Loaded and this Beach Boys greatest-hits record, Made in the U.S.A. A lot of our guitar tones are based on what Reed and Sterling Morrison did.

I honestly wish we could have copied them more. We didn't come close enough. But that was cool, because it became more of our own thing. Which is something else I got from the Velvets. They taught me just to be myself.

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18.
At Motown, Marvin was one of the main characters in the greatest musical story ever told. Prior to that, nothing quite like Motown had ever existed — all those songwriters, singers, producers working and growing together, part family, part business — and I doubt seriously if it will ever happen like that again. And there's no question that Marvin will always be a huge part of the Motown legacy.

When Marvin first came to Motown, he was the drummer on all the early hits I had with the Miracles. He and I became close friends — he was my brother, really — and I did a lot of production and wrote a lot of songs for him: "Ain't That Peculiar," "I'll Be Doggone." Of course, that means that I spent a lot of time waiting for Marvin. See, Marvin was basically late coming to the studio all the time. But I never minded, because I knew that whenever Marvin did get there, he was going to sing my song in a way that I had never imagined it. He would Marvinize my songs, and I loved it. Marvin could sing anything, from gospel to gutbucket blues, to jazz, to pop.

But Marvin was much more than just a great singer. He was a great record maker, a gifted songwriter, a deep thinker — a real artist in the true sense. What's Going On is the most profound musical statement in my lifetime. It never gets dated. Listen to it right now — "Brother, brother, brother/ There's far too many of you dying" — it's even more poignant than it was when he made it. I still remember when I would go by Marvin's house and he was working on it, he would say, "Smoke, this album is being written by God, and I'm just the instrument that he's writing it through."

Marvin really had it all — that voice, that soul, that look, too. He was one very handsome man, and he had xes appeal that women were drawn to always. And his music was sexy, not just "Let's Get It On" or "I Want You," but all of it. You couldn't blame women for falling in love with Marvin.

Beyond being his friend and his brother, I'm a major Marvin Gaye fan. At the time Marvin was alive, his was my favorite male voice. I said before that when you worked with Marvin, it meant you were waiting for Marvin. But Marvin was always worth the wait. I suppose that in a way, I'm still waiting for Marvin.

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17.
Muddy and his band opened for ZZ Top on a tour in 1981. This was over forty years after his first recordings, and that band could still play the blues, not just as seasoned pros but with the same enthusiasm Muddy had when he started out. When he sang that his mojo was working, you could tell his mojo had not slowed down at all. He was satisfied, composed, self-contained. If he had an opinion on a subject, he didn't allow a whole lot of latitude to be convinced otherwise. If he was bitter about the way he'd been treated by record companies, he never showed it. We talked to him a lot as we traveled traveled, when he wasn't chasing young girls through the airport. He told us a story once about his friends Freddie King and Little Walter walking from Dallas to Chicago. I've always had that image in my mind of two guys walking from the South to the North. Everyone else in the great migration took the train. I hope they weren't carrying their equipment.

Back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, this clamor started among musicians to go back to the authentic sounds of the Fifties, and they started paying outrageous prices for guitars of that era. People were always asking Muddy how he got this particular sound on a record and what instruments they were playing. Muddy's answer was usually "Anything we could afford to get our hands on." And sometimes they couldn't afford it but they took it anyway. He told a story about Shakey Walter Horton and a friend of his who had a job as a cab dispatcher. One night at the end of the shift, they just took a wire cutter and snipped off the microphone, so they had something to play the harp through. That's the authentic sound of the blues right there: a stolen cab dispatcher's microphone.

People call his sound raw and dirty and gritty, but it wasn't particularly loud. It just sounded that way. A guitar amplifier in the Fifties was maybe the size of a tabletopradio. To be heard over a party, you had to crank that thing as loud as it would go. And then you left behind all semblance of circuit design and entered the elegant field of distortion that made everything so much deeper. If you didn't have a big band with twenty guys, you had twenty watts.

I first heard Muddy Waters through two friends of mine, Walter Baldwin and Steve Roberts, in junior high in 1962 or '63. We grew up together and jumped on every piece of musical madness we could find. Most people in my generation probably discovered Muddy backwards from the Rolling Stones, who got their name from a Muddy song. I heard him just before the Stones got here, but it was all good, whether you discovered it backwards, forwards or sideways.

Anyway, I picked up the guitar because of Muddy Waters as much as anyone. Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf, T-Bone Walker, Albert King, B. B. King, Freddie King -- they all had an impact too, but they all followed Muddy Waters. He started out in Mississippi playing acoustic, using his thumb to play the bass line and a real bottleneck slide for melody on the upper strings. The slide guitar got the nuance of the human voice better than any other instrument. Basically, it was a Robert Johnson thing, and Muddy took it to Chicago, electrified it, added a bass player and a harp with a good backbeat, and you had a party. His bands were always powerhouses, and his voice had an amazing depth.

The remarkable thing is that the blues never died out, ever. It's been rediscovered every ten years since the Twenties. Nobody can do what Muddy did, but his energy is still fueling that fire. You can hear his enthusiasm in bands like the White Stripes or the Black Keys. I'd recommend his first album, The Best of Muddy Waters, with the early Chess singles, to anyone. "Honey Bee," "Rollin' Stone," "Louisiana Blues," "She Moves Me" — every track is worthy. The albums Johnny Winter produced in the late Seventies, Hard Again and I'm Ready, are also terrific. Johnny understood the music and caught the early Fifties ambience.

It was all supposed to be disposable. Just noise on a shellac disc. And here we are in the twenty-first century still trying to figure out how such a simple art form could be so complicated and subtle. It's still firing brain synapses around the world. You've got the Japanese Muddy Waters Society corresponding with fans in Sweden and England, and his music can still propel a party in the U.S. He made three chords sound deep, and they are.

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16.
Sam Cooke was grounded in a very straightforward singing style: It was pure, beautiful and open-throated, extraordinarily direct and unapologetic. Let's say you're going to sing "I love you for sentimental reasons." How do you hit that I? Do you slur into it? Do you put in a little hidden h? The attack on that vowel sound is the tip-off to how bold a singer is. If you pour on the letter i from the back of your throat, the listener gets that there is no fudge in the first thousandth of a second. There's just confidence from the singer, that he knows the pitch, and here's the sound. That's what Sam was great at. He had guts as a singer.

Sam also threw a lot of notes at you. Today you hear everyone doing those melismatic notes that Mariah Carey made popular. Sam was the first guy I remember singing that way. When he's singing, "I love you for sentimental reasons/I hope you believe me," the next line should be, "I've given you my heart." But he goes, "I've given you my-my-mah-muh-my heart/Given you my heart because I need you." It's as if he's saying, "Now that I've sung the word, I'm going to sing it again, because I've got all this feeling in my heart that demands expression." He could have given us less, and that would have been enough, but he put in all those extra notes, as in "You Send Me," where he's scatting between the lines: "I know, I know, I know, when you hold me."

He had fabulous chops, but at the same time fabulous taste. I never felt that he was overdoing it, as I often feel with singers today. He stayed rhythmic and fluty and floaty; he always showed brilliant vocal control.

