Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | NXg | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest |

MUSIC MATTERS

My Five -- Rahul Kumar

Led Zeppelin

The opening song for most Led Zepp concerts, it’s about Viking conquests. Listening to the strength and energy of The Immigrant Song is an incredibly empowering experience. The riff with its crisp timbre and the pounding bass guitar is just amazing. Page’s solo while doing it live is simply transcendental.

Originally an Isley Bros. song, it was covered by The Beatles on their debut album Please Please Me. Lennon did the recording with a severe cold and bad throat, yet ended making the song special. It features the group singing ‘wooo’ in harmony, which would become a cliché of the early Beatles and Beatlemania.

A sure masterpiece by the father of Rock N’ Roll, the song is partly autobiographical: a true story about how playing music on a guitar can change your life forever. He could play the guitar just like a-ringing a bell Berry sings in the first verse — a perfect description of his sound which reverberates through every style of rock guitar, from the Beatles and the Stones down. The song, accompanied by Berry’s entertaining duckwalk and other onstage antics, always made the fans ask for an encore.

This track influenced by the theme of Hemingway’s novel showed that California metal wasn’t all hair spray and power chords. The epic bass solo by the legendary late Cliff Burton was a departure from the clichéd norm of solos oozing out of lead guitar only. The song is inarguably the greatest metal war song and everything that Metallica and thrash metal is all about.

This song was The Who’s ticket to legend. Bassist Entwistle’s exchange of crisp and aggressive solo breaks with Townshend’s Stratocaster coupled with Roger Daltry’s stuttering vocals and Keith Moon’s avalanche drumming created a vivid, mounting anxiety that climaxed with Townshend and Moon smashing their gears in front of thousands of counterculture followers. Smashing guitars and exploding drums promptly turned the song to an immortal youth-mutiny anthem.

Those that almost made it

Ozzy Osbourne: Crazy Train

Elvis Presley: The Girl of My Best Friend

Iron Maiden: The Number of the Beast

George Harrison: My Sweet Lord

Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall

Thin Lizzy: Black Rose

Queen: Radio Gaga

(Rahul Kumar is a passionate rock fan and a research scholar in African Studies, University of Delhi)

[Readers may contribute to MyFive at myfivecolumn@gmail.com. Submissions must have a full address and telephone number. Publication is at the discretion of Weekend Metroplus.]

My Five is a personal list of the five greatest tracks in popular music

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail