| 1 | Like a Rolling Stone | "I wrote it. I didn't fail. It was straight," Bob Dylan said of his greatest song shortly after he recorded it in June 1965. There is no better description of "Like a Rolling Stone" of its revolutionary design and execution or of the young man, just turned 24, who created it. | Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia) | Bob Dylan | Dylan | Tom Wilson | July, 1965 | 12 weeks | No. 2 |
| 2 | (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' | "It's the riff heard round the world," says Steve Van Zandt, guitarist for the E Street Band. "And it's one of the earliest examples of Dylan influencing the Stones and the Beatles the degree of cynicism, and the idea of bringing more personal lyrics from the folk and blues tradition into popular music." | Out of Our Heads (ABKCO) | The Rolling Stones | Mick Jagger, Keith Richards | Andrew Loog Oldham | May, 1965 | 14 weeks | No. 1 |
| 3 | Imagine | John Lennon wrote "Imagine," his greatest musical gift to the world, one morning early in 1971 in his bedroom at Tittenhurst Park, his estate in Ascot, England. His wife, Yoko Ono, watched as Lennon sat at the white grand piano now known around the world from films and photographs of the sessions for his Imagine album and virtually completed the song: the serene melody; the pillowy chord progression; that beckoning, four-note figure; and nearly all of the lyrics, 22 lines of graceful, plain-spoken faith in the power of a world, united in purpose, to repair and change itself. | Imagine (Capitol/Apple) | John Lennon | John Lennon | Lennon, Phil Spector, Yoko Ono | October, 1971 | 9 weeks | No. 3 |
| 4 | What's Going On | "What's Going On" is an exquisite plea for peace on Earth, sung by a man at the height of crisis. In 1970, Marvin Gaye was Motown's top male vocal star, yet he was frustrated by the assembly-line role he played on his own hits. Devastated by the loss of duet partner Tammi Terrell, who died that March after a three-year battle with a brain tumor, Gaye was also trapped in a turbulent marriage to Anna Gordy, Motown boss Berry Gordy's sister. Gaye was tormented, too, by his relationship with his puritanical father, Marvin Sr. "If I was arguing for peace," Gaye told biographer David Ritz, "I knew I'd have to find peace in my heart." | What's Going On (Tamla) | Marvin Gaye | Gaye, Renaldo Benson, Al Cleveland | Gaye | Feb, 1971 | 13 weeks | No. 2 |
| 5 | Respect | Otis Redding wrote "Respect" and recorded it first, for the Volt label in 1965. But Aretha Franklin took possession of the song for all time with her definitive cover, made at Atlantic's New York studio on Valentine's Day 1967. "Respect" was her first Number One hit and the single that established her as the Queen of Soul. In Redding's reading, a brawny march, he called for equal favor with volcanic force. Franklin wasn't asking for anything. She sang from higher ground: a woman calling an end to the exhaustion and sacrifice of a raw deal with scorching sexual authority. In short, if you want some, you will earn it. | I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (Atlantic) | Aretha Franklin | Otis Redding | Jerry Wexler | April, 1967 | 12 weeks | No. 1 |
| 6 | Good Vibrations | "It scared me, the word 'vi-brations,'" Brian Wilson once said, remembering how, when he was a boy, his mother, Audree, tried to explain why dogs barked at some people and not others. "A dog would pick up vibrations from these people that you can't see but you can feel. And the same thing happened with people." "Good Vibrations" harnessed that energy and turned it into eternal sunshine. "This is a very spiritual song," Wilson said after its release, "and I want it to give off good vibrations." | Smiley Smile/Wild Honey (Capitol) | The Beach Boys | Brian Wilson, Mike Love | Wilson | October, 1966 | 14 weeks | No.1 |
| 7 | Johnny B. Goode | "Johnny B. Goode" was the first rock & roll hit about rock & roll stardom. It is still the greatest rock & roll song about the democracy of fame in pop music. And "Johnny B. Goode" is based in fact. The title character is Chuck Berry "more or less," as he told Rolling Stone in 1972. "The original words [were], of course, 'That little colored boy could play.' I changed it to 'country boy' or else it wouldn't get on the radio." Berry took other narrative liberties. Johnny came from "deep down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans," rather than Berry's St. Louis. And Johnny "never ever learned to read or write so well," while Berry graduated from beauty school with a degree in hairdressing and cosmetology. | The Anthology (Chess) | Chuck Berry | Chuck Berry | Leonard and Phil Chess | April, 1958 | 15 weeks | No. 8 |
| 8 | Hey Jude | The Beatles' biggest U.S. single nine weeks at Number One was also their longest, at seven minutes and 11 seconds. During the recording sessions, producer George Martin objected to the length, claiming DJs would not play the song. "They will if it's us," John Lennon shot back. Paul McCartney wrote "Hey Jude" in June 1968, singing to himself on his way to visit Lennon's soon-to-be-ex-wife, Cynthia, and their son, Julian. The opening lines were, McCartney once said, "a hopeful message for Julian: 'Come on, man, your parents got divorced. I know you're not happy, but you'll be OK.'" McCartney changed "Jules" to "Jude" a name inspired by Jud from the musical Oklahoma! and presented a demo tape to Lennon, who loved the song. He also thought McCartney was singing to him, about his relationship with Yoko Ono and the strains on the Lennon-McCartney partnership. But his self-centered reading underscored the universal comfort in McCartney's lyrics and the song's warm, rolling charm, fortified in the fade-out by a 36-piece orchestra whose members (with one grumpy exception) also clapped and sang along for double their usual fee. | 1 (Capitol/Apple) | The Beatles | John Lennon, Paul McCartney | George Martin | Aug, 1968 | 19 weeks | No. 1 |
| 9 | Smells Like Teen Spirit | Producer Butch Vig first heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in early 1991, on a boombox cassette recorded by bassist Krist Novoselic, drummer Dave Grohl and singer-guitarist-songwriter Kurt Cobain in a barn in Tacoma, Washington. The fidelity was abysmal. Vig about to work with Nirvana on their major-label debut, Nevermind could not tell that the song would soon make underground Seattle rock the new mainstream and catapult Cobain, a troubled young man with strict indie-culture ethics, into megacelebrity. "I could sort of hear the 'Hello, hello' part and the chords," Vig said years later. "But it was so indecipherable that I had no idea what to expect." | Nevermind (DGC) | Nirvana | Kurt Cobain | Butch Vig | Sep, 1991 | 20 weeks | No. 6 |
| 10 | What'd I Say | "The people just went crazy, and they loved that little ummmmh, unnnnh," Ray Charles told Rolling Stone in 1978, describing the instant genesis of "What'd I Say," his first Top 10 pop single and the greatest feel-good song in rock & roll. "Later on, people said it was vulgar," Charles continued, referring to that irresistible, sexually heated vocal bridge. "But, hell, let's face it, everybody knows about the ummmmh, unnnnh. That's how we all got here." | The Ultimate Hits Collection (Rhino) | Ray Charles | Charles | Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler | June, 1959 | 15 weeks | No. 6 |
| 11 | My Generation | The Who's guitarist, Pete Townshend, supposedly wrote "My Generation," his immortal fuck-off to the elders in his way, on his 20th birthday, May 19th, 1965, while riding a train from London to Southampton for a television appearance. The song wasn't intended as a youth-mutiny anthem at first. It was a Jimmy Reed-style blues, reflecting Townshend's fears about the impending strictures of adult life, famously captured in the line "Hope I die before I get old." "My Generation' was very much about trying to find a place in society," he told Rolling Stone in 1987. "I was very, very lost. The band was young then. It was believed that its career would be incredibly brief." Instead, "My Generation" became the Who's ticket to legend their first British Top Five hit, and a battle cry for young mod rebels and it established Townshend as a fearless and eloquent songwriter. "My Generation" went through months of arranging and rerecording before the Who got it right, in two takes, on October 13th, 1965. Townshend opened the song with a two-chord assault that beat punk rock to the punch by more than a decade. Bassist John Entwistle took the solo breaks with crisp, grunting aggression he had to buy three new basses to finish the recording, since his Danelectro's strings kept breaking and replacement strings weren't available. (He ended up playing the song on a Fender.) Roger Daltrey's stuttering, howling performance, Townshend and Entwistle's R&B-inspired backing vocals, and the upward key changes created a vivid, mounting anxiety that climaxed with a studio re-creation of the Who's live gear-trashing finales, with Townshend spewing feedback all over Keith Moon's avalanche drumming. Four decades later, Townshend and Daltrey are all that remain of the original Who, and they still play "My Generation" at every show now with the fire and wisdom of age. | My Generation (Universal) | The Who | Pete Townshend | Shel Talmy | Nov, 1965 | 5 weeks | No. 74 |
| 12 | A Change Is Gonna Come | In 1963, Sam Cooke America's first great soul singer and one of the most successful pop acts in the nation, with 18 Top 30 hits since 1957 heard a song that profoundly inspired and disturbed him: Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." What struck Cooke was the challenge implicit in Dylan's anthem. "Jeez," Cooke mused, "a white boy writing a song like that?" | Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964 (ABKCO) | Sam Cooke | Cooke | Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore | Dec, 1964 | 7 weeks | No. 31 |
