YOU WILL NEED BOOKS

You know the rule: One entry per artist. Links to #81–200 at the end.

80 Travelin’ Man by Rick(y) Nelson (1961)

Rick is 21! the album declares right there in the title, desperate in a pay-no-attention-to-the-men-behind-the-curtain way for us to forget little Ricky Nelson the child radio star. For the last 13 (!) years, Ricky had played a strange fictionalized doppelganger of himself on the arch-square sitcom Ozzie and Harriet (the names of his parents, of course). For over half his life he’s been just an annoying younger brother. Today he is Rick.

It’s easy to make fun of someone who grew up in public. Rick Schroder will tell you how hard it is to lose the Ricky. This is incredibly unfair, of course. “As if Elvis’s folks were any cooler! At least Ozzie could play the sax.”1 By 1961 Rick Nelson had already made at least one real movie and a bunch of good country pop sides. He’d keep putting out good music well into the ’70s. I’m not here to take anything from Rick Nelson! He quite explicitly learned that he couldn’t please everybody so he elected to please himself, and it went well for him!

So is it weird if I say that this, his finest ’sixties moment, is square, and that it is great precisely because Nelson himself is square? Unlike Dave Dudley, who sang essentially the same song (#132), Nelson cannot convey heart-breaking caddishness let alone the jaded weariness of a world traveler. I’m not claiming that a performer doesn’t motor around, nor that the Nelsons didn’t have groupies; what do I know? I just mean he doesn’t sell it. He’s completely unbelievable! The song is clearly a series of lies! Berlin, despite, what Rick would have us believe, is not known for being a port city.

But a lothario bragging about his sexual conquests would have made a much worse song! “Travelin’ Man” is great because it’s clearly about a dweeb fantasizing about the day he’ll be able to drive to the mall in his second-base-mobile. That’s an interesting song! And it doesn’t hurt that Ricky is a smooth singer, either!

79 I Do by The Marvelows (1966)

Does this song even have lyrics? Who cares! It’s a doo-wop song, so 0% of its virtue lies in the words while 100% lies in its driving energy.

Wikipedia says The Marvelows composed this as a “show warm-up song” and—yes, it does indeed get me warmed up.

Surely this must be one of the last doo-wop songs to be a top 10 R&B hit?

78 Baby, It’s You by The Shirelles (1961)

Unlike other girl groups of the day, The Shirelles (the first of them all, o.c.) had a sound marked by this brittleness, as though their songs had to be held gently or they’d crack open. I have probably failed to convey accurately what I mean, and it probably only applies to their early years. Anyway, among their many great recordings, “Baby, It’s You” stands out for its full, almost Spectory background, with that rattling drum coming in as the other instruments retreat.

P.S.: I apologize for all the times I made fun of Burt Bacharach!

77 The Vatican Rag by Tom Lehrer (1965)

Tom Lehrer is really a product of the 1950s. His concerns are Eisenhower-era concerns, and most of his best songs are from his ’50s recordings; in fact, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Elements,” “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” “Masochism Tango,” and “Oedipus Rex”—probably his top five, if not in that order, all come from his 1959 album More of Tom Lehrer (and also his 1959 live album An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer—it’s the same set list on both!).

But even if he peaked in 1959, he still had quite a career ahead of him, writing excellent funny songs for an educational children’s program (The Electric Company) and a satirical news program (That Was the Week That Was). After TW3 (as they call it) ended, Lehrer issued a record of some of the songs he’d written for the program, their topicality rendering each more or less opaque to audiences of the future, but containing some real gems, such as “New Math,” “So Long, Mom,” and this number, a response to Vatican II. Alas, 1965 was too early to make a Vatican II: The Revenge joke, but the lyrics are still at near-peak cleverness, rhyming, e.g. kyrie eleison with everybody say his own and abdomen with Roman.

Before he died, Lehrer, bless his kind heart, released all his recordings into the public domain, which means that you can listen to the link for this one, unlike any of the others, with a clean conscience. What a stand-up guy.

76 Jump in the Line by Harry Belafonte (1961)

My kids complain that I listen to calypso music all the time, which is not true. I spend a very small percentage of my time listening to calypso music, albeit perh. more than the median for my demographic (disaffected white US male); my preference is for calypso of the 1930s—the era of Wilmouth Houdini and Lord Invader and esp. Roaring Lion—when you don’t know whether a calypso song is going to be a straight gospel tune or a guy bragging about his cool clothes or a call for anticolonial arson, sabotage, and anarchy. But that’s all in retrospect. I only heard about Roaring Lion long after his death. I’m aware that for most of America, calypso started in 1956 when Harry Belafonte released Calypso, one of the best-selling albums of all time and the first to sell a million copies in a year. An inescapable cultural force at the time, Belafonte was satirized as Shoeless Pashly (“king of the bongo drums” in Uncle Scrooge #20…

…but alas fame is fleeting, and by the twenty-first century Shoeless Pashly would be remembered as Disney’s satire on Elvis. Maybe the mythical average American has no idea what calypso means nowadays; but if the word has any meaning, it’s probably synonymous with Harry Belafonte. But Harry Belafonte was more than calypso: He appeared in several movies, at least one of which was great; political activist etc.; and Belafonte sang a lot of songs and many of them weren’t even calypso! Often he was just doing “oldies adult contemporary.”

But sometimes, like this song, he was calypso as heck! I first heard this one in my youth in the movie Beetlejuice and it never left my brain. Belafonte’s finest hour, surpassing even his more famous banana boat standard. You can tell me that that girl is “the reason for aviation” and all I can say is “okay, I believe you.”

75 Walk like a Man by The Four Seasons (1963)

I won’t be the first to point out that Frankie Valli sings “walk like a man” in the least manly of voices. In fact, the whole production feels almost like a novelty tune—is anyone singing on this one not joking? That level of fun is what propels this track, for me, ahead of The Four Seasons’ other (excellent) hits.

74 Jackie by Scott Walker (1967)

There’s absolutely nothing in the world I know less about than intellectualized midcentury Belgian showtunes, but here we are—there was once a guy named Jacques Brel? Anyway, one of his songs got covered in 1968 by Scott Walker, and that song is the supremely weird “Jackie.”

If I had banks on every finger,
A finger in every country,
And all the countries ruled by me
I’d still know where I’d want to be:
Locked up inside my opium den
Surrounded by some Chinamen.
I’d sing the song that I sang then
About the time they called me “Jackie.”

It’s really important that people call him “Jackie,” guys! The lyrics are surreal enough, but the whole thing comes with an overproduced horn-heavy arrangement that sounds something like Tom Jones and something like the apocalypse. It’s one of a kind and it’s beautiful.

73 Snoopy vs. the Red Baron by The Royal Guardsmen (1966)

The first (unreleased) version of this song was educational…meaning it had a Red Baron in it but no Snoopy, as befits most accounts of the Great War. It went nowhere. But that was before Charles Schulz had introduced the WWI flying ace to the Peanuts comic strip; once Snoopy started this particular fantasy life, though, the songwriters (Gernhard and Holler) dusted off the old gem, added some new, beagle-centric verses, and gave it to struggling local band The Royal Guardsmen. Suddenly the Guardsmen had a #2 pop hit and had also entered a strange hell in which they were compelled to release Snoopy-themed novelty content periodically, climaxing (bathosizing?) in 2006’s “Snoopy vs Osama.”

Some of those follow-up tracks are actually good (some not), but nothing matches the first one, a sprightly march into history. The music is great, but this is one of those rare instances where the story is great, too. I first heard the song when I was around seven years old, and let me tell you, it was tense. That’s good action!

The German count-up at around the 23-second mark is sublime.

72 The Lion Sleeps Tonight by The Tokens (1961)

“In the space ship, the silver space ship, the lion takes control,” They Might Be Giants sang…

It’s effortlessly parodyable, but it’s also one of the great hooks of the 1960s. A cover of a Pete Seegar cover of a South African pop song…honestly, that sounds fake, like the kind of marketing nonsense some exec dreamed up because there’s a lion in the song’s title, but apparently it’s true, and you can listen to Solomon Linda and The Evening Birds’ 1939 original, which is (in the nature of covers and sources) different but excellent in its own right.

So the Tokens (aka Neil Sedaka’s old band) gave it English lyrics (with no space ship) and a modified melody and it hit #1, which was the capstone of the Tokens’ career. People who received no songwriting credit include: Solomon Linda and The Tokens.

71 Love’s Gonna Live Here by Waylon Jennings (1964)

Did Waylon Jennings ever (excluding some hypothetical Songs from The Dukes of Hazzard album of my dreams) put out a better record than JD’s? Apparently the title is actually Waylon Jennings at JD’s, JD’s being the name of the bar Jennings played at, but it just says JD’s on the cover…what do I know?

Anyway, the record collects songs Jennings had been playing and perfecting night after night, and his cover of Buck Owen’s record-breaking chart topper (it sat the champion-longest time at the top of the country charts until dethroned in 2013 by the always invincible Taylor Swift) is a better-than-Buck highlight.

70 The Girl Who Stood Beside Me by Bobby Darin (1966)

Bobby Darin was well above 21 when the ’60s got into gear, but he occupies some of the same space as Ricky Nelson above, a teeny-bopper rocker who’s grown up. More of a rocker than Nelson ever was, Darin may have had to mature more to put out a song this mellow and gentle—but he had more time!

But not much more time. In a couple of years Darin would grow up faster than ever as he watched RFK get gunned down before his very eyes by a Rosicrucian. Then he learned his sister was his mother. Then he fell over dead. It wasn’t even drugs!

69 Suspicious Minds by Elvis Presley (1968)

My all-time favorite Elvis song, by far, is “Tomorrow Night” which was, I had been assured, released in 1965 and therefore a shoo-in for (a better place on) this list. Only later did I realize that the version I like is the understated 1954 unreleased recording for Sun, which in 1965 got a post-hoc slick production with more instruments and vocals and it’s too crowdy! No good! I mean, usually I’d just cheat for a 1954 song released in 1965, but it’s not even the same song! The good one was never released in the ’60s!

So instead, by default, take late-’60s comeback Elvis.

68 There’s Something on Your Mind by Bobby Marchan (1960)

When erstwhile female impersonator Bobby Marchan—one of his first labels signed him under the misapprehension that he was in fact a lady—put out this double-sided single, he made the first half a relatively conventional cover, and then it goes…

Are there spoiler warnings on songs? Should I say this is a spoiler?

Because halfway through the song, Marchan starts some intermittent spoken word sections—usually deadly to any song, but somehow these are good (by which I mean repeat-listenable). They tell the story of how Marchan’s girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend, so he shoots the friend. Not the girlfriend, though, because (as Bobby says, using the second person as though this happens to all of us) “if you shoot her, all of your love in your long lifetime will be gone forever.” But then “just as you make it up in your mind to forgive her, here comes another one of your best friends through the door.” (Bear in mind this is all spoken, without even the benefit backdrop of music.) So then you really do shoot her, and as she’s dying you lean down to get her last words…

And her last words are perfect. This song is brilliant!

67 Party Lights by Claudine Clark (1962)

Another one-hit wonder, whence and whither come again who knows, but before she went, Clark delivered a side that provides 100% what rock and roll should provide: teenage agony treated seriously and with the driving, relentless energy of seething and barely repressed rebellion. “They’re doing the Twist, the Fish, the Mashed Potato, too—I’m here looking at you [, mom]!”

66 Pack Up Your Sorrows by Mimi & Richard Fariña (1965)

Three tragedies:

1935: Sidney Smith signes a contract making him the highest-paid cartoonist in America. On his way home from signing, he crashed his car and dies.
1940: A play named after Eileen McKenny (My Sister Eileen) is about to open on Broadway and McKenny is invited to the premiere. On her way to the airport her husband crashes the car and she and he both die.
1966: Richard Fariña is celebrating the release of his first and only novel and…

Look, it doesn’t go well for Richard Fariña. Don’t get too excited on a vehicle is perhaps the lesson here. Fariña left behind that novel, a young widow, and the two albums she and he collaborated on. It’s on the first of the two albums that we get their finest moment, a duet (as so many of theirs are) between one pleasant-but-confused and one ridiculously soprano voice. It’s poppier and more accessible than most of their slim discography, and everyone chooses this one! Once again I feel bad to pick the obvious choice!

Both Richard and Mimi Fariña are larger-than-life revolutionary figures, not always but sometimes for causes I’d support. Maybe I should have started with that. Anyway, “Pack Up Your Sorrows” is great!

65 Philosophy of the World by The Shaggs (1969)

“Science proved it years ago: The Shaggs were much better than The Beatles.”

Music as outsider art rests on two pillars and one (we’ll get to the other one later) is The Shaggs. Three sisters utterly incapable of singing or playing music, forced into a studio by their delusionally eager father to record their own insane compositions…

I remember thinking, when I first heard the Shaggs, that the Wiggin sisters must have never heard pop music before, must have been unfamiliar with its conventions. Well, in some CD liner notes Dot Wiggin explains that the family always had the radio on. They knew! They knew what songs were like! The Shaggs just failed, when it was time to make their own music, Molyneux’s Problem!

So many great songs, but I picked “PotW”—no other song not written by Brian Wilson has ever been simultaneously this ambitious and this innocent. Some of the philosophy is debatable, and perhaps the rich people don’t care much for what the poor people have, but who can argue with: “you can never please anybody in this world”?

64 Let’s Stick Together by Wilbert Harrison (1962)

In 1959, Wilbert Harrison hit the #1 spot on both the pop and R&B charts with what is is probably the best of many versions of “Kansas City,” but his momentum was stymied by some kind of contract shenanigans, which proved fatal to his career. It would be ten years before he had another top 40 hit, 1970’s “Let’s Work Together.”

“Let’s Work Together” is just an inferior (and loose) remake of one of Harrison’s earlier, neglected singles—this one, 1962’s “Let’s Stick Together.” The backing track is…I want to say raunchy? Gritty? It’s almost like a rusty gate? You’ve heard it before, but never quite like this, and Harrison’s pulpit-pounding vocals are a perfect contrast.

Accept no 1970 substitute! Stick with the original!

63 Needles and Pins by The Searchers (1963)

Jackie “What the World Needs Now Is Love” de Shannon gives it a great performance on the original recording, but this song needs that Merseybeat jangly guitar and those hiccuping vocals (“run awayay”). The barely decipherable “huttinuh! huttinuh!” before the bridge is, admittedly, clearer when de Shannon genderflop sings it: “hurting him! hurting him!”

62 The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel (1969)

This inescapably iconic ’60s duo is often too airy-fairy for me (if you know what I mean; not gay but the other thing), but not even Paul Simon’s literary lyrics can spoil this banger. In fact, for once they work together, the poetic pocketfuls of mumbles and the cameos by various ridiculous instruments (including Hal Blaine’s snare drum) and the general overproduction adding up to something genuinely epic.

61 Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969)

Speaking of inescapable…CCR rode out of the ’60s and into the ’70s with a string of indispensible hits. Some are just plain fun, some are dead serious, and this one is both! Usually touted as an antiwar song, “Fortunate Son” is really a protest against everything: hypocrisy, class, militarism, patriotism, whatever you’ve got. For extra fun, they never say the song’s title until…the…very…end.

you will not regret reading this book

1. Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The greatest (and most paranoid) SF movie from a decade with a bunch of good SF movies—featuring the most versatile of all alien metaphors. “They seem to be going through the motions of being humans without really meaning it or understanding it,” Daniel Pinkwater writes in Lizard Music, and you know whom he’s referring to, don’t you? He’s referring to them!

I mean Communists.

2. The Burmese Harp

Peak Japanese humanist cinema (perhaps not literally; there’s always The Human Condition) about WWII Japanese soldiers who will-they or won’t-they surrender. The 1950s is the decade of the Japanese film, and I deliberately chose a year that wouldn’t make me look like a complete nutjob (unlike, say, 1954).

3. The Killing

This movie would rate even higher if it were not for the unnecessary and gauche voice-over. Still a favorite noir.

