| 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 |