| 13 | Yesterday | Paul McCartney's greatest ballad holds a Guinness World Record as the most recorded song of all time; seven years later, there were 1,186 versions by artists as varied as Frank Sinatra, Otis Redding and Willie Nelson. But McCartney's original reading cut on June 14th, 1965, at EMI's Abbey Road studios in London remains the most beautiful and daring of all: a frank poem of regret scored and sung with haunted elegance. There are no other Beatles on the record. None were needed. George Martin's arrangement for a string quartet emphasized lower-octave melancholy, while McCartney's almost whispered vocal reverberated with longing in the big, dark spaces where drums and electric guitars would have been. The melody, he said, came to him in a dream: "My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes, I thought maybe I'd just remembered it from the past." McCartney auditioned the song for Martin, with the working title "Scrambled Eggs," in a hotel room in Paris in January 1964 before the Beatles had even landed in America but would not record it for another year and a half. "We were a little embarrassed about it," McCartney confessed. "We were a rock & roll band." A Number One single in America, "Yesterday" was, in his own words, "the most complete song I have ever written." | Help! (Capitol/Apple) | The Beatles | John Lennon, Paul McCartney | George Martin | Sep, 1965 | 11 weeks | No. 1 |
| 14 | Blowin' in the Wind | In April 1962, at Gerde's Folk City in New York's Greenwich Village, 20-year-old Bob Dylan gave a quick speech before playing one of his new songs: "This here ain't no protest song or anything like that, 'cause I don't write no protest songs," he said. Then he sang the first and third verses of the still-unfinished "Blowin' in the Wind." Published in full a month later in the folk journal Broadside and recorded on July 9th, 1962, for his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind" was Dylan's first important composition. It is also the most famous protest song ever written. | The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (Columbia) | Bob Dylan | Dylan | John Hammond | May, 1963 | Did not chart | |
| 15 | London Calling | Named after the call signal of the BBC's World Service broadcasts, the title alarm of the Clash's third album was an SOS from the heart of darkness. When they recorded the song, the Clash British punk's most political and uncompromising band were without management and sinking in debt. Around them, Britain was suffocating in crisis: soaring unemployment, racial conflict, widespread drug use. "We felt that we were struggling," Joe Strummer said, "about to slip down a slope or something, grasping with our fingernails. And there was no one there to help us." | London Calling (Epic) | The Clash | Mick Jones, Joe Strummer | Guy Stevens | Jan, 1980 | Did not chart | |
| 16 | I Want to Hold Your Hand | As a young, struggling beat group, playing grueling gigs at grubby bars, the Beatles had an in-joke to cheer themselves up: declaring that they were going "to the toppermost of the poppermost." By 1963, they meant it enough to issue an ultimatum. "We said to [manager] Brian Epstein, 'We're not going to America till we've got a Number One record,'" Paul McCartney said. So he and John Lennon went to the home of the parents of Jane Asher, McCartney's girlfriend, where "one on one, eyeball to eyeball," as Lennon put it they wrote "I Want to Hold Your Hand," an irresistibly erotic come-on framed as a chaste, bashful request. The lightning-bolt energy of their collaboration ran through the band's performance, taped October 17th, 1963. It lunges out of the speakers with a rhythm so tricky that the first wave of bands to cover the song often couldn't figure it out; Lennon and McCartney constantly switch between unison and harmonies, both of them snapping and whooping like they own the melody. Every element of the song is a hook, from Lennon's Chuck Berry riffing to George Harrison's string-snapping guitar fills to the quartet's syncopated hand claps. With advance orders at a million copies, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was released in the U.K. in late November, and promptly bumped the band's own "She Loves You" from the top of the charts. | Meet the Beatles! (Capitol/Apple) | The Beatles | John Lennon, Paul McCartney | George Martin | Dec, 1963 | 15 weeks | No. 1 |
| 17 | Purple Haze | It is one of the unforgettable opening riffs in rock: a ferocious, stomping guitar march, scarred with fuzz and built around the dissonant "devil's interval" of the tritone. And it launched not one but two revolutions: late-Sixties psychedelia and the unprecedented genius of Jimi Hendrix. For the first time, Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell got to show off their acrobatic onstage chemistry on record and they somehow managed to condense it to an under-three-minute blaze of overdubbed guitar sorcery. (The first chord of its main riff has come to be known among guitarists as the "Hendrix chord.") The song, which Hendrix wrote on December 26th, 1966, in the dressing room of a London club, also served as a showcase for his brilliant, often contradictory lyrical gifts (boiled down from a much longer initial draft called "Purple Haze Jesus Saves"). He spiked the surging rhythmic confidence of the Experience with intimate pictorial tension: "Actin' funny, but I don't know why/'Scuse me while I kiss the sky." (Hendrix later said that he had written the lyrics after he'd had a dream in which he could walk underwater.) The Experience recorded "Purple Haze" across a series of sessions in January and February, 1967, experimenting with recording techniques such as the blitzed-out distortion on Hendrix's guitar when the master tape was sent to their American record label, an enclosed note diligently pointed out that the distorted sound of the song was deliberate. In the closing solo, Hendrix echoed his screaming Strat with an additional shrieking guitar put through a new harmonic-manipulation device called an Octavia and played back at double speed. "Purple Haze" the opening track on the U.S. version of his debut LP, Are You Experienced? captured the liberating rush of Day-Glo culture just in time for the Summer of Love. | Are You Experienced? (Experience Hendrix) | The Jimi Hendrix Experience | Hendrix | Chas Chandler | March, 1967 | 8 weeks | No. 65 |
| 18 | Maybellene | Rock & roll guitar starts here. The pileup of hillbilly country, urban blues and hot jazz in Chuck Berry's electric twang is the primal language of pop- music guitar, and it's all perfected on his first single. The entire song is a two-minute chase scene packed with car-culture vernacular and Berry's hipster-lingo inventions ("As I was motorvatin' over the hill. . . ."). Its groove comes from "Ida Red," a 1938 recording by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (of a song that dates back to the 19th century). By the time of the May 21st, 1955, session, Berry had been playing country tunes for black audiences for a few years "After they laughed at me a few times, they began requesting the hillbilly stuff," he has said. Leonard Chess came up with the title, inspired by a Maybelline mascara box lying on the floor at the Chess studio. DJ Alan Freed had nothing to do with writing "Maybellene," although he got co-credit and royalties for years in return for radio airplay: payola in all but name. | The Anthology (Chess) | Chuck Berry | Berry | Leonard and Phil Chess | July, 1955 | 11 weeks | No. 5 |
| 19 | Hound Dog | "Hound Dog" was a hit before Elvis Presley sang it, and he was famous for singing it before he recorded it. Written in 1952 by white teenagers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for R&B singer Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, it was a smash for her, and was immediately covered by a handful of country acts. (The chorus, Leiber noted in 1987, was code for "You ain't nothin' but a motherfucker.") Presley, always on the lookout for hillbilly/R&B crossover possibilities, added the song to his stage act in the spring of 1956, after hearing Freddie Bell and the Bellboys sing it in Las Vegas. On June 5th of that year, his hip-swiveling performance of "Hound Dog" on The Milton Berle Show became an instant sensation notorious enough that on his next TV appearance, he crooned the song to a top-hatted basset hound. The next morning, Presley and his band got deadly serious about "Hound Dog," perfecting it over 31 takes at New York's RCA Studios. With snarling vocal authority, D.J. Fontana's tommy-gun drumrolls and slashing guitar by Scotty Moore, Presley transformed the song's blues changes and put-down rhymes into a declaration of independence from his generation's cold, rigid elders. "Hound Dog" was the flip side of "Don't Be Cruel," Presley's third RCA single. It was also the song in which he told the world: Like it or not, rock & roll is here to stay. | Elvis 30 #1 Hits (RCA) | Elvis Presley | Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller | Steve Sholes | July, 1956 | 28 weeks | No. 1 |
| 20 | Let It Be | Inspired by the church-born soul of Aretha Franklin, an anxious Paul McCartney started writing "Let It Be" in 1968, during the contentious sessions for the White Album. His opening lines "When I find myself in times of trouble/Mother Mary comes to me" were based on a dream in which his own late mother, Mary, offered solace during a tumultuous time for both the band and the culture, assuring him that everything would turn out fine. "I'm not sure if she used the words 'Let it be,'" McCartney recalled, "but that was the gist of her advice." McCartney unveiled a skeletal version of "Let It Be" to the other Beatles at an even worse time: during the initial, disastrous Let It Be rehearsals in January 1969. John Lennon, the group's resident heretic, was brutally dismissive, mistaking McCartney's secular humanism for self-righteous piety. Yet the Beatles put special labor into the song, getting the consummate take on January 31st the day after their last live performance, on the roof of their Apple offices in London. (R&B musician Billy Preston, a friend of the band's from its early days, contributed the gospel-flavored organ part.) George Harrison later took a couple of cracks at adding a guitar solo: The single version features his solo from April 30th, 1969, and the album cut's solo was taped at the final Beatles recording session, on January 4th, 1970. Released four months later, "Let It Be" effectively became an elegy for the band that had defined the Sixties. | Let It Be (Capitol/Apple) | The Beatles | John Lennon, Paul McCartney | George Martin | March, 1970 | 14 weeks | No. 1 |
