The Mighty 55 -- Rock 'N Roll's Greatest

Counting Down The Greatest in Rock History

The Mighty 55 is a serial blog that I've been working on over the past 13 months.   I counted down the 55 historically most important acts, grading them on a 40-point scale, with 35 the top score, earned, as it happened, by the top 14 entries.

Of course there are genres like jazz and country that aren't covered here, save for a hat tip or two.  You have to draw the line somewhere.

I'll be referencing a few acts that came awfully close, and yet more that I've only just been introduced to.  All that at the end of our countdown.

On 2/18/18 (and again on 1/22/23)

New to list (green color)
Crossouts = moved to another space
Removed from list (red)

#55 - Jefferson Airplane My Morning Jacket

#54 - Indigo Girls

#53 - The Supremes Anna Ternheim

#52 - The Weavers Bonobo

#51 - Aretha Franklin Red Hot Chili Peppers

#50 - Alanis Morissette

#49 - Janis Joplin The Cranberries

#48 - Elton John Leon Russell

#47 - B. B. King

#46 - The Kinks

#45 - Carole King

#44 - Al Green

#43 - Traffic

#42 - Marvin Gaye

#41 - Radiohead

#40 - Sleater-Kinney Beth Orton

#39 - Donovan Muddy Waters

#38 - Chrissie Hynde

#37 - Thelonius Monk

#36 - Steely Dan

#35 - Emmylou Harris

#34 - Paul Simon

#33 - Eric Clapton Shook Twins

#32 - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

#31 - Sting

#30 - Stevie Wonder

#29 - The Doors David Bowie

#28 - David Byrne / Talking Heads

#27 - Peter Gabriel

#26 - R.E.M.

#25 - Fleetwood Mac

#24 - Leon Russell Niko Case

#23 - Crosby, Stills & Nash

#22 - Sly & The Family Stone

#21 - Linda Ronstadt

#20 - Eagles

#19 - Bob Dylan Aretha Franklin

#18 - Mark Knopfler / Dire Straits

#17 - Sarah McLachlan Jimi Hendrix

#16 - Pink Floyd

#15 - Django Reinhardt Neil Young

#14 - Santana Bob Dylan

#13 - Jimi Hendrix Dave Mathews Band

#12 - Neil Young Sarah McLachlan

#11 - The Allman Brothers Band

#10 - Joni Mitchell

#9 - Led Zepplin

#8 - Dave Matthews Band The Beatles

#7 - The Band Santana

#6 - The Beatles The Band

#5 - The Rolling Stones

#4 - The Grateful Dead

#3 - Bob Marley and the Wailers

#2 - U2

#1 - Your own fan favorite (mine: Natalie Merchant / 10,000 Maniacs)

A few that came close:

Van Morrison (honorary #56)

Blondie

Bonnie Raitt

Jackson Browne

The Who

Red Hot Chili Peppers (now on list)

James Brown

Credence Clearwater Revival

David Bowie (now on list)

Bo Diddley

Sam Cooke

Lovin' Spoonful

Muddy Waters (now on list)

And a few I've heard on the radio over the past year and liked, but haven't heard enough of to judge:

My Morning Jacket (now on list)

The Black Keys

Shook Twins (now on list)

Beth Orton (now on list)

Lucinda Williams

Bonobo (now on list)

Neko Case (now on list)

The Cranberries (now on list)

Karen O

Anna Ternheim (now on list)

Oh, That Revolution We Won

Say It Like The Big Boys Do

A puzzle I've often spoken about is how different our movie stars, sportscasters, news announcers, even politicians sound these days, compared to those of the 1950s and before.  

Here's the Atlantic's James Fallows on this huge shift in what we consider a style well-spoken:

        "It was a style of phony-British “Announcer Speak”
     that dominated formal American discourse from the 
     1920s to maybe the 1950s—and now has entirely   
     disappeared."

Except, my guess is that this staccato spit-fire, bowl-you-over style dates from the 19th century and before.  The speaker who used it was displaying an ability to 'say it like a big boy'.  Names, places, foreign languages, and certainly vocabulary, would all be readily available, without delay, to the mind in speech; appropriateness be damned.

This mastering of the spoken word would be analogous to the colonialism of the period.  It was the same stark, unexamined supply-and-demand that began with the needs of the 'superior' civilization, met with product, without appropriate second thought, from the lands of the 'inferior'.  

To return the analogy to speaking style, the speaker would speak rat-a-tat, forcing the words out with the self-knowledge of a prize fighter, reveling in his mastery.  But suitability, the self-fulfillment that comes from fitting beautifully the needs of a mate, a friend, another people, an artful world, that was absent, or tended to be walled off into a separate compartment labelled variously: 'religion', 'buddies', 'marriage'.  

