Rosetta Stone Lyrics Young Thug

[Derrik Navarro]

Hotel California" was rumored to be about heroin addiction or Satan worship, but Henley had more prosaic things on his mind: "We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest," he said. "'Hotel California' was our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles." (That doesn't preclude heroin or Satan, of course.) Recording the six-and-a-half-minute song posed its share of problems: Working in Miami, the Eagles were initially unable to re-create Felder's 12-string intro and elaborate twin-guitar coda. Panicked, Felder called his housekeeper in L.A. and sent her digging through a pile of tapes in his home studio so she could play his demo back over the phone.

When Simon wrote this tribute to friendship, he and Garfunkel were arguing over everything, even who should sing it. "He felt I should have done it," Simon said. "Many times I'm sorry I didn't." The "Sail on, silver girl" verse was Garfunkel's idea; Simon has never liked it.

"All Along the Watchtower" had just been released on Dylan's John Wesley Harding when Hendrix began tinkering with the song at Electric Lady Studios in New York on January 21st, 1968. Using the line "And the wind began to howl" as a springboard, Hendrix constructed a tumultuous four-part solo that transformed Dylan's concise foreboding into an electric hurricane. Dylan acknowledged Hendrix's masterstroke: His subsequent versions of "All Along the Watchtower," including the treatment on his 1974 reunion tour with the Band and the live LP Before the Flood, emulated Hendrix's cover.

When RCA Records signed "hillbilly cat" Presley, they expected more songs like his rockabilly hits from Sun Records. Instead, for his first RCA single, Presley recorded this gloomy, downtempo number, co-written by Axton, his former publicist, and inspired by a Miami Herald report of a suicide note that consisted solely of the line "I walk a lonely street." But what Sun Records founder Sam Phillips called "a morbid mess" went on to become Presley's first Number One hit and million-selling single, thanks to Scotty Moore's steely guitar leads, a thumping bass line from Bill Black and the brilliant melodrama with which Elvis infused every line.

Charles' driver had heard him singing "Georgia on My Mind" in the car and suggested that Charles add that to the record he was working on, an album consisting of songs with place names in their titles. Once he recorded it, though, Charles said he thought of many ways his rendition could have been better. As the single was about to enter the charts, Charles introduced his version to America on Hugh Hefner's Playboy Penthouse, a syndicated show out of Chicago, with David "Fathead" Newman handling the string parts on flute.

The Band was chiefly known as Bob Dylan's touring group when it retreated to a pink house in Woodstock, New York, to record its debut, Music From Big Pink. The album was centered by "The Weight," an oddball fable of debt and burden driven by an indelible singalong chorus ("Take a load off, Fanny. . . ."). Robertson said he was inspired to write the song after watching director Luis Bunuel's films about "the impossibility of sainthood," but characters such as Crazy Chester (who tries to pawn his dog off on the narrator) could have walked straight out of an old folk song. As for the biblical-sounding line "pulled into Nazareth," it refers to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, home of the Martin Guitar factory.

Gordy Stevenson, who gave Martha Reeves her first job, as his secretary, approached the group with this song after it was turned down by Motown labelmate (and future Mrs. Stevenson) Kim Weston. The trio agreed to record "Dancing in the Street" as a demo with its songwriters singing background. "When Martha got into the song," Stevenson said, "that was the end of the conversation!" Against a backbeat that cracks like a gunshot, Reeves reinvents the world as a giant block party.

The Stones channeled the emotional wreckage of the late Sixties on a song that Richards wrote in 20 minutes. The intro, strummed on an electric-acoustic guitar modeled on a Chuck Berry favorite, conjures an unparalleled aura of dread. Singer Merry Clayton brings down Armageddon with a soul-wracked wail: "Rape, murder, it's just a shot away." The song surfaced days after Meredith Hunter's murder at Altamont. "That's a kind of end-of-the-world song, really," Jagger said in 1995. "It's apocalypse." Richards later said that his guitar fell apart on the last take, "as if by design."

The uptempo version on 1975's Natty Dread is forgettable, but the swaying, incantatory take on 1975's Live! remains one of the reggae legend's most beloved performances. The "government yard in Trench Town" refers to the Jamaican public-housing project where Marley lived in the Fifties. He gave a songwriting credit to childhood friend Vincent "Tata" Ford to help keep Ford's Kingston soup kitchen running.

Achtung Baby was the album on which U2 traded in a decade of earnestness for irony, but the new approach resulted in their most moving single ever. "One" was spun off from another song, "Mysterious Ways," when the Edge came up with two ideas for the bridge, and Bono so liked one of them that he wrote a new set of lyrics. Though some hear it as a love song, the words are full of hurt and ambiguity. "People have told me they play it at their wedding," the Edge said. "And I think, 'Have you listened to the lyrics? It's not that kind of a song.'"

Spector was conducting the musicians for a Ronettes show in San Francisco when he decided to sign the Righteous Brothers, who were on the bill. He then asked Mann and Weil to come up with a hit for them. Bill Medley's intro sounds impossibly deep. "When Phil played it for me," Mann recalled, "I said, 'Phil, you have it on the wrong speed!'" Bobby Hatfield was puzzled by his partner's opening solo: "What do I do while he's singing the entire first verse?" he asked Spector, who answered, "You can go directly to the bank."

The inspiration for this hellish detour came from Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, which depicts Satan having his way in 1930s Moscow. Richards struggled to find the right backing for Jagger's menacing Dylan-esque lyrics, unsure "whether it should be a samba or a goddamn folk song," he recalled. The Stones ended up giving the devil one of their best grooves, built on Rocky Dijon's congas and Bill Wyman's Bo Diddley-ish maracas. "Before, when we were just innocent kids out for a good time [the media said], 'They're evil, they're evil,'" Richards said. "So that makes you start thinking about evil. . . . Everybody's Lucifer."

All epic anthems must measure themselves against "Stairway to Heaven," the cornerstone of Led Zeppelin IV. The acoustic intro sounds positively Elizabethan, thanks to John Paul Jones' recorder solo and Plant's fanciful lyrics, which were partly inspired by Lewis Spence's historical tome Magic Arts in Celtic Britain. Over eight minutes, the song morphs into a furious Page solo that storms heaven's gate. Page said the song "crystallized the essence of the band. It had everything there and showed us at our best. It was a milestone. Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality, something which will hold up for a long time. We did it with 'Stairway.'"

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."

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."

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.

"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.

"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."

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