4. Street of Shame

Ayako Wakao (from Floating Weeds) and Machiko Kyo (from Rashomon…and also Floating Weeds) lead an ensemble cast in this detailing of the director’s extremely ambivalent feelings on prostitution. The film comes across ultimately as con, but Mizoguchi—I remember him described somewhere with the painfully awkward phrase: “an avowed goer of brothels”—can’t help but let his giddiness leak in, which of course saves the film from being a preachy piece of kitsch.

5. The Man Who Knew Too Much

Perhaps it’s not as tight as the 1934 version of the film but Hitchcock’s remake of his own movie is more spectacular, with the most clean-cut cast imaginable (Doris Day & Jimmy Stewart!) tangled up in Cold War jet-setting (from Morocco to England!). I saw this in the theater with my grandmother, who screamed at one point, giving me insight into what it must have been like to watch movies back in the day with a non-jaded audience.

Has another director ever remade his own B&W flick as a color one years later? The answer is yes, by strange coincidence, when Kon Ichikawa remade #2 above in 1985.

6. The Bad Seed

A campily horrid little adaptation of a campily horrid little book. Another case of the Hays Code “rebeccafying” a book’s perfectly good plot, but here, perhaps, the ending is ridiculous enough that it works on its own (campy, horrid) level.

7. Forbidden Planet

The Tempest in space. This, the paradigmatic “smart” SF film, is of course not actually so smart, but it sure is pulpy, and that’s even better! It’s a rare movie that can compete with pulp on its own terms and not look clownish!

8. Crazed Fruit

A Japanese Less Than Zero, with bored, disaffected youths whose horrible lives are, of course, objectively much better and more exciting than mine has ever been. Ultimately, though, the movie spirals out of disaffection and towards something noirish and interesting.

9. Bus Stop

Marilyn Monroe is a good actress. Who knew?

10. Crime of Passion

Perhaps not, by some definitions of the word good, even the best (goodest?) Barbara Stanwyck movie of the year (because There’s Always Tomorrow), nevertheless this movie does something that few films of the ’50s do, which is keep you guessing. Is it a screwball romantic comedy about flirty crimesolvers? Is it an existential piece about a desperate housewife crushed beneath the weight of Cheeverian suburbia? Or is it, you know, crazed fruit? I defy anyone to guess the ending of this movie from the first fifteen minutes.

N.B.: CoP had its US release in 1957, but I go by the IMDB year which honors the fact that it debuted in the UK December 28, 1956.

P.S.: That’s right! I don’t like The Searchers! That ending is so absurd it’s almost so-bad-it’s-good—except the movie’s already been canonized as good-good and not bad-good, so I can’t even enjoy that part!

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Now we’re getting to the good stuff! Hey, it’s all been good stuff, but you know what I mean. Links to #101–200 down at the bottom.

100 Rendezvous with You by The Desires (1960)

Just five teenagers from New York City (one had just moved there from Rochester) singing streetcorner harmonies (over presumably studio musicians).

The Desires were only together for three years, but this side, with Robert “Bootsie” White belting “I want to rendezvous with you” into that break in the music guarantees them immortality. And it’s under two minutes (always a plus!)! Short and sweet, just like the lifespan of The Desires.

99 Monster Mash by Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Crypt Keepers (1962)

Those halcyon days when a pure novelty song (not the last we’ll encounter) could become a number one hit! “Monster Mash” is a catchy rock tune, an opportunity to impersonate both Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and the first1 all-monster team-up of the sort that would become faddish a few years later in Mad Monster Party? (1967) or Groovie Goolies (1970–72).

98 The Narrow Way Part 3 by Pink Floyd (1969)

1969 saw Pink Floyd sandwiched between two other identities: They had started as a vehicle for Syd Barrett’s twee imagination and would, in the 1970s, become anthemic AOR rockers. In between they were a jam band. (I know I’m oversimplifying.) And as a jam band in 1969 they came up with their worst idea for an record at least until Momentary Lapse of Reason: I’m talking about Ummagumma, a double album with one disk being just four extended jams and the other disk being…the even worse idea.

Instead of operating as, you know, a band the four members of Pink Floyd made a whole disk of solo projects. And I do mean solo: The poor drummer had no recourse but to release seven-minutes of drums (his wife played flute in brief bookends). You do not want to listen to this.

Of course, some instruments sound better on their own, and some members of PF are better at playing multiple instruments, so not every track is unlistenable. I know some Beatles albums are made up of “solo” tracks; I guess the idea could work, although it does seem like a strange way to squander the concept of a band. The sad truth is most of the songs on the second half of Ummagumma are just not very good, with perhaps a lukewarm Waters exception, and…somehow David Gilmour came up with this track, the third part of his contribution and the most hauntingly beautiful piece he’d ever write.

97 We All Make the Flowers Grow by Lee Hazlewood (1963)

Lee Hazlewood won’t be the only ’60s musician to get better in the ’70s (in fact if I were to do a list like this for the 1970s, Hazlewood would have the #1 spot); for Lee in the 1960s you probably think of him as a producer or songwriter or someone who duetted with Nancy Sinatra or Ann-Margret. But he put out some solid solo work as well, including, early in the decade, a strange concept album, Trouble Is a Lonesome Town, which is what we’re visiting right now.

Trouble is something like a more benign version of Hazlewood’s 1972 album 13, each track introducing a character in trouble (and, o.c., in Trouble). Each also features a somewhat ponderous little spoken word introduction: Sometimes these are clever (“Trouble is little and it’s lonesome; you won’t find it on any map; but you can take three steps in any direction and you’re there”) and sometimes they are overlong. The one for “We All Make the Flowers Grow” is overlong, but I’m not taking points off for that. I just know to start the track 1:05 in.

And what a track! It’s simpler (and more explicitly country) than a lot of his later work, just a rhythm guitar for most of the song, but simple is good, especially for a light-hearted song about death. “Please don't blame me, I didn't start this mess,” Hazlewood sings (speaking as the town undertaker). “You’ll never get out of this world alive.”

96 Hey, Little Cobra by The Rip Chords (1963)

The single greatest car song not to be recorded by The Beach Boys or Jan & Dean (although it does feature future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, because there is no escaping fate). The opening acapella “Hey, Little Cobra, don’t you know you're gonna shut ’em down?” (repeated throughout the song) is cool enough to earn the song this slot on its own.

95 They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa! by Napoleon XIV (1966)

Insofar as there is a genre of music called dementia, this song was its apotheosis for over a decade (until it was dethroned by “Fish Heads”). The two tracks share a lot beyond just being weird—especially a contempt for the very concept of musicality. “Monster Mash” was a novelty song, but it was primarily a song. “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!” (like “Fish Heads”) asks you to imagine a world in which music has never progressed beyond some kind of rhythmic chanting, a literal madman bashing literal pots.

This was a #3 pop hit, people! The 1960s were strange!

94 She Cried by Jay and the Americans (1961)

Jay and the Americans had a bunch of great hits in the mid to late 1960s with a different frontman (who had to change his name to Jay in some kind of Ramones-style initiation), but for my money nothing they recorded could ever touch this dirge, their first hit, with its guilt-drenched atmosphere slowly marching to doom. Now that’s good melodrama!

93 First Girl I Loved by The Incredible String Band (1967)

The early years of the rock era are so resolutely pitched at adolescents, its musical ripening so tied to youth culture, that it is disorienting to encounter a song that comes across as…mature. The bittersweet retrospective of a lost love, with an understanding that trade-offs are serious and “if I was lying near you now / I wouldn't be here at all”—i.e. these two lovebirds have lived whole lives apart and those lives would not have existed had they stayed together.

Simpler musically than ISB’s later material, more personal than its earlier—Robin Williamson must have written this song about his long-ago teenage love (“and you’ve turned into a grown-up female stranger”) when he was all of twenty-three or -four. Of course, the next year he became a Scientologist, so make of things what you will.

92 Throw It Out of Your Mind by Louis Armstrong (1965)

Who else could have a piece in the greatest hundred songs of a decade, decade after decade, for five decades in a row? Johnny Cash probably; Dolly Parton almost. But absolutely Louis Armstrong, whose Hot Five band dominated New Orleans jazz in the mid ’20s and who as a bandleader or solo artist kept cranking out the good stuff year after year. I’ll admit I don’t like what had happened to jazz by the 1960s—I’m not sure if jazz survived the Second Wold War any more than poetry survived the First—and even if some people managed to put out Big-Bandy material (Les & Larry Elgart, say), no one kept the old swinging flame alive like Armstrong.

Long before 1965 Armstrong had become something between a cultural icon and an elder statesman—I’d call him a cliche if he wasn’t still great. This recording comes from a Connie Francis movie I’ve never seen but which has a good soundtrack—Herman’s Hermits, Sam the Sham—from which this song is the plum. The lyrics are perfunctory, but Armstrong delivers them in his inimitable voice and they are the catchy capstone to a great jazz number.

91 No Time for Tears by Sam Hawkins (1960)

Sam Hawkins was predominantly a NYC nightclub singer who released occasional singles throughout the 1950s and ’60s. With his emotive showmanship and impressive vocal range, you’d’ve thought one would have caught on—but such was not to be. I really know very little about this guy.

But ars longa, vita brevis, and we still have the singles, my favorite of which is this carnivalesque march (that sounds oxymoroinic, but listen and you’ll know what I mean).

90 Outside of a Small Circle of Friends by Phil Ochs (1967)

Fifty Phil Ochs fans can’t be wrong, am I right? One of the innumerable ’60s folkies who never quite “made it” (however one measures that) Ochs tantalizingly bubbled just under the level of success, and maybe it drove him nuts. Joan Baez had a hit with one of his songs. And then “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends”—not pure folk—was rising in the charts, promising to be a hit, until some grundies objected to the passing mention of marijuana. DJs stopped playing the song, and it never charted.

More amazing is the fact that it ever threatened to! Ridiculous vaudeville instruments back a pitch-black sardonic song about apathy. The tone is set by the opening quatrain:

Look outside the window, there’s a woman being grabbed!
They’ve dragged her to the bushes, and now she’s being stabbed!
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain,
But Monopoly is so much fun. I’d hate to blow the game.

The song would get red-flagged now for its flippant view of violence, but even at the time its indictment of society should have been more controversial than the word marijuana.

89 The End of the World by Skeeter Davis (1962)

I believe this is the only single to hit the top five on the pop, R&B, country, and adult contemporary charts, and right from its Pachabelly opening you know you’re in for something at the very least ambitious. The song moves through 1962 strings to a very-country steel guitar, and…is that a musical saw?…but it never loses that ambition, which is to present a personal experience as literally apocalyptic. There has never been melodrama this melodramatic, and Skeeter Davis plays it straight throughout.

88 Sheila by Tommy Roe (1962)

Who says American rock ’n’ roll was dead in 1962? This song rocks as hard as any ’50s composition, although I’ll admit its place on this chart is probably due primarily to how much I love the way Tommy Roe sings “her name drives me insane.”

87 Yes, Mr Peters by Roy Drusky & Priscilla Mitchell (1965)

Certainly an evil song and almost a godawful kitsch song—nevertheless I cannot help but love it. I think it’s supposed to be a straightforward tale of sincere love, but it reminds be of one of Haven Hamilton’s songs from Nashville: simultaneously a great country tune and a sendup of the worst habits of great country tunes.

The schtick (in case you don’t know) behind this duet, which opens on a musique concrète / foley phone ring like a little skit, is that the two singers are having an affair they must conceal from Roy Drusky’s (or rather his character’s) wife. Priscilla Mitchell (or rather her character) has phoned Drusky and professes love, lust, and frustration, while Drusky, whose wife can hear his side of the conversation, pretends his ambiguous answers are responses to his boss, Mr. Peters. The song ends with Drusky leaving for an assignation with Mitchell, having successfully deceived his (explicitly understanding) wife into thinking he merely has a work assignment.

That’s awful! But art exists in a moral vacuum, and this is a great country tune, with the best part being Drusky’s hesitant, over-loving, and very weird way of singing, in a rising intonation, “Mr. Peters.” I mean, perhaps there is a sense in which the cutesyness is overpowering, but pop music is about big emotions expressed in a clunky or overwrought fashion. I love it!

86 Did She Mention My Name? by Gordon Lightfoot (1968)

It’s tough to pick one song for Gordon Lightfoot, but I ultimately settled on this one, a bridge between his earlier “pure” folk sound and the more poetic/introspective (one must say Dylanesque, although of course the comparison only goes so far) tone featured on his next year’s Sit Down, Young Stranger album.

“Did She Mention My Name?” is essentially the same song as #196’s “Homecoming,” only less subtle, so the question is: Why does one rank over a hundred places above the other?

I mean, maybe it’s just that Lightfoot is a better showman that Tom T. Hall. But also there’s something pleasantly plaintive about Lightfoot’s sad failure to keep his desire in check. He’s grilling an “old friend” from his “home town,” and wants to know if a certain someone (not Barbara Walker; we never get her name) there mentioned his name, and he brings it up constantly. He cannot stop asking this question. He cannot get a grip on himself.

His other questions are desperately stupid or inapposite (like the elaboration of a bad liar, as Hannibal Lecter might say), ranging from strangely specific and somewhat poetic questions about the weather (“Is the ice still in the river?” or “Is the old roof still leaking when the late snow turns to rain?”) to prosaic trivia: “Is the landlord still a loser? Do his signs hang in the hall?” is my favorite.

The result is a song that directs its clumsiness towards an artistic whole, something I’m not persuaded Lightfoot’s later, “artier” songs always achieve (and which Hall’s song, fails at; it is less clumsy, but its occasional clumsinesses just lie there).

85 Destination: Anywhere by The Marvelettes (1968)

Motown’s original teen phenoms The Marvelettes had trouble recapturing the fire of their first hit, the crossover #1 “Please Mr. Postman.” That’s hardly unusual, especially for the fickle 1960s, but the Marvelettes had gone all in, dropping out of high school; their lead singer was an orphan in the foster-care system who somehow got herself fostered by Berry Gordy’s sister (!). Any write-up about the Marvelettes seems to focus on the depressing fact that their time as Motown’s darlings was short, and other, more successful girl groups would soon eclipse them.

I guess that does sound depressing—but all that sad time The Marvelettes were putting out a string of great songs, several of which were better than, if never as popular as, the already excellent “Postman.” My favorite is this late piece, not a successful single and recorded after their long-time lead left, but nevertheless an artistic triumph. Here’s your great melodrama! The fantasy of escape from your misery via train almost sounds retro, ever for 1968, and the fact that our new lead can’t stop explaining to everyone (or at least a ticket agent and a train conductor) that she just wants to get away and why is wonderful.

How ominous a lyric is “This whole world ain’t got no back door”!

84 No Milk Today by Herman’s Hermits (1966)

Herman’s Hermits are usually the kings of dumb fun, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Their songs often sound like the soundtrack to a cartoon, and even the better ones feature a kind of music-hall moronocism. Head and shoulders above them all is this track, which manages for once to sound like it was recorded by a “real band” (again, that sounds worse than I intend it to), right from the ominous, “grown-up,” discordant opening.

“No Milk Today” has a special place in my heart as well because one of my kids used to love it when he was five years old; it was clear that he thought he understood what the song was about, when for at least two reasons this was quite impossible.

83 Men of Good Fortune by Lou Reed (1965)

You probably remember the story: how after Lou Reed’s death an envelope of old demo tapes turned up among his effects. In 2022 they (i.e. some record company) issued cleaned-up version of the old tapes. They’re great! Included are new (i.e. old) takes on old Reed favorites and some compositions of startling originality.

Best of all, though, is this composition of startling unoriginality. “Men of Good Fortune” sounds like an ancient ballad, like something from the Harry Smith Anthology, and Reed sings it straight, the way an Anthology singer would. The result is heartbreaking, and not even very Reedy—but that guy had a lot of tricks up his sleeve, and one more should be no surprise.

Unrelated to the song of the same title from Berlin.

82 These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ by Nancy Sinatra (1966)

I think I’m supposed to believe that Nancy Sinatra can’t sing, but really she only can’t sing compared to her father, which is a weird way of measuring things. No one has ever sincerely suggested that Frank Sinatra be the baseline against which singers get measured.