I must have sung "You Send Me" to myself walking up and down stairwells at least a thousand times. It was on the charts right when I was having my first little success with Paul Simon as Tom and Jerry. Our "Hey, Schoolgirl" was on the charts with "You Send Me," "Jailhouse Rock" and "Jingle Bell Rock." I was just a kid, calling on radio stations for promotional purposes, and all I heard was "You Send Me." Sam was great to sing along with. He was my hero.

There was a deep sense of goodness about Sam. His father was a minister, and he obviously had spent a lot of time in church. His first success came early as a gospel singer, and he expanded into R&B and pop. It looked like he was making the right choices in life until he got shot by the night manager of a motel. You wonder who he had fallen in with.

Paul Simon, James Taylor and I covered "Wonderful World," which he also wrote. It was a teenage short story like Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen" or "School Days." You're stroking the teenager's sense of style with those pop songs. Sam was a master of that idiom. "Wonderful World" was both unsophisticated and very Tin Pan Alley.

Sam came along before the album was discovered as an art form. You think of him in terms of songs. My favorites are "Sad Mood," "Wonderful World," "Summertime," "For Sentimental Reasons" and "You Send Me." I think that "A Change Is Gonna Come" shows where he could have gone if he had lived through the Sixties, doing Marvin Gaye kind of lyrics about the society we live in. It was a tremendous loss when he was killed. I remember thinking, "Oh, that can't be." He was such a rising star, a fabulous singer with intelligence. And that brilliant smile.

I used to think he was just a great singer. Now I think he's better than that. Almost nobody since then can touch him.

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15.
Let me put it this way: wherever I go in the world, I always take a copy of Songs in the Key of Life. For me, it's the best album ever made, and I'm always left in awe after I listen to it. When people in decades and centuries to come talk about the history of music, they will talk about Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. Stevie came out of the golden age of Motown, when they were putting out the best R&B records in the world from Detroit, and he evolved into an amazing songwriter and a genuine musical force of nature.

He's so multitalented that it's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes him one of the greatest ever. But first, there's that voice. Along with Ray Charles, he's the greatest R&B singer who ever lived. Nobody can sing like he does. I know: I actually recorded a version of "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" when I was young, and I really had to squeeze my balls to get those high notes.

As a keyboard player, I've played with him over the years, and he never ceases to amaze me, the stuff he comes up with. He can play anything — check out his harmonica playing. I think I'm a pretty good musician, but he's in a whole other league. He could play with Charlie Parker or John Coltrane and hold his own.

Stevie's Sixties hits are amazing — joyful music that still sounds great — but then, starting in the Seventies, he hit a run of albums that's unsurpassed in music history, from Talking Book to Songs in the Key of Life. I think the elite — the most major of major artists — often have a period when they can do no wrong. It happened to Prince, too, who is like Stevie in some ways. He has got an immeasurable amount of talent — so much talent that sometimes he gets lost.

Stevie is an amazingly positive, peaceful man. When you ask him to do something, he is generous. He loves music. He loves to play. When he comes into a room, people adore him. And there aren't many artists like that. People admire you and they like your records, but they don't want to stand up and hug you. But this man is a good man. He tries to use his music to do good. His message, I think, is about love, and in the world we live in today, that message does shine through.
 

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14.
Heavy metal would not exist without Led Zeppelin, and if it did, it would suck. Led Zeppelin were more than just a band — they were the perfect combination of the most intense elements: passion and mystery and expertise. It always seemed like Led Zeppelin were searching for something. They weren't content being in one place, and they were always trying something new. They could do anything, and I believe they would have done everything if they hadn't been cut short by John Bonham's death. Zeppelin served as a great escape from a lot of things. There was a fantasy element to everything they did, and it was such a major part of what made them important. Who knows if we'd all be watching Lord of the Rings movies right now if it wasn't for Zeppelin.

They were never critically acclaimed in their day, because they were too experimental and they were too fringe. In 1968 and '69, there was some freaky sh!t going on, but Zeppelin were the freakiest. I consider Jimmy Page freakier than Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix was a genius on fire, whereas Page was a genius possessed. Zeppelin concerts and albums were like exorcisms for them. People had their asses blown out by Hendrix and Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, but Page took it to a whole new level, and he did it in such a beautifully human and imperfect way. He plays the guitar like an old bluesman on acid. When I listen to Zeppelin bootlegs, his solos can make me laugh or they can make me tear up. Any live version of "Since I Been Loving You" will bring you to tears and fill you with joy all at once. Page doesn't just use his guitar as an instrument. For him, it's like some sort of emotional translator.

John Bonham played the drums like someone who didn't know what was going to happen next — like he was teetering on the edge of a cliff. No one has come close to that since, and I don't think anybody ever will. I think he will forever be the greatest drummer of all time. You have no idea how much he influenced me. I spent years in my bedroom — literally fµck!ng years — listening to Bonham's drums and trying to emulate his swing or his behind-the-beat swagger or his speed or power. Not just memorizing what he did on those albums but getting myself into a place where I would have the same instinctual direction as he had. I have John Bonham tattoos all over my body — on my wrists, my arms, my shoulders. I gave myself one when I was fifteen. It's the three circles that were his insignia on Zeppelin IV and on the front of his kick drum.

"Black Dog," from Zeppelin IV, is what Led Zeppelin were all about in their most rocking moments, a perfect example of their true might. It didn't have to be really distorted or really fast, it just had to be Zeppelin and it was really heavy. Then there's Zeppelin's sensitive side — something people overlook, because we think of them as rock beasts, but Zeppelin III was full of gentle beauty. That was the soundtrack to me dropping out of high school. I listened to it every single day in my VW bug, while I contemplated my direction in life. That album, for whatever reason, saved some light in me that I still have.

I heard them for the first time on AM radio in the Seventies, right around the time that "Stairway to Heaven" was so popular. I was six or seven years old, which is when I'd just started discovering music. But it wasn't until I was a teenager that I discovered the first two Zeppelin records, which were handed down to me from the real stoners. We had a lot of those in the suburbs of Virginia, and a lot of muscle cars and keggers and Zeppelin and acid and weed. Somehow they all went hand in hand. To me, Zeppelin were spiritually inspirational. I was going to Catholic school and questioning God, but I believed in Led Zeppelin. I wasn't really buying into this Christianity thing, but I had faith in Led Zeppelin as a spiritual entity. They showed me that human beings could channel this music somehow and that it was coming from somewhere. It wasn't coming from a songbook. It wasn't coming from a producer. It wasn't coming from an instructor. It was coming from somewhere else.

I believe Zeppelin will come back and prove themselves to once again be the greatest rock band of all time. It will happen. They'll find someone to play the drums and I'll be right there, front row at every goddamn show. Then I could finally die a happy man.

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13.
Buddy Holly was a complete and utter hillbilly. I'm very proud of that. So much of our musical heritage is from the country. People always ask me, "Why do you stay in Indiana?" Well, I have to. Just about every song, every sound that we emulate and listen to was created by a hillbilly, born out of the frustration of a small town where there ain't much to do in the evening. That's one thing that I loved about Buddy Holly.

