Old Bill Shakespeare once said “If music be the food of love, play on”. Never were truer words spoken, or written. My love of music is well documented here. Yet in spite of that, I actually came pretty close to shutting down the blog today. As much as I love it, it just seemed irrelevant. In light of this past weekend, a lot of things do. See, in a life of great moments, I had one of the top five this past weekend. I’ve watched the sunset and rise in the middle of the oceans. Stood in the shadows of the Sphinx and stood on the great Pyramids of Egypt. I’ve walked the streets of Isreal. Yet watching my baby graduate was such an amazing moment, it’s really changed me forever. I dare any man who has watched if baby girl do something like that to tell me otherwise.

Fortunately, I was talked down from the edge by someone I consider a pretty good friend. However, I am going to take next week off, while I enjoy a week with my baby girl on her dream vacation. So this week, I am gong to be a little selfish, and post some of the songs I consider my favorites of all time. They are the songs I can’t live without. They all have a special meaning to me, and I want to share it with you all.

1. The Velvet Underground & Nico - Sunday Morning - The first Velvet Undergound song I ever heard. It remains my favorite to this day. I can listen to that album all day long.
2. David Bowie - Five Years - Listening to the stuff Bowie did in the early 80’s, I was curious as to why he was considered great. this song answered that question in my mind. Doesn’t matter that he didn’t do too much I considered great after 1980. Ziggy will live forever.
3. Sweet - Love Is Like Oxygen - I remember hearing this song on a car radio in the 70’s at a gas station. At the time, we were forced in to listen to country music in my house. Never rock. This song was my first clue there was a bigger, better world out there waiting to be discovered.
4. The Beatles - A Day In The Life - The greatest song The Beatles ever did. My friends and I would sit and get stoned in the late 80’s to the Beatles. As a young teen, John Lennon was a god. He was shot the day after my birthday. I was watching Monday Night Football at the time, and I remember I went to my room in the basement, and cried.
5. Queen - Killer Queen - Glam rock never knew a greater talent than Freddy Mercury. His command of an audience was complete, as anyone who saw him sing Radio Gaga on Live Aid can attest to. Kids, want to know what great is? Watch this clip. There’s 200,000+ plus in Wembley, and he controls them like a puppet master. I watched this performance live on TV, and will never as long as I live forget it.
6. The Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The UK - Johnny Rotten opens this song with a menacing snarl and laugh, and it only gets better from there. This song made my head explode the first time I heard it in a record shop in Kent, Ohio. It started a love affair with punk that continues to this day.
7. Joy Division - Transmisssion - I first heard the next two songs in the same record shop. I had no clue what it was I was listening to, but it changed my work for ever. These two songs are some of the finest songs ever, and they changed for ever the way I listen to music. The older I get, the more I live Joy Division. RIP, Ian…your music will live forever.
8. Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
9. Blondie - Heart of Glass - My introduction to Blondie, I’m ashamed to say. But I quickly bought everything I could find of theirs. Just a perfect band, and a prefect object of lust for a teenage me.
10. Gerry Rafferty - Baker Street - My favorite song of all time. Odd choice, isn’t it? In 1978, three things reached a loner kid in the 8th grade. One was reading SE Hinton’s The Outsiders. The second was reading When Legends Die. This was the third. For some reason, it reached me. I still love it, and sing every word of it. By myself, of course.
11. Jackson Browne - Running on Empty - This song gave me hope that someday, I could escape the desperately drab, poverty stricken world I was raised in. This past weekend, while dining with my sisters and my neices and nephews, I pointed across the street from the restaurant to an empty parking lot. “Thats where they handed out the government cheese in the Reagan years. Sometimes thats all we had to eat for a week was cheese sandwiches.” That spoke volumes to the our children, and forever put to rest their questions of just how poor we were as kids.
12. Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb - I loved it when it came out. We got stoned to it as teens. After my world fell apart, I lay awake at night, listening to this song, and promising myself I would somehow pull myself up and make something out of myself. I did. It was the hardest thing I ever did. In 1986, all I owned in this world was one pair of jeans, a tshirt, underwear, socks, and one pair of sneakers. It was what I wore to Navy boot camp. 21 years later, I live a life I better than the best life I ever dreamed of back then.
13. Iggy Pop - Lust For Life - I’m worth a million in prizes, indeed. Never been a funner song to listen to.
14. The Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil

- Just a perfect song, in my opinion. I’m not a huge fan of the Stones, but this is flat out one of the best rock songs ever. Every time I hear it, I can’t help but to sing it.

Tune in tomorrow for day two. This is just the beginning.