| 21 | Born to Run | This song's four and a half minutes took three and a half months to cut. Aiming for the impact of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, Springsteen included strings, glockenspiel, multiple keyboards and more than a dozen guitar tracks. "I had enormous ambitions for it," said Springsteen. "I wanted to make the greatest rock record I'd ever heard." Springsteen's lyrics told a story of young lovers on the highways of New Jersey. "I don't know how important the settings are," Springsteen said. "It's the idea behind the settings. It could be New Jersey, it could be California, it could be Alaska." | Born to Run (Columbia) | Bruce Springsteen | Springsteen | Springsteen, Mike Appel | Aug, 1975 | 11 weeks | No. 23 |
| 22 | Be My Baby | Phil Spector rehearsed this song with Ronnie Bennett (the only Ronette to sing on it) for weeks, but that didn't stop him from doing 42 takes before he was satisfied. Aided by a full orchestra (as well as a young Cher, who sang backup vocals), Spector created a lush, echo-laden sound that was the Rosetta stone for studio pioneers such as the Beatles and Brian Wilson, who calls this his favorite song. "The things Phil was doing were crazy and exhausting," said Larry Levine, Spector's engineer. "But that's not the sign of a nut. That's genius." | The Best of the Ronettes (ABKCO) | The Ronettes | Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich | Spector | Aug, 1963 | 13 weeks | No. 2 |
| 23 | In My Life | "''In My Life' was, I think, my first real, major piece of work," John Lennon said. "Up until then it had all been glib and throwaway." The ballad reflects the serious turn the Beatles took with Rubber Soul, but it specifically arose from a journalist's challenge: Why don't you write songs about your life? The original lyrics put Lennon on a bus in Liverpool, "and it was the most boring sort of 'What I Did on My Holidays Bus Trip' song," he said. So Lennon rewrote the lyrics, changing the song into a gorgeous reminiscence about his life before the Beatles. The distinctive "harpsichord" solo near the song's end is actually an electric piano played by Martin and sped up on tape. | Rubber Soul (Capitol) | The Beatles | John Lennon, Paul McCartney | George Martin | Dec, 1964 | none | none |
| 24 | People Get Ready | "It was warrior music," said civil rights activist Gordon Sellers. "It was music you listened to while you were preparing to go into battle." Mayfield wrote the gospel-driven R&B ballad, he said, "in a deep mood, a spiritual state of mind," just before Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on the Impressions' hometown of Chicago. Shortly after "People Get Ready" was released, churches in Chicago began including their own version of it in songbooks. Mayfield's version of the song ended with "You don't need no ticket/You just thank the Lord," but the churches' rendition, ironically, made the lyrics less Christian and more universal: "Everybody wants freedom/This I know." | The Very Best of the Impressions (Rhino) | The Impressions | Curtis Mayfield | Johnny Pate | Jan, 1965 | 8 weeks | No. 14 |
| 25 | God Only Knows | "It's very emotional, always a bit of a choker with me," said Paul McCartney of this Pet Sounds ballad. The night McCartney and John Lennon first heard Pet Sounds, at a London party, they wrote "Here, There and Everywhere," which is influenced by "God Only Knows." Carl Wilson's understated lead vocal is note-perfect, but it's the arrangement of horns, sleigh bells, strings and accordion that gives "God" its heavenly feel. Brian Wilson was fascinated by spirituality and said this song came out of prayer sessions in the studio. "We made it a religious ceremony," he said of recording Pet Sounds. The only problem: The use of the word "God" in the title scared off some radio programmers. | Pet Sounds (Capitol) | The Beach Boys | Brian Wilson, Tony Asher | Wilson | May, 1966 | 8 weeks | No. 39 |
| 26 | (Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay | A few days after his starmaking set at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, Redding stayed on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, while he played the Fillmore in San Francisco. He wrote the first verse to "Dock of the Bay" on that boat, then completed the song with guitarist Cropper in Memphis. Just a few days later, Redding was on tour with the Bar-Kays when his private plane crashed into Lake Monona in Madison, Wisconsin. While divers searched for Redding's body, Cropper kept his mind busy by mixing "Dock of the Bay." On December 11th, 1967, the plane was pulled out of the lake, with Redding's body still strapped into the co-pilot's seat. | The Dock of the Bay (Atlantic) | Otis Redding | Redding, Steve Cropper | Cropper | Jan, 1968 | 16 weeks | No. 1 |
| 27 | Layla | Embroiled in a love triangle with George and Patti Boyd Harrison, Clapton took the title for his greatest song from the Persian love story "Layla and Majnoun." Recorded by the short-lived ensemble Derek and the Dominos, "Layla" storms with aching vocals and crosscutting riffs from Clapton and contributing guitarist Duane Allman, then dissolves into a serene, piano-based coda. "It was the heaviest thing going on at the time," Clapton told Rolling Stone in 1974. "That's what I wanted to write about most of all." | Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (Polydor) | Derek and the Dominos | Eric Clapton, Jim Gordon | Tom Dowd, the Dominos | Nov, 1970 | 15 weeks | No. 10 |
| 28 | A Day in the Life | "A Day in the Life" was one of the last true Lennon-McCartney collaborations: Lennon wrote the opening and closing sections, and McCartney contributed the "Woke up/Fell out of bed" middle. For the climax, they hired 40 musicians, dressed them in tuxedos and funny hats, and told them they had 15 bars to ascend from the lowest note on their instruments to the highest. "Listen to those trumpets they're freaking out," McCartney said. The final piano chord concluded Sgt. Pepper and made rock's possibilities seem infinite. | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol) | The Beatles | John Lennon, Paul McCartney | George Martin | June, 1967 | none | none |
| 29 | Help! | "Most people think it's just a fast rock & roll song," Lennon said. "Subconsciously, I was crying out for help. I didn't realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie." Overwhelmed by Beatlemania, Lennon was eating "like a pig," drinking too much and "smoking marijuana for breakfast" only 24 years old, he was already expressing nostalgia for his lost youth. "I don't like the recording that much," Lennon would later tell Rolling Stone. "We did it too fast, to try and be commercial." | Help! (Capitol) | The Beatles | John Lennon, Paul McCartney | George Martin | July, 1965 | 13 weeks | No. 1 |
| 30 | I Walk the Line | Cash began work on this track while he was in Germany with the Air Force, years before he would ever enter a studio. He returned to it after he hit with "Folsom Prison Blues," only to find that the original tape had gotten mangled. But Cash liked the strange sound and added a click-clack rhythm by winding a piece of wax paper through his guitar strings. Phillips then had him speed up the song, originally a ballad, to a driving rumble. "It was different than anything else you had ever heard," Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone. "A voice from the middle of the Earth." | The Complete Original Sun Singles (Varese Sarabande) | Johnny Cash | Cash | Sam Phillips | Aug, 1956 | 22 weeks | No. 17 |
| 31 | Stairway to Heaven | All epic anthems must measure themselves against "Stairway to Heaven," the cornerstone of Led Zeppelin IV. The acoustic intro sounds positively Elizabethan, thanks to John Paul Jones' recorder solo and Plant's fanciful lyrics, which were partly inspired by Lewis Spence's historical tome Magic Arts in Celtic Britain. Over eight minutes, the song morphs into a furious Page solo that storms heaven's gate. Page said the song "crystallized the essence of the band. It had everything there and showed us at our best. It was a milestone. Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality, something which will hold up for a long time. We did it with 'Stairway.'" | Led Zeppelin IV (Atlantic) | Led Zeppelin | Jimmy Page, Robert Plant | Page | Nov, 1971 | none | none |
| 32 | Sympathy for the Devil | The inspiration for this hellish detour came from Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, which depicts Satan having his way in 1930s Moscow. Richards struggled to find the right backing for Jagger's menacing Dylan-esque lyrics, unsure "whether it should be a samba or a goddamn folk song," he recalled. The Stones ended up giving the devil one of their best grooves, built on Rocky Dijon's congas and Bill Wyman's Bo Diddley-ish maracas. "Before, when we were just innocent kids out for a good time [the media said], 'They're evil, they're evil,'" Richards said. "So that makes you start thinking about evil. . . . Everybody's Lucifer." | Beggar's Banquet (ABKCO) | The Rolling Stones | Mick Jagger, Keith Richards | Jimmy Miller | Dec, 1968 | none | none |