Buddy Holly was one of the first great singer-songwriters — he wrote his own material and in the end was producing it, too. He came from such a rural area and was able to speak to so many people in so many locations. He was one of the first to get away from the Tin Pan Alley songwriting factory and communicate directly, honestly with his audience.

I was just a little kid when I first heard Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue." You may not understand what it was like being about nine years old in 1957 or '58, but it was quite a treat. All of this music was just coming out of nowhere -- Memphis and Texas. I was in a band when I was in sixth grade, and we played "Not Fade Away." You shouldn't even be in a band if you haven't played that song. It's two chords, beautiful melody, with a nice message. Holly's songs never really left my consciousness. I just set up my iPod and there he was, those same songs that I've heard for the last forty years. They sound just as good as the first time I heard them.

Holly's melodies and arrangements were a huge influence on the Beatles. With the whirlwind they were on in 1964, the first thing John Lennon asked when he got to the Ed Sullivan Show was, "Is this the stage that Buddy Holly played on?" That shows a lot of quiet admiration. Listen to the songs on the first three Beatles albums. Take their voices off, and it's Buddy Holly. The Rolling Stones, too. A lot of the stuff they did on their first couple of records was pure Buddy Holly.

Record companies encourage young artists to copy what's been there before. But nobody was pushing Holly in any direction. That was just all him and his instincts. Those songs are great, and some are only a minute and twenty-five seconds long. Think about delivering a song like that today. The magic that Buddy Holly created was nothing short of a miracle. The fact that he died at twenty-two is just ridiculous. That tells you all you need to know about just how focused and visionary he was.

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12.
The Beach Boys showed the way, and not just to California. Sure, they may have sold the California Dream to a lot of people, but for me, it was Brian Wilson showing how far you might have to go in order to make your own musical dream come true.

In the beginning, I was someone who grew up in California and was a lover of the early music that he and the Beach Boys made. Later, I would relate to Brian's struggle as an artist against a machine that tended toward serving the bottom line. Brian fought hard against the industry attitude that if it works, run it into the ground. Music meant much more to him than that. He was trying to do something so much bigger than that with his teenage symphonies to God. In the process, he really rocked the boat and changed the world.

When the Beach Boys started, Brian was taking European sensibilities and infusing them into a Chuck Berry format. Those harmonies were based on the Four Freshmen, with a little church element added to it. He put all that on top of Chuck Berry rock & roll, and the result sounded so fresh. I remember hearing "Surfin' Safari" first when I was in sixth grade and the way that record jumped out of the radio. It had the beat, the sense of joy, that explosion rock & roll gave to a lot of us. But it also had this incredible lift, this amazing kind of chemical reaction that seemed to happen inside you when you heard the whole thing.

Pet Sounds is the acknowledged masterpiece, and it's everything it's said to be, with Brian taking some of the influences he got from Phil Spector and making something all his own. But even before that there's Side Two of The Beach Boys Today!, which is really just one ballad after another and is for me one of the great sides on a rock album. Those are beautiful numbers — "Please Let Me Wonder," "Kiss Me Baby," "She Knows Me Too Well," "In the Back of My Mind" — that foreshadow Brian's angst and show where he's starting to expose his vulnerability. A lot of what you find later on Pet Sounds or Smile, you could find in a different form early on.

Today it's nice to see that Brian's in a place where he can do what he wants without the pressure of selling or of having to be the support system for so many others. That's great, because he gave the rest of us more than his fair share of good vibrations.

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11.
What separates Bob Marley from so many other great songwriters? They don't know what it's like for rain to seep into their house. They wouldn't know what to do without their microwaves and stoves — to make a fire with wood and cook their fish next to the ocean. Marley came from the poverty and injustice in Jamaica, and that manifested itself in his rebel sound. The people were his inspiration. Straight up. Like John Lennon, he brought the idea that through music, empowerment and words, you can really come up with world peace. But it's hard to compare him to other musicians, because music was just one part of what he was. He was also a humanitarian and a revolutionary. His impact on Jamaican politics was so strong, there were assassination attempts on his life. Marley was like Moses. When Moses spoke, people moved. When Marley spoke, they moved as well.

Marley almost single-handedly brought reggae to the world. When I was growing up in Haiti — where my father was a missionary and a church minister — we could barely get away with listening to Christian rock and definitely couldn't get away with any rap. When I was fourteen, I slipped on "Exodus," and my dad, who didn't speak English very well, asked me, "What's this song about?" I told him it was biblical, and it was about movement. The minute it reached his ears — the minute Marley's music reaches anybody's ears — he was automatically grooving. The vibe goes straight to your brain.

"Redemption Song" transcends time. "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/ None but ourselves can free our minds/Have no fear for atomic energy/'Cause none of them can stop the time." It will mean the same thing in the year 3014. Today, people struggle to find what's real. Everything has become so synthetic that a lot of people, all they want is to grasp onto hope. The reason people still throw on Bob Marley T-shirts is because his music is one of the few real things left to grasp onto.
 

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10.
Ray Charles is proof that the best music crosses all boundaries, reaches all denominations. He can do any type of music, and at the same time he's always true to himself. It's all about his soul.

His music first hit me when I heard a live version of "What'd I Say" on American Forces Network in Germany, which I used to listen to late at night. Then I started buying his singles. His sound was stunning -- it was the blues, it was R&B, it was gospel, it was swing -- it was all the stuff I was listening to before that but rolled into one amazing, soulful thing.

As a singer, Ray Charles doesn't phrase like anyone else. He doesn't put the time where you think it's gonna be, but it's always perfect, always right. He knows how to play with time, like any great jazzman. But there was more to him than that voice — he was also writing these incredible songs. He was a great musician, an amazing record maker, a great producer and a wonderful arranger.

There's a reason they called Ray Charles "the Genius." Think of how he reinvented country music in a way that worked for him. He showed there are no limitations, not for someone as good as he is. Whatever Ray Charles does, whatever he touches, he makes it his own. He's his own genre. It's all Ray Charles music now.

I always learn something listening to him. It's music that set a tough standard. For me, two albums that stand out are Ray Charles at Newport and Ray Charles In Person. Then there's Genius + Soul = Jazz with the Basie orchestra and Quincy Jones. And of course Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. There's so much to live up to -- these days, you almost have to go backwards to go forwards.

Recently I did a duet with him on one of my songs, "Crazy Love." It felt fantastic. I always loved his singing, but I also connected with him on a soul level. I just felt his emotion. People like Ray Charles — and Sam Cooke, Bobby Bland and Solomon Burke — defined what soul was for me. It wasn't just the singing — it was what went into the singing. These were guys who put their souls on the line.

This music is way beyond marketing. This music is global, and its appeal is universal. Ray Charles changed music just by being himself — by doing what he did and translating it to millions of people with the wide-ranging effect of his one-of-a-kind soul. That's his legacy. I think that the music of Ray Charles will probably outlive us all — at least I hope that it will.