And anyway, I’d rather take Nancy over Frank any day of the week, especially for her string of great songs written by Lee Hazelwood. I always feel bad when I fall on the obvious choice, but “Boots” is so good, with its almost campy falling baseline, and that spoken-word ending, right before the horns—that’s magic!

81 The Boy from New York City by The Ad-Libs (1964)

Old songs about being cool can, as time passes on, become abstruse or inexplicable. In (for example) Fred Waring’s 1925 recording “Collegiate,” the college boys sing: “Garters are the things we never wear / And we don’t have any use for red hot flannel.” Thank you for sharing that, I guess? Like, same.

And just when you think The Ad-Libs are going to fall into something equally period-bound—“And he’s cute in his mohair suit”—they bring it back to the universal—“And he keeps his pockets full of spending loot.” The boy from New York City is for the ages. “He can dance and make romance,” and as he’s also rich what more is there?

As is so often the case in great ’60s pop, the lyrics may appear trivial but the music lets you, the listener, know that such trivialities are the most important things of all. Mary Ann Thomas sings a fierce lead with the male Ad-Libs doo-wopping behind her. “He’s the most from coast to coast.”

The Beach Boys recorded an excellent “response song” to remind us that NYC has girls, too.

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(If you find anything I say entertaining or enlightening, please check out the books I write, such as this collection of twenty alternate history scenarios, this new crime thriller novel, or this postmodern Pynchonean filth about NYC in 2003—a historical novel! Plus many more!)

120 Let’s Make the Water Turn Black by The Mothers of Invention (1968)

Zappa fans are a breed apart, and I can’t usually pick up what they’re laying down. There are a few exceptions, though, such as this irresistible little song about the strange pastimes of two young brothers. Apparently some killjoy (named Frank Zappa!) went ahead and decoded all the mysterious lyrics, but I prefer a little mystery here: In my mind, Kenny and his buddies are literally taking water and adding various disgusting household items to it until, you know, it turns black.

I guess the part about burning poots is pretty unambiguous and clear.

119 Trail to Mexico by Peter LaFarge (1963)

A genuine rodeo rider and folk singer, Peter LaFarge died young but left behind a legacy…perhaps mostly of songs he wrote (many of which, including “Ira Hayes,” his friend Johnny Cash later covered) but also of songs he recorded, like this great bitter cowboy ballad. In the stoic cowboy tradition, LaFarge sounds equanimous despite his hardships, climaxing in a faithless love.

Well, damn your gold and the bullets too!
God pity a woman who can’t prove true.
I’m heading back where the bullets fly,
And stay on the trail till the day I die.

Maybe I’m bad at reading people’s tones (empirically true), but LaFarge makes the experience sound so light-hearted and pleasant. Sign me up!

118 The Shoop Shoop Song by Betty Everett (1964)

I don’t know how had the idea of naming the song after the background nonsense syllables and not for the chorus hook, but it’s a genius move. The shooping is the best part of an already great song! The whole song is so up-tempo that it kind of rattles my nerves, but it really ratchets up in the…is that the bridge? It happens twice…are there two bridges? Well anyway, Betty Everett may as well be defusing a bomb the way I’m on the edge of my seat. I mean that as a compliment.

The background singers (the uncredited Opals, apparently) are really the co-stars of this record, and half its charm comes from the call-and-response, and Everett’s growing frustration: “You’re not listening to all I say!” Overall, the lyrics are superior to what you’d expect from a hit song of 1964: “That’s just his arms” is, in context, a genuinely funny line.

Note that the album this single derives from is, in fact, titled It’s in His Kiss.

117 We’re a Winner by The Impressions (1967)

Eventually Curtis Mayfield would take R&B down paths I couldn’t follow—too funky; too soulful—but before something goes too far there is generally a place where it goes just far enough, and that’s “We’re a Winner,” a rousing anthem complete with crowd cheers and weird grammar. Are we not winners? But surely this is a political message of unity.

The lyrics are some kind of postmodern game, insisting as they do, that:

We’ll just keep on pushing
Like your leaders tell you to

when of course it was The Impressions who told us, back in 1965, to keep on pushing. Meanwhile, the lyrics say that “we’re moving on up,” and indeed a solo Mayfield would “Move on Up” one year later. Maybe, if I had a more encyclopedic knowledge of the Impressions’ catalog, I’d be able to spin more connections out.

But, honestly, although I’m aware I’m supposed to listen to Impressions songs for the lyrics, they’re not Frank Gallup, so I don’t. I’m sure I’m missing a lot of political subtext (or, you know, text), but great art transcends politics. Great art is just soulful enough.

116 Higher Ground by Sarah & Maybelle Carter (1966)

You know these two, right? They’re cousins (who married brothers) from The Carter Family, that seminal and indispensable country group from the 1920s and ’30s. Everything about country music (except the Nudie Suits) that did not spring autochthonously from the soil of America came from The Carter Family. I can say without exaggeration that Maybelle Carter is if not the greatest guitarist in American music history (she’s probably more like #2 or 3), she is nevertheless the most influential.

Well, that was along time ago, and what are you going to do for us now, Carter Family? By 1966, one third of the original Carters was dead, but the other two thirds are back, baby! They were middle-aged to old, and honestly sounded older than they were, but they still sounded great; and they won’t be the last old-timey musical figure returned to the recording studio by the 1960s’ passion for old folk songs.

115 theme from Spider-man (1967)

I don’t really think of the 1960s as the Golden Age of TV theme songs, although The Andy Griffith Show, Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, It’s About Time, and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? all make a good argument I’m wrong. (I didn’t include the theme from The Brady Bunch on that list because the iconic version doesn’t appear until season two in 1970; sorry, Peppermint Trolley Company.) But I couldn’t just clutter this list up with TV theme songs, could I? I mean, It’s About Time is really tempting; yet I held strong.

Except when I caved; that blast of a jazz-horn opening leading right to the excited group chanting (from anonymous or semi-anonymous CDC session singers) of that unforgettable couplet. He does whatever a spider can!

I think this song succeeds because the anonymous or semi-anonymous CDC session singers almost make it sound like a real song, but not quite—it has a little of the Golden Records sound about it still. It’s like a juvenile trembling on the cusp of regular pop.

Note that the Bob Harris credited with co-writing this song is not the same as Bob Harras, alleged “nasty S.O.B.” and erstwhile EIC of Marvel Comics.

114 You Can’t Hurry Love by The Supremes (1966)

I think I undervalue The Supremes because, unlike some other major girl groups of the era (The Crystals, The Ronettes, even the Shirelles) they have no one or two transcendent songs, no single that just blows me out of the water. Nothing truly top notch. But what The Supremes do have is a deep catalog of second-notch songs, and they’re all really good and they all sound different! After the Ronettes burn through their best half-dozen songs, the quality starts to drop, but the Superemes’ repertoire, um, keeps hanging on. (Sorry.)

Anyway, which of their songs to choose is pretty arbitrary, and I kept changing it. Probably I can’t go wrong.

113 Matty Groves by Fairport Convention (1969)

A traditional folk song, sung to the tune of a different traditional folk song, all to tell the tale of a lover not a fighter, and what happens to him when he meets a fighter.

Honestly, this song is so good it would have been higher up were it not for the interminable jam session at the end (a common Fairport Con. weakness). Does it go on for fifteen minutes? No, but it sure as heck feels like it does.

My preferred alternate traditional lyrics for the ending bit:

“A grave! A grave!” Lord Donald cried,
“And a stone to place above.
“But bury my lady at the top
“For the days we were in love.”

If you ever have an opportunity to cover the song, try these lyrics instead.

112 How Glad I Am by Nancy Wilson (1964)

A good example of a song that is 110% only successful because of the performance. Nancy Wilson overcomes the cloying instrumentation and especially annoying percussion to craft an amazing vocal performance, especially on that “you don’t know you don’t know you don’t know you don’t know.”

“How Glad I Am” won a Grammy in the R&B category, which, I will not be the first to point out, is a little strange because the song is more pop than R&B; it did much better on the pop than the R&B charts. But Wilson has always been hard to categorize, and her performance here owes as much to jazz as it does to pop vocalizations. And the single charted during the (brief) time when Billboard threw its hands up and proclaimed that no one could tell R&B from pop any more. Billboard recanted (and Cash Box had never given up its separate charting), but the fact remains that this track, at least, is sui generis. If it was just pop it would suck, but it’s not, and it’s great!

111 Do You Know the Way to San Jose? by Dionne Warwick (1968)

I will admit that as a rule I can’t stand Dionne Warwick, her weak breathy voice, or her songs’ cheesy arrangements. But this side, for reasons I don’t even want to try examining, haunts me. Even the weird organ behind “parking cars and pumping gas” is great! Yeah, this one works.

110 Georgie and the IRT by Dave Van Ronk (1961)

Much like a Weird Al number, “Georgie and the IRT” is funnier if you know the original it is parodying: the grisly train disaster song “Engine 143” (by the Carter Family (!), although of course in the custom of folk songs the song is older than their recording). “Engine 143” is more explicit than most train disaster songs (“The Wreck of the Old 97,” “Casey Jones”), with lyrics like:

Upside down the engine turned and Georgie’s breast did smash.
His head was against the firebox door, the flames were rolling high.

(That looks like it should be the end, but Georgie survives for two more bloody stanzas)

but it has nothing on “Georgie and the IRT”!

The IRT is Interborough Rapid Transit, one of the companies that used to run NYC’s subways (the “numbered” lines). The distinction between the IRT and BMT (or even IND) lines no longer matters, but you still can hear old-times in NY casually drop the terms. If I were traveling from Times Square to Flatbush Ave. (and Georgie does) I’d take the B or the Q, which are not IRT lines, but presumably things were different sixty-odd years ago.

Anyway, this song is about the day Georgie gets decapitated (alternately: bisected) by the train doors, his body parts traveling different routes. It’s played for laughs. In “143” Georgie’s last words are: “Nearer my God to thee,” but in “IRT” they’re: “Screw the IRT.”

His body, it lies between the ties, amidst the dust and dew,
And his head it rides the IRT to Flatbush Avenue.

Dave Van Ronk, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street” (as per the title of his posthumous memoir), was a long-time Village folkie who seems to have always been Forrest-Gumpliy stumbling through the paradigmatic life of a folk singer. He arranged songs for Bob Dylan (who was sleeping on his couch). He was almost one-third of Peter, Paul, and Mary (but Albert Grossman decided he was too unkempt, Red, unmarketable, or all of the above). He got arrested in the Stonewall Riots (he has just been wandering by and joined in). He (supposedly) inspired the character Llewyn Davis. Perhaps he never got the fame he deserved, but many Trotskyites, including Trotsky, had worse lives.

This song is really a duet with Dick Rosmini, who also didn’t get the fame he deserved; I barely even credited him!

109 Little Black Egg by The Nightcrawlers (1965)

Of all the inexplicable ’60s lyrics, the little black egg with the little white specks, desideratum of this song, is perhaps the least explicable. Supposedly written for an Easter concert, which might explain the egg part…nope, still doesn’t track. It almost sounds like a children’s song (with that lovely hypnotic guitar), but it’s also a little ominous. Why does everyone want to take his egg?

A minor sleeper hit in its own era (it charted in 1967, two years after release), it slept even longer before inclusion in the Nuggets compilation, which is where I, and presumably many others, first heard it. Another great find, so, um, thanks, Nuggets!

Buy me a coffee (more accurately: tea)

108 The Fairest of the Seasons by Nico (1967)

Surely Nico has the weirdest beautiful voice in music, accented and low, low like someone on the phone pretending to be the president. The high point of her career was surely her one album with the Velvet Underground (specifically, and this is very specific, the way she sings the word clown on “Femme Fatale”), but her solo album Chelsea Girls would be an enviable high point of most careers. Famously, Nico hated it, objecting to all the background strings (and especially the flute!). She wanted to rock!

Some of Nico’s later work, presumably closer to her artistic intent, can be, if not hard to listen to at least strange to listen to. I feel like I’m betraying something deep within me when I say I prefer the overproduced 1967 stuff.

An album full of great songs, but my favorite is this melancholy (is Nico ever not melancholy?) number.

107 Black Nights by Lowell Fulson (1966)

Lowell Fulson fans probably either think of his ’50s material or his funky 1967 hit “Tramp,” but for my money his finest hour is this comeback song, a melancholy as the blues should be. The way he hits that “it used to beeee” is heartbreaking.

106 This Train by Big Bill Broonzy (1962)

Does this even count? I don’t mean Big Bill Broonzy in general, a towering figure in blues, folk, and country for decades. I mean, can this be one of the best songs of the 1960s when Broonzy died in 1958?

But “not long before his death” (as the liner notes say), Moses Asch recorded a mortally ill Broonzy, and those recordings were not released (AFAIK) until 1962. Is that not a ’60s record?

The album that session was finally released on (which also contains unrelated live tracks) was the Folkways issue Big Bill Broonzy Sings Folk Songs, which is a strange title because it makes it sound like Broonzy is leaving his comfort zone, you know, like The Country Side of Esther, when Broonzy has sung plenty of folk songs in his life, before and after his bluesiest period.

Broonzy was quite literally dying when this song was recorded, his face (the liner notes again) a rictus of pain as he sang. It’s a song (like many a train song) about the inevitable trajectory of life towards death, and Broonzy gives it his most poignant performances.

105 Palisades Park by Freddy Cannon (1962)

We had a couple heavy ones in a row, but the neat thing about music is that a song doesn’t have to be serious or even particularly intelligent to be great. Cue Freddy Cannon, who went to a theme park and met a girl.

Maybe you think it’s unfair of me: Fulson sings about the end of love and Cannon sings about the beginning of love, and I immediately characterize the latter as juvenile. But what could be more juvenile that “Palisades Park”? If your heart goes up like a rocket ship it must go down like a roller coaster (etc., I assure you)! This song, Cannon’s last top ten hit, is great because, like early rock ’n’ roll, it captures both lyrically and in the raucous music, a uniquely teenage experience.

The Beach Boys covered “Palisades Park” in the mid ’70s, not altogether successfully; they got closer to the joyous spirit of Freddy Cannon in their 1965 recording “Amusement Parks U.S.A.”; but closer doesn’t match it. Not even Brian Wilson’s manic laughter can touch Cannon’s anarchic glee.

104 Madame George by Van Morrison (1968)

Joining Sister Ray and Brother Mary in the triumvirate of ambiguously gendered oldies characters comes Madame George, in a long, rambling, and exceptionally Dylanesque exercise in surreality. Van Morrison, the quintessential garage rocker and quintessential blue-eyed soul singer must have surprised people with this gentle, nostalgic, hard-to-understand portrait of…something? Beautiful; it does not wear out its welcome over its nearly ten-minutes’ length.

I assume “the love that loves to love” is a Ulysses reference.

103 Got a Woman Cross Town by Pink Anderson (1961)

Pink Anderson, unwitting eponym for the band Pink Floyd, had a long career as an entertainer, but almost all of it is lost to time—hardly a unique situation, as most vaudeville performances, and up until the late twentieth century even most live performances, went unrecorded. Anderson’s habitual venue was unusual, though: He toured with various patent medicine peddlers. Occasionally recorded by blues-hungry folklorists, he was filmed in 1962 by a documentarian singing an album’s worth of material, which was only released some ten years’ after his death (and long after the 1960s; a sort of reverse Bill Broonzy situation).

Either a loose adaptation of the Ray Charles number or a song built on similar traditional tags, “Got a Woman Cross Town” is one of those songs that sounds a thousand years old, which in mid-twentieth-century terms just means it sounds forty years old.

102 Public Execution by Mouse and the Traps (1965)

Did I say “Madame George” was Dylanesque? “Public Execution” is practically fraud!

Still, even fake Dylan is good. Another Nuggets find.

101 North to Alaska by Johnny Horton (1960)

Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans” has to be the most educational pop song, in the sense that no regular joe would remember when the Battle of New Orleans took place or between whom without it; or maybe I should say it’s the best educational pop song; but it’s 1959, and not going on this list. We’re here for Horton’s follow-up hit, the beautiful chugalong “North to Alaska.” Apparently the theme song to a movie of the same name; the single dropped before the movie did.

Johnny Horton would die (car accident; Æ 35) during the brief interval between the release of the single and the release of the movie.