| 33 | River Deep - Mountain High | Spector heard the Ike and Tina Turner Revue at a Hollywood club at a time when their recording career had stalled after a handful of R&B hits in the early 1960s. Spector had a song called "River Deep Mountain High" that he was sure was going to be huge, and he wanted Tina to sing it, though he forbade Ike from even coming to the sessions. "I must have sung that 500,000 times," Tina later said. "I was drenched with sweat. I had to take my shirt off and stand there in my bra to sing." | Proud Mary: The Best of Ike and Tina Turner (EMI) | Ike and Tina Turner | Phil Spector, Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich | Spector | May, 1966 | 4 weeks | No. 88 |
| 34 | You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'' | Spector was conducting the musicians for a Ronettes show in San Francisco when he decided to sign the Righteous Brothers, who were on the bill. He then asked Mann and Weil to come up with a hit for them. Bill Medley's intro sounds impossibly deep. "When Phil played it for me," Mann recalled, "I said, 'Phil, you have it on the wrong speed!'" Bobby Hatfield was puzzled by his partner's opening solo: "What do I do while he's singing the entire first verse?" he asked Spector, who answered, "You can go directly to the bank." | Anthology 1962-1974 (Rhino) | The Righteous Brothers | Phil Spector, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil | Spector | Dec, 1964 | 16 weeks | No. 1 |
| 35 | Light My Fire | It was the first song Krieger ever wrote with additional lyrics from Morrison and arrangements from the rest of the band. "It's like I'd saved up all [these ideas] in my mind and got them out all at once," Krieger said. The song catapulted the Doors to overnight fame, which Krieger says was part of Morrison's plan: "Jim had this idea of the band being a shooting star," Krieger said. "Fire" ran for seven minutes on the LP and was cut down to three, with Krieger's and keyboardist Manzarek's solos excised, on the single. | The Doors (Elektra) | The Doors | Robby Krieger, John Densmore, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek | Paul Rothchild | June, 1967 | 17 weeks | No. 1 |
| 36 | One | Achtung Baby was the album on which U2 traded in a decade of earnestness for irony, but the new approach resulted in their most moving single ever. "One" was spun off from another song, "Mysterious Ways," when the Edge came up with two ideas for the bridge, and Bono so liked one of them that he wrote a new set of lyrics. Though some hear it as a love song, the words are full of hurt and ambiguity. "People have told me they play it at their wedding," the Edge said. "And I think, 'Have you listened to the lyrics? It's not that kind of a song.'" | Achtung Baby (Island) | U2 | Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr. | Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois | Nov, 1991 | 20 weeks | No. 10 |
| 37 | No Woman, No Cry | The uptempo version on 1975's Natty Dread is forgettable, but the swaying, incantatory take on 1975's Live! remains one of the reggae legend's most beloved performances. The "government yard in Trench Town" refers to the Jamaican public-housing project where Marley lived in the Fifties. He gave a songwriting credit to childhood friend Vincent "Tata" Ford to help keep Ford's Kingston soup kitchen running. | Natty Dread (Island) | Bob Marley | Vincent Ford, Marley | Chris Blackwell, Marley and the Wailers | May, 1975 | none | none |
| 38 | Gimme Shelter | The Stones channeled the emotional wreckage of the late Sixties on a song that Richards wrote in 20 minutes. The intro, strummed on an electric-acoustic guitar modeled on a Chuck Berry favorite, conjures an unparalleled aura of dread. Singer Merry Clayton brings down Armageddon with a soul-wracked wail: "Rape, murder, it's just a shot away." The song surfaced days after Meredith Hunter's murder at Altamont. "That's a kind of end-of-the-world song, really," Jagger said in 1995. "It's apocalypse." Richards later said that his guitar fell apart on the last take, "as if by design." | Let It Bleed (ABKCO) | The Rolling Stones | Mick Jagger, Keith Richards | Jimmy Miller | April, 1969 | 11 weeks | No. 21 |
| 39 | That'll Be the Day | Recorded in Clovis, New Mexico, in February 1957, the song took its title from a recurring line in the John Wayne movie The Searchers. "We were cutting 'That'll Be the Day' just as a demo to send to New York, just to see if they liked the sound of the group not for a master record," recalled Crickets drummer Allison. "So we just went in and set up and sort of shucked through the song." Allison credits Holly's guitar-picking on "That'll Be the Day" to the influence of New Orleans bluesman Lonnie Johnson. | Greatest Hits (MCA) | Buddy Holly and the Crickets | Jerry Allison, Holly, Norman Petty | Petty | May, 1957 | 1 week | No. 1 |
| 40 | Dancing in the Street | Gordy Stevenson, who gave Martha Reeves her first job, as his secretary, approached the group with this song after it was turned down by Motown labelmate (and future Mrs. Stevenson) Kim Weston. The trio agreed to record "Dancing in the Street" as a demo with its songwriters singing background. "When Martha got into the song," Stevenson said, "that was the end of the conversation!" Against a backbeat that cracks like a gunshot, Reeves reinvents the world as a giant block party. | The Ultimate Collection (Motown) | Martha Reeves and the Vandellas | Marvin Gaye, Ivy Hunter, William "Mickey" Stevenson | Stevenson | Sept, 1964 | 14 weeks | No. 2 |
| 41 | The Weight | The Band was chiefly known as Bob Dylan's touring group when it retreated to a pink house in Woodstock, New York, to record its debut, Music From Big Pink. The album was centered by "The Weight," an oddball fable of debt and burden driven by an indelible singalong chorus ("Take a load off, Fanny. . . ."). Robertson said he was inspired to write the song after watching director Luis Bunuel's films about "the impossibility of sainthood," but characters such as Crazy Chester (who tries to pawn his dog off on the narrator) could have walked straight out of an old folk song. As for the biblical-sounding line "pulled into Nazareth," it refers to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, home of the Martin Guitar factory. | Music From Big Pink (Capitol) | The Band | Robbie Robertson | John Simon | Aug, 1968 | 7 weeks | No. 63 |
| 42 | Waterloo Sunset | The Davies brothers were in the middle of recording their band's fifth album, Something Else by the Kinks, when Ray played an early version of this delicate orchestral-pop ballad for Dave. "We started ad-libbing vocal parts around the chorus," Dave said. Ray recalled that he went home and revised "until [the song] became like a pebble which had been rounded off by the sea . . . perfectly smooth." But he initially held off sharing the lyrics about a loner who "don't need no friends" with the rest of the band. "I was embarrassed by how personal [the lyrics] were," he later wrote. "It was like an extract from a diary nobody was allowed to read." | Something Else by the Kinks (Warner Bros.) | The Kinks | Ray Davies | Ray Davies | Feb, 1968 | none | none |
| 43 | Tutti-Frutti | "I'd been singing 'Tutti-Frutti' for years," said Richard, "but it never struck me as a song you'd record." Blackwell asked La Bostrie, a young songwriter who had been pestering him for work, to clean up the filthy original lyrics ("Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don't fit, don't force it/You can grease it, make it easy"). "Fifteen minutes before the session was to end, the chick comes in and puts these little trite lyrics in front of me," said Blackwell. Richard cleaned up his own "Awop-bop-a-loo-mop a-good-goddamn" and loaded La Bostrie's doggerel with sexual dynamite. | The Georgia Peach (Specialty) | Little Richard | Dorothy La Bostrie, Richard Penniman, Joe Lubin | Robert "Bumps" Blackwell | Dec, 1955 | 12 weeks | No. 17 |
| 44 | Georgia on My Mind | Charles' driver had heard him singing "Georgia on My Mind" in the car and suggested that Charles add that to the record he was working on, an album consisting of songs with place names in their titles. Once he recorded it, though, Charles said he thought of many ways his rendition could have been better. As the single was about to enter the charts, Charles introduced his version to America on Hugh Hefner's Playboy Penthouse, a syndicated show out of Chicago, with David "Fathead" Newman handling the string parts on flute. | Ultimate Hits Collection (Rhino) | Ray Charles | Hoagy Carmichael, Stuart Gorrell | Sid Feller | Sept, 1960 | 13 weeks | No. 1 |
| 45 | Heartbreak Hotel | When RCA Records signed "hillbilly cat" Presley, they expected more songs like his rockabilly hits from Sun Records. Instead, for his first RCA single, Presley recorded this gloomy, downtempo number, co-written by Axton, his former publicist, and inspired by a Miami Herald report of a suicide note that consisted solely of the line "I walk a lonely street." But what Sun Records founder Sam Phillips called "a morbid mess" went on to become Presley's first Number One hit and million-selling single, thanks to Scotty Moore's steely guitar leads, a thumping bass line from Bill Black and the brilliant melodrama with which Elvis infused every line. | Elvis 30 #1 Hits (RCA) | Elvis Presley | Mae Boren Axton, Tommy Durden, Presley | Steve Sholes | Jan, 1956 | 27 weeks | No. 1 |
| 46 | Heroes | After a coke-fried spell in Los Angeles, Bowie was detoxing in Berlin when he spied two lovers having a rendezvous by the Berlin Wall. Said Bowie, "I thought, of all the places to meet in Berlin, why pick a bench underneath a guard turret on the Wall?" Imagining the story behind their affair, Bowie wrote his most compassionate song ever. The song builds for six minutes, with Bowie setting his ragged, impassioned croon over a throbbing groove consisting of Eno's humming synths, Robert Fripp's guitar and producer Visconti banging on a metal ashtray that was lying around the studio. Bowie wails with crazed soul about two doomed lovers finding a moment of redemption together just for one day. | Heroes (Virgin) | David Bowie | Bowie, Brian Eno | Tony Visconti | Sept, 1977 | none | none |
