10 Toad the Wet Sprocket – “P.S.”
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I am stockpiling hated bands. I once heard this dude in the grocery store, this dude I was working with, say he hated the song “Walk on the Ocean,” when it came on. Who the fu** would say this, who would fu** with Toad the Wet Sprocket? I mean this wasn’t even a guy who you’d get satisfaction out of fighting, or intimidating, he was just a loud mouth dork I had to work with. At the end of the day, this song, and the greatest hits entitled this, is about the best fu**ing ‘90s alternative rock you can get with your money, so if you get it for free, that should say something.
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9 Muddy Waters – “Louisiana Blues”
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Muddy Waters’ voice here howls at the moon, and at the moon in you, but the guitar gently weeps. Get it right.
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8 Journey – “Lights”
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Ordering mail and not getting it. It’s become a recurring theme in my life lately, whether it’s my black Panthers Cam Newton jersey, or two out of the three CDs I ordered in the last month, one of which was Journey’s greatest hits. I always sorta hated this band, for obvious reasons, like I thought “Don’t Stop Believin’” was their only song (as anyone listening to the radio would)… but their classic songs do about, from “Separate Ways” to “Open Arms,” to yeah maybe this song too, which happens to sonically replicate what it’s singin’ about pretty well.
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7 Dirty Pretty Things – “Gin & Milk”
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I’m going to modify this list for this track: this is the BASS GUITAR rottweiler right here. The guitar, that’s just punk shreds, some cheap whore in a dress, for if you still believe in such things, one way of the fu**ing other.
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6 The Stooges – “Penetration”
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It should be noted that I hate The Stooges, because I can still hear all the hipster fu**s at IU playing like speed quarters with this simplistic meathead slop playing in the background, and I especially hate this album Raw Power, because it sounds like for the most part it was recorded through a fu**ing leaf blower, but this song is less rhythm guitar and more good ol’ Midwestern meat and potatoes riffage, hence its legitimacy.
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5 Limp Bizkit – “The One”
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“We tried to do it without Wes (Borland),” I remember Fred Durst saying in this one interview, “and it just sounded like sh**.” So what, they just like didn’t know any of the equipment he’d played on on Significant Other? Hmm, but I digress. I think most of my friends were off the Bizkit train by the time of Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, but I was still living with delusions of man’s invincible power on planet Earth, so much so that I was willing to forgive lines like “I believe we could be / So happy and free inside a world of misery.”
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4 Allman Brothers Band – “Melissa”
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I actually don’t even like this song that much, I just put on here ‘cause the extent to which Beck ripped it off for the first song on Morning Phase is like scary. I think he even used Warren Haynes’ guitar.
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3 Grateful Dead – “Terrapin Station”
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But more importantly, please check out those videos of those little terrapins shreddin’ on like banjo and tambourine outside that lil’ shack on the youtube videos. Nine shades o’ nifty.
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2 Aerosmith – “Janie’s Got a Gun”
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Anyone not convinced of the genius of Joe Perry, like say the me in high school when I was too much of a Dandy Warhols-listening twat (I still love Dandy Warhols though), has apparently never heard the riff in “Sweet Emotion”… well all those ‘80s years of Steven Tyler being a junkie must have given him plenty of time to clean up his studio act. Plus, it reminds me of Not Another Teen Movie, and that’s never a bad thing.
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1 Pearl Jam – “No Way”
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If you’re looking for musical geniuses, you might ask the trolley to stop and steep in an extra full vista-gathering around the one and only Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam. I believe he wrote this song (he definitely wrote “Faithfull,” my favorite PJ track, the one right before this one on Yield), and yes that is him on rhythm guitar to Mike McCready’s lead, a sort of unsung innard of one of the most democratic bands of all time.