With Mick Mars’ pulsating opening guitar riff (matched by Nikki Sixx’s bass), you’re immediately sucked in to this kick-ass rock song. The high guitar wail at the end of the intro gives you that frantic feeling that the echo what the lyrics are all about, our local drug dealer, Jimmy. “Let him soothe your soul/just take his hand/Dr. Feelgood” Judging by their reputation (and their revelations in their book, “The Dirt”), the boys in Mötley Crüe knew Jimmy well. Nikki Sixx undoubtedly had him on speed dial. They tell writers to write what they know, and Mötley Crüe does just that.

Vince Neil has one of those great metal voices that weren’t made for songs like “Love on the Rocks.” It was made for songs like this one. That gravely growl/sing thing that he’s got going on may be annoying to some, but if you really love rock/metal songs, his is a voice of a generation. Nikki Sixx often matches the guitar melody with his bass, giving the chorus that extra thump. It’s nice to see a bass player that realizes he doesn’t always get noticed. It’s like that utility infielder in baseball who doesn’t care where or when he plays, he just wants to help his team win. Given the fact that Nikki co-wrote almost all of Mötley Crüe’s songs, including this one, the sacrifice for the good of the song hasn’t gone unnoticed by me.

This is the title track for the album that was the first that they did with mega-producer Bob Rock. Rock brought a lushness of sound that was missing in earlier Crüe albums. Lots of people denigrate Rock's production style, comparing it to Mutt Lange's overproduced hair metal records earlier in the 80's. I say good production isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you've listened to the redone Beatles songs done for the Cirque du Soleil show, Love, I'd argue that many of those mixes are superior to the originals. So give Bob his credit, he helps craft some amazing songs. Just ask the guys in Metallica (we'll talk more about them later).

A great rock song I could probably listen to every day for the rest of my life, Dr. Feelgood takes a brutal subject matter and makes it almost fun with it’s guitar hooks and melody that won’t let you go. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but I can promise you, I’m putting it on again right now.

Lots of love songs are ballads. Most of them are. Not too many upbeat songs scream romance. This one does, though. Listening to Stevie sing about how everything in the universe knows its place, so does his heart know that he loves her. As he continues, it occurs to me that I could listen to him sing the phone book. Who else could make “Anderson, Stephanie A, Anderson Theodore, Angelo Constantine E” sound like poetry? But in this case, he just gives us poetry. Telling his best loved not only that he will love her always, but comparing it to the great events of the universe. Now that’s love. Here’s what he has to say:

Just as time knew to move on since the beginning

And the seasons know exactly when to change

Just as kindness knows no shame

Know through all your joy and pain

That I'll be loving you always

That’s all you need to know. As long as… well, pretty much anything… I’m going to love you. The lyrics to this song make all of us guys who wish we could say these things fume at the fact that Stevie just hit the nail on the head. I guess we’ll have to let him do the talking for us.

With the music, you’re transfixed by his little interludes of keyboard magic that dance around the main melody. Herbie Hancock played keyboards on this song, so you can definitely see the jazz influence that he brought to a more traditional R&B song, helping take it to another level of sophistication and listenability (is that even a word?). The bass line is deceptively intricate, but doesn’t really kick in until the choruses, when it just makes you want to get up out of your chair and dance around like a big fool.

Musically, this is a dance song. Lyrically, a love song. Put them together, and it’s just a great song. Some people may say that the song is too long, and at seven minutes long, they may be a little right. But if you can hear seven minutes of this instead of two crappier 3 1/2 minute songs, wouldn’t you?

Me too.

They say write what you know. So that's what's first up for me. A few years ago, Rolling Stone came out with their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It was a great list that I enjoyed reading (and reading about, and discussing in probably too much detail). And it made me think. What songs did I agree with or disagree with and which songs did I think were unfairly left out?

I thought about going through each of the songs and putting in my own two cents, but that just seemed a bit redundant. So I decided to come up with my own list. My own list of what I thought were the Greatest Songs of All Time, just like Rolling Stone (except I'm not really an expert, or a paid journalist, or a magazine that you pay for - you get the idea). I was talking to a friend and joking about the fact that Mozart would be really pissed he didn't make the Top 500 and then this thought occurred to me: Rolling Stone was just doing the greatest songs of the rock & roll era, the last forty-ish years, their lifetime.

