Greatest Ever Rock The Definitive Collection

[Eustacio Gadit]

Inthe early 1990s, Cuomo had an awkward girlfriend who was routinely picked on. His efforts to stick up for her inspired Weezer's breakthrough, a track whose bubble-grunge hooks and lines such as "I look just like Buddy Holly/And you're Mary Tyler Moore" helped the band reach a nation of pop-minded suburban punks. It also earned Weezer autographed photos from the real Mary Tyler Moore.

The Stones were in Toronto, rehearsing for their classic gigs at the El Mocambo Club, when Jagger, jamming with R&B legend Billy Preston, came up with "Miss You." With a disco groove and a touch of the blues via a harmonica player they found in a Paris subway, it became the band's first Number One hit in five years. "It's not really about a girl," Jagger said. "The feeling of longing is what the song is."

R. Kelly's automotive metaphors for booty-knockin' in "Ignition" are subtler than they might've been; the lyrics were toned down at the request of a Chicago radio station. On Chocolate Factory, the original version of the song segued immediately into the hit remix.

The rhythm was inspired by the wriggling of a praying mantis that VanWyngarden and Goldwasser kept in college. VanWyngarden wrote about rock-star fantasies ("I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin"), though it's unclear how facetious the words are. "Some think we're druggies. Others see the tongue-in-cheek element," he said. "That's what I hope for as a lyricist: confusion!"

In 1979, Gaynor's career was falling apart. Donna Summer had replaced her as the leading disco diva, and the 32-year-old Gaynor had recently suffered the death of her mother and had undergone spinal surgery. So when she belted out "I Will Survive," she brought extra attitude. The track was originally a B side, but after enterprising DJs started to play it at discos, it turned into a smash.

Attempting to jump-start a solo career after her stint in the Runaways, Jett had her demo tape to "I Love Rock 'N Roll" rejected by 23 record labels. Tiny Boardwalk Records finally bit, but the label sold her the radio rights to the track for $2,500. Today, the song is worth nearly $20 million.

A staple of beach-town jukeboxes every summer since its release, "Under the Boardwalk" evokes the carefree sounds of the shore. But its recording was no day at the beach. Johnny Moore was drafted to sing lead because the track's original singer, Rudy Lewis, died of a heroin overdose in his hotel room the night before the session.

"I've never been a big fan of irony," Smith said, which might be why this reverie of love, cut at a vineyard in the South of France, is his favorite Cure song. The band's girlfriends influenced the music. "The girls would sit on the sofa in the back of the control room and give the songs marks out of 10," he said. "So there was a really big female input."

Before "I'm Eighteen," Cooper was just another hairy rock oddball. But this proto-punk smash defined the age when, in Cooper's words, you're "old enough to be drafted but not old enough to vote." A few years later, Johnny Rotten sang this at his audition for the Sex Pistols; by then, Cooper was a guest on The Muppet Show.

In 1975, Bowie traded his glammed-out Ziggy Stardust persona for an exploration of what he called "plastic soul." Yet this R&B homage is one of his warmest, wildest tales, recorded in Philadelphia with a then-unknown Luther Vandross on backing vocals and David Sanborn wailing on sax. "It's about a newlywed couple who don't know if they really like each other," Bowie said.

This hit about a Big Easy streetwalker remains in rotation 35 years after it hit Number One. The group was from Philadelphia, but the nasty groove was classic New Orleans, with producer Toussaint and his house band, legendary R&B stalwarts the Meters, funking up the beat. Thanks to the ladies of LaBelle, every disco fan now knows at least one line of French: "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?"

James wasn't exactly modest about his ambitions. As he declared in 1981, "I wanna make Paul McCartney white-boy money!" He got it with the self-described "punk funk" of "Super Freak," from his breakthrough album, Street Songs. James enlisted the Temptations for background vocals. The song got a second life when MC Hammer jacked it for the 1990 megasmash "U Can't Touch This."

Adam "MCA" Yauch came up with the killer fuzz-bass riff at Manhattan's Tin Pan Alley studio, but it wasn't until a year later that the song was finished in L.A. With two weeks to go before Ill Communication was completed, Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz got all hot and bothered about paparazzi on the mike and came out of the song's breakdown with a scream for the ages.

Youthful angst on the Lower East Side: Lou Reed vocals and cool confusion, driven by the surging, garage-band sound that would go on to define early-2000s rock. The Strokes supposedly nicked the opening riff from Tom Petty's "American Girl." "I saw an interview with them where they admitted it," Petty told Rolling Stone. "I was like, 'OK, good for you.' It doesn't bother me."