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People keep making these lists and they’re all foolish and embarrassing blunders, so I thought I’d make my own blunder, as foolish and embarrassing as it may be. I let the year 2000 count as this century (because I don't believe in math), and I was open to letting 2025 count as well, but no current movie, not even the ones you like so much, cracked the top 25, which is where I stopped.

I limited things to one entry per director, for reasons unclear to me. This post is of course too long for an email, so click through to find out what is number one (“…will surprise you”).

As always: FIGHT ME!

25 Boyhood (2014)

I love a good gimmick, and spending a decade slowly making a film (you know, like they did with Stranger Things ha ha) is even better than a Tingler. Epic in the way that’s hardest to fake.

24 Another Year (2010)

Perhaps not the best Mike Leigh film, but his best of this century, a quiet, pleasant, melancholy year in the life of a couple and their friends. Compare this movie to the frenetic, unpleasant, implausible Four Seasons mini-series. Back in 2010 people could make movies about a worthwhile life that wasn’t overstocked with signifiers of wealth.

23 Samaritan Girl (2004)

Like many a Kim Ki-duk film, this is partially a horror story, partially a portrait of strange psychology, and partially…just weird. But unlike in most movies—not most KKD movies, I mean, but in most movies—the characters’ insane actions gel into something more than just the arbitrary requirements of the the three-act structure.

22 Primer (2004)

I’m not sure most movies should require a viewer to take so many notes, but maybe it’s good at least one does. Time travel without the nonsense.

21 Apocalypto (2006)

There’s a story beat I love, when the barbarian from the hinterlands enters Rome (or fantasy-Rome-analog) and looks around with that just where on Earth am I? only it doesn’t quite work because for viewers few things are less alien than Rome (or fantasy-Rome-analog). Well, Apocalypto squares that circle because the city our barbarians come to is nothing like Rome or (for most of us) like anything previously encountered.

Everyone got mad at this movie when it came out because Mel Gibson is a bad guy (although perhaps not the worst guy to direct a film on this list) and because our particular fantasies about particular times and places were not being consulted. I don’t care about any of that, and what I like about this movie is that it shows a persuasive (not necc. realistic, but movies are not supposed to be realistic; they must always be persuasive) stone age people as, you know, people, as opposed to positive or negative cliches, repositories for our fears or desires. The opening is fascinating, and better than any depiction of such a people I have ever seen. And then the coming to the city is even better! Of course, the movie descends after that to being a perfectly serviceable action flick, which is too bad, but it pulls up in the end with a truly apocalyptic closing shot. And note that the shot, like the whole movie, is still from the POV of Jaguar Paw and his people. You thought you’d seen it all, guys? You thought you’d lived through apocalyptic trouble? The worst is yet to come. It’s a terrifying ending, and a rare use of dramatic irony that doesn’t feel pandering and cheap. I’ve said too much.

20 Princess Raccoon (2005)

I once read an interview with Seijun Suzuki where he said, concerning his later films, something along the lines of: “I’m eighty years old; I’ll do what I want.” Well, his stagy, crazed Pistol Opera was Suzuk-y enough, but not even that could match the strange, beautiful, surreal quality of this tanuki fairy tale.

19 Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)

Everything an animated feature should be: kinetic, kid-pleasing, and, measured in pure laugh units, arguably the funniest movie of the twenty-first century. The Aardman studio has put out some great films, but this is the jewel in their crown.

18 Capturing the Friedmans (2004)

Just a documentary about a family either implicated in or (more likely) witch-hunt railroaded into a child-abuse plot, only with clowns. The tragedy is that some of the best parts are relegated to the generous DVD extras, such as the part where (we are told) Elaine Friedman watches herself speaking on screen and insists, “I never said that.” I guess canting critics say it’s a one-sided portrait, but what documentary is not, and, come on—a middle aged man has only so many orgasms he can conjure in a day and he’s going to waste one (as prosecution witnesses insist) on ookie on the cookie? Wholly implausible.

17 The Prestige (2006)

People gripe at this movie for discarding an admirable vaudeville narrative in favor of a daffy science fiction narrative, but pulp has got to pulp, and the only way to succeed is to dare more excess (this is right there in the movie, folks!) than any one would believe. The ridiculous Tesla appendix is the stuff of nightmares.

16 The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

Like several Pynchon novels one could name, TMWWT is both a loving homage to pulpy noir and a portrait of a time and place, in this case postwar (aka midcentury) America. “Your honor, I plead Modernism” (not an actual quote).

15 The Act of Killing (2012)

An insane documentary idea, getting mass-murderers to reenact their murders, and in almost any other context an unforgivably cynical marketing ploy; but somehow The Act of Killing comes across a humanist film. The mass-murderers here are, of course, often officially on the side of right and justice, and by invoking the word “murderer” I am asserting power over both them and to some extent the Indonesian government; I’m also talking out of my hat, as everything I know about Indonesian history I learned from this film—but this is the power of the film to persuade you, the viewer, that you have learned something about both Indonesian anti-communism and humanity.

Also, the reenactments get really (of course in a good way) weird.

14 Christine (2016)

I sometimes praise actors to make myself sound like a sympathetic soul and not the monstrously inhuman critic that I really am, but the truth is I barely understand acting or any artistic endeavor that requires looking at another human, especially in the face. The exception is Rebecca Hall in her portrayal of infamous newscaster Christine Chubbuck, as she manages to appear uncomfortable (as they say) in her own skin for every moment of this movie’s two hours. It’s painful to watch, which, in a biopic of Christine Chubbuck, is of course thematically intentional.

Naming your film after a much more famous one, especially when yours is ambitious and serious, while the other is about a homicidal car—yeah, that’s a gutsy move.

13 Mother! (2017)

Simultaneously a retelling of the Bible, an ecological fable, a portrait of a troubled relationship, and a Kafkaesque nightmare, Mother! (I’m supposed to decapitalize the M, but to heck with that) is as busy and excessive as its exclamation point. That could be a problem if there was only a little excess, but there’s plenty of excess, and nothing exceeds like excess. Has any movie been this self-serious and yet this playful since Buñuel’s catalog?

The scene where partygoers break a sink is as tooth-gnashingly frustrating to watch as anything filmed this century.

12 Match Point (2005)

I think I’m supposed to like Crimes and Misdemeanors (to which this film is some kind of homage) better, but give me the thirsty class advancement and pure noir quicksand of Match Point any day. The film is just as slick as it needs to be, and that exceedingly gauche tennis-ball metaphor of the opening pays off so well. You can psychoanalyze why Woody Allen would be the master of the overcoming-guilt narrative, but I’m just here for the movie!

11 Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021)

Kristen Wiig’s accent is sufficiently hilarious to get this film at least a nomination for this list. A buddy comedy in the tradition of Wayne’s World or Romy and Michele, both movies that famously go off the rails, but Barb and Star goes so much further off the rails, and then further still. I assume this is a cult classic now, or will be soon.

10 Get Out (2017)

A great B-movie premise (like The Atomic Brain’s) somehow given emotional and moral weight without getting flattened. It helps that the screenplay (unlike, you know, most) feels thought out, and that the movie believes in its world. Hitchcock called the inconsistencies in his movies icebox scenes, but surely the better icebox moment is when you realize, hours after finishing a film, that actually the story made more sense than you anticipated. “So that’s why she fought the cop about checking ID; so there’d be no record he was visiting! It all makes sense!”

Also: Ever since I saw that UBC sketch I watch for titular lines in movies, and Get Out has one of the best.

9 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

In a way a harkening back to the old adventure films of the distant past, like Gunga Din or a Fritz Lang silent, but also of course a love letter to the very different tradition of wuxia—CTHD has enough melodrama for three films and enough action for twelve. The wirework is breathtaking, but the miracle is that this is also a character piece, with great actors—Michelle Yeoh is the standout, but hardly alone here.

Best of all, and unlike all but a very few fantasy films, CTHD takes place (or of course seems to take place) in a world with a rich history that is hinted at but rarely explained. This is doubtless due to its being adapted from a much longer serialized story (which I’ve never read, so I cannot complain, as I can with Jackson’s LOTR films, when something gets screwed up).

8 Damsels in Distress (2011)

Whit Stillman’s most challenging and philosophical movie. I’ve ranted elsewhere at some length on the film’s meaning, so let me just say here that few movies are more fun; that this is Greata Gerwig’s finest role; and it’s insane to me that it did not make Carrie MacLemore, the funniest player in the film, into a star.

7 Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

The only thing Wes Anderson has been missing all these years is gravitas and this elegy for a departed world of prewar elegance has it in spades. I once claimed that Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence was about not the gilded age but rather the innocent time before the Great War, and this movie, too, feels like it harks back to the First World War while reveling in its connection to the Second. Love those frame narratives, as balanced and nesting as an Anderson shot composition.

6 Parasite (2019)

One of the best tone-shifts in film is this nutty grifter comedy that blossoms into something more serious on two different levels. It helps that the grifter comedy was a really good grifter comedy!

5 There Will Be Blood (2007)

I undervalued There Will Be Blood for a while, but I had a reason. On my first viewing, after the first ten minutes or so, I thought, “This is the greatest movie ever made.” Then, after the first hour, I thought, “Okay, it couldn’t maintain that tension; but it’s still the greatest movie of the last ten years.” But of course it couldn’t maintain that tension either, so by the end I was reduced to considering TWBB one of the top three movies of the year.

But that was all contrast! It was like jumping from the hot tub to the pool—of course the pool feels cold! When I was ready for the downward arc in quality, the contrast didn’t seem as great, and, sure, it’s a drop, but it drops from an empyreal height!

4 Inglourious Basterds (2009)

In the same way that Ian McEwan cheapened the “twist” of Atonement by repeating it in Sweet Tooth, Tarantino may have compromised the success of Inglourious Basterds by reusing its own twist in a perfectly serviceable but lesser film. But nothing can wash away the rush of watching Basterds when it first came out—“How are they going to get out of this one?” you asked, before the incredible catharsis of realizing they weren’t going to. Christoph Waltz is the man you love to hate, even in a movie full of men you love to hate.

A rocketship ride from the incredibly tense opening scene to the “masterpiece” ending. “I’ve been chewed out before,” is the Tarantino line I quote the most.

3 The American Astronaut (2001)

A rock-and-roll space western musical with a budget so low the spaceships are just chalk drawings may not sound like the most auspicious set-up for a movie…or it sounds like the most auspicious set-up possible. The soundtrack (by The Billy Nayer Show) rocks, the jokes are solid, the low-fi vibe is utterly charming, and (whether this sounds auspicious or in- will depend on your own esthetics) the whole thing is the slowest, trippiest, most pornographically (?) lingeringly beautiful movie since 2001.

2 Up (2009)

In the 1973 Japanese revenge fantasy Lady Snowblood, Yuki [SPOILER!] comes face to face with the man she has sworn to kill, but the man grabs Yuki’s love interest (to whom she owes her life) and used him as a human shield. What are you going to do now, Yuki?

That man Yuki has sworn to kill? Yuki stabs him right through the love interest. She stabs them both! Yuki has a mission, and nothing is going to distract her from her mission.

I mention this because of all the things there are to love about Up—the melodramatic opening; the post-pulp esthetic; the peak-Pixar humor—there is also this: Carl has a mission at Paradise Falls, and although he is tempted away from his mission to help save a child from mortal peril he does nothing until he achieves his Paradise Falls goal. This is one of the most hard-core moments in all of American cinema.

Sure, sure. The rest of the movie is boss, too.

1 2046 (2004)

A sequel to more than one Wong Kar-wai film, 2046 is a busy shaggy-dog portrait of a man in despair. It’s also at times a science-fiction epic that mixes kitschy retro-future costumes with execrable CGI. None of this should work, and if things had been a little different it wouldn’t have, and the whole house of cards would have come tumbling down. But it works, and 2046 is the best film of the last twenty-five years.

Based on my experiences watching WKW’s My Blueberry Nights, a lot of this melancholy would come across as insufferably ponderous if intoned in English. Obviously I have no idea how it sounds in any of the several languages it was recorded in…but the slight distance provided by reading this stuff makes it sound beautiful.

The cast is wonderful throughout, but the real hero is Tony Leung, who manages to take a character who is dull and odious on paper and make him fascinating to watch. I don’t want to sound crazy, but the real real hero here is the set design of the Oriental Hotel, especially that uncanny shade of green. Would I have even liked the movie if it hadn’t been for that green? Probably, but not as much.

Great gifts for upcoming holidays!

140 Ode to Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry (1967)

I was going to put “Harper Valley PTA” here, because I sing it every time the parents at the playground talk about the local PTA, but then I remembered it’s the same song as “Ode to Billie Joe,” so this one gets in on precedence.

139 I Know by Barbara George (1961)

People don’t sing in church choirs any more and that’s why we don’t have any real singers? Is this true or just a conspiracy theory?

Anyway, Barbara George was another chorister who became a great R&B singer. She was a teenage wife and mother when she wrote and recorded her first and only album. Driven by a simple, catchy piano from its opening seconds and featuring George’s heartfelt, brassy vocals, this single deservedly became a crossover hit…and then George faded from music history as fast as she rocketed in. The ’60s, like the ’80s, were a time of one-hit wonders, and George will neither be the first nor the last on our list. I hope that, as the writer of this track, she actually got a payout.

138 Alice’s Restaurant Massacree by Arlo Guthrie (1967)

I wouldn’t want every song to be like this, but I’m glad one is.

Of all second-generation musicians, Arlo Guthrie had the biggest shoes to fill (sorry, Julian Lennon), and while is output is usually competent, he had one moment of genius. Woody Guthrie played a mean talking blues, but Woody Guthrie never wove a shaggy-dog story like this—not even in those CDs of endless Alan Lomax interviews: A cute little anecdote (about littering) that blossoms into an anti-war song that potentially blossoms into a movement. What a portrait of the times!

Incidentally, I assume that it is pure hell having your signature song be over eighteen minutes long, and you barely even get to jam.

137 Do You Love Me? by The Contours (1962)

A song famously earmarked for The Temptations, who were at church (!) when Berry Gordy came looking for them. The Contours were at the Motown studio, though, so Gordy tried them out, and the rest is dance party history.

“Do You Love Me?” may be the purest encapsulation of 1960s pop of any song not produced by Phil Spector (which is perhaps weird because this is an R&B song?). The lyrics literally could not be dumber—it takes zero skill to Mash Potato or to do the Twist. Look at a printout of the words and try to piece the song together by reading them:

Work, work!
Well, I’m gonna drive you crazy.
Work, work!
You are getting kind of cold, now.
Work, work!
With just a little bit of soul, now.

It’s not even English! Even the premise (set forth in the introduction) is silly.

And yet the music is not stupid. The music is about how important it is to dance the Twist. The fade out and return defeats (and what else in music does?) The Isely Brothers. That weird opening tremolo guitar (?). And…how many ’60s songs are this quotable (I know I just said the lyrics are dumb, but…)? “Now I’m back to let you know I can really shake ’em down.” “Watch me now, hey!” “Work, work!” Why is it impossible not to chant “work, work”?

Could The Temptations have pulled this off?

136 Ramona by The Blue Diamonds (1960)

The Blue Diamonds were two brothers, Indonesian emigrants to the Netherlands who were, apparently, popular in Europe, but in 1960 they had a modest US hit with this rocked-up version of an old standard. A crack at the US market makes sense: If the Everly Brothers had not yet, in 1960, been paralyzed by the triple blow of military enlistment, drug addiction, and a lawsuit that prevented them from writing their own songs, they soon would be, and the Hot 100 biome was ready for something Everlyish to fill their eco-niche; and if there’s one thing The Blue Diamonds were, it’s Everlyish.

Nevertheless, stateside stardom eluded them, but we’ll always have “Ramona,” a pretty but sleepy melody converted into a still mellow but nevertheless drum-crashy (I mean drum-crashy for 1960) rocking single. It supposedly moved a million copies in Germany; a shame it didn’t catch on here.

135 I’m Tore Down by Freddy King (1961)

Chicago blues is usually not my kind of blues, but at this point in Freddy (as he spelled it then) King’s career, a side could be like 2/3 R&B with only 1/3 Chicago noodling, and that turns out to be the right ratio. And what a great lyric!: “I’m tore down / I’m almost level with the ground.”