| 47 | All Along the Watchtower | "All Along the Watchtower" had just been released on Dylan's John Wesley Harding when Hendrix began tinkering with the song at Electric Lady Studios in New York on January 21st, 1968. Using the line "And the wind began to howl" as a springboard, Hendrix constructed a tumultuous four-part solo that transformed Dylan's concise foreboding into an electric hurricane. Dylan acknowledged Hendrix's masterstroke: His subsequent versions of "All Along the Watchtower," including the treatment on his 1974 reunion tour with the Band and the live LP Before the Flood, emulated Hendrix's cover. | Electric Ladyland (MCA) | The Jimi Hendrix Experience | Bob Dylan | Hendrix | Sept, 1968 | 9 weeks | No. 20 |
| 48 | Bridge Over Troubled Water | When Simon wrote this tribute to friendship, he and Garfunkel were arguing over everything, even who should sing it. "He felt I should have done it," Simon said. "Many times I'm sorry I didn't." The "Sail on, silver girl" verse was Garfunkel's idea; Simon has never liked it. | Bridge Over Troubled Water (Columbia/Legacy) | Simon and Garfunkel | Paul Simon | Art Garfunkel, Roy Halee, Simon | Feb, 1970 | 14 weeks | No. 1 |
| 49 | Hotel California | "Hotel California" was rumored to be about heroin addiction or Satan worship, but Henley had more prosaic things on his mind: "We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest," he said. "'Hotel California' was our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles." (That doesn't preclude heroin or Satan, of course.) Recording the six-and-a-half-minute song posed its share of problems: Working in Miami, the Eagles were initially unable to re-create Felder's 12-string intro and elaborate twin-guitar coda. Panicked, Felder called his housekeeper in L.A. and sent her digging through a pile of tapes in his home studio so she could play his demo back over the phone. | Hotel California (Elektra) | The Eagles | Don Felder, Glenn Frey, Don Henley | Bill Szymczyk | Dec, 1976 | 19 weeks | No. 1 |
| 50 | The Tracks of My Tears | Legend had it that audiences would actually break into tears when Robinson and the Miracles sang "The Tracks of My Tears." "It tapped into their emotions," said Moore of the Miracles. Pete Townshend was obsessed with the way Robinson put across the word "substitute" ("Although she may be cute/She's just a substitute"). So obsessed, he said, "that I decided to celebrate the word with a song all its own" which is how he came to write the Who's 1966 hit "Substitute." When Robinson cut "Tears," it was such a clear winner that even hard-to-please Motown founder Berry Gordy proclaimed it a masterpiece. | Going to a Go-Go (Motown) | Smokey Robinson and the Miracles | Pete Moore, Robinson, Marv Tamplin | Robinson | June, 1965 | 12 weeks | No. 16 |
| 51 | Crazy | "Crazy" was a rarity in the 2000s: a universal pop smash that was played on virtually every radio format â it went Top 10 on both the pop and the modern-rock charts â and was covered by singers from Nelly Furtado to Billy Idol. The lyrics, which celebrate risk-taking, came out of a conversation Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse had in the studio: The pair decided that their genre-smashing collaborations were indeed "crazy." With a haunting melody inspired by spaghetti Western soundtrack-composer Ennio Morricone, "Crazy" didn't feel like a hit. "It seemed too out there for urban radio and too urban for rock radio," Danger Mouse told Rolling Stone. | St. Elsewhere (Downtown) | Gnarls Barkley | Brian Burton, Thomas Calloway, Gianfranco Reverberi, Gian Piero Reverberi | Danger Mouse | May , 1906 | 24 weeks | No. 2 |
| 52 | Fortunate Son | "Fortunate Son" is a blast at rich folks who plan wars and then draft poor people to fight them. Fogerty wrote it out of disgust at the fancy wedding plans of Richard Nixon's daughter. "You just had the feeling that none of these people were going to be too involved with the war," he said. | Willy and the Poor Boys (Fantasy) | Creedence Clearwater Revival | John Fogerty | Fogerty | Oct. , 1969 | 14 weeks | No. 14 |
| 53 | Love and Happiness | "Sixty percent of my audience are women," Green once said. "And a woman is more sensitive than a man, especially in the area of love and happiness." Hodges wrote the urgent, romantic "Love and Happiness" one morning in between having sex with his girlfriend and watching wrestling on TV. Green recently claimed that Hodges sang him the opening guitar riff on a road trip and they drove 160 miles back to Memphis to record it that night. He has described the song as "like a slow fever, building on the beat, pushing up the temperature with each breath of the staccato horns and pushing through delirium as we came up on the fade." | I'm Still in Love With You (Capitol) | Al Green | Green, Mabon "Teenie" Hodges | Willie Mitchell | June , 1972 | 12 weeks | No. 3 |
| 54 | Roll Over Beethoven | "I wanted to play the blues," Chuck Berry told Rolling Stone. "But I wasn't blue enough. We always had food on the table." Berry originally wrote this guitar anthem as an affectionate dig at his sister Lucy, who spent so much time playing classical music on the family piano that young Chuck couldn't get a turn. But "Roll Over Beethoven" became the ultimate rock & roll call to arms, declaring a new era: "Roll over, Beethoven/And tell Tchaikovsky the news." Berry announced this changing of the musical guard with a blazing guitar riff and pounding piano from sidekick Johnnie Johnson. | The Anthology (Chess) | Chuck Berry | Berry | Leonard and Phil Chess | May , 1956 | 5 weeks | No. 29 |
| 55 | Great Balls of Fire | With Lewis pounding the piano and leering, "Great Balls of Fire" was full of Southern Baptist hellfire turned into a near-blasphemous ode to pure lust. Lewis, a Bible-college dropout and cousin to Jimmy Swaggart, refused to sing it at first and got into a theological argument with Phillips that concluded with Lewis asking, "How can the devil save souls?" But as the session wore on and the liquor kept flowing, Lewis' mood changed considerably â on bootleg tapes he can be heard saying, "I would like to eat a little pussy if I had some." Goodness gracious, great balls of fire, indeed. | Original Sun Greatest Hits (Rhino) | Jerry Lee Lewis | Otis Blackwell, Jack Hammer | Sam Phillips | Nov. , 1957 | 21 weeks | No. 2 |
| 56 | Blue Suede Shoes | Johnny Cash had already given Perkins the phrase "blue suede shoes" as an idea for a song. But when he overheard a Tennessee hepcat who was trying to keep the girl he was dancing with from scuffing up his new kicks, Perkins was inspired to write the song that would be his Sun debut. It was the first single to crack the pop, R&B and country charts, and Perkins was driving to New York to perform the song on The Perry Como Show when his car crashed into a poultry truck, laying him up for weeks. He could only sit home and watch while "Blue Suede Shoes" was performed on The Milton Berle Show â sung by Elvis Presley, who would later admit he couldn't top Perkins' original. | Original Sun Greatest Hits (Rhino) | Carl Perkins | Perkins | Sam Phillips | Feb , 1956 | 21 weeks | No. 2 |
| 57 | Good Golly | Little Richard first heard the phrase "Good golly, Miss Molly," from a Southern DJ named Jimmy Pennick. He turned the words into perhaps his most blatant assault on American propriety: "Good golly, Miss Molly/You sure like to ball." He swiped the music from Ike Turner's piano intro to Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88," recorded by Sam Phillips in Memphis seven years earlier. "I always liked that record," Richard recalled, "and I used to use the riff in my act, so when we were looking for a lead-in to 'Good Golly, Miss Molly,' I did that and it fit." Richard had renounced rock & roll the previous year, but Specialty couldn't leave this classic in the vaults. | The Georgia Peach (Specialty) | Little Richard | Robert "Bumps" Blackwell, John Marascalco | Blackwell | Feb. , 1958 | 15 weeks | No. 10 |
| 58 | I Still Havent Found What Im Looking For | "The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God," Bono told Rolling Stone. U2's second Number One single revels in ambivalence â "an anthem of doubt more than faith," Bono has called it. The song was typical of the arduous sessions for The Joshua Tree: Originally called "Under the Weather," it began, like most U2 songs, as a jam. "It sounded to me a little like 'Eye of the Tiger' played by a reggae band," the Edge recalled. "It had this great beat," Lanois said. "I remember humming a traditional melody in Bono's ear. He said, 'That's it! Don't sing any more!' â and went off and wrote the melody as we know it." | The Joshua Tree (Island) | U2 | Bono | Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno | May , 1987 | 17 weeks | No. 1 |
| 59 | Blitzkrieg Bop | In less than three minutes, this song threw down the blueprint for punk rock. It's all here on the opening track of the Ramones' debut: the buzz-saw chords, which Johnny played on his $50 Mosrite guitar; the snotty words, courtesy of drummer Tommy (with bassist Dee Dee adding the brilliant line "Shoot 'em in the back now"); and the hairball-in-the-throat vocals, sung by Joey in a faux British accent. Recorded on the cheap at New York's Radio City Music Hall, of all places, "Blitzkrieg Bop" never made the charts; instead, it almost single-handedly created a world beyond the charts. The kick-off chant "Hey! Ho! Let's go!" meanwhile, is now an anthem of its own at sporting events nationwide. | Ramones (Rhino) | Ramones | The Ramones | Craig Leon | May , 1976 | Did not chart | |
| 60 | Suspicious Minds | When Moman presented this song to Presley in 1969, the singer was, as the lyrics put it, "caught in a trap" â a cash cow being milked dry by his label and hangers-on. That might be why Presley was convinced he could turn the song into a deep-soul hit, even though it had flopped in 1968 for singer-songwriter Mark James. Recorded between four and seven in the morning, during the landmark Memphis session that helped return the King to his throne, "Suspicious Minds" â the final Number One single of his lifetime â is Presley's masterpiece: He sings so intensely through the fade-out that his band returns for another minute of the tear-stained chorus. | Elvis 30 #1 Hits (RCA) | Elvis Presley | Mark James | Chips Moman, Felton Jarvis, Presley | Sept. , 1969 | 15 weeks | No. 1 |
| 61 | In the Still of the Night | Five Satins frontman Parris wrote the song while on guard duty in the Army, and the group recorded it in the basement of a church in Parris' hometown of New Haven, Connecticut. The roughness shows: The drums and piano are muffled, the alto sax cracks during the solo, and the backing vocals wander off-key. But the primitive sound â and the fact that only four of the Five Satins were even present for the session â can't keep "In the Still of the Night," originally released as a B side, from being a sublime, definitive piece of doo-wop. | The Five Satins: Their Greatest Hits (Collectables) | The Five Satins | Fred Parris | The Five Satins | Sept. , 1956 | 19 weeks | No. 24 |
| 62 | California Dreamin | One frigid winter in Manhattan, a song came to John Phillips in the middle of the night. He woke up his young wife, Michelle, who was homesick for the West Coast, to help him finish writing "California Dreamin'," one of the all-time sunniest songs of longing. The tune was first recorded by Phillips' folk group the New Journeymen and later given to Barry McGuire as a thank-you after McGuire, riding high with "Eve of Destruction," introduced the group to producer Lou Adler, who convinced the Mamas and the Papas to cut it themselves. | If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (MCA) | The Mamas and the Papas | John and Michelle Phillips | Lou Adler | Dec. , 1965 | 17 weeks | No. 4 |
| 63 | My Girl | The Temptations were sharing a bill with Robinson and his group the Miracles at Harlem's Apollo Theater when Robinson took time out to cut the rhythm track for a new song. After they heard it, the Tempts begged him to let them record the song rather than the Miracles, as he had been planning. Robinson relented and chose the throaty tenor David Ruffin to sing lead, the first time he had done so with the group. The Tempts rehearsed the song that week at the Apollo, then recorded it back home in Detroit on December 21st, 1964. | The Temptations Sing Smokey (Motown) | The Temptations | Smokey Robinson, Ronald White | Robinson, White | Jan. , 1965 | 13 weeks | No. 1 |
| 64 | Ring of Fire | Carter wrote this song while driving around aimlessly one night, worried about Cash's wildman ways â and aware that she couldn't resist him. "There is no way to be in that kind of hell, no way to extinguish a flame that burns, burns, burns," she wrote. Not long after hearing June's sister Anita's take on the song, Cash had a dream that he was singing it with mariachi horns. Cash's version became one of his biggest hits (inspiring cover versions by everyone from Frank Zappa to Adam Lambert), and his marriage to June four years later helped save his life. | The Man in Black: His Greatest Hits (Columbia) | Johnny Cash | June Carter, Merle Kilgore | Don Law | May , 1963 | 13 weeks | No. 17 |
| 65 | Thunder Road | "We decided to make a guitar album, but then I wrote all the songs on piano," Springsteen said of his third album, Born to Run. "Thunder Road," its opening track, is a cinematic tale of redemption with a title borrowed from a 1958 hillbilly noir starring Robert Mitchum as a bootlegger with a car that can't be beat (though the Boss had never actually seen the movie). An early title for the song was "Wings for Wheels," which resurfaced as the name of a Born to Run documentary. Decades later, Springsteen would marvel that he wrote the line "You're scared, and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore" when he was all of 24 years old. | Born to Run (Columbia) | Bruce Springsteen | Springsteen | Springsteen, Jon Landau, Mike Appel | Aug. , 1975 | Non-single | |
| 66 | Crazy | Cline wasn't impressed when her husband, Charlie Dick, brought home a demo by a 28-year-old rookie Nashville songwriter named Willie Nelson. Told that the song's title was "Crazy," she responded, "It sure is." But Bradley helped Cline make the song her own with a lush arrangement and understated backing vocals from gospel group the Jordanaires. Cline's vocals, cut in one take, infused Nelson's lyrics with slow-burn sex appeal. "Crazy" set the stage for a sophisticated new phase of the C&W sound known as "countrypolitan," although Cline herself wouldn't be around to shape it: She died in a plane crash less than two years later. | Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits (MCA) | Patsy Cline | Willie Nelson | Owen Bradley | Oct. , 1961 | 11 weeks | No. 9 |
| 67 | Every Breath You Take | For their biggest hit, the Police went back to basics, junking an elaborate synth part that distracted from the song's hypnotic bass line in favor of a lick that guitarist Andy Summers recorded in one live take. Sting admitted that the lyrics â which sounded tender but were actually bitter â were pulled from the rock & roll cliche handbook. "'Every Breath You Take' is an archetypal song," he told Rolling Stone. "If you have a major chord followed by a relative minor, you're not original." Following Sting's unoriginal-and-proud manifesto, Puff Daddy would sample "Breath" extensively 14 years later for his own huge hit, the Notorious B.I.G. tribute "I'll Be Missing You." | Synchronicity (Interscope) | The Police | Sting | Hugh Padgham | May , 1983 | 22 weeks | No 1 |
| 68 | Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) | This wry, wistful folk ballad was among the first of the Beatles' revolutionary studio experiments. The inclusion of the sitar, an instrument that George Harrison had recently discovered, was groundbreaking. The song, written by Lennon, is the tale of a late-night tryst â although it's electric with sexual possibility, the bemused cad ends up sleeping in the bathtub (and maybe takes his revenge by burning the place down the next morning). Lennon said that the lyrics disguised an actual affair: "I was very careful and paranoid because I didn't want my wife, Cyn, to know that there was something going on." | Rubber Soul (Capitol) | The Beatles | John Lennon, Paul McCartney | George Martin | Dec. , 1965 | Non-single | |
| 69 | Blueberry Hill | "Blueberry Hill" was first recorded in 1940 by several artists, including Gene Autry and Glenn Miller. But Domino drew on the 1949 Louis Armstrong version when he had run out of material at a session. Producer Bartholomew thought it was a terrible idea but lost the argument. Good thing, too. It ended up being Domino's biggest hit and broadened his audience once and for all. As Carl Perkins later said, "In the white honky-tonks where I was playin', they were punchin' 'Blueberry Hill.' And white cats were dancin' to Fats Domino." | The Fats Domino Jukebox (Capitol) | Fats Domino | Al Lewis, Larry Stock, Vincent Rose | Dave Bartholomew | Oct. , 1956 | 27 weeks | No. 2 |
| 70 | I Heard It Through the Grapevine | Motown producer Whitfield had a reputation for recording the same song with a number of acts, changing the arrangement each time. This irritated some of the label's artists, but every now and then he would get a golden idea â as happened with Gaye's 1968 version of "Grapevine," which had been a hit the year before for Gladys Knight. Whitfield and co-writer Strong set the track in a slower, more mysterious tempo, and the song â which Gaye initially resisted recording â became the bestselling Motown single of the decade. | Every Motown Hit (Motown) | Marvin Gaye | Barrett Strong, Norman Whitfield | Whitfield | Oct. , 1968 | 15 weeks | No. 1 |
| 71 | You Really Got Me | Convinced that the band's previous two singles had flopped because they were too pristine, the Kinks went into the studio in the summer of 1964 to record this deliberately raw rave-up, written by Ray Davies on the piano in his parents' living room. But the original recording still felt too shiny, and the band had to borrow 200 pounds to cover the cost of another session. Seventeen-year-old guitarist Dave Davies took a razor to the speaker cone on his amp to get the desired dirty sound for that immortal, blistering riff. "The song came out of a working-class environment," Dave recalled. "People fighting for something." A month later, the proto-heavy-metal song went straight to the top of the British charts. | Kinks (Castle) | The Kinks | Ray Davies | Shel Talmy | Sept. , 1964 | 15 weeks | No. 7 |
| 72 | Mr. Tambourine Man | The only Byrd to play on the band's first hit was Roger McGuinn, whose chiming 12-string Rickenbacker guitar became folk rock's defining sound. Everything else came from L.A. session players, including drummer Hal Blaine and bassist Larry Knechtel of Phil Spector's Wrecking Crew. But the rest of the Byrds soon caught up, and as the song was breaking, a curious Dylan checked out the band at Ciro's, a Los Angeles club. Reportedly, he didn't recognize some of his own songs in their electrified versions. | Mr. Tambourine Man (Columbia/Legacy) | The Byrds | Bob Dylan | Terry Melcher | May , 1965 | 13 weeks | No. 1 |