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9.
As a producer, I almost always addressed phrasing and enunciation with the singer, but in Aretha's case, there was nothing I could tell her. Not only could I not help, I would only be getting in her way. Nowadays, singers who want to be extra soulful overdo melisma. Aretha only used it a touch and used it gloriously because her taste was impeccable. She never went to the wrong place.

It wasn't her gospel training. Most young African-American singers get their musical training in church. Training can give you form, can give you tradition, can give you the cadence. When genius gets good training, it can expedite the process, but training isn't genius. Genius is who she is, how everything is filtered through her consciousness.

"Respect" had the biggest impact, truly global in its influence, with overtones for the civil-rights movement and gender equality. It was an appeal for dignity combined with a blatant lubricity. There are songs that are a call to action. There are love songs. There are xes songs. But it's hard to think of another song where all those elements are combined.

Aretha wrote most of her material or selected the songs herself, working out the arrangements at home and using her piano to provide the texture. In this case, she just had the idea that she wanted to embellish Otis Redding's song. When she walked into the studio, it was already worked out in her head.

Otis came up to my office right before "Respect" was released, and I played him the tape. He said, "She done took my song." He said it benignly and ruefully. He knew the identity of the song was slipping away from him to her.

Aretha had a minor career at Columbia before coming to Atlantic. I don't think Columbia let her play the piano much. It's always been my belief that when a singer plays an instrument, you should let them play it on the record, even if the singer is not a virtuoso, because they're bringing another element to the recording that is uniquely themselves. In Aretha's case, there was no compromise in quality. She was a brilliant pianist, a combination of Mildred Falls — Mahalia Jackson's accompanist — and Thelonious Monk. In other words, Aretha brought a touch of jazz to her gospel piano. And it was all instinctual. I don't think she had any classical training. She just put it together. It was part of her genius. No one could copy her. How could they? She's all alone in her greatness.

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8.
A lot of people call me the architect of rock & roll. I don't call myself that, but I believe it's true. You've got to remember, I was already known back in 1951. I was recording for RCA-Victor — if you were black, it was called Camden Records — before Elvis. Then I recorded for Peacock in Houston. Then Specialty Records bought me from Peacock — I think they paid $500 for me — and my first Specialty record, in 1956, was a hit: "Tutti Frutti." It was a hit worldwide. I felt I had arrived, you know? We started touring everywhere immediately. We traveled in cars. Back in that time, the racism was so heavy, you couldn't go in the hotels, so most times you slept in your car. You ate in your car. You got to the date, and you dressed in your car. I had a Cadillac. That's what the star rode in.

You remember the way that Liberace dressed onstage? I was dressing like that all the time, very flamboyantly, and I was wearing the pancake makeup. A lot of the other performers at that time — the Cadillacs, the Coasters, the Drifters — they were wearing makeup, too, but they didn't have any makeup kit. They had a sponge and a little compact in their pocket. I had a kit. Everybody started calling me gay.

People called rock & roll "African music." They called it "voodoo music." They said that it would drive the kids insane. They said that it was just a flash in the pan — the same thing that they're saying about the hip-hop today. Only it was worse back then, because, you have to remember, I was the first black artist whose records the white kids were starting to buy. And the parents were really bitter about me. We played places where they told us not to come back, because the kids got so wild. They were tearing up the streets and throwing bottles and jumping off the theater balconies at shows. At that time, the white kids had to be up in the balcony — they were "white spectators." But then they'd leap over the balcony to get downstairs where the black kids were.

I didn't get paid — most dates I didn't get paid. And I've never gotten money from most of those records. And I made those records: In the studio, they'd just give me a bunch of words, I'd make up a song! The rhythm and everything. "Good Golly, Miss Molly"! And I didn't get a dime for it. Michael Jackson owns the Specialty stuff now. He offered me a job with his publishing company once, for the rest of my life, as a writer. At the time, I didn't take it. I wish I had now.

I wish a lot of things had been different. I don't think I ever got what I really deserved.

I appreciate being picked one of the top fifty performers, but who is number one and who is number two doesn't matter to me anymore. Because it won't be who I think it should be — it's not going to ever be any of the entertainers from the past. The Rolling Stones started with me, but they're going to always be in front of me. The Beatles started with me — at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, before they ever made a record — but they're going to always be in front of me. James Brown, Jimi Hendrix — these people started with me. I fed them, I talked to them, and they're going to always be in front of me.

But it's a joy just to still be here, to have stood the test of time. I think that when people want joy and fun and happiness, they want to hear the old-time rock & roll. And I'm just glad that I was a part of that. There's only a few of us left: myself, Bo Diddley, Chuck, Fats, Jerry Lee, the Everly Brothers. It's getting thin. So I think this is the last of it, the last of the good days. Soon there'll be a totally new thing. But it won't be the same. Never.

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7.
In one sense, James Brown is like Johnny Cash. Johnny is considered one of the kings of country music, but there are a lot of people who like Johnny but don't like country music. It's the same with James Brown and R&B. His music is singular — the feel and tone of it. James Brown is his own genre.

He was a great editor — as a songwriter, producer and bandleader. He kept things sparse. He knew that was important. And he had the best players, the funkiest of all bands. If Clyde Stubblefield had been drumming on a Motown session, they would not have let him play what he did with James on "Funky Drummer." James' vision allowed that music to get out. And the music always came from the groove, whereas for so many R&B and Motown artists at the time it was more about conventional songs. James Brown's songs are not conventional. "I Got You," "Out of Sight" — they are ultimately vehicles for unique, even bizarre grooves.

The first big record in hip-hop that used a Brown sample was Eric B. and Rakim's "Eric B. Is President." That opened the floodgates for people to sample Brown. I can't remember ever using a James Brown sample on my early records with LL Cool J or the Beastie Boys, but I wanted to make records that felt as good as Brown's, and I didn't want to do it by sampling or copying him. For me, it was about understanding the feeling you get when you listen to those grooves, figuring out how to achieve that with drum machines.

That feeling was something that the Red Hot Chili Peppers and I worked on for BloodSugarSexMagik. We used Brown's idea that all the musicians didn't have to be playing at the same time. Let the bass have its moment; don't be afraid to start a song with just guitar or break a song down to just drums and guitar. Those are the sort of dynamics you hear on Brown's records.

I remember going to Minneapolis to visit Prince years ago, sitting in an office waiting for him — and there was an endless loop of James Brown's performance in the 1964 concert film The T.A.M.I. Show running on a screen. That may be the single greatest rock & roll performance ever captured on film. You have the Rolling Stones on the same stage, all of the important rock acts of the day, doing their best — and James Brown comes out and destroys them. It's unbelievable how much he outclasses everyone else in the film.

I first saw James Brown around 1980, between my junior and senior years in high school. It was in Boston. The show was in a catering hall, with folding chairs. And it was one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. His dancing and singing were incredible, and he played a Hammond B3 organ tufted with red leather, with godfather in studs written across the front.

