Rank the Beatles

Rolling Stone came out with a special issue listing the Top 100 Greatest Beatles Songs. After considering the matter for fifteen minutes, I produced my own Top Twenty. Let’s compare:

Rolling Stone Top Twenty
1) A Day in the Life 2) I want to Hold Your Hand (yikes) 3) Strawberry Fields Forever 4) Yesterday 5) In My Life 6) Something 7) Hey Jude 8) Let it Be 9) Come Together 10) While My Guitar Gently Weeps 11) A Hard Day’s Night 12) Norwegian Wood 13) Revolution 14) She Loves You 15) Help 16) I Saw Her Standing There 17) Ticket to Ride 18) Tomorrow Never Knows 19) Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds 20) Please Please Me

My Top Twenty

1. A Day in the Life
2. Hey Jude
3. Come Together…hair down below his knees, hold you in his arm chair you can feel his disease, or as Dylan put it: see the primitive wallflower freeze, where the jelly face women all sneeze, and the one with the moustache saying jeez I can’t find my knees…come together right now over me…shoot
4. Tomorrow Never Knows…Close your eyes, relax and float downstream
5. Help… powerful verses, so powerful they needed to be repeated in harmony. If Subterranean Homesick Blues is the first rap song, Help is the debut of punk
6. Rocky Racoon…Beatles Americana (this didn’t make the RS top 100)
7. Revolution (slow version)…shoe be doo wop bob…nice and easy, everybody sing: Don’t you know that you can count me out (in).
8. Strawberry Fields Forever…Nothing to get hung about... the double fade away ending…sublime…I buried strawberries
9. Happiness is a Warm Gun…She’s not a girl who misses much
10. Ticket to Ride…tasty guitar riff and these lads can sing!
11. Yesterday…You can outplay this song, but you can’t contain it
12. I Dig A Pony…I listened to this every day when I was six – weird song for a weird kid
13. I Am the Walrus…I like animal songs
14. You Got to Hide Your Love Away…Dylanesque…I can see them laugh at me
15. All You Need is Love…first Beatles tune to catch my ear, it’s easy
16. Nowhere Man …Isn’t he a bit like you and me
17. She’s a Woman …I know that she’s no peasant and she won’t be bringing me any presents
18. You Never Give Me Your Money…Oh that magic feeling…all good children go to heaven
19. For You Blue…My favorite George thang, because your sweet and lovely, I love you…The Beatles filled the world with silly love songs
20. Yer Blues…Sizzling guitar…Feel so suicidal just like Dylan’s Mr. Jones…