| 73 | I Got You (I Feel Good) | The same year he hit with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," Soul Brother Number One scored his biggest pop success with "I Got You." It was a sped-up, hyped-up new version of a song called "I Found You" that Brown had written a few years previous for one of his early proteges, James Brown Revue singer Yvonne Fair. "I Got You" received some help on the pop charts from a most unlikely source; a few months before the single was released, Brown performed the song in the Frankie Avalon teen flick Ski Party. | James Brown 50th Anniversary Collection (UTV/Polydor) | James Brown | Brown | Brown | Nov. , 1965 | 12 weeks | No. 3 |
| 74 | Mystery Train | "Mystery Train" is one of Presley's most haunting songs, a stark blues number that sounds ancient but was actually first cut only two years before by Memphis blues singer Junior Parker. Presley recorded it with the groove from the flip side of the same Parker single, "Love My Baby," and Sun producer Phillips' taut, rubbery echo effect made guitarist Scotty Moore's every note sound doubled. Presley added a final verse â "Train . . . took my baby, but it never will again" â capped by a celebratory falsetto whoop that transformed a pastoral about death into a song about the power to overcome it. | Sunrise (RCA) | Elvis Presley | Junior Parker, Sam Phillips | Phillips | Sept. , 1955 | Did not chart | |
| 75 | Strawberry Fields Forever | Lennon often considered "Strawberry Fields Forever" his greatest accomplishment with the Beatles. The song, a surreal kaleidoscope of sound, was the first track recorded for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (although it was released as a single instead). The lyrics are a nostalgic look at Lennon's Liverpool childhood and an expression of his own pride. Said Lennon, "The second line goes, 'No one I think is in my tree.' Well, what I was trying to say in that line is, 'Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius.'" | Magical Mystery Tour (Capitol) | The Beatles | John Lennon, Paul McCartney | George Martin | Feb. , 1967 | 9 weeks | No. 8 |
| 76 | Whole Lotta Love | The members of Led Zeppelin first got their sound together by jamming on blues standards, stretching them out into psychedelic orgies. "Whole Lotta Love" was a tribute to Chicago blues songwriter Willie Dixon, based on his "You Need Love," a Muddy Waters single from 1962 (though Robert Plant also threw in quotes from songs Dixon wrote for Howlin' Wolf). The copyright issues weren't sorted out until 1985, when Dixon brought legal action and got his rightful share of the credit for "Whole Lotta Love." "Page's riff was Page's riff," Plant said. "I just thought, 'Well, what am I going to sing?' That was it, a nick. Now happily paid for." Said Page, "Usually my riffs are pretty damn original. What can I say?" | Led Zeppelin II (Atlantic) | Led Zeppelin | Willie Dixon, Led Zeppelin | Jimmy Page | Oct. , 1969 | 15 weeks | No. 4 |
| 77 | Summertime Blues | Cochran's label tried molding him into a crooning teen idol, but he made his mark with a string of rockabilly ravers written with partner Capehart. Explaining the inspiration for this classic, Capehart said, "There had been a lot of songs about summer, but none about the hardships of summer." With that idea and a guitar lick from Cochran, they knocked out the song in 45 minutes. | Somethin' Else (Razor and Tie) | Eddie Cochran | Cochran, Jerry Capehart | Capehart | July , 1958 | 16 weeks | No. 8 |
| 78 | Superstition | Wonder debuted this hard blast of funk live while opening for the Rolling Stones in the summer of 1972, intent on expanding his audience. The 22-year-old former child star had written it at the drum set, humming the other parts to himself. Wonder had initially intended for Jeff Beck to record the song, but Berry Gordy wouldn't let him give it away. It became the first single from Talking Book â and Wonder's first Number One hit in nearly a decade. | Talking Book (Motown) | Stevie Wonder | Wonder | Wonder, Malcolm Cecil, Robert Margouleff | Nov. , 1972 | 16 weeks | No. 1 |
| 79 | California Girls | The first time Wilson took acid, he sat at the piano and wrote the brooding, beautiful opening bars to "California Girls." It was a breakthrough moment, Wilson has said, that led him to begin creating more complex, emotional music. The lyrics, written by Love, were inspired by Wilson's assertion that "everybody loves girls." And despite the teen-fantasy theme, the singing is tougher than earlier Beach Boys hits, with tightly wound harmonies and an aggressive lead vocal. "I taught Mike to sing with attitude," said Wilson. "I was trying to create a new Beach Boys sound." | Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys (Capitol) | The Beach Boys | Brian Wilson, Mike Love | Wilson | July , 1965 | 11 weeks | No. 3 |
| 80 | Papas Got A Brand New Bag | 13 weeks | No. 8 | In mid-1965, Brown was locked in a contract struggle with King Records, but when he learned King was nearly bankrupt, he threw the label a bone: a song he'd recorded a few months earlier, yelling, "This is a hit!" as the tape rolled. Arguably the first fu | James Brown | Brown | Brown | July , 1966 | |
| 81 | Walk On By | Early in her career, Warwick was a back-up singer who also cut demos for Brill Building songwriters Bacharach and David. This forlorn classic solidified her stardom, capping a series of singles in which she played the pleading lover. A downcast ballad set to a bossa nova beat, it was originally relegated to the B side of "Any Old Time of the Day," until New York DJ Murray the K asked listeners to vote on the single's two sides. The winning cut scaled the charts during the heady exuberance of Beatlemania, which provided an unwitting foil for the understated perseverance of "Walk On By." "I didn't get the guy very often in those days," Warwick said. | The Dionne Warwick Collection: Her All-Time Greatest Hits | Dionne Warwick | Burt Bacharach, Hal David | Bacharach, David | April , 1964 | 13 weeks, No. 6 | |
| 82 | Crying | Orbison said he wrote this lush, dreamy ballad after an encounter with an old flame: "Whether I was physically crying or just crying inside is the same thing." His near-operatic performance culminated in a high, wailing note, which Orbison never lost the capacity to hit until his death in 1988. "He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business," Bob Dylan wrote in Chronicles. "He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal." | For the Lonely: 18 Greatest Hits (Rhino) | Roy Orbison | Joe Melson, Orbison | Fred Foster | Aug. , 1961 | 16 weeks | No. 2 |
| 83 | Tangled Up in Blue | When Dylan introduced "Tangled Up in Blue" onstage in 1978, he described it as a song that took him "10 years to live and two years to write." It's still one of his most frequently performed live staples. It was the six-minute opener from Blood on the Tracks, written as his first marriage was falling apart. Dylan takes inspiration from classic country singers like Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell, in a tale of a drifting heart on the road through the Sixties and Seventies. Dylan kept revising the song heavily through the years; on his 1984 Real Live, he plays with the chords and lyrics to tell a whole new story. | Blood on the Tracks (Columbia) | Bob Dylan | Dylan | Dylan | Jan. , 1975 | 7 weeks, No. 31 | |
| 84 | Jailhouse Rock | Songwriters Leiber and Stoller had already penned a couple of Presley hits â most notably "Hound Dog," picked up from blues belter Big Mama Thornton â but the theme song for Presley's third movie was the duo's first studio collaboration with the young superstar. "Jailhouse Rock" was decidedly silly, the kind of tongue-in-cheek narrative goof they had been coming up with for the Coasters. The King, however, sang it as straight rock & roll, overlooking the humor in the lyrics (like the suggestion of gay romance when inmate Number 47 tells Number 3, "You're the cutest jailbird I ever did see") and introducing Scotty Moore's guitar solo with a cry so intense that the take almost collapses. | Elvis 30 #1 Hits (RCA) | Elvis Presley | Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller | Steve Sholes | Oct. , 1957 | 27 weeks, No. 1 | |
| 85 | Redemption Song | Marley had already recorded a version of this freedom hymn with his band when Island Records' chief Blackwell suggested he try it as an acoustic-style folk tune. Inspired by the writings of Marcus Garvey, Marley's lyrics offer up music as an antidote to slavery, both mental and physical. "I would love to do more like that," Marley said a few months before his death, from cancer, at age 36 in 1981. As the final track on his final album, "Redemption Song" stands as his epitaph. | Uprising (Island) | Bob Marley and the Wailers | Marley | Chris Blackwell | June , 1980 | Did not chart | |
| 86 | Sunshine of Your Love | Bassist Bruce and lyricist-poet Brown came up with "Sunshine" toward the end of an all-night session, which inspired the opening line: "It's getting near dawn/When lights close their tired eyes." The killer riff was inspired by Jimi Hendrix and based on a bass ostinato from Bruce; Clapton added the chorus hook, and drummer Ginger Baker laid down a mammoth, tom-tom-heavy beat. Bruce knew "Sunshine" would do well, but Atlantic Records nearly rejected it until some of the label's biggest acts started championing the record. "Both Booker T. Jones and Otis Redding heard it and told me it was going to be a smash," he recalled. | Disraeli Gears (Polydor) | Cream | Jack Bruce, Pete Brown, Eric Clapton | Felix Pappalardi | Jan. , 1968 | 26 weeks | No. 5 |
| 87 | She Loves You | Lennon and McCartney began writing this song on a tour van, and George Harrison dreamed up the harmonies, which Martin found "corny." The band overruled Martin on the harmonies, but they took his suggestion to kick off the song with the jubilant chorus. When McCartney's father heard the song, he said, "Son, there are enough Americanisms around. Couldn't you sing, 'Yes, yes, yes,' just for once?" McCartney said, "You don't understand, Dad. It wouldn't work." | The Beatles 1 (Capitol/Apple) | The Beatles | John Lennon, Paul McCartney | George Martin | Sept. , 1963 | 15 weeks | No. 1 |
| 88 | For What Its Worth | As police and teens clashed on L.A.'s Sunset Strip, Neil Young's guitar tolled like a funeral bell; the Summer of Love was unraveling before it even began. "It turned out to be indicative of what was about to happen," said Stills. | Buffalo Springfield (Elektra) | Buffalo Springfield | Stephen Stills | Charles Greene, Brian Stone | Feb. , 1967 | 15 weeks, No. 7 | |
| 89 | Bo Diddley | Didley's first single went to Number One on the R&B charts and immortalized the bedrock beat that would power everything from Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" to the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now." The song originated as a sexually suggestive ditty titled "Uncle John," but the Chess brothers asked Diddley to clean up its lyrics and give it a more memorable title to match its otherworldly sound. Diddley, who studied violin as a child and built his own instruments, wrote songs that were deceptively simple, driven by interplay between the bass, drums and his tremolo guitar. But you can't copyright a beat, and Diddley never reaped the rewards for his greatest innovation. | His Best: The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection (Chess) | Bo Diddley | Ellas McDaniel | Phil and Leonard Chess | June , 1955 | Did not chart | |
| 90 | Whole Lotta Shakin Going On | When Lewis decided to record what would be his breakthrough hit, it had already been cut four times and gone nowhere. Lewis filled it with frantic piano and filthy instructions ("All you got to do, honey, is kinda stand in one spot/Wiggle around just a little bit"). But what really made "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" work was producer Cowboy Jack Clement's decision to turn the session over to the manic energy of Lewis' live shows. "I just simply turned on the machine, mixed it on the fly," he said. After Lewis played a fiery version of "Shakin'" on Steve Allen's TV show, the song went on to sell more than 6 million copies. | Original Sun Greatest Hits (Rhino) | Jerry Lee Lewis | Dave Williams, Roy Hall | Jack Clement | June , 1957 | 29 weeks | No. 3 |
| 91 | Lets Stay Together | After Mitchell gave Green a rough mix of a tune he and drummer Jackson had worked out, Green wrote the lyrics in five minutes. Still, Green didn't want to record the song and fought with Mitchell for two days before finally agreeing to cut it. The recording was finished late on a Friday night in the fall of 1971; Mitchell pressed the single on Monday, and by Thursday Green was told that "Let's Stay Together" would be entering the charts at Number Eight. Within two weeks, it had reached Number One on the R&B charts, and in February 1972, the warm, buoyant love song gave Green his only Number One pop hit. | Let's Stay Together (The Right Stuff) | Al Green | Al Green, Al Jackson Jr., Willie Mitchell | Mitchell | Dec. , 1971 | 16 weeks | No. 1 |
| 92 | The Times They Are A-Changin | "I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, with short, concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way," said Dylan. "This is definitely a song with a purpose." Inspired by Scottish and Irish folk ballads and released less than two months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, "The Times They Are A-Changin'" became an immediate Sixties anthem and was covered by artists ranging from the Byrds to Cher to Eddie Vedder. Said Dylan, "I knew exactly what I wanted to say and who I wanted to say it to." | The Times They Are A-Changin' (Columbia) | Bob Dylan | Dylan | Bob Johnston | Jan. , 1964 | Did not chart | |
| 93 | Billie Jean | Sinuous, paranoid and omnipresent: The single that made Jackson the biggest star since Elvis was a denial of a paternity suit, and it spent seven weeks at Number One on the pop charts. Jackson came up with the irresistible rhythm track on his home drum machine and he nailed the vocals in one take. "I knew the song was going to be big," Jackson said. "I was really absorbed in writing it." How absorbed? Jackson said he was thinking about "Billie Jean" while riding in his Rolls-Royce down the Ventura Freeway in California â and didn't notice the car was on fire. | Thriller (Sony) | Michael Jackson | Jackson | Jackson, Quincy Jones | Jan. , 1983 | 7 weeks | No. 1 |
| 94 | Whiter Shade of Pale | A somber hymn supported by an organ theme straight out of Bach ("Air on the G String," from the "Suite No. 3 in D Major"), Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale" was unlike anything else on the radio in 1967. Reid got the idea for the song when he overheard someone at a party tell a woman, "You've gone a whiter shade of pale." The track was also the only one recorded by the initial lineup of Procol Harum, which started as a British band, the Paramounts, in 1963. A worldwide smash that sold more than 6 million copies and quickly found its way into wedding ceremonies (and, later, the Big Chill soundtrack), "Pale" helped kick-start the classical-rock boomlet that gave the world the Moody Blues. | Greatest Hits (A&M) | Procol Harum | Keith Reid, Gary Brooker | Denny Cordell | June , 1967 | 12 weeks | No. 5 |
| 95 | Anarchy in the U.K. | This is what the beginning of a revolution sounds like: an explosion of punk-rock guitar noise and Johnny Rotten's evil cackle. The Sex Pistols set out to become a national scandal in the U.K., and they succeeded with their debut single. Jones made his guitar sound like a pub brawl, while Rotten snarled, spat and snickered, declaring himself an antichrist and ending the song by urging his fans, "Get pissed/Destroy!" EMI, the Sex Pistols' record label, pulled "Anarchy in the U.K." and dropped them, which just made them more notorious. "I don't understand it," Rotten said in 1977. "All we're trying to do is destroy everything." | Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Warner Bros.) | The Sex Pistols | Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock, Johnny Rotten | Chris Thomas, Bill Price | Nov. , 1977 | Non-single | |
| 96 | Long Tall Sally | Half of a double-sided hit (the flip was "Slippin' and Slidin' [Peepin' and Hidin']"), "Long Tall Sally" was aimed squarely at pop singer Pat Boone. "The white radio stations wouldn't play Richard's version of 'Tutti-Frutti' and made Boone's cover Number One," recalled Blackwell. "So we decided to up the tempo on the follow-up and get the lyrics going so fast that Boone wouldn't be able to get his mouth together to do it!" "Long Tall Sally" proved to be Little Richard's biggest hit. Unfazed, Boone also recorded the song, taking it to Number Eight. | The Georgia Peach (Specialty) | Little Richard | Robert "Bumps" Blackwell, Enotris Johnson, Little Richard | Blackwell | March , 1956 | 19 weeks | No. 6 |
| 97 | Louie Louie | A blast of raw guitars and half-intelligible shouting recorded for $52, the Kingsmen's cover of Richard Berry's R&B song hit Number Two in 1963 â thanks in part to supposedly pornographic lyrics that drew the attention of the FBI. The Portland, Oregon, group accidentally rendered the decidedly noncontroversial lyrics (about a sailor trying to get home to see his lady) indecipherable by crowding around a single microphone. "I was yelling at a mike far away," singer Jack Ely told Rolling Stone. "I always thought the controversy was record-company hype." | The Best of the Kingsmen (Rhino) | The Kingsmen | Richard Berry | Ken Chase | June , 1963 | 16 weeks | No. 2 |
| 98 | When a Man Loves a Woman | Sledge was touring the South with an R&B combo called the Esquires when producer Ivy heard him belt out an intense, pleading ballad at the local Elks Club. Sledge had recently lost both his construction job and his girl, who'd taken off for L.A. to pursue a modeling career. "I didn't have any money to go after her, so there was nothing I could do to try and get her back," he later recalled. Ivy had the lyrics rewritten, and Sledge quit the Esquires to cut his first solo side, the immortal "When a Man Loves a Woman." When Atlantic's Jerry Wexler heard the song, he told partner Ahmet Ertegun, "Our billing for the summer is in the bag." | It Tears Me Up: The Best of Percy Sledge (Rhino) | Percy Sledge | Calvin Lewis, Andrew Wright | Marlin Greene, Quin Ivy | March , 1966 | 13 weeks | No. 1 |
| 99 | When Doves Cry | The Purple Rain soundtrack album was completed, and so was the movie. But Prince just couldn't stop making music. And at the very last minute, he added a brand-new song: "When Doves Cry." Even by Prince standards, it's eccentric; after single-handedly recording the stark, broken-hearted song in the studio, he decided to erase the bass track from the final mix. According to the engineer, Prince said, "Nobody would have the balls to do this. You just wait â they'll be freaking." He was right. Prince made it the soundtrack's first single â and 1984's most avant-garde pop record became his first American Number One hit, keeping Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" out of the top spot. | Purple Rain (Warner Bros.) | Prince | Prince | Prince | June , 1984 | 21 weeks | No. 1 |
| 100 | The Message | "The Message" was a breakthrough in hip-hop, taking the music from party anthems to street-level ghetto blues. It began as a poem by schoolteacher Bootee; Sugar Hill boss Robinson decided to make it a rap record with Melle Mel of the Furious Five. Said Flash in 1997, "I hated the fact that it was advertised as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, because the only people on the record were Mel and Duke Bootee." But the song, driven by its signature future-shock synth riff and grim lyrics about urban decay, became an instant sensation on New York's hip-hop radio. "It played all day, every day," Flash said. "It put us on a whole new level." | The Best of Sugar Hill Records (Rhino) | Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five | Duke Bootee, Melle Mel | Sylvia Robinson | May , 1982 | 7 weeks | No. 62 |