Regardless of what goes on in his personal life, his legacy is secure. He certainly does things along the way where you can't help wondering, "What's going on?" But the good stuff comes from these one-of-a-kind people. These people are just touched by God. They are special. And James Brown is one of them. His legend will loom large, because the rhythm of life is in there.

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6.
Jimi Hendrix is one of those extraordinary hubs of music where everybody lands at some point. Every musician passes through Hendrix International Airport eventually ⁚ whether you're a Black Sabbath fan or an Elmore James fan; whether you like Hanson or the Grateful Dead. He is the common denominator of every style of contemporary music. There were so many sides to his playing. Was he a bluesman? Listen to "Voodoo Chile" and you'll hear some of the eeriest blues you can find. Was he a rock musician? He used volume as a device. That's rock. Was he a sensitive singer-songwriter? In "Bold As Love," he sings, "My yellow in this case is not so mellow/In fact I'm trying to say it's frightened like me" -- that is a man who knows the shape of his heart.

So often, he's portrayed as a loud, psychedelic rock star lighting his guitar on fire. But when I think of Hendrix, I think of some of the most placid, lovely guitar sounds on songs like "One Rainy Wish," "Little Wing" and "Drifting." "Little Wing" is painfully short and painfully beautiful. It's like your grandfather coming back from the dead and hanging out with you for a minute and a half and then going away. It's perfect, then it's gone.

I think the reason musicians love Hendrix's playing so much is that the language of it was so native to his head and heart. He had a secret relationship with playing the guitar, and though it was incredibly technical and based in theory, it was his theory. And I think that was sacred to him. That's why you almost never read an interview with him explaining his live-gear setup or his favorite scales. That's part of what made his playing so compelling — all you heard was the color. The math is what's been applied ever since.

I discovered Hendrix by way of Stevie Ray Vaughan. I heard Stevie Ray do "Little Wing," and I started working my way backward to Hendrix. The first Hendrix record I bought was Axis: Bold As Love, because it had "Little Wing" on it. I remember staring at the album cover for hours. Then I remember spending months listening to Electric Ladyland, which was very creepy. There's something dark about it in certain places that maybe Hendrix was too honest to hide.

Hendrix invented a kind of cool. The cool of a big conch-shell belt. The cool of boots that your jeans are tucked into. If Jimi Hendrix is an influence on somebody, you can immediately tell. Give me a guy who's got some kind of weird-ass goatee and an applejack hat, and you just go, "He got to you, didn't he?"

Hendrix has the allure of the tragic figure: We all wish we were genius enough to die before we're twenty-eight. People want to paint him as this lonely, shy figure who managed to let himself open up on the stage and play straight colors through the crowd. There's something heroic about it, but there's nothing human about it. Everybody is so caught up in the otherworldliness of Jimi Hendrix. I prefer to think about his human side. He was a man who had a Social Security number, not an alien. The merchandising companies made the Space God. They put Jimi Hendrix's face on a tie-dyed T-shirt, and somehow that's what he became. But when I listen to Hendrix, I just hear a man, and that's when it's most beautiful — when you remember that another human being was capable of what he achieved. I will always try to attain that kind of control on the guitar: Hendrix's playing was sloppy, but it was controlled. Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix. And that's who a lot of people have become. However far you stop on your climb to be like him, that's who you are.
 

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5.
Like a lot of guitarists of my generation, I first heard Chuck Berry because of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I was so blown away by the way the Beatles and the Stones were playing these hard-core rock & roll songs like "Roll Over Beethoven" and "Around and Around." I'd looked at the labels, under the song titles. I'd seen the name "Chuck Berry." But I was fortunate enough, again like a lot of guys from my generation, to have a friend who had an older brother, who had the original records: "If you like the Stones, wait until you hear this!" I heard Chuck you hear this!" I heard Chuck Berry Is On Top — and I really freaked out! That feeling of excitement in the pit of my stomach, in the hair on the back of my head: I got more of it from Chuck Berry than from anybody else.

The Stones were a close second, because they were one of the few bands then who could play Berry's stuff and really sound like they knew what it was about. They had the right combination of technical skill, with that punk attitude of "Let's lay it down!" They did their homework, but they were also able to tap that feeling, that rhythm, which was so important in Chuck Berry's music.

It's not so much what he played — it's what he didn't play. His music is very economical. His guitar leads drove the rhythm, as opposed to laying over the top. The economy of his licks and his leads — they pushed the song along. And he would build his solos so there was a nice little statement taking the song to a new place, so you're ready for the next verse.

As a songwriter, Chuck Berry is like the Ernest Hemingway of rock & roll. He gets right to the point. He tells a story in short sentences. You get a great picture in your mind of what's going on, in a very short amount of time, in well-picked words. He was also very smart: He knew that if he was going to break into the mainstream, he had to appeal to white teenagers. Which he did. Everything in those songs is about teenagers. I think he knew he could have had his own success on the R&B charts, but he wanted to get out of there and go big time.

He was also celebrating the music and lifestyle of rock & roll in songs like "Johnny B. Goode" and "School Days" — how anybody could make a guitar sound like the ring of a bell. Anytime you put the words rock & roll in a lyric, you have to be careful. But he did it perfectly. "Johnny B. Goode" is probably the most covered song ever. Bar bands, garage bands — everybody plays it. And so many bands play it badly. As much fun as it is to play, it's also easy to destroy it. But it was probably the first Chuck Berry song I learned. It hits people on all levels: lyric, melody, tempo, riff.

It's funny — my twelve-year-old son, Roman, came back from his guitar lesson today, and I said, "What song were you learning today?" He said, "We're learning 'Johnny B. Goode.' " That's the essence of the appeal of Chuck Berry. When you're a young guitar player now, you're confronted by all these guys: Eric Clapton, Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page. But you can sit down and get your guitar to sound like Chuck Berry in a very short amount of time.

The other thing is, Chuck Berry was a showman: playing the guitar behind his head and between his legs, doing the duckwalk. It's not like you could close your eyes and hear his playing suffer because of it. He was able to do all that stuff and make it look like it was so easy and natural.

I still listen to Chuck Berry Is On Top. Except for one or two songs, like "Blues for Hawaiians," the whole thing just rocks out. That's why I love it — for the same reason I love AC/DC records. They just don't stop. That was another thing he did: He stayed in that groove. He could have done one or two of those "Johnny B. Goode"-type songs, or a couple like "Maybellene," then gone off and done whatever. But he stayed in that place, that groove, and made it his.

I also have a bunch of different compilations, an I also have a bunch of different compilations, and I hear the direct influence on me. The way he phrases things, that double-time stop, where you get the two notes bending against each other and they make that rock & roll sound — that's what I hear when I listen back to a lot of my solos. It's a little bit of technique, but it's mostly phrasing.

And kids today are playing the same three chords, trying to play in that same style. Turn the guitars up, and it's punk rock. It's the Ramones and the xes Pistols. That new band Jet has that vibe. I hear it in the White Stripes, too.

I think he's kind of forgotten, in a way. He doesn't get played much on the radio, although he's on my fµck!ng iPod, in my top ten records. But as far as the general public goes, I think he is kind of an artifact.

