CLASSIC ROCK TRACKS POLL voting thread -- deadline July 15 -- VOTING CLOSED

i used to think "Lights" but now i lean toward "Squeezin'." but the top Journey on my ballot will be "Any Way You Want It" and "Separate Ways." i may include all four. and "Stone In Love." and "Don't Stop Believin'." and a write-in vote for "Feeling That Way." fuuuuck Journey has got jams.

heard "rock and roll never forgets" and "main street" 20+ times on my uncle's motorboat tape deck one summer

"Lights" is my favorite Journey song these days, it's very "driving home on early sunday morning" evocative

yeah, "Lights" is pretty dreamy. even thought i know it's about San Francisco, in my mind the city by the bay is Baltimore.

stone in love and wheel in the sky are the most classic rock Journey. faithfully is the greatest ballad Journey.

lights is sublime but living in the bay area I can't separate it from the local narcissism that end in Train.

i love 'wheel in the sky'

"endS in Train," obv

I'm curious about this soundtrack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream,_After_Dream
It's Journey in 81 but it's supposed to be more progier/jammier like the early stuff. Love that first album a bunch.

"Wheel in the Sky" is already safe on my list, trying to decide what the second Journey song is gonna be! Nobody gets more than a three song rock block and I can only spare a handful of those, Journey can only have a two-fer! This is starting to make me cry!

agree: night moves and maggie may are all-time

yes: of the two songs i mentioned in my "night moves" post, "night moves" was indeed the all-time one.

xp

As your Journey sommelier, let me recommend "Stone in Love" -- it's from a good vintage but easily overlooked. You could call it the Journey lover's Journey song.

http://www.labelvalue.com/images/freedom.gif

xp

As your Journey sommelier, let me recommend "Stone in Love" -- it's from a good vintage but easily overlooked. You could call it the Journey lover's Journey song.

― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra)

YOU PEOPLE.

Now I am remembering how great Stone in Love is! The blue jean girl! He'll keep her forever!

Also: having to choose between Caught Up in You and Hold On Loosely is too cruel. It's Sophie's Choice. I can't do it.

Just want to make sure that everybody is voting for "Spirit In the Sky." That is all.

I wanted to have so many rock blocks - i think i only ended up with 1 and it was not 38 special ;_;

Sandy, check out this classic thread:

"Stone in Love" - Classic or Greatest 4:25 In The History Of The Bay Area?

weird poll for me -- like, 'it's only rock 'n' roll' is nowhere near my favorite stones song, but it seems to fit ~classic rock~ more perfectly than the others

i can assure you that 'stone in love' was very high on my list tho

Yeah, there's a strong chance my only Stones will be "It's Only Rock And Roll" and "Heartbreaker" for this reason. "Wild Horses" and "Beast of Burden" are also very classic rock, but I'm just not as attached to 'em.

also while i <3 in a big country, for example, that ain't CR imo so

my #1 stones right now, and this is subject to change, is "can't you hear me knocking," which is probably my favorite post-'70s stones (except for maybe "happy," which isn't on the list). i do hear it on cr radio. but i don't hear it a lot on cr radio, certainly not as much as some of the tracks mentioned above (except "heartbreaker," which i never hear). so it's not the MOST classic rock of classic rock tracks, but it IS classic rock, and it's the one i like most, and if i were running this cr station, every time a dj wanted to play "it's only rock and roll," i'd run into the booth and make him play "knocking" instead. otherwise, djs would have lots of freedom at my station, but on this particular point, they would not.

Included on my ballot, but probably underrated: That Smell. The backing vocals alone on that are so immense. "You fool you!"

WHISKEY BOTTLE
BRAND NEW CAR
OAK TREE YOU'RE IN MY WAY

that's how you open a song

FUCK YES.

I've been sitting on my ballot since Thursday thinking I might revisit it and switch some stuff around, but I've decided to just ship it. I pulled it together very quickly and I'm sure that I'll regret my picks and order, but what can you do? I definitely gave priority to tracks that I personally like even if they don't fit the Classic Rock format very well, we'll see how that goes...

yeah even second-tier skynyrd is monstrous. you could justify a ROCK BLOCK on the ballot even without "sweet home" and "freebird"

How have I never noticed the bongos in "Two Tickets to Paradise" before?

And I did! xp

absolutely xxp

Doing the final look-over of my list today before submitting and Skynyrd might be the one band that breaks my no-more-than-three-songs-per-artist rule. And Free Bird isn't even one of the four songs on my short list.

green grass and high tides is such a (literal) jam

Just submitted because I figured there's no way I'm gonna have time to hear the ~400 songs I don't know. Narrowed it down to 55 songs that cross the "is great song" and "is classic rock" thresholds. Barely spent time ordering apart from the top five picks, which I felt was in the spirit of radio

haha "spirit of radio"

Just want to make sure that everybody is voting for "Spirit In the Sky." That is all.

― voodoo chili, Sunday, July 6, 2014 10:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

^^^ Not much of a classic rock radio listener, but I'm pretty sure my local doesn't play this anymore, if they ever did.

such a weird song. one of the coolest, sleaziest-sounding riffs ZZ Top never wrote, and then homeboy starts singing about having a friend in Jesus.

Yes. The song itself was simple, when you’re writing a song you keep it simple of course. It wasn’t like a Christian song of praise it was just a simple song. I had to use Christianity because I had to use something. But more important it wasn’t the Jesus part, it was the spirit in the sky. Funny enough… I wanted to die with my boots on.

^Never knew this!

Haha, was just listening to the Norman Greenbaum album! Unfortunately it has no other death-worshiping drone-rock anthems, but it does have some pleasant singer-songwriter odes to the good country life in a James Taylor/down-south horns mode - "Jubilee," "Junior Cadilac." Actually it's all pretty listenable. "Spirit in the Sky" is top ten classic rock: "Draggin' The Line" gone horribly wrong, optimistic on paper but an Altamont bad trip on record.

death-worshiping drone-rock anthems
i never thought of it that way, but sure! spirit in the sky was right up there with sultans of swing for radio songs i loved as a kid, like ages 4-6
it really is funny realizing how classic rock radio molded my brain at an early age
it's kind of embarrassing tbh!

it really is funny realizing how classic rock radio molded my brain at an early age

otm. revisiting all this music has turned out to be deeply spiritual to me in a way I didn't expect.

Total death-worship. Jesus gets name-checked but when I diiie is clearly the real attraction here.

Death is pure love iirc

By extension: Death is like Oxygen.

You get too much, you get too high. Not enough and you're gonna live.

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/qteq21CvDRE/hqdefault.jpg

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-classic-rock-isnt-what-it-used-to-be/

Beginning to think ILX is the rest of the internet's lab rat.

Fuck "R.E.M. is now classic rock."

Will be interesting to see how our countdown lines up with those top tracks.

“We start from a set of artists and use a lot of complicated math to extrapolate the rest of the universe if those artists are the the center of it,” McDonald said. In order to define a genre, first McDonald has to find out the relationships among different artists. To do that, he relies on a mountain of data that The Echo Nest collects from users and elsewhere. “We have listening histories and machines that go read the web,” he said. “We read charts, we read reviews, we read blog posts, we read news articles, Wikipedia entries, pretty much anything we’re legally allowed to read.”

reading between the lines: your ILX poll votes matter!

:D