Which is why, given the end of the colonial era, the rise of the environmental movement, women's rights, civil rights, even the historic preservation movement, we began to speak differently, too.

Update: Fallows expands on his original post, quoting feedback he received from his readers.  The most likely explanation for the style in question seems to be the use of primitive microphones in the early years of sound recording that demanded enunciation and clarity.  While this may be a contributing factor, I stand by the above explanation. 

   

We Tend To Reflect Our Surroundings

Majestic Nature Matters

Here's a photo that shows how a society with a greater focus on the natural world approaches art.  It shows my mother's father's hand-painted birth announcement from Osaka, Japan in the late 1880s.  It projects a natural balance.

It also illustrates a point.  Our unconscious, from childhood, reflects the world around us.  And as the world has modernized, it's lost the perfectly locking puzzle pieces that are wilderness.  Instead, arbitrary straight lines and flat urban surfaces have taken over.  Likewise, societies have gradually switched over from nature-worship to institutionalized, man-made beauty in the form of religion, ceremony and art.  Its as if we were squaring a circle that, as a guide, is gradually fading.

At first this was likely successful, since wild remnants could always be found and revered, giving rise to hybrid forms of wild and human beauty like the above birth announcement.  Here, for example, are what look like two puzzle-pieces in a single landscape: forest and grassland.  On closer inspection we find that they're actually two types of moss on a forest floor.  So the original old-growth forest and flowering prairie may be gone, but if we look hard, even in this modern era, we find interlocking puzzle pieces to remind us of original wilderness.

Unknown, is what'll happen if natural inspiration becomes ever rarer.  And, worse yet, if the institutionalized, man-made order found in modern civilization is ever over-taken by over-crowded excess, disease and destructive conflict; what then?  In that light, the past few hundred years seem almost like an unwieldy experiment whose outcome is unknown and potentially disastrous.

Here's a visitor to Patriarch's Grove under Mount Rainier in Washington state, a place I visited on that same day.

What I'm proposing in these few paragraphs is that being with such splendor--in this case, ancient Douglas fir--would impact default patterns of unconscious / conscious reflection in a visitor's mind.  Instead of dwelling on disjointed minor details, the visitor would aim for the big-picture, and in a bold manner.

All of which might suggest that there's truth in Thoreau's line: "in wildness is the preservation of the world".

A final note: A recent study has found that the single biggest determinant for success in life, for those born into poverty, is not parenting, but whether the poor get lucky and grow up in a community with good schools and nice neighbors.  Which would suggest that we actually do, to a certain extent, reflect our surroundings.

My Little Twitter Idea

No, Not The Big One

That's right, I've got a big, especially interesting idea for social media.  I wrote about it on Feb. 25th, '15 with my 171st tweet:

Q: Will my 'next-social-media' idea pan out?  A: Can't say or it'd no longer be mine.  No Catch-22, just write a teaser check; teaser reply.  

This thing I've just thought up is instead my little twitter idea.  'Little' in comparison, and best used on Twitter, though it might work on another platform.

Actually, wait a minute, why am I writing this?  If the idea is good enough, and I think it is, and it's not going to save or improve lives, other than being fun, challenging and strangely addictive (in a status-driven context), why not hang on to it and maybe I'll be able to use it in some fantastic future that I couldn't possibly imagine in present-day 2015?  

Why not?  Because it might be the door to that fantastic future.  After all, you have to start somewhere.

Yeah, maybe so.  Hey, wait, what if I reveal an even teensier idea--an appetizer to the appetizer?  Surely that's all very possible since it's likely not an original idea.  So here goes:

Woe is the newspaper business.  The classified ad section (formerly a big money-maker for the industry) has been downsized thanks to on-line versions.  And the younger generation gets its news in other ways.  And... I know.  I follow the number of free, all-ad tabloids distributed to non-newspaper-subscribing households in my town from one week to the next (that's because I deliver them in mailboxes and the bundles I receive each week have a total for my route that I can track).  Many borderline subbers tend to let their subscriptions lapse, then wait for a 'special offer' from the publisher to re-subscribe.  Others read a copy at work and are not subscribers.  And while the slide in subscribers may be leveling off in our town, as our newspaper learns how to fight back, the future doesn't look good.

Lately, I've noticed our paper containing considerably more local stories.  "What's that construction project on such-and-such street"; the kind of thing you might call your local, lowest-rung elected official about.  So, they're on the right track.  My idea is simply a furthering of that trend.