But people will always cover Chuck Berry songs. When bands go do their homework, they will have to listen to Chuck Berry. If you want to learn about rock & roll, if you want to play rock & roll, you have to start there.

I've had the fortune to shake his hand once or twice, but I've never really had a chance to tell him any of this. It was always in passing, at an airport or something. The last time was in the Seventies. I was walking through the airport, and someone said, "It's Chuck Berry over there." Well, I had to go over and shake his hand. But he was tongue-tied. Then he was gone.

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4.
The Rolling Stones are my life. If it wasn't for them, I would have been a Soprano for real. I first saw the Stones on TV, on Hollywood Palace in 1964. In '64, the Beatles were perfect: the hair, the harmonies, the suits. They bowed together. Their music was extraordinarily sophisticated. The whole thing was exciting and alien but very distant in its perfection. The Stones were alien and exciting, too. But with the Stones, the message was, "Maybe you can do this." The hair was sloppier. The harmonies were a bit off. And I don't remember them smiling at all. They had the R&B traditionalist's attitude: "We are not in show business. We are not pop music." And the xes in Mick Jagger's voice was adult. This wasn't pop xes -- holding hands, playing spin the bottle. This was the real thing. Jagger had that conversational quality that came from R&B singers and bluesmen, that sort of half-singing, not quite holding notes. The acceptance of Jagger's voice on pop radio was a turning point in rock & roll. He broke open the door for everyone else. Suddenly, Eric Burdon and Van Morrison weren't so weird — even Bob Dylan.

It was completely unique: a white performer doing it in a black way. Elvis Presley did it. But the next guy was Jagger. There were no other white boys doing this. White singers stood there and sang, like the Beatles. The thing we associate with black performers goes back to the church -- letting the spirit physically move you, letting go of social restraints, any form of embarrassment or humiliation. Not being in control: That's what Mick Jagger was communicating. There were a few James Brown and Tina Turner dance moves in there. But James Brown was very choreographed. Those strange moves Jagger was doing — they were of the spirit. Iggy Pop and Jim Morrison took it to another level, but all that came from Jagger.

In the beginning, it was Brian Jones' band. He named them. He managed them — got the gigs and wrote to the paper when they got bad reviews. The attitude and aggressiveness — they first came from him. And the tradition came from him. He was using the blues pseudonym Elmo Lewis and playing bottleneck guitar. Then, on albums like December's Children and Aftermath, he was playing all of these other instruments: dulcimer, harpsichord, sitar. He was so inventive and important. If anybody gets left out of the Stones' story, he's the one.

But Keith Richards has been taken for granted too, relegated historically to permanent rhythm guitar. But his solos were great: "Heart of Stone," "It's All Over Now." And there are the riffs: "Satisfaction," of course, and "The Last Time," which the Stones themselves considered the first serious song they wrote. "***** Tonk Women" is just one chord. Then he started the tunings: the G tuning and the five-string version of the G tuning. There are chord patterns that relate to his tunings — the "Gimme Shelter" effect, let's call it — where you add a suspended note, and it becomes more melodic and rhythmic at the same time. I play rhythm guitar with the E Street Band in Keith's style all the time. Anybody who plays rock & roll guitar does.

Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, more than any other rock & roll rhythm section, to this day, knew how to swing. It's so much a thing of the past now, but in those days rock & roll was something you danced to. You can just picture how much fun it was to be at the Richmond Hotel in London, at the Station Hotel in 1962 and '63: the crowd going crazy, the Stones going crazy, like they were in a South Side Chicago blues club. You can picture it in the music.

There are generations of young people now who only know the Stones iconically. There is no connection to the music. So I'd send them to the first four albums, the American versions: England's Newest Hitmakers, 12x5, Now and Out of Our Heads. The next lesson is the second great era: Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. They make up the greatest run of albums in history ⁙ and all done in three and a half years.

In a lot of ways, the Stones are playing better now than they were in the Sixties. They were quite sloppy in the early days — which I enjoy. Technically, they're better than they've ever been. The trouble is, their power comes from their first twelve albums. There have been a few great songs since '72, but only a handful. If they were making great records and playing live the way they are now, my God, how amazing would that be?

But live, they're still able to communicate that original power. You can learn a lot from the Stones still: Write good songs, stay in shape and dig deep down for that passion every night. You should live so long, a tenth as long, and be as good as Mick Jagger. It's amazing Keith is still alive. There are a few people who have this constitution of invulnerability, although you shouldn't learn that. Let's be honest: Excessive drug use hurts songwriting. The good side is, he's still on the road, rockin', forty years later. You can't hold most bands together for four years, let alone forty.

I don't look forward to the day when the Stones stop, because going out there and playing continues to be the most effective advertisement for these songs. They may have a bit of production with them onstage now, but it's still about them. They're pushing things to the limit, showing that if you stick to your guns, and don't compromise with what's trendy, you're gonna go a long fµck!ng way.

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3.
Out of Tupelo, Mississippi, out of Memphis, Tennessee, came this green, sharkskin-suited girl chaser, wearing eye shadow -- a trucker-dandy white boy who must have risked his hide to act so black and dress so gay. This wasn't New York or even New Orleans; this was Memphis in the Fifties. This was punk rock. This was revolt. Elvis changed everything — musically, xesually, politically. In Elvis, you had the whole lot; it's all there in that elastic voice and body. As he changed shape, so did the world: He was a Fifties-style icon who was what the Sixties were capable of, and then suddenly not. In the Seventies, he turned celebrity into a blood sport, but interestingly, the more he fell to Earth, the more godlike he became to his fans. His last performances showcase a voice even bigger than his gut, where you cry real tears as the music messiah sings his tired heart out, turning casino into temple.

In Elvis, you have the blueprint for rock & roll: The highness — the gospel highs. The mud — the Delta mud, the blues. xesual liberation. Controversy. Changing the way people feel about the world. It's all there with Elvis.

I was barely conscious when I saw the '68 comeback special, at eight years old -- which was probably an advantage. I hadn't the critical faculties to divide the different Elvises into different categories or sort through the contradictions. Pretty much everything I want from guitar, bass and drums was present: a performer annoyed by the distance from his audience; a persona that made a prism of fame's wide-angle lens; a sexuality matched only by a thirst for God's instruction.

But it's that elastic spastic dance that is the most difficult to explain — hips that swivel from Europe to Africa, which is the whole point of America, I guess. For an Irish boy, the voice might have explained the sexiness of the U.S.A., but the dance explained the energy of this new world about to boil over and scald the rest of us with new ideas on race, religion, fashion, love and peace. These were ideas bigger than the man who would break the ice for them, ideas that would later confound the man who took the Anglo-Saxon stiff upper lip and curled it forever. He was "Elvis the Pelvis," with one hand on the blues terminal and the other on the gospel, which is the essence of rock & roll, a lightning flash running along his spine, electroshock therapy for a generation about to refuse numbness, both male and female, black and white.