134 Different Drum by The Stone Poneys (1967)

“Wow, that’s a lot of harpsichord for a Stone Poneys record,” you may be thinking. It’s actually a lot of harpsichord for any song. It does work, though. I don’t usually think of myself as a Linda Rondstadt fan, but here she delivers one of the great vocal performances of the decade, so go figure.

A Mike Nesmith composition rejected by The Monkees (or their zookeepers); I mention this because I think it is hilarious that this is the one Stone Poneys song where the Poneys don’t play their own instruments.

133 Never Comes the Day by The Moody Blues (1969)

The Moody Blues are a pickle, by turns beautiful and terrible (you know, like the morning and the night). Some of the recited poetry is unendurable, not so much for its content as for Mike Pinder’s ponderous delivery. The pretentious orchestral interludes are a common enough vice magnified to 11. Even the album covers are usually cheesy (skull/baby)…while also looking kind of cool (skull/baby).

Because when they’re not making you writhe in agony, aren’t the Moodys kind of…good?

YMMV on things like concept albums and hippie visionquest trips, but there are enough solid three- (or, you know, five-) minute rock songs in their ’60s catalog to make a selection a challenge. I settled on this lovely little folk-rocker with its gentle, stringy opening and an irresistible swell into hand-clapping party time. Is it possible this song should rank higher and I let some kind of anti-Moody prejudice keep it from its proper place? Nah, it’s just that so many 1960s songs are so good!

I assume Roger Waters was thinking of the lyric “If only you knew what’s inside of me now / You wouldn’t want to know me somehow” when he came to write “The Final Cut” (“and if I show you my dark side” etc.).

132 Truck Drivin’ Son-of-a-Gun by Dave Dudley (1965)

This song is a good reminder (as “A Boy Named Sue” is not) that grown-up adults used to be able to say things like “son of a gun” unironically.

It’s a “girl-in-every-port” song, like “Travelin’ Man” or “The Wanderer,” although Dave Dudley’s blue-collar bass sounds more plausible as a callous roving heartbreaker than sensitive Dion or sissy Ricky Nelson—which of course means those songs are better than this one. Too on point, Dudley!

Still, if this “kiss-stealin’, wheelin’, dealin’, truck drivin’ son-of-a-gun” can’t compete with those teen heartthrobs, he is operating on a different level for a different audience, and in that way he’s hard to beat, with a boogie-woogie country piano and a sardonic delivery that (gun or no gun) has persuasively been there. Years later the Teamsters made Dudley an honorary member for his devotion to truck driving songs, and you can kind of see it, can’t you?

131 Only Love Can Break a Heart by Gene Pitney (1962)

What am I doing? I don’t even like this kind of music! Who put all those strings in there? This was the music rock ’n’ roll was invented to overthrow!

But Pitney’s voice is always one-of-a-kind, and it’s at its most heartbreaking in this song. I might have chosen a more endurable production like “Liberty Valance,” but Pitney’s performance here beats them all. Maybe it wouldn’t even work as well without all the kitsch blaring behind it. We’re left with what we got, and the song, despite itself, is great.

130 Saginaw, Michigan by Lefty Frizzell (1963)

This tale of class-based resentment and revenge is delivered in such a gentle and appealing way as to sound as unthreatening as your standard toffs vs. yobs story, despite the fact that here the narrator has committed literal fraud and will certainly be in financial if not legal trouble from which no amount of “serves him right” (as the lyrics assert) will extricate him. It’s a working man’s rebellion fantasy, the kind that would blossom in the 1970s with “Convoy” or “One Piece at a Time,” here made strictly personal because it is (as the law requires) a love song. He’s only defrauding his father-in-law! That’s how to impress a lady!

So all of that is fun. The father-in-law freezing in the Klondike is fun. But I think the best part of the song is the euphony of the repeated phrase “Saginaw, Michigan”—the state’s greatest gift to music since “Kalamazoo.”

129 Angel of the Morning by Merrilee Rush & The Turnabouts (1968)

Chip Taylor wrote both this song and “Wild Thing”—that’s the alpha and omega of pop music! That’s all of pop music! Chip Taylor has won pop music, and he won it in 1968!

128 Any Day Now by Chuck Jackson (1962)

I think I spend a lot of time making fun of Bruce Bacharach, but this is a solid tune. Former Del-Viking Chuck Jackson really sells the heartbreak, and the rhythm is pulsing, and that hammond organ is beautiful. “Any day now / When the clock strikes go.” No complaints.

127 Nag by The Halos (1961)

The 1960s as a cultural era has a definite beginning (JFK’s election), but musically it’s rather arbitrary. You can pretend that ’50s music ended with the 1959 payola investigation or the 1959 Beechcraft Bonanza plane crash, but while rock ’n’ roll proper may have waned temporarily, music chugged along into the new decade blissfully (as they say) unaware anything had changed (until The Beatles, 1964, of course).

This is fine, because the late ’50s were a particularly fun and fecund era in music. Take “Nag,” a cross between Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” and The Coasters’ “Yakety Yak” (by way of “Lost My Job”) complete with basso asides. The result is so juvenile I hadn’t realized until this writeup that the titular nag is a spouse and not a parent. But late ’50s music excelled at being juvenile, and here we are in 1961 still not grown up. Just dig the simple rocking drum kit and the semi-novelty bilabial falsetto gobbling (I don’t how else to describe it)! Who would want to grow up if juvenility rocks this hard?

126 The Night Has a Thousand Eyes by Bobby Vee (1962)

Bobby Vee famously got his musical start filling in at age fifteen for a newly dead Buddy Holly; apparently the surname Velline was too long, challenging, or ethnic for the public at the time. He sang pleasant songs and generally lived as a mid-tier early ’60s performer, the kind that got buried under the weight of the British Invasion.

(Actually, I guess he had an excellent 1967 comeback single, too.)

But there was nothing mid-tier about this particular song, Vee’s main claim for immortality, a song so nervous and carnivally (I can’t really say carnivalesque) right from its early high-speed drumbeat that blooms into a chorus simultaneously brash, paranoid, jovial, and insane.

Plato once wrote, “I wish I were the night, so I could watch you sleep with its thousand eyes,” but Bobby Vee knows his girl’s not sleeping, and yet he sounds just as excited as Plato.

125 Springtime for Hitler from The Producers (1967)

Art should be, in some sense, dangerous, a fact that we have either forgotten or fully embraced by ramping up the danger. People went to court (and lost!) for printing Ulysses in 1921 and Boiled Angel in 1994, but the arc of our courts has generally bent towards increasing laxity: While laxity in the court of public opinion seems to have bell-curved: Songs like “Angel of the Morning” had been controversial at the time; then very briefly everyone mellowed out; then people learned it was more fun to melt down about art. Recent conniption fits over art that may or may not endorse political violence seem weird to anyone who can remember that there were whole genres of punk music explicitly endorsing political violence. Pink Floyd (NOT AN OBSCURE BAND) made an entire concept album and the concept was “wouldn’t it be fun to kill a whole bunch of politicians, starting with Margaret Thatcher?” The only controversy I’ve ever heard expressed about the album was the fear that it might be racist against the Japanese.

The ebb and flow of taboo mean that this song (from a mainstream 1967 movie) is perhaps unlistenable-to today, but it was once and perhaps will be again someday the funniest three minutes in all of ’60s music. “Well! Talk about bad taste!”

124 When I Lay My Burdens Down by The Oak Ridge Quartet (1966)

In another ten years, the Oak Ridge Boys (as the Oak Ridge Quartet was already calling itself sometimes) would be the greatest band in the world (and the mere fact that I believe something so outre is why I am not making a best songs of the 1970s list), but in 1966 they were not there yet. The signature Oak Ridge Boys sound is based on two novelties:

1. They transported Southern gospel harmonies to country music, and

2. Although plenty of bands have had great harmonies, no one has had a bass as rich and deep as Richard Sterbin’s to bottom out the harmony and give it a whole new sound.

But Richard Sterbin hadn’t joined the band yet in the 1960s, and the Oaks were still doing gospel, so instead of striding confidently somewhere into the top five, they’re here. But here is still great, and these guys were an amazing group even if (as in this album) only William Lee Golden from their “classic” lineup is present.

123 Play Those Oldies, Mr DJ by Anthony & The Sophomores (1963)

Don’t worry, Potsie! It’s never too soon to get nostalgic about the 1950s!

Maybe when Little Caesar and the Romans sang “Those Oldies but Goodies” in 1961 they were talking about songs (you know, like “Ramona”) that were actually old (hard to prove), but the oldies that Anthony and the Sophomores crave are quite explicitly tunes like “Tears on My Pillow” by Little Anthony and the Imperials (1958) or “Earth Angel” by the Penguins (1954)—songs, Anthony sings, from “just a couple, couple years ago.” In context, the Mr. Sandman-style call-and-response (“ye-e-e-sss?”) is presumably thematic.

In fact, the song was originally titled “Sing Those Oldies, Mr. Bass Man,” but Johnny Cymbal’s “Mr. Bassman” (a song so good it probably should have made the list, except I messed up; I messed up a lot) came out first, so they made a quick switch to the DJ.

My only complaint: Anthony and The Sophomores perform perfectly competent South Philly doo-wop, and their energy on this song is infectious; but they’re no Penguins, and…

Ah, but no spoilers. What is to come must not be revealed.

122 Pretty Little Angel Eyes by Curtis Lee (1961)

Very early Phil Spector doesn’t quite have his sounds in a wall yet, but he gets some nice effects with that opening percussion and the overall rocking busy near-chaos—even before the breakdown.

Curtis Lee does a fine job, but he’s probably the least important part of the track, behind the production and the background singers (who are, by the way, our friends The Halos from five slots away). Wikipedia summarizes the tragedy of the one-hit wonder succinctly: ”Without Spector’s influence, Lee’s hits dried up. He went into the construction industry with his father in 1969. He died from cancer on January 8, 2015, in Yuma, Arizona, aged 75.” He didn’t even get to do the revival circuit?

121 Having a Party by Sam Cooke (1962)

This was the A side, “Bring It On Home to Me” was the B side, and yet the B side gets all the love. I AM CHANGING THAT TODAY. Not because “Bring It On Home” isn’t great—it’s great—but because “Having a Party” is Sam Cooke’s finest hour.

Is he having such a good time (as he alleges)? This is the crux of the song for me, because no one (this is a paradox) has ever sounded as morose as Sam Cooke while also being in a strange kind of bliss. Othr listeners don’t seem to hear the melancholy in this song, which I can’t believe—this is the most downtempo party anyone’s ever thrown! But he is also having so much fun, and this I cannot deny. For me, the tension in the entire song. To bad it’s a fallen world…but at least I’m dancing with my baby.

Cooke, of course, suffered an ending more tragic than Curtis Lee’s obscurity, shot dead while naked and perhaps enraged in a motel. Johnny Ace has been called rock’s first martyr, and then there was The Day the Music Died, and then the ’60s as they spilled into the ’70s would generate its own martyrologies: I’m not here to pinpoint which death was the most tragic, but let’s have a moment of silence for Sam Cooke, who died (like Alexander the Great, like Cuchulainn, like Christ) Æ 33.

One song per band! All 1960–1969 (North American?) releases eligible! Let’s go!

160 Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood by Nina Simone (1964)

Sure, The Animals do a good cover, but not even Eric Burdon can sound as haunted as Nina Simone. And then there’s the background orchestration, led by those creepy Phantom-of-the-Opera music-box chimes including a string section more muted and tasteful than is usual for 1964. I love how the stressed syllable changes as Simone slips into: “I try so hard, so please don’t let me be misunderstood.”

159 Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler (1961)

In the early ’60s music really seemed to be experimenting with how stupid it could sound. I know that comes off as insulting, but I mean this in a good way, in the way The Ramones would try something similar a decade or so later. We think of rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s as a stripped down version of previous pop music, but you could also call it (and people did!) a dumbed down version of previous pop music. You dumb it down enough and only the good parts show.

We’ll have dumber songs later on in this list, and we’ve had arguably dumber songs previously, but right now we have “Duke of Earl,” a nonsense lyric over the durpiest of doo-wop backgrounds. Duke-duke-duke of Earl sounds like someone making fun of doo-wop singers, but it’s also, and this is important, irresistibly catchy. Makes you want to go duke-duke-duke yourself, doesn’t it? It’s like the Twist—almost not a dance, but don’t you want to try it out?

The lyrics don’t make more sense from that point on. It’s also a love song because songs have to be love songs. “We’ll walk through my dukedom. / It’s a paradise we will share.”

One thing I love about pop music from the 1920s is that the singers so often sound like they’re joking, and, similarly here, Gene Chandler sounds like he’s in on the joke. The way he dresses on the album cover seems to indicate that this is half a novelty song.

I think I sound like I don’t like this song, which means I have failed, because I love this song. I think you don’t like this song! I think you don’t like this song enough! Chandler is derping all the way to the bank.

158 I Sat Back and Let It Happen by Leroy Van Dyke (1962)

Leroy Van Dyke is better known for his single “Walk on By,” which was a monster hit in 1961 but is still not the “Walk on By” you’re probably thinking of. Even better, though, is this uptempo story of a man who loses his girl through Hamletty inaction: “I sat back and let it happen.”

There’s a tradition in country music especially of allowing a chorus’s words to return at the end of a song with the meaning reversed—The Oak Ridge Boys practically specialized in it (check those links!)—and here Van Dyke fantasizes about a future in which his girl has returned to him and they can “sit back and let it happen” (his stress). Not passively allow love to fade, but make love happen i.e. bloom.

Just a fantasy, though. Love the bass “boom boom” background under Van Dyke’s already deeper-than-usual vocals.

157 Eep Opp Ork Ah-ah by Jet Screamer (1962)

Hanna-Barbera cartoons are generally marked by solid music, with Josie and the Pussycats especially being filled with banging pop (check those links, too!)—but before Josie, it was jazz, specifically jazz written by Hoyt Curtain. Jonny Quest probably had the best incidental jazz score, but everyone remembers the Jetsons theme, which hit #9 on the Billboard charts in…1986? Whatever you’re into, radio fans.

Wikipedia, in a hamfisted way I’d probably have to make an account to correct, thinks the #9 hit was this tune, the elegantly titled “Eep Opp Ork Ah-ah” (only played by Jet Screamer “in-world”—I assume it was really Howard Morris and Hoy Curtain). I guess maybe “Eep Opp Ork Ah-ah” also charted in 1986, by some miracle, but probably this is all just wish fulfillment, because “Eep Opp Ork Ah-ah” is 700X better than the Jetsons theme! It’s futuristic rockabilly with a midcentury modern esthetic, contemporary guitar licks, and beeps and boops. But it’s also (“nobody digs a word we say”) an old man’s view of 1962 rock ’n’ roll, at once ridiculous and juvenile: funny funny faces and ipso facto every nonsense utterance must be about love. It’s one of those rare songs that is at once a parody of the genre it exists in and a wonderful example of the genre it exists it (you know, like the songs from Nashville).

156 The Bridge by Dolly Parton (1968)

Dolly Parton would come into her own in the 1970s and stay near the top of the music world for the next two decades (at least), but if her ’60s work doesn’t quite reach the heights she would later attain, it was often excellent in its own right. Especially memorable is this beautiful tragic ballad, sung with an uncharacteristic lisp (?).

Points off for the line “Our emotions filled the air”; but so many points extra for the boldest ending in all of country music.

155 Sugar Babe, It’s All Over Now by Mark Spoelstra (1963)

You listen to Mark Spoelstra’s smooth, confident voice and you might assume this song would fall in the top 50 on this list; then you hear that virtuoso guitar, and you might think top 20.

So why is it down here at #155? For me, at least, the vocals and the music just don’t work together. They sit awkwardly on top of each other, instead of blending into an organic whole.

Once again I find myself only saying negative things about a song I love. Why am I so mean?