Morrissey cribbed lyrics from George Eliot, but guitarist Marr cited another reference: Derek and the Dominos. "I wanted an intro that was almost as potent as 'Layla,'" he said. "When [it] plays in a club or a pub, everyone knows what it is."

Franklin disappeared after a 1967 session in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, leaving this simmering ballad unfinished. A few weeks later, she resurfaced in New York. The resulting vocal, said producer Wexler, was "perfection."

Cheap Trick provided the ultimate Seventies teen anthem in "Surrender," with a verse about a kid who catches his parents making out and gets stoned to his Kiss records. Guitarist- songwriter Nielsen's secret? "I [had] to go back and put myself in the head of a 14-year-old."

Stax singer Ingram, frustrated with the state of the world, told house songwriter Rice that "black folk need to learn to respect themselves." Rice liked the comment so much that he built a funk groove around it, then gave the song to the Staples. "This is the song I've been waiting [for]," said producer Bell, who laid it down with the famous Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.

For this thumping ode to conspicuous consumption, the king of New York rap hooked up with Houston rap dons UGK over a beat that sounds like it was cut in Cairo. Timbaland allegedly based the melody on a 1957 song by Egyptian Abdel Halim Hafez.

Elliott was convinced that Miss E needed one more track. So Timbaland cooked up a stuttering, tabla-laden beat based on bhangra, an Indian dance genre he heard while traveling, and plucked out the signature six-note riff on a tumbi, a one-stringed Punjabi guitar.

For Chess Records' first single, Waters turned Mississippi bluesman Robert Petway's "Catfish Blues" into a spare track he named "Rollin' Stone." "We wouldn't do it exactly like those older fellows," Waters said. "We put the beat with it, put a little drive to it." The Rolling Stones took their name from it, as did, in part, this magazine.

This was cut twice: first as a single that was rushed to radio and became one of the Ramones' few modest hits, then in a slightly souped-up version for the band's album Rocket to Russia. "I combined Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, with the primalness of punk rock," said Joey Ramone. "It was funny, because all the girls in New York seemed to change their names to Sheena after that."

After Lennon composed "Strawberry Fields Forever," McCartney wrote his own snappy memoir. Penny Lane was a Liverpool bus stop where Lennon and McCartney often met. "John came over and helped me with the third verse, as was often the case," McCartney said. "We were writing recently faded memories from eight or 10 years before."

This seven-minute, two-chord track spiked out its territory with lyrics about shooting up until you felt like Jesus' son. "It wasn't pro or con," Reed said. "It was about taking heroin from the point of view of someone taking it. I'm still not sure what was such a big deal. So there's a song called 'Heroin.' So what?" Drummer Moe Tucker disagreed: "I consider it our greatest triumph."

Morton found the inspiration for this song at a diner in Hicksville, New York. "Bikers, hot rodders, gum-smacking ladies," he said, "not careful at all about their language." He brought a bike into the studio for the motorcycle sounds.

"It's just about people and what they're expected to act like," Cobain said. "The lines in the song are really contradictory. They're kind of a rebuttal to each other." The song is driven by a simple riff that Vig goosed with a flanged, subaquatic guitar effect. Cobain apparently lifted it from a 1985 song by U.K. art-metal band Killing Joke, whom Dave Grohl paid back 12 years later by drumming on their 2003 album.

Late one night, while Sonny and Cher were living in their manager's house, Bono woke up Cher and asked her to listen to "I Got You Babe" and to sing the lyrics, which he had written on a piece of shirt cardboard. She thought it was OK but really wanted a song that modulated. So he changed the key at the bridge and woke Cher up again hours later to hear it; she was delighted.

Although the Fireballs scored eleven US hits over a ten year period, there remains a distinctly unfair tendency to overlook them when it comes to discussing American bands who enjoyed long term success throughout the 60s. They are victims of their own versatility, for they moved from one genre to another with such ease and re-invented themselves in such a convincing way that it seemed as if they were several different bands. So will the real Fireballs please stand up? Were they that pioneering instrumental group who established the three guitars and drums line-up as the classic formation for rock with Torquay in 1959, the purveyors of sweet-toothed mid-60s pop-rock vocals as exemplified by the enchanting Sugar Shack, or the long-haired folkies who brought us the rousing sing-a-long-folk of Bottle Of Wine towards the end of the 60s? Actually, they were all three!

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