I recently met with Coretta Scott King, John Lewis and some of the other leaders of the American civil-rights movement, and they reminded me of the cultural apartheid rock & roll was up against. I think the hill they climbed would have been much steeper were it not for the racial inroads black music was making on white pop culture. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival were all introduced to the blues through Elvis. He was already doing what the civil-rights movement was demanding: breaking down barriers. You don't think of Elvis as political, but that is politics: changing the way people see the world.

In the Eighties, U2 went to Memphis, to Sun Studio -- the scene of rock & roll's big bang. We were working with Elvis' engineer and music diviner, Cowboy Jack Clement. He reopened the studio so we could cut some tracks within the same four walls where Elvis recorded "Mystery Train." He found the old valve microphone the King had howled through; the reverb was the same reverb: "Train I ride, sixteen coaches long." It was a small tunnel of a place, but there was a certain clarity to the sound. You can hear it in those Sun records, and they are the ones for me -- leanness but not meanness. The King didn't know he was the King yet. It's haunted, hunted, spooky music. Elvis doesn't know where the train will take him, and that's why we want to be passengers.

Jerry Schilling, the only one of the Memphis Mafia not to sell him out, told me a story about when he used to live at Graceland, down by the squash courts. He had a little room there, and he said that when Elvis was upset and feeling out of kilter, he would leave the big house and go down to his little gym, where there was a piano. With no one else around, his choice would always be gospel, losing and finding himself in the old spirituals. He was happiest when he was singing his way back to spiritual safety. But he didn't stay long enough. Self-loathing was waiting back up at the house, where Elvis was seen shooting at his TV screens, the Bible open beside him at St. Paul's great ode to love, Corinthians 13. Elvis clearly didn't believe God's grace was amazing enough.

Some commentators say it was the Army, others say it was Hollywood or Las Vegas that broke his spirit. The rock & roll world certainly didn't like to see their King doing what he was told. I think it was probably much more likely his marriage or his mother — or a finer fracture from earlier on, like losing his twin brother, Jesse, at birth. Maybe it was just the big arse of fame sitting on him.

I think the Vegas period is underrated. I find it the most emotional. By that point Elvis was clearly not in control of his own life, and there is this incredible pathos. The big opera voice of the later years — that's the one that really hurts me.

Why is it that we want our idols to die on a cross of their own making, and if they don't, we want our money back? But you know, Elvis ate America before America ate him.
 

Marlon12

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2.
Bob Dylan and I started out from different sides of the tracks. When I first heard him, I was already in a band, playing rock & roll. I didn't know a lot of folk music. I wasn't up to speed on the difference he was making as a songwriter. I remember somebody playing "Oxford Town," from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, for me. I thought, "There's something going on here." His voice seemed interesting to me. But it wasn't until we started playing together that I really understood it. He is a powerful singer and a great musical actor, with many characters in his voice.

I could hear the politics in the early songs. It's very exciting to hear somebody singing so powerfully, with something to say. But what struck me was how the street had had such a profound effect on him: coming from Minnesota, setting out on the road and coming into New York. There was a hardness, a toughness, in the way he approached his songs and the characters in them. That was a rebellion, in a certain way, against the purity of folk music. He wasn't pussyfooting around on "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Ballad of a Thin Man." This was the rebel rebelling against the rebellion.

I learned early on with Bob that the people he hung around with were not musicians. They were poets, like Allen Ginsberg. When we were in Europe, there'd be poets coming out of the woodwork. His writing came directly out of a tremendous poetic influence, a license to write in images that weren't in the Tin Pan Alley tradition or typically rock & roll, either. I watched him sing "Desolation Row" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" in those acoustic sets in 1965 and '66. I had never seen anything like it — how much he could deliver with a guitar and a harmonica, and how people would just take the ride, going through these stories and songs with him.

When he and I went to Nashville in 1966, to work on Blonde on Blonde, it was the first time I'd ever seen a songwriter writing songs on a typewriter. We'd go to the studio, and he'd be finishing up the lyrics to some of the songs we were going to do. I could hear this typewriter — click, click, click, ring, really fast. He was typing these things out so fast; there was so much to be said.

And he'd be changing things during a session. He'd have a new idea and try to incorporate that. That was something else he taught me early on. The Hawks were band musicians. We needed to know where the song was going to go, what the chord changes were, where the bridge was. Bob has never been big on rehearsing. He comes from a place where he just did the songs on acoustic guitar by himself. When we'd play the song with him, it would be, "How do we end it?" And he'd say, "Oh, when it's over, it's over. We'll just stop." We got so we were ready for anything — and that was a good feeling. We'd think, "OK, this can take a left turn at any minute — and I'm ready.",

More than anything, in my own songwriting, the thing I learned from Bob is that it's OK to break those traditional rules of what songs are supposed to be: the length of a song, how imaginative you could get telling the story. It was great that someone had broken down the gates, opened up the sky to all of the possibilities. One thing that I don't think people realize is that to write the way he does, to get that many ideas into these very distinct melodies, you had to be really good at phrasing. His vocal phrasing was special. He got these characters and images across in a way that didn't feel stiff or forced, with a musical comfort so you could just take the ride and never question it. And a lot of times there was an attitude in his voice that worked for a particular record. I remember when he played Nashville Skyline for me. I was amazed at the character that he had pulled out of the bag for that.

I think Bob has a true passion for the challenge, for coming up with something in the music that makes him feel good, to keep on doing it and doing it, as he does now. The songs Bob is writing now are as good as any songs he's ever written. There's a wonderful honesty in them. He writes about what he sees and feels, about who he is. We spent a lot of time together in the 1970s. We were both living in Malibu and knew what was going on in our respective day-to-day lives. And I know Blood on the Tracks is a reflection of what was happening to him then. When he writes songs, he's telling me things about himself, holding up a mirror — and I'm seeing it all clearly, like I've never seen it before.

From my knowledge of him, I don't think Bob ever wanted to be more than a good songwriter. When people are like, "Oh, my God, you're having an effect on culture and society" — I doubt he thinks like that. I don't think Hank Williams understood why his songs were so much more moving than other people's songs. I think Bob is thinking, "I hope I can think of another really good song." He's putting one foot in front of the other and just following his bliss.

But Bob is a great barometer for young singers and songwriters. As soon as they think they've written something good — "I'm pushing the envelope here, I've made a breakthrough" — they should listen to one of his songs. He will always stand as the one to measure good work by. That's one of the greatest accomplishments of all.

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The Greatest Music ARTIST(S) EVER
"The Beatles arrived sounding like nothing else," I first heard of the Beatles when I was nine years old. I spent most of my holidays on Merseyside then, and a local girl gave me a bad publicity shot of them with their names scrawled on the back. This was 1962 or '63, before they came to America. The photo was badly lit, and they didn't quite have their look down; Ringo had his hair slightly swept back, as if he wasn't quite sold on the Beatles haircut yet. I didn't care about that; they were the band for me. The funny thing is that parents and all their friends from Liverpool were also curious and proud about this local group. Prior to that, the people in show business from the north of England had all been comedians. Come to think of it, the Beatles recorded for Parlophone, which was a comedy label.