Here it is: 
Have an on-line address that accepts ideas for stories that contain opinion.  There'd be two categories.  One for short, tweet-length observations:
* "That photo on page #1 was so good; did you see the little doggie?" 
* "Saw a young kid at the Mall; is there something about holes in pants that makes sense?" 
* "I don't like that billboard on such-and-such street"
* "You've got to see the community theater doing X...."  

The other category would be for longer pieces tied to the current issue, or to a topic fresh in the public mind.  These would be several paragraphs, and unlike the shorter, brief bits, could earn the writer more than his/her name in the paper, though the amount paid would likely be but a token, maybe an extension on one's subscription.  

And because opinions can be dangerous for a publisher, these longer pieces would be on-line only, accessible with a subscriber's password.  They'd thus generate interest in the paper, yet not require space, per se, while also avoiding any question of advocacy, since they would qualify as something like a letters-to-the-editor section.

As with the comments in most on-line fora, writers would have their opinions ranked by 'thumbs up', 'neutral', and 'thumbs down', with the ups appearing first in the reader's feed and the 'downs' buried for all but the most dedicated reader.  These opinions would also be categorized, with Sports, Personalities, Community, Politics, Education and The Arts, being possible categories.

Trusted writers who reach a certain level of output are posted immediately.  Others are vetted, problems are flagged, ...the usual.

Ideally, a subscriber reads the newspaper, then heads for the on-line version where opinions are offered and chatter enhances the original reading experience.

Initially, newspapers may have a role in encouraging their on-line chatter--getting the ball rolling.  Eventually, though, there'd be very little to do, as natural leaders would likely emerge to fulfill a moderator's role.

Yeah, I know, that's not very exciting.  But I guarantee you my 'little' and my 'big' ideas are many times more interesting.

I Can't Hear You!

The First Goth Ball

For all these years a portrait on the wall has stared calmly down at me whenever we've had enough people in the house to have a party in the dinning room.

Except for an explanatory note taped to the back, that I typed up about 25 years ago, I hadn't thought much of this print of Holbein's Duchess of Milan:

Dad and I recently looked up the relevant passage in my mother's father's unpublished autobiography and found that on a visit to Gõttingen, Germany in 1912, while studying in the UK, he had purchased the above for 12.50 DM (then, the equivalent of $3.00).

Had that been the end of it, well, that's all very interesting.  But then we looked up just who was the Duchess of Milan and found that she was originally Princess Christina of Denmark, who was married off at the age of 12 to the Duke of Milan; her 'husband' then died the next year.  Again, this would be interesting in itself.  But it gets really interesting when we discover that when she was 16, England's Henry VIII had her portrait drawn by Holbein (on March 12th, 1538) with the intention of perhaps choosing her as his next wife.  In response, she wore her mourning clothes and had her rooms in Brussels draped in black; and, if one looks closely, there is a delicate arrangement to the fingers to note.  She is rumored to have said of the situation: "If I had two heads, one should be at the King of England's disposal".  Henry pursued the match (upon seeing her portrait for the first time, it is said that he was so happy he had his musicians play all day--this is understandable, as she has an intelligent look about her), but Christina's guardian, her aunt, Mary of Hungary, did not approve and, besides, Christina had strong ties to the Lutheran church.

The Duchess marries again, four years later (to the man who was originally to marry Henry's fourth wife, Anne).  He then dies and she is left to raise a son and two daughters as regent of Upper Lorraine. Her children, incidentally, become the ancestors of many of the royal bloodlines of Europe.

If you're wondering, the cuttings in the above photo are of pink dogwood.

A Boardgamer's Concise Manifesto

What Makes A Boardgame Great

Each year hundreds of boardgames appear on the market (here's a list of the most popular).  Most people don't know about these games because boardgame aisles only have Monopoly, Battleship and Clue for sale.  Meanwhile, dozens of new boardgame publishers appear each year, many to hawk self-published titles which are money-losing and time-wasting for all involved.  So, here's a handy guide to finding the occasional diamond in the rough.

#1: Is it Fun?  This criterion eliminates most kiddie games like Candyland, and most self-published games that weren't first tested, then revised, then retested by professionals working for game publishers.  Beyond this, everyone has their own tastes (see mine below).

#2: Does it speak to you?  If there's only one other person in your life who likes to play boardgames, don't buy a game that can't be played by two.  If you don't like to be reminded about war, or disease, or nasty creatures, or frightening space aliens, don't buy games with those thematic settings.

#3: Just looking at it, is it captivating?  Sure, some popular games like checkers and chess have boards that are plain checkerboards.  But wonderfully designed boards are the first step on the way to an exciting world drawing you in.