So I decided to publish my own list. This is the Top 100 Songs of My Lifetime. Songs I love that were released after I was born. That way, I have at the very least a tactile association with them. I was alive when they were.

For those interested in how I came up with the list, I came up with a process that I took pretty seriously. I knew that this wasn't going to be just a "this is a great song!" blog, so I wanted to make sure I was generating a list that was both diverse and interesting. So here's how I did it:

Firstly, I wasn't going to put any Bob Dylan songs on my list. To me, his voice just sounds too ridiculous to be taken seriously. He might just be the Shakespeare of songwriting, but he's not even the Joan Rivers (yes, she wrote a book) of singing. So no Bob for me.

Next, I put a lot of weight on the songs on the list being written by the performers on the list. So you won't get Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" here or even Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," since neither of them had much of anything to do with the writing of their great songs. It may be dismissive, but I have tremendous respect for songwriters and wanted to pay tribute to them.

I wanted diversity in my list, so I specifically decided to have only one entry per band, unless I absolutely could not limit that band/person to just one entry. My favorite band, U2, does have three entries, but I could've put a dozen on here, so I actually showed some restraint. Rolling Stone didn't so much. Of their Top 30, seven were by one band, The Beatles. U2 only has two entries in my Top 30. As far as other artists getting more than one song, there are only three others (I won't tell you who) that got two entries on my list. So even though the second greatest song by The Who may be better than the best song by Dave Matthews Band, I chose diversity over reality.

As far as actually choosing the songs, I just listened to tons of music over about a month. I took songs that I listened to that I thought were great and put them on a list. Then I listened to each of them again to see if they were worth that second listen. That whittled my list down to 182 songs. I had a brief thought like, "Hey, if I just add 18 songs, I'll have a nice list of 200!" Then I thought that was just lazy and started the laborious process of whittling down my list to the 100 I'm going to write about.

So I broke those 182 songs down into groups of fifty (1-50, 51-100 and so on). I weighed each song, "Is this a top 50 of all time?" What I ended up with after that process was 72 songs in my 1-50. So that left me with promoting 28 songs from the 51-100 list (which had 62 songs in its own right) into the first list, giving me my Top 100. That took longer than I thought it would, because there were more than a few songs that were thatclose to being in the Top 100.

But once I had my Top 100, I broke them down again into tens (1-10, 11-20, etc.). This time, my top 10 only had 9 songs, but my top 11-20 had 16. So again began the process of grouping and narrowing, promoting and demoting until the list ended up as the one I'm going to do posts on. So feel free to go through the process yourself and see what stacks up for you. I'd love to see other people's lists (and even read whatever they'd like to write about them), so feel free to leave comments.

Most people (if they ever were to read these posts) would find this list, and my writing it, as a pretentious waste of time, my wife being one of them. My best friend, my brothers, and my father in law, however, might get a kick out of it, though. So Todd, Todd, Scott and Dad, here we go...

(My brother, Scott, came up with a great idea for this list. He said that he'd like to be able to listen to the song while he was reading what I had to say about it. So I've added a video of each song from Youtube so you can hear (and see) the song as you read about it.)

For someone who's always been somewhat of a computer/technology geek and also considered himself a writer of sorts, it's hard to believe that it's taken me this long to actually put a blog together. I guess I didn't want to put anything out there on those internets* until I was sure I had something to say. I guess I finally figured out that I had.

Who's going to be interested in what I have to say? I have no idea. It may just be me and my wife - maybe a few friends and family. That's just fine with me. I'm not looking to become the next, um, who the heck is a famous blogger? Perez Hilton? Ugh. Yeah, better just blog on in obscurity, because I'm not dying my hair pink.

So if you're reading this, thanks for stopping by and I hope that what I have to say is worth your time. You know, just in case you were wondering...


*And in case you were wondering if I was stupid or not, it's a joke.