154 Always Something There to Remind Me by Lou Johnson (1964)

Another former gospel singer—his group, The Zionettes, had the best name since The Fabulons—Lou Johnson here sings the most Bacharachy of Bacharach compositions, and single-handedly salvages the song from mediocrity. The opening horns are too “tasteful,” the opening vocal too slow and measured…but then it builds to the belt-it-out chorus, and everything is forgiven.

153 Mama’s Doing the Twist by Linda Hopkins (1962)

I know earlier I was talking big about the best Twist songs, but I had forgotten all about this delightful number! Despite a sixty-year career, Linda Hopkins never really had a hit single; she did once reach #21 on the R&B charts, which is something, but she’s probably better remembered for her work on Broadway.

This B-side, a cover of an Eve Boswell song I have never heard and cannot find, is not necessarily typical of the Hopkins sound, but it’s a great tune right from the opening “Ma! Hey, Ma!” shout. What follows is a top-drawer twister with a rocking beat and fun vocals, but it’s also the story of how an easy and family-friendly dance temporarily closed the generation gap; it would reopen, of course, but somewhere along the line rock ’n’ roll would have to come to grips with the idea that it was not just for teenagers. In part this was because the teenagers were growing up, but in part it was because the beat was just so infectious.

Like, remember how in Ferris Bueller’s father can’t resist doing a little bit of the Twist in his office?

That’s what mama’s doing!

History’s best Twist song! (Sorry Chubby Checker. You almost made the list.)

152 Don’t Leave Me, Baby by The Camelots (1963)

Literal a cappella NYC doo-wop, the simplest song imaginable, and only a minute and a half long. Perfection.

151 We’ll Sing in the Sunshine by Gale Garnett (1964)

Later on Gale Garnett would have the most annoying album title of the entire decade:

—and remember that this is the 1960s, so there is serious competition:

But that’s all in the future! It’s only 1964, and all album titles are like “Meet the X” or “The Many Sides of X.” It’s only 1964, and Gale Garnett has her first and biggest hit, an exceptionally melancholy take on the carpe diem theme. It’s practically a dirge! It’s like a Limeliters song! It sounds like it was meant to be a singalong wedding standard, except of course you can’t play it at a wedding. We’ll always have Paris.

150 I Resign from Your Love by Syl Johnson (1963)

That wild animal yell is one of the best openings to any record! Syl Johnson is better known for his later, funkier recordings, but for my money nothing can beat this tight number. It would be a solid rocker even with the yell, but it also has the yell! What a way to resign!

Don’t confuse it with Johnson’s other very similarly titled single!

149 Two Lovers by Mary Wells (1962)

You liked the Twist, didn’t you, music fans of 1962? Well here’s a twist for you!

Mary Wells’s scandalous little number belongs with “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” (or even “Shaving Cream” and “Darbytown”) with it’s “we’re singing something naughty—whoops! no we aren’t!,” except it is completely self-serious. That self-seriousness could be unbearable, but Wells sells it.

I assume you know the twist, but if you don’t—well, I’m not here to spoil it for you.

Another Smokey Robinson composition; another Motown hit.

148 My Girl by The Temptations (1964)

Oh! Speak of the devil! Another Smokey Robinson composition and another Motown hit is this fan favorite from the greater of the two rival Temptations-monickered bands. I love a song that starts out unmistakable from the first three bass notes.

147 Remember Then by The Earls (1963)

The nasal and almost sarcastic “re-meh-meh, re-meh-meh-member” is so irresistible that it’s easy to forget all the other great components of this doo-wop classic: the barbershoppy “then, then, then, then, then” rising, an opening riff that sounds like CCR’s “Looking Out My Back Door” (I am not crazy), and especially Larry Chance(?)’s sublime vocals on the bridge, a high point in a song full of high points.

146 I Know a Place by Petula Clark (1964)

We all think of the British Invasion as being made up of rock combos, but there’s more than one way to British-Invade, and here comes Petula Clark, already an international star of two decades’ standing in Europe, riding the wave of swinging London’s hep status to finally start charting in the US. “Downtown” was a #1 hit in 1964, and “I Know a Place” is her very similar follow-up. On another day perhaps I might have preferred one of her other great hits, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for this number, a rather ridiculous and vague description of a music venue. Perhaps it’s located downtown.

As befits a pan-European star who recorded in multiple languages, Clark made her own French version of the single: “Viens Avec Moi.”

145 Tossin’ and Turnin’ by Bobby Lewis (1960)

An orphan, slowly going blind, runs away to join the carnival circuit and works his way up to recording, improbably, the most popular pop song of 1960. Improbable but true.

“Tossin’ and Turnin’” is a step above the usual R&B singles of the time (many of which, o.c., were excellent) because of the vocals: The gospel-infused background vocals, sure, but mostly Bobby Lewis, himself, with that inimitable hitch in his voice when he sings “just-a thinking of you.”

Not even this Almond Delight commercial can ruin the song.

144 Lizzie Borden by The Chad Mitchell Trio (1962)

The Chad Mitchell Trio weren’t specifically a novelty act, the way Tom Lehrer, say, was, but when I think of them, it’s always a song like “John Birch Society” or “Super Skier” or this hilarious experiment in black humor. Maybe the folk scene of the time just had a tongue often in cheek—even arch-squares like The Kingston Trio covered “Charlie on the M.T.A.”—but in any event here Chad and his pals riff off the most famous quatrain in the annals of American crime to create a satire on another folk staple: the murder ballad.

(The murder ballad it reminds me the most of is Hazel Dickens’s “The Yablonski Murder,” but clearly this 1962 single is not satirizing a crime that happened in 1969; so never mind about that.)

While The Trio always had a way with words (and their John Birch song linked above is only one notch below Lehrer himself), come “Lizzie Borden” they outdid themselves with its frenzied grotesque humor. “They said, Lizzie, cut it out, / So that’s exactly what she did.”

One gag that I didn’t understand in my youth (and, judging by their muted response, that the live audience in 1962 didn’t get either) was: “Such a snob! I’ve heard it said / She met her pa and cut him dead.” Etiquette books have since taught me that to “cut him dead” merely means to snub him. So I offer that explanation for those unfamiliar with the slang that was apparently already obsolescent in 1962.

143 It’s Cold Outside by The Choir (1966)

I feel like I must do penance for every track from the various Nuggets compilations I include on this list. It’s just too obvious where I got the songs from. I am revealed as a poser and not an obsessive collector of old o.o.p. 45s, like a real man.

But sometimes you have to bite the bullet and admit how great the Nuggets selections are. Case in point: This one, the absolute gentlest garage band song every recorded, complete with the jangly guitars you want and the campy background ahhhs you need.

142 Surfin’ Bird by The Trashmen (1963)

The genesis of rock ’n’ roll was, like many geneses, also an apocalypse, an apocalypse for the pop music of the past. Songs had once had lyrics by mature professionals, so in “Cocktails for Two” Howard Phillips could rhyme “cigarette” with “chansonnette” and “serviette,” while the catty wittiness of “Tangerine” was practically Algonquin. “Tutti Frutti,” “Wooly Bully,” or “Hanky Panky” are all great songs, but lyrically they come from another planet, a primitive planet of barbarous cavemen.

And that’s just the lyrics, which are of course subservient to the actual music. In On Chesil Beach, set in 1962, Ian McEwan has his classical music aficionado character complain:

When the tunes were so elementary, mostly in simple four-four time, why this relentless thumping and crashing and clattering to keep time? What was the point, when there was already a rhythm guitar, and often a piano? If the musicians needed to hear the beats, why not get a metronome?

Why not get a metronome? You are so dumb! No argument there, but this was part of the great rock experiment: to see how dumb music could get and still stay music. As I’ve said before, punk would try some of the same things business in a later decade…but before there was punk, there was “Surfin’ Bird,” a partially improvised cover of a song The Trashmen had heard second-hand the night before.

I once read (probably in some liner notes) that the most punk rock moment in musical history was when Jonathan Richman decided to do another chorus of his childlike bubblegum jingle “Ice Cream Man” in front of hostile, incredulous, booing punks at CBGB. Before that the most punk rock moment in musical history had been “Surfin’ Bird”—The Trashmen had put such a period on this method of contempt that Richman had to turn things in the opposite direction to outpunk them.

Obviously professional lyricists (Brill Building, etc.) still flourished in the rock era, as did pre-rock pop forms (Peggy Lee hit Billboard #11 in 1969); furthermore, rock ’n’ roll would get smarter, not always to its advantage. But we had to tear it down to build it up, and “Great Balls of Fire” or “Louie Louie” did their part, but no one tears it down (or tears it up) like “Surfin’ Bird.”

141 The Horse Wrangler by Roger Welsch (1965)

Roger Welsch was an academic folklorist at Nebraska Wesleyan University who, in celebration of Nebraska’s state centennial,1 recorded an album of traditional Nebraska folk songs that had been “collected” decades earlier as part of an FDR-era WPA project. The plum of the record is this wry cowboy ballad about the hard lot of the cow puncher.

In Nebraska, Welsch was apparently known as a humorous commentator, a kind of local Andy Rooney type—Wikipedia doesn’t even mention his musical endeavors beyond a reluctant discography as a kind of appendix. Welsch is actually an excellent guitarist, but the whole glory of the song lies in his bemused delivery. “And in the morning—if you don’t die…” The song is funny without being a novelty tune; it’s cowboy exaggeration, which is always fun even when it’s not funny; and Welsch sings it like a cowboy—not the lonesome type, but the tall-tale type. “Then cut your throat with a butcher knife, ’cause it’s easier done that way.”

In context, it’s funny.

Mostly, I write books

If you buy one, I won't die of exposure.

Remember the rules: One cut per artist. That’s the main rule. Part 1 (#181–200) is here, part 3 (#141–160) here.

180 Cry like a Baby by The Box Tops (1968)

A very weird rock ’n’ roll song made weirder by the fact that it also pure pop, and a little bubble-gummy. It also has everything thrown in, an electric sitar (!), an opening John-Cale-y organ drone, a backup girl-group (but only for the second half), a muted breakdown section that they may have just forgotten to fill in, and a gruff “rock” vocal curiously low in the mix. That’s too many ideas for one song! But the gestalt works, because the bubblegum poppiness is so very poppy. The electric sitar sounds pretty sweet, like something from a Men without Hats album. An opening organ drone is **always cool**. By the time the horns and strings come in, their excess just sounds natural.

179 It’s My Party by Lesley Gore (1963)

Now that’s good melodrama! This track combines busy and complicated production values (Quincy Jones produced) with the raw emotion of a genuine teenager: Lesley Gore, unlike most of the people on this list, was an actual Baby Boomer, and only sixteen when she knocked this one out.

Early rock ’n’ roll is powered by pure punk teenage emotion; by the ’60s people (esp. but hardly exclusively Phil Spector) had learned to couple that raw emotion with the kind of emotional background that is anything but raw; eventually music “grows up,” which is a weird thing for music to do, and a teenage party will sound like a ridiculous topic to write a song about. But that’s too bad. It was a glorious moment, when a song like this could make sense.

178 Meet Me at the Twistin’ Place by Johnnie Morisette (1962)

By 1962, all of America had fallen in love with, become disenchanted with, and then fallen in love all over again with the Twist! That’s when Sam Cooke wrote and produced this single for Johnnie Morisette, and, like…who’s Johnnie Morisette? No one knows, because not even the combined powers of Sam Cooke and the Twist could keep this single from obscurity, which is UNJUST! Because this song is great! “Man, I sure wish I had somewhere to go,” it starts, stating a problem before offering the solution: the twisting place! Johnnie Morisette’s gritty R&B vocals contrast splendidly with the squeaky-clean, much whiter backup singers, and that’s the twist in a nutshell. This might be the best song ever recorded about twisting that is not also about shouting.

177 Those Were the Days by The Limelighters (1962)

Glenn Yarbrough’s creepy-ass voice is seared into my brain because he played the minstrel of Gondor in the Rankin-Bass TV special Return of the King: “Frodo of the nine fingers…”. But here he is singing not about a ring of doom but about the terrifying passage of time.

The song is (they say) an old Russian folk song, and it certainly presents as one, with its haunting minor chords. I know nothing about Russian music beyond, you know, Tchaikovsky or Mussorgsky, but this sounds plausible—certainly the music is Slavoiserie, if nothing else. And the lyrics are as bitter as bittersweet gets, a Carmina Burana dirge to lost youth. That’s all good. Whichever Limeliter is singing lead—presumably Alex Hassilev, a Russian-Jewish emigre—is fine, and the song is haunting, and then the chorus comes and—

—and it’s Glenn Yarbrough, with a voice from the time before time (Middle Earth, I guess). Those were the days, he sings, and he’s only part of the harmony, but he takes over and it all sounds so long ago. Those were the days.

This is the reason The Limeliters’ version is better than Mary Hopkin’s. Hopkin didn’t have Yarbrough singing backup.

176 Rice Is Nice by The Lemon Pipers (1968)

The Lemon Pipers were one of those ’60s bands that did not want to play the music the industry demanded of them, and yet they managed, however reluctantly, to produce the absolute finest moment of bubblegum pop (um…depending on your definitions) of the decade. It’s 1968 and someone is still putting out a love song celebrating marriage (metonymized through thrown rice)!

175 Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh by Alan Sherman (1963)

Of all the things mainstream music has lost since the ’60s (or perhaps the ’70s), the most unjustly unmourned is the loss of a sense of humor. Sure, “Weird” Al is great, but he didn’t have a top ten hit until 2006—only his second top forty single! I guess Biz Markie got to #9 in 1990…that’s something. Fill in your favorites here, but they’re all fringe productions.

Meanwhile, back in 1963, Alan Sherman could bring a nineteenth-century opera tune with barely sung lyrics full of goofy camp jokes to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. For shame, modern world!

I’m not damning with faint praise: This song is great! Goofy jokes are good jokes! And the simplicity of the tune makes it perfect for singalongs—this is one of those songs that people who have never heard the recording may have learned at a summer camp. One wonders what “kids these days” make of a lyric like: “And the head coach wants no sissies / So he reads to us from something called Ulysses.”

174 Sittin’ on Top of the World by Roscoe Holcomb (1964)

You can kind of see how the music world was prepped, in the mid ’50s, for rock and roll. The music of the time, while not bad, was soft, safe, decadent: just a bunch of late-period Romans sitting around waiting for the barbarians to come.

This is, I think, the mainstream take, the rockist take, but it obscures the fact that before the ’50s music was strange, dangerous, and whatever is the opposite of decadent (acandent?).

We’re not here to talk about Greil Marcus’s “Old Weird America”…we’re here to talk about the 1960s…but here comes Roscoe Holcomb and his banjo, singing the old songs in the old way, and he sounds practically primeval, like a track from the Harry Smith Anthology.

“I killed a man / With a borrowed (?) knife / Got (?) 99 years / [unintelligible] life.”

The ’60s folk revival brought all manner of folk music back into American homes, and it’s easy to think of The Kingston Trio or Bob Dylan. There’ll be older performers on this list, but none of it will sound older. None of it will be this alien. Dylan once said, “If I told you what my music was about, we’d all be arrested,” but nothing he sang ever sounded as dangerous as Roscoe Holcomb, borrowed knife or no.

173 I Was Gone by Eddy Clearwater (1961)

Another gospel performer drawn to the blues, Eddy Clearwater (his stage name is a play off Muddy Waters) is remembered for his six (!) decades-long career playing Chicago Blues, but this track is from an earlier period, when he was still under the spell of Chuck Berry. Cincinnati’s Federal Records (the label that is hardest to Google, because just try) put out a lot of great 45s in the ’50s and ’60s, but this is one of the best, a rollicking story of reckless driving (“I moved up to one-two-oh” (i.e. m.p.h.)) that is propelled both by its Berryish R&B guitar and its unusual call-and-response structure with the mocking backup band: “Are you crazy?” a Greek chorus asks Clearwater; “stay gone,” it demands when he brags, “I was gone.” Maybe to escape them was the whole reason he was going. They’re merciless.

As a bonus, the cop who pulls the narrator over has his siren invoked/imitated by a great irritating sax riff.

Clearwater’s uncle, the Rev. Houston H. Harrington, owned the Chicago Atomic-H label, which is how a Mississippi lad like Eddy Clearwater ended up playing Chicago blues in the first place. The Chuck Berry sounds, though, is pure fandom.

