As a fan of a wide variety of popular (and not-so-popular) music from the 1950s (and sometimes even earlier) up through the present, one of my bucket list projects for years has been to put together a list of my 100 favorite songs of all time. At some point I decided that, once I got around to figuring that out, I could put it out on a blog, for the infinitesimally small proportion of the Internet world that might be interested. So, here we are. While the Top 100 will be a major focus, I also plan to post on a variety of other musical (and occasionally non-musical) topics, in which you may or may not be interested. (If a particular posting doesn’t ring your bell, you’re only a few clicks away from a dancing cat video on YouTube.)

Sunday, December 29, 2013

#90 Substitute -- The Who (1966)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts9-4jbFWGg

This is the first song by The Who that I ever heard. Back in the mid-60s, WFEC (1400 on the AM dial) was the big Top 40 station in Harrisburg PA, where I grew up, so that’s what all of us kids listened to most of the time. At some point in the fall of 1965, I discovered that another local AM station (WKBO 1230) had a one-hour show every Sunday night that featured the music that was current in England at the time. I listened to that religiously every week and picked up on a lot of great tracks that were big across the Atlantic but never made it over here, including “Substitute.”

Somewhat unbelievably, The Who only had one Top 10 hit in the U.S. (This one wasn’t it.)

2 comments:

  1. This one gives me hope that, down the "road," there might some heavy metal on this list

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    Replies
    1. All this talk about "hope" -- are you also a fan of Washington's professional football team? ;-)

      You might be interested in checking out the countdown of "Greatest Rock Songs" that WXPN ran in 2012(http://xpn.org/music-artist/885-countdown/2012). I did vote in that -- will try to dig that list up and post it at some point.

      If I ever do a countdown of Top Song Intros of all time, "Crazy Train" is likely to make it. (The rest of the song fails to live up to the beginning, IMHO.)

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