Rambling Rhoads: 2026-08-16

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.)

Monday, August 17, 2026

Dave Marsh

Opinionated rock critic and prolific author Dave Marsh died this past Friday at the age of 76.

While I enjoyed his two early Bruce Springsteen bios (Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story and Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s), for me they pale in comparison to The Heart Of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Every Made, which is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s still in print, available from Amazon and presumably elsewhere.

Marsh’s opinions of various musical acts were always fun to read, whether you agreed with them or not. According to his Wikipedia entry, he wrote that “Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band,” characterized Journey as “a dead end for San Francisco area rock,” and dismissed the Grateful Dead as the “worst band in creation.” I do have to give him bonus points for his evaluation of Air Supply as the “most calculated and soulless pseudo-group of its kind.”