172 Lost My Job by The Del-Airs (1960)

Don’t confuse the Del-Airs with the Del-Aires, the rock band from Horror at Party Beach (also a great band)! Oh no, these Del-Airs are a doo-wop group from Philadelphia, where the Del-Aires’ pendleton shirts were presumably illegal. In fact, they’re a great doo-wop group! They only put out two or three (sources differ) singles, but one of them is “Lost My Job,” which combines rock ’n’ roll instrumentation and a rockabilly breakdown with the bum-bum-bum backgrounds and wailing falsettos from acapella doo-wop. None of that is unique, or even unusual—it just works great here! The mild griping (“why oh why do I try?”) lyric is clearly harkening back to earlier (and even better) songs: The Coasters’ “Yakety Yak” or The Silhouettes’ “Get a Job”—losing a job is hardly an existential threat here, just a mild inconvenience. Now the singers have no “pay,” “bread,” OR “dough.” The whole thing is in fun.

Incidentally, the site “White Doo Wop Collector” claims this track is from 1962, but Discogs says 1960, so I went with the latter.

171 Mountain of Love by Johnny Rivers (1965)

Is it just me or does no one talk about Johnny Rivers any more? The dude had nine top ten hits! I guess most of them are only okay (including his overwrought chart topper), but whatever; maybe I’m misreading the room, but I feel like we’re treating this guy like a one-hit wonder, when actually he cranked out hits for years.

Anyway, this is the only Rivers recording I really love. Here he took Harold Dorman’s excellent 1960 single, removed the strings, added a harmonica, and sped it up slightly, improving it 100%. That should be enough for any career, but, like I said—Rivers put out the hits! Choose your poison.

170 Carrie Anne by The Hollies (1967)

Don’t you hate it when your girl runs off with a prefect? Man, the ’60s were so British.

But the good thing about being British is you get British pop, and The Hollies deliver with a catchy tune, steel drums, and a chorus that both rocks and harmonizes, which people don’t usually try simultaneously.

169 Colours by Donovan (1965)

In 1995, Adrian Tomine put out a comic book about a hippie who named his two daughters after musical legends: Dylan and…Donovan? How did he get in there?

Isn’t that what’s annoying about Donovan? They guy is always punching above his weight. And then there’s the whole sensitive half-fey persona that I don’t even know is Donovan’s fault, but it clings to him like a miasma. Don’t you want to hate him?

But what can I say? This song is beautiful.

168 Connie by The Fabulons (1963)

The late ’50s and early ’60s actually had quite a few mixed-race musical groups, even if, Del-Vikings aside, such compositions were forbidden among the more successful. Where would they play? What labels would release them? I guess it upset the whole musical applecart, which was predicated on two kinds of music, white and “race,” even if everyone listened to everything, at least on the sly.

But as long as you were not successful, things were more loosey-goosey. Bring on The Fabulons (great name!) from Stamford, Conn. In fact, The Fabulons’ name is so choice that a Florida party band has claimed it, making it hard to look up much of anything about the original group. But the AUTHOR IS DEAD, so let’s just worry about this great track! Built around a tasteful piano riff, with gentle “ahh ahh” background vocals and a somewhat inane (“You’re my guiding light / Each and every night”), this piece sounds like something from six years earlier. Of course, music was still great six years earlier, so that’s no complaint! Bert Person’s vocals are so smooth and the song drives along with the secret implicit in so much pop of the era: that talking about love always sounds inane, which is why the music is there to convey the meaning for you.

“Teach me of the birds and bees. / Oh love me, won’t you please?”

167 I’m a Nut by Leroy Pullins (1966)

Leroy Pullins’s sole hit is this bonkers little novelty tune that combines borschty gags (“only forest fires prevent bears”), self-deprecating celebrations (?) of how impoverished Pullins is (“if it took a dime to go ’round the world, I couldn’t get out of sight”), solid guitar work, and this…noise that Pullins can make…presumably with his mouth? Remember when yodeling was big and country singers would all yodel?—I mean, I don’t remember it either, it was like a hundred years ago, but I know it happened. Anyway, I think Pullins was trying to create something new, like yodeling, that could take the country world by storm.

In some alternate history, everyone would be making that noise. But Pullins turned out to be a one-hit wonder: He left music to become (Wikipedia says) a fireman, and this track is the only immortality he and that noise will share.

166 Part-Time Love by Little Johnny Taylor (1963)

Little Johnny (not to be confused with Johnnie Taylor, who is also good) Taylor’s biggest hit is this wonderful slow piece, its creepy music—a noodling blues guitar over truly ominous drones—matching the morose, defeated vocals. “People in the cemetery / They’re not all alone.” Unlike, presumably, Little Johnny Taylor. Creeptastic.

This might be the first (but will hardly be the last) time that my one-per-artist rules really hurt me in the application. On another day I would have picked a different Little Johnny Taylor song.

165 Bye-bye Birdie by Ann-Margret (1963)

It’s hard to separate the song “Bye-bye Birdie” from its music video—I mean the opening (and closing: treat it as a two-sided single) credits of the film of the same name, with Ann-Margret on an unseen conveyor belt that perpetually threatens to carry her away from the camera as she scurries to stay in one place. She also mugs shamelessly and makes that weird obscene hand gesture from Friends, all against a blank blue background. It’s unforgettable.

But we’re not here for music videos! “Bye-bye Birdie” works blind, and it works because of Ann-Margret, who mostly refuses to sing (although she could really sing), preferring to belt out a brassy, over-breathy (Birdie = Bird–heee) pout. None of this should work, but it sounds like nothing else and is, like that conveyor belt, unforgettable.

The rest of the movie doesn’t hold up, though.

164 In Dreams by Roy Orbison (1963)

Yeah, it’s hard to separate this one from its music video, too.

161 Twist and Shout by The Isley Brothers (1962)

I feel like Dave Barry spends enough time defending The Isley Brothers (against the Beatles) that the rest of us can just shut up about it. Anyway, it’s true: The Isleys’ version is better. Dance party indispensable.

162 Israelites by Desmond Dekker and the Aces (1968)

I don’t want to come across as a guy who loves reggae, because, you know, I’d be a type. I’d have to get a whole new set of clothes; change my identity; it sounds like a lot of work.

But this song, this song is great! Even for 1969 (when it charted in the US) it must have sounded different from the rest of the charting records—and lots of records sounded different from each other in 1969! Dekker just comes across so cool as he croons, “I don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyyyyde.”

161 Barbara by The Temptations (no, not those ones) (1960)

What do you want from me? There were more than one band called The Temptations in the 1960s (although apparently not simultaneously). I don’t know anything about this earlier group except that 1. they were from New York, and 2. one of them would “climb the highest mountain” to get Barbara to “wear [his] high school ring.” That kind of bathos is what I’m all about. That’s what the early ’60s were great at, and that’s why we’re here.

Also I love the plink plink plink of the opening, whatever it is they’re plinking. What a great song!

Mostly, I wrote books.

If you buy one, I won't die of exposure.

My basic attitude towards the ’60s is more or less like my basic attitude to the early years of Modernism: It’s mostly bad and dumb, but it must have been exciting to be young then. But then there’s the music…

Not Modernist music; I mean the music of the 1960s. When has music ever been as exciting at the 1960s? When has music been as consistently good across such a wide spectrum of genres? When has music changed so much in such a short time? Maybe you could pitch the 1920s as an answer for two of those questions, but not all three. Everyone knows Sturgeon’s Law is “ninety percent of everything is crap”; but in the ’60s about 75% of music was at least pretty good.1 It’s not quite an inverse Sturgeon’s Law, but it’s close.

So of course I thought I’d ruin everything by quantifying it. I mean by pretending to quantify it. I have ranked the 200 best songs of the 1960s, and I will stand by my rankings with religious fervor, but I have scarcely assigned them scores in different categories and then run them through some database compiling…engine? I don’t know words for things, and I have certainly misused every musical term I bring up in the following piece, including easy ones like “country and western” or “drums.” Anyway, I just put the songs in the order of how much I liked them.

I decided to limit spots to one song per artist after I saw how many Jan & Dean tracks were on the list. “No one is going to respect me if they see all this Jan & Dean,” I said silently to myself. So there’s only one Jan & Dean pick. I tried to be accommodating with people who were in more than one band, or who fielded solo careers, largely because I didn’t want to have to pay attention to who was in The Drifters when. If you see someone pop up more than once, don’t shoot me. It'll happen, and don’t shoot me.

In general, you should not be angry that I have snubbed your favorites. First of all, I hate most music, so statistically speaking I probably hate whatever you like, even in an inverse-Sturgeon era like the 1960s. Second of all, I’m an idiot. Third of all, there are plenty of good songs and artists sitting in #201–300, and I just didn’t get around to them. And, you know, last: I cleverly arranged the list in reverse order and then doled it out piecemeal, so you can keep pretending your missing favorites are higher up, towards number one, and by the time you learn the truth, weeks or months from now, we’ll possibly all be dead.

Feel free to provide threats, recriminations, broken links, and predictions.

200 I’ll Be Doggone by Marvin Gaye (1965)

From the prolific pen of Smokey Robinson comes my favorite Marvin Gaye moment of the ’60s, and Gaye’s first #1 R&B hit. Supposedly, Robinson wrote this the day after “Tracks of My Tears”—but he must have been churning out six hits a month, so it’s probably not so remarkable. Anyway, Marvin Gaye is excellent, and I know people are going to be mad about the fact that he clocks in at #200, but that’s how good the 1960s were.

Also, the combination of raisins and that interminable CCR jam have ruined “Grapevine” for me, so that song wasn’t about to chart. It had to be this one.

199 For What It’s Worth by Buffalo Springfield (1967)

Sure, sure, this song is good, but it’s up on the list at #199 because of its guitar solo, the greatest guitar solo of all time. The solo starts at 2:34, and you’ll notice it’s only two seconds long. Why didn’t more people follow this lead?!?

198 Alley-Oop by The Hollywood Argyles (1960)

I’ve never heard the term “caveman rock” bandied about [ETA: Actually George Starostin just used it to describe The Pretty Things], but if I ever hear it I’ll know what it means: “Louie Louie” or “Wooly Bully” or something like that. Wrong, idiot! I am wrong! It’s “Alley-Oop”! He’s a literal caveman!

“Alley-Oop” revels in its own stupidity, mixing beatnik slang with just made-up prehistoric (?) neologisms: “A mean motor scooter and a bad go-getter.” The whole thing grinds along at a pace that seems to indicate moving faster would tax The Hollywood Argyles’ neanderthal brains. Also: It’s a paean to a comic strip. In other words, this is the most punk song ever recorded, or it was in 1960. Better examples may follow over the course of the decade.

197 Silver Dagger by Joan Baez (1960)

Certainly not the best rendition of this folk song (that would be Dolly Parton’s 1999 cut, of course), and perhaps not even Joan Baez’s best song (take your pick from the early ’70s), but this one’s great, with lovely fast picking and a vocal that switches between beautiful and chatty. And in case you’re wondering why Dolly sings “all men are fools,” which makes no sense in context—Baez sings “all men are false,” and what’s oral tradition without misheard lyrics?

196 Homecoming by Tom T. Hall (1969)

Tom T. Hall is known for telling stories in his songs; I mean, that’s his job; of course he’s good at it. I think he got even better in the following few years, but 1969 had several sweet tales, including this one about an alienated musician and his brief trip to see his family after his mother’s passing. The entire song is a monolog, but like a Bob Newhart telephone gag, with responses to inaudible questions. And the whole thing builds up to a quiet moment at the end: The monolog, we learn, has been a delaying tactic as the narrator works his nerve up to say the thing he came here to say.

Maybe this song lacks the catharsis of “Turn It On, Turn It On, Turn It On” or the whimsy of “The Monkey Who Became President,” but it’s a heartbreaker on its own. “And by the way, if you see Barbara Walker, tell her that I said hello.”

195 Yonder Come the Blues by Odetta (1962)

We think of Odetta as a folk singer, and indeed she brought her acoustic guitar to the 1963 March on Washington, but (like Cass Elliot after her), her voice was too vast for conventional folk, and it must have seemed natural for her to branch out: This track has her singing blues with a dixieland jazz band, and I’ll take it over her arguably more famous “If I Had a Hammer” or “There’s a Hole in the Bucket.”

For extra trivia: Odetta is the only person on this list to make a cameo in The Education of Robert Nifkin.

194 Simple Song of Freedom by Tim Hardin (1969)

One of the glories of the ’60s is that even in what we may think of as a marginalized style—folk music—so many varieties of folk music could flourish. Cf. this folksy cover of a Bobby Darin song to the tracks by Joan Baez or Odetta above or The Rooftop Singers or Doc Watson [etc.] below. Hardin jazzes it up (compared to Darin’s even folksier version; Hardin’s was released first) and gets some L. Cohen-y backup singers, but it’s his own sleepy, druggy vocals that sell the piece.

Too bad he drops Darin’s Solzhenitsyn reference. Pop music needs more Solzhenitsyn in it.

193 A Losing Battle by Johnny Adams (1962)

Church choirist Johnny Adams was overheard singing (says the NYT obituary) in the bathtub by a neighbor, and that neighbor just happened to be the woman who cowrote “Tutti Frutti” with Little Richard. I guess she had contacts. So thin walls and Dorothy LaBostrie got Adams to record some R&B sides, and he kept performing and recording until the very end (hence the NYT obituary). “Losing Battle” was his only real hit in the ’60s, and here Adams mixes his trademark smooth vocals and occasional falsetto with sardonic lyrics for a real winner.

192 Road Runner by Bo Diddley (1960)

Bo Diddley is one of those 1950s legends whose star had dimmed by the ’60s. If he didn’t enter the decade as gracefully as Elvis or Chuck Berry, well…he was doing better than Buddy Holly, wasn’t he?

My favorite of Diddley’s ’60s output is this casually strolling blues rock piece. The contrast between the novelty “beep beep” background and Bo Diddley’s bragging talk—somewhat reminiscent of 1958 hit “Say Man,” but less, you know, hostile, while still being pretty hostile—is irresistible.

191 The Pusher by Steppenwolf (1968)

Second-generation (his mother wrote “Heartbreak Hotel”) songwriter Hoyt Axton penned “The Pusher” back in 1963 and played it in his live gigs; some of the musicians-who-later-became-Steppenwolf heard him and released their version five years later (which is seventy years in 1960s-music time). Axton eventually made his own recording, but, and I hate to say this…Steppenwolf’s is better, because they really damn that pusher. I mean, that is some serious damning. They hit it hard. That damning is the whole song to me. God damn.

Axton was dead broke when the song appeared in Easy Rider, and from that point on he was no longer broke.

190 Bad Boy by The Donays (1962)

In a screenplay-ready moment, a quartet of high school friends from the suburbs of Detroit put out a lone single—and the Beatles cover the B-side! And after that…nothing happens. The Donays never recorded a third song. This girl group disappeared into the vacuum of history. “We’ll always have the B-side.”

Even better than that B-side, though, as custom dictates, is this A-side, the off-brand–Motown “Bad Boy,” with its “cheat cheat” background vocals. “Popcorn” Wylie (freshly off the Motown label after a feud with Berry Gordy) produced, which may explain the familiar sound; regardless, this is a single that deserved more than it received (i.e. nada).

189 Just a Little by The Beau Brummels (1965)

Great little early folk rocker from a band probably more famous now for being included in the Nuggets box set. According to wikipedia, the “folk” part of this folk rock was accidental: The band wasn’t skilled enough to keep their songs from sounding the same, so in desperation they switched to acoustic instruments. “Mighty events turn on a straw; the crossing of a brook decides the conquest of the world” (Carlyle).

188 Son-of-a Preacher Man by Dusty Springfield (1968)

Aretha Franklin would release her own version two years later, but this time, and only this time, Dusty Springfield gets the palm. It’s like when Shelley and Keats each wrote a poem about Egypt, and Keats produced “To the Nile,” and Shelley produced “Ozymandias,” and posterity has ever after been “Shelley beat Keats how???” It’s like that.