#4: Have you enjoyed playing it?  That's right, you can attend a convention, try out games that look good, and buy after you play.  Here's a list of convention resources.

..........

And what game categories interest me?  Here I whittle away at the tens of thousands of boardgames published in the past 50 years:

* No disturbing images, objectives or settings.  This eliminates war, horror and colonialism as game categories.

* 2-player games are preferred.  I don't care for the relationship struggle that means favoring one opponent over another.  I'd rather focus all my energies on crafting a 'win', rather than being fair and civil to everyone.

* Beautiful boards!  If I'm staring at it for an hour or so, I like to open my eyes wide and soak in the image.

* Crafting.  It takes skill to start with a subject like a high school dance and not only make a game that's fun, but artfully include the characters in attendance, the music played, the food/drinks consumed, the clothes characters are wearing and what those characters are allowed to do at the dance.  Then, it takes imagination to raise the game to a higher level, by, for example, creating shifting personalities (a wallflower becomes the center of attention), song requests, illegal booze/penalty, even different venues at the school (bathroom, dance floor, behind stage, parking lot, janitorial closet, etc.)

This last criterion, of raising a design to a higher level, is where much of my winnowing occurs.  There are many games where a designer has invented a new way to play cards, roll dice, arrange tiles, rank turn order, etc.; has sketched out something of a mechanical drawing to show how the idea works; and then casts about for a subject to tack on.  Sometimes the fit is surprisingly good; usually it isn't, though; and sometime it's woefully inadequate.  A favorite for game designers who like to tack on thematic settings after the fact are fantasy, space and other imaginary realms where there are none of reality's constraints.

I prefer games that begin with a subject and develop a game idea around the setting.  This is much harder to do well, because it's very tempting to take shortcuts, rather than hone the same design for years, until fun is maximized and depth absolute.

My Favorite Web Links

A window on my worldview.  

My favorite writers on the web and links to them:

#1:  Paul Krugman.  More followers than just about anyone on Twitter, he combines Economics wizardry with a gift for explanation, and adds wit for leavening.  Hard to beat his devastating ability to call out the wrong-headed while also owning up to his own minor errors.  A columnist for the New York Times.    Link

#2:  James Fallows.  While his blog posts can be on topics that don't especially interest me (airplanes), when he does write about public policy, including foreign policy, especially China, where he lived, his writing is as reasonable and well thought out as can be found anywhere.  Associated with the Atlantic magazine.   Link

#3:  Kevin Drum.  His interests are about as broad as can be imagined.  Again, well-thought-out, logically limber arguments that leave that magical feeling of wonder at the end.  Occasional swear words must be endured, but otherwise an absolute joy.  At Mother Jones magazine.   Link

#4:  Radio Paradise.  My go-to site for music, which is writing for the ear.  The husband and wife who run this site have usually excellent taste in music, mixing world music and the occasional jazz and classical music selection with a majority of recent release masterpieces, plus golden oldies.  The golden oldies seem to be the most popular, judging from listener rankings.  There is also a discussion board and comments section.   Link 

#5: Alex Voltaire.  An American professor of history who teaches in Singapore, Alex is a friend from way back who is consistently interesting and has inspired my own writing.  His ranking of US presidents is excellent.  His work on Rock 'N Roll acts has gained a wide following.  Note the tabs for these super categories at the top of his Northumbrian Countdown site.    Link 

#6: Alison Tyler.  Another personal friend, her writing on the granular level is what I strive for, and what outshines all the others on this list; but, one does have to ignore Tyler's main focus, which is erotica, and rather enjoy her writer's instincts.  This is easily done, however, using her twitter account, a good place to find the captivating nugget emerging from that all but lost mother lode.   Link 

#7: Cecil Adams.  The columnist behind the intriguing, funny and cool The Straight Dope has been "fighting ignorance since 1973" with his brand of laid-back expertise.  For example:  "If you handle baby birds, will their parents shun them (apparently not)?"    Link

#8: Nancy LeTourneau.  The Washington Monthly magazine's blog, Political Animal, has at its helm a new weekday blogger who is not only a woman, but is probably the closest to come to my own politics. Link

#9 Ta-Nehisi Coates.  A difficult childhood has been overcome with writing skills which have blossomed into something awesome.  His experience learning French, as an adult, helped set me on the path to playing around on the piano.  His recent piece on how 'friends' have inadvertently disclosed to the world where he lives, is also terrific.  A writer for the Atlantic magazine.   Link 

#10 Ezra Klein.  Originally with the Washington Post, Klein has now started Vox, which is an interesting, cutting-edge and consistently well-written site.  Sarah Kliff is the resident expert on health care, for example.     Link