I was exactly the right age to be hit by them full on. My experience — seizing on every picture, saving money for singles and EPs, catching them on a local news show — was repeated over and over again around the world. It was the first time anything like this had happened on this scale. But it wasn't just about the numbers; Michael Jackson can sell records until the end of time, but he'll never matter to people as much as the Beatles did.

Every record was a shock when it came out. Compared to rabid R&B evangelists like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles arrived sounding like nothing else. They had already absorbed Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry, but they were also writing their own songs. They made writing your own material expected, rather than exceptional.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney were exceptional songwriters; McCartney was, and is, a truly virtuoso musician; George Harrison wasn't the kind of guitar player who tore off wild, unpredictable solos, but you can sing the melodies of nearly all of his breaks. Most important, they always fit right into the arrangement. Ringo Starr played the drums with an incredibly unique feel that nobody can really copy, although many fine drummers have tried and failed. Most of all, John and Paul were fantastic singers.

Lennon, McCartney and Harrison had stunningly high standards as writers. Imagine releasing a song like "Ask Me Why" or "Things We Said Today" as a B side. They made such fantastic records as "Paperback Writer" b/w "Rain" or "Penny Lane" b/w "Strawberry Fields Forever" and only put them out as singles. These records were events, and not just advance notice of an album release.

Then they started to really grow up. Simple love lyrics to adult stories like "Norwegian Wood," which spoke of the sour side of love, and on to bigger ideas than you would expect to find in catchy pop lyrics.

They were pretty much the first group to mess with the aural perspective of their recordings and have it be more than just a gimmick. Brilliant engineers at Abbey Road Studios like Geoff Emerick invented techniques that we now take for granted in response to the group's imagination. Before the Beatles, you had guys in lab coats doing recording experiments in the Fifties, but you didn't have rockers deliberately putting things out of balance, like a quiet vocal in front of a loud track on "Strawberry Fields Forever." You can't exaggerate the license that this gave to everyone from Motown to Jimi Hendrix.

My absolute favorite albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. On both records you can hear references to other music — R&B, Dylan, psychedelia — but it's not done in a way that is obvious or dates the records. When you picked up Revolver, you knew it was something different. Heck, they are wearing sunglasses indoors inthe picture on the back of the cover and not even looking at the camera . . . and the music was so strange and yet so vivid. If I had to pick a favorite song from those albums, it would be "And Your Bird Can Sing" . . . no, "Girl" . . . no, "For No One" . . . and so on, and so on. . . .

Their breakup album, Let It Be, contains songs both gorgeous and jagged. I suppose ambition and human frailty creep into every group, but they managed to deliver some incredible performances. I remember going to Leicester Square and seeing the film of Let It Be in 1970. I left with a melancholy feeling.

The word Beatlesque has been in the dictionary for a while now. I can hear them in the Prince album Around the World in a Day; in Ron Sexsmith's tunes; in Harry Nilsson's melodies. You can hear that Kurt Cobain listened to the Beatles and mixed them in with punk and metal in some of his songs. You probably wouldn't be listening to the ambition of the latest OutKast record if the Beatles hadn't made the White Album into a double LP!

I've co-written some songs with Paul McCartney and performed with him in concert on two occasions. In 1999, a little time after Linda McCartney's death, Paul did the Concert for Linda, organized by Chrissie Hynde. During the rehearsal, I was singing harmony on a Ricky Nelson song, and Paul called out the next tune: "All My Loving." I said, "Do you want me to take the harmony line the second time round?" And he said, "Yeah, give it a try." I'd only had thirty-five years to learn the part. It was a very poignant performance, witnessed only by the crew and other artists on the bill.

At the show, it was very different. The second he sang the opening lines -- "Close your eyes, and I'll kiss you" -- the crowd's reaction was so intense that it all but drowned the song out. It was very thrilling but also rather disconcerting. Perhaps I understood in that moment one of the reasons why the Beatles had to stop performing. The songs weren't theirs anymore. They were everybody's.
 

Marlon12

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Chuck Berry should be higher, probably #1 but no lower than #2. He basically invented Rock & Roll. He established the form and made the guitar its signature instrument. It seems obvious now, but compare Berry's music to the horn driven sound of Bill Haley or the piano based shouters like Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard who were also among the R&R pioneers. It's Berry's lead guitar that still resounds in music today. Lyrically it was Berry that made it the music of youth and rebellion. It's been said that every song lyric of the last half century has been an exploration of the endless possibilities stemming from the first verse of "No Particular Place To Go".
 

smartgolddigger

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im glad to see some rappers on this list. but mj not being in the top 10..c'mon man!!!<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:eek:ffice:eek:ffice" /><o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
im not a huge mj stan but he deserves to at least be in the top 10 as an ARTIST.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p>i agree with 5-10 tho. </o:p>
 

Marlon12

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I do think the way Elvis is viewed as an artists vs. Michael Jackson is straight up racist! I don't understand how you even put Elvis above people he stole from (i.e. Little Richard).
 

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they are missing the Jackons/5 they are one of the most if not the most influential boy bands. You see how good of artist they were after they left motown

Typical Beatles and Elvis
 

Marlon12

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they are missing the Jacksonns/5 they are one of the most if not the most influential boy bands. You see how good of artist they were after they left motown

Typical Beatles and Elvis

I have the problem with Elvis. I can't deny the Beatles influence on pop culture.


 

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michael-jackson.jpg

35.
Michael Jackson is the world's greatest entertainer. One of the most explosive performances I've ever witnessed was Jackson sliding across the stage at the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary show. Just watching that made us all know: That's what greatness is, and anything that doesn't measure up to that is beneath greatness. Before him there were the Beatles and Elvis and Frank Sinatra; Michael Jackson takes his place right alongside those greats.

I'm almost the same age as Michael, and I was one of the original fans. I first saw him at the Ohio State Fair, when I was very young; the Jackson 5 were performing with the Commodores. Michael came on, and that voice of his rang over the whole fairground. I was deeply touched by that voice from the very beginning.

"Billie Jean" is the most important record he's made, not only because of its commercial success but because of the musical depth of the record. It has more hooks in it than anything I've ever heard. Everything in that song was catchy, and every instrument was playing a different hook. You could separate it into twelve different musical pieces and I think you'd have twelve different hits. Every day, I look for that kind of song.

Michael has influenced so many artists, some of whom are picking up on the grandeur and showmanship of his live performances. You can see his influence in his sister Janet, in Justin Timberlake, Usher, Britney Spears, and in Jennifer Lopez and Mariah Carey. You can see his influence in the dance moves -— the syncopated choreography — that a lot of young artists use. And a lot of them have picked up his work ethic. When you look at a Britney Spears production or a Justin Timberlake production, or if you look at an Usher production, you really see that they took a page out of Michael's book; they went to rehearsal, and they must've worked eight hours a day, because their shows are flawless, as Michael's shows were flawless.

There are many, many people who think of Michael as a spectacle, and it's sad. All of it has taken away from our ability to see him for the artist he really is. A world without Michael Jackson would be a very, very different world. And I think we should all feel very blessed that an artist of that caliber came into our lives, because he has enriched our lives.

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