187 Indian Giver by The 1910 Fruitgum Co. (1969)

The 1910 Fruitgum Co. is the perfect name for a late-sixties pop band, and even more perfect is this driving bubblegum piece with it louche Indian theme. The central metaphor (a girl who took back her heart) is backed with a tom-tom beat. The whole thing is irredeemably offensive, all the way to the faux Native American costumes on the album cover, but it’s still 1910FCo.’s best single, and one of the catchiest of the decade.

Just to make everything weirder, the B-side of the single is merely a different 1910FCo. song (about Howdy Doody of all things, and itself a bonkers track) played backwards.

186 Mama Don’t Allow by The Rooftop Singers (1963)

Like some kind of bizarro-world Peter, Paul, and Mary: I give you Erik, Bill, and Lynne, the Rooftop Singers. Their version of this classic may not be the best ever recorded—that would be this one—but it does capture perfectly the combination of anarchy and harmlessness inherent in a song that models guitar-playing as the apotheosis of rebellion.

185 Leader of the Pack by The Shangri-Las (1964)

Absolute peak ’60s tragedy porn. The precise peak comes when the Leader’s girlfriend staccato-shouts: “Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!”

184 The Train That Carried My Girl from Town by Doc & Merle Watson (1967)

Doc Watson had recorded this old folk song before (for example in 1963), but this version (with his son Merle, just a teenager at the time) moves the fastest. The faster the picking, the faster the train, I suppose.

The ’60s folk revival reinvigorated the careers of a lot of half-forgotten old masters and launched the careers of some newbies (plenty of whom will appear in later installments), but Doc Watson is an unusual case: Not quite “authentic” (despite being authentically blind; go figure) Watson decided one day to un-Dylan himself, dropping his electric guitar and playing, you know, the authentic instruments with genuine authenticity. And here we are.

183 Now That the Buffalo’s Gone by Buffy Sainte-Marie (1964)

Buffy Sainte-Marie sounds like a cross between Joni Mitchell and Johnny Rotten, just the absolute angriest person imaginable expressing herself sweetly and with maximum vibrato. The effect has always been kitsch, as kitschy as “Leader of the Pack,” but perhaps it was the kind of kitsch we’re supposed to feel bad about enjoying because it was, after all, about serious and important matters.

Except, of course, it turns out that it was all fake. Not the centuries of injustice part, but the part where Buffy Sainte-Marie pretended to be an Indian. Imagine singing:

Can you remember the times
That you have held your head high
And told all your friends of your Indian claim,
How your great-great-grandfather from Indian blood sprang…

and the whole time you’re just no more an Indian than the 1910 Fruitgum Co.! This is amazing!

It wouldn’t work if the song wasn’t so good, but Sainte-Marie is a great songwriter (check out this cover of her 1972 side “Moonshot”). This is good kitsch, and good kitsch should be fake and Buffy Sainte-Marie is fake and now the world makes sense (except for the injustice part).

182 I Enjoy Being a Boy by The Banana Splits (1969)

The early years of the record biz saw a host of fake bands, I mean bands (orchestras, we used to call them sometimes) recording side after side and changing their name each time. Who would know? If you don’t want to buy thirteen different 78s by one band, we can make believe you’re buying thirteen different 78s by thirteen different bands, and everyone’s happy.

Factors such as the cult of celebrity and appearances in film (and later television) killed the idea of musicians being faceless widgets that could be replaced at a whim—and of course record companies were furious! Possible solutions included just rewidgetifying your bands (famously no members of the Crystals appeared on their sole #1 hit), inventing fake bands from whole cloth, or reducing bands to animated cartoons. Everyone thinks of The Archies in this regard, because they had the #1 hit, but perhaps more tantalizing were The Beagles, because the songs from the cartoons could be played live by actors cavorting in dog costumes. Get several dog costumes, and The Beagles could play multiple concerts on different coasts simultaneously (you know, like mall Santas). Everyone wins!

Well, The Banana Splits were not even cartoons, although they introduced cartoons on TV. They were three guys in animal costumes, and the various actors in various copies of their animal costumes could tour the country. Another difference: The Archies were bubblegum pop and The Beagles were (as the name implies) British Invasion pop, but the Banana Splits actually rocked! Their album is surprisingly loud.

Perhaps it is no surprise that they were better when they were not rocking, though. The Banana Splits’ infectious (tra la la, la la la la) theme is great, but even better were some other very poppy sides, like “Long Live Love” and especially this one, my choice for #182 on our list, “I Enjoy Being a Boy.” By 1969, the ’60s were almost unparodyable, but these opening lyrics (“I live in a cucumber castle on the banks of a cranberry sea”) give it a good shot; they would be unendurable if they were not being sung by literal animals. Sung by literal animals, the song becomes sublime. TMBG did a cover, BTW.

181 Hava Nagila by Dick Dale & the Deltones (1963)

Look, surf music is great, and probably a sober analysis would put Dick Dale higher on this list and the Ventures, the Surfaris, the Chantays, etc. peppered throughout it (just as The Royal Fingers belong on any best-of list of the early 2000s). But no ’60s ranking should be sober, and surf music is like Gregorian chants: I love it when I hear it, but I can never remember which song I’m listening to. So here we are, surf fans.

And I picked the song that you won’t confuse with any other. “Hava Nagila” blends seamlessly into the surf sound, which actually makes sense, giving surf’s Eastern-Mediterranean roots: Dick Dale is half Lebanese and “Misirlou,” a song so good that even Carl Wilson’s 1963 chops couldn’t ruin it, is famously a Greco-Armenian folk song set to reverb. By the ’90s, the cool kids spun this record at their bar mitzvahs.

Continued here!

I wrote a lot of books you might buy

1. Arsenic and Old Lace

“Not the Melbourne method, please, Johnny, please.” Absolutely the funniest black comedy, with the greatest cast (especially Peter Lorre at his most unctuous and Cary Grant at his screwball best) and the most memorable lines. “Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.” “No, I’m not drunk, but you’re giving me an idea.” “I’m not a cabdriver: I’m a coffee pot.” The Hays Code wouldn’t permit the final scene from the play, but the picture works without it. One of my all-time top five films.

2. Double Indemnity

This year’s other big one: not the first film noir (no matter what they say) but certainly the best. No cast has ever played a love triangle this hot: Maybe a fast-talking Edward G. Robinson is my favorite leg of the triangle, but I’ll hear lobbyists for other legs. Watch the 1973 TV movie version to see what this screenplay sounds like coming from other actors—yeah, it doesn’t work at all. “Straight down the line.” One of my all-time top ten films.

3. Laura

Gene Tierney’s finest hour: I mean, for the first half of the movie she’s amazing, and she’s only a painting! I don’t intend to be snarky; probably this movie works best if you fall in love with Tierney as you watch, and perhaps not everyone is temperamentally equipped to do so. But Dana Andrews is, and I guess I am, too.

4. Lifeboat

Hitchcock’s first crazy experiment (and the original “bottle episode”?), a movie set in a lifeboat and only a lifeboat, with a bunch of regular schmucks and one very competent Nazi. Ostensibly a failure as propaganda (because of that ubermenschy Nazi), but actually the best kind of propaganda, a statement of purpose for the Allied cause; and also, you know, a great drama.

5. To Have and Have Not

Supposedly Jean Arthur (who starred in Howard Hawks’s 1939 Only Angel’s Have Wings) saw Lauren Bacall in this piece and said (I paraphrase): “Oh! That’s what Hawks wanted me to do”; and Arthur realized that she had blown her shot at immortality. Sucks for Jean Arthur, but we’ll always have Bacall in To Have and Have Not.

6. Ministry of Fear

The Hays Code couldn’t quite handle Graham Greene’s pulpiest novel (it got Rebeccaed, if you know what I mean), but it’s still pure pulp magic.

7. Murder, My Sweet

Ostensibly the sequel to The Big Sleep, a movie that would not come out for two more years, this early noir shares a retrospective flashback voiceover with Double Indemnity, but with a twistier plot and fewer bad wigs. If it pales in comparison with Indemnity, or even Sleep, this is no criticism.

8. Phantom Lady

Another early noir, because who can resist? A million years ago, a friend of mine handed me this movie on VHS (!) in a purple box and told me to watch it for the jazz sequence. Not even my kind of jazz, but still a cool scene.

9. Miyamoto Musashi

Quick and dirty is perhaps not what you think of when you think of Kenji Mizoguchi, but here we are. Not his only samurai movie, and probably not his best, but still my own favorite depiction of Musashi’s most famous duel.

10. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

Not Preston Sturges’s funniest film, but his—holy smokes, how did they make this in 1944?—most outrageous. It’s kind of like Sullivan’s Travels, I guess, with its “let’s just pretend everything that happened is all right and we’re all okay with it” ending, only with mysterious pregnancy and not attempted murder. Honestly, how did they make this in 1944, a year when mysterious pregnancies were so much more scandalous than attempted murder? I guess that’s the true miracle of Morgan’s Creek.

Tryyyyyyyyyy one

1. Lady Snowblood

I have a theory, too long to be contained in this margin, that Up is the American equivalent of Lady Snowblood. The Japanese version is bloodier, though.

2. The Day of the Jackal

Methodical assassination caper film. We sometimes say about an old film “that could never get made today” because Mickey Rooney’s playing a Japanese guy or something, but let me tell you, this film could never get made today for…other reasons. Anyway, this here is the rarest bird: A solid adaptation of a solid book.

3. The Holy Mountain

Perhaps the weirdest move ever made, and I say that as a fan of weird movies. Less accessible than El Topo (also by Jodorowsky), which, you will perceive if you have seen El Topo, is saying a mouthful.

4. Theater of Blood

Light-hearted horror thriller swimming in Shakespeare references. Vincent Price’s best film not to star Gene Tierney.

5. F for Fake

The medium is the message. Before the rapid-cutting of MTV and commercials and scene-establishing montages deadened us to all sensation, Orson Welles (!) figured out that the whole thing was a trick.

6. Paper Moon

Charming and irresponsible picaresque. This is the same year as The Sting, and in some ways Paper Moon is the same movie—but Paper Moon is more charming, more irresponsible, and much more picaresque!

7. Jesus Christ Superstar

Probably unendurable upon initial release, but by now, as the film is such an over-the-top kitschy vision of 1973, the whole thing reads like a fun parody.

8. Fantastic Planet

“Why do you keep showing me disturbing movies?” a friend of mine asked after I showed her Fantastic Planet. I’m not sure if I’d call the film, a French SF cartoon, disturbing, but it does manage to feel like science fiction, something most ostensibly SF movies fail at—but not because it is particularly plausible or “scientific”; rather it is bonkers and “big picture” in a New Wavey way, and that’s SF in 1973.

9. Love and Anarchy

Another assassination film, this one about Mussolini. I’ll admit I have trouble remembering which Lina Wertmüller film is which, but I think this is the one with the great gag: One character gets his two middle fingers shot off, and now when he tried to salute Mussolini, he looks like he’s giving him the horns.

10. The Exorcist

I sat near the front of the theater when I saw this movie (not first run)—and partway through I moved to the back of the theater. I was unprepared for that level of intensity! Almost pornographic in its insistence on grotesque spectacle over all else; or maybe I just tell myself to remove some of the shame of slinking back to the back row.

Read these books before The Unraveling*

*(entropic collapse)

As you know, I have been occasionally swiping Joe Surkiewicz’s idea (and formatting) and cooking up retrospective best-of movie lists. 1985 was a time when they still made fun mainstream movies that weren’t stupid, and any number of them, like Return to Oz or Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure or, who knows?, After Hours, could have squeezed onto this list on a different day—in fact, several of them are already there.

1. Ran

Possibly the greatest movie by the greatest film director in cinema history. Nothing not to love (unless you don’t like despair).

2. Better Off Dead

“Gee, I'm really sorry your mom blew up, Ricky.” Almost a bad movie time and again as it embraces every 1985 teen-movie cliche, but so outrageously funny that it is in fact a great movie. Charles De Mar is my hero.

3. Phenomena

There has never been a bad film about girl/bug psychic bonds; this one ranks between Nausicäa and Mothra in the pantheon. A.k.a. Creepers, if you’re a poser.

4. Kiss of the Spider Woman

The almost-impossible feat of making a good mainstream “art” film. Even the name actors couldn’t ruin this one (I guess Julia wasn’t yet a name?). Ah, I’m a sucker for prison movies anyway.

5. Back to the Future

One of the crowd-pleasingest crowd pleasers. The extremely likable cast manages to overcome some fatal plot holes (how far is the mall from downtown?) and the drag of having more endings than Return of the King…

6. My Life as a Dog

I was wondering, “Why do I always think of this movie as a Swedish What’s Eating Gilbert Grape??” and then I checked and they have the same director, so I’m not crazy.

7. Brazil

By turns stupefyingly brilliant and frustrating, like a Gilliam film should be. I haven’t rewatched the movie since it all came true, and maybe I’ll rank it higher, for prescience, when I do. Spoiler in the footnote.1

8. The Goonies

A much better film, on rewatching as an adult, than I remember from my youth; the whole thing works as a what if, starting (as many movies do) with a what if children had agency?, but building layers upon layer of ludicrousness, climaxing in what if pirates wore eyepatches to conceal bone deformities?

9. Come and See

Absolutely brutal Soviet “anti-glacier” film. Sure, you already knew that war is bad and that Nazis, specifically, are bad, but we don’t judge movies on their messages’ freshness, or even their messages at all—but rather on esthetics, and outside of architecture, brutal is a wonderful esthetic.

10. The Breakfast Club

Curse my trite gen-X sympathies, elbowing out (as they do here) my film-snob pretensions. Ferris Bueller may be John Hughes’s masterpiece, but it’s hard not also to love this little cheese-fest. Every character gets to break down and chew the scenery, one by one…but not Ally Sheedy. They never really get Ally Sheedy.

A paranoid YA thriller: 99¢!

In my never-ending attempt to cash in on other people’s ideas to achieve illicit virality, I have decided to copy Joe Surkiewicz’s idea of listing best movies, with the slight modification that I’ll be doing one year at a time. Today’s year is the second-greatest year for movies (by my lights): 1994.

Make sure to fight me! I am here to fight!

A paranoid adult thriller! Also 99¢!

1. Barcelona

Whit Stillman’s dancing-yuppie masterpiece, the wittiest film ever made. An anthropologically exacting view of the Cold War but also a genuine romantic comedy, albeit one with a structure both bonkers and satisfying.

2. Pulp Fiction

Yeah, yeah, maybe everyone copied it and now it looks tired and cliched, but if you can try to remember what the world was like before 1994, this movie reappears as the freshest and newest; still a surprisingly humanist film.

3. Crumb

One of the all-time great documentaries, buoyed by the crazy revelation that R. Crumb is the sane one in his family. “Well, someone was giving me enemas.”

4. To Live

Zhang Yimou’s discursive story of life into and during the literal and Cultural Revolutions. The rending of the veil during the shadow-puppet scene is one of my favorite shots in all cinema.

5. Clerks

I once met a guy who talked like a Kevin Smith character; turns out he was just from Red Bank, which makes me suspect Smith should be regarded as the J. M. Synge of local New Jersey syntax. Anyway, in this movie, unlike many of his others, Kevin Smith reins in his bad habits and showcases his good ones.

6. Heavenly Creatures

Alternately fanciful and horrifying based-on-a-true-story murder ballad. My favorite date movie.

7. Shallow Grave

For a couple of years, before it all went disastrously wrong, I thought Danny Boyle was going to be one of the kings of cinema, and it started here in this extremely dark but even more extremely fun crime romp. “What then? What then?”

8. Cemetery Man

The best of the lighthearted zombie movies that would one day be inescapable. Francesco Dellamorte speaks for us all when he says, “The only thing that’s not shitty is sleep.“

9. Eat Drink Man Woman

Ang Lee’s uneven path to occasional greatness passes through this excellent if earnest family drama. Honestly, there is a lot of food.

10. Spanking the Monkey

Speaking of family dramas, here’s the world’s most uncomfortable one! I think David O. Russell’s filmography is less bad than most people say it is, but surely even the haters can get behind this hilarious little cringe-fest.

Fight me! Make your own lists! Propose other years!