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The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten Facts


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The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten #136

FOUR songs this week:

Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On) - Robert Plant & Alison Krauss (2007)

Ready For Love - Bad Company (1974)

Angel In Blue - J. Geils Band (1982)

Montague Terrace (In Blue) - Scott Walker (1967)

If you have any info on any of the songs mentioned anywhere in this thread, please feel free to post your knowledge here. Submissions on songs will be collated and sent to the main site and you will receive credit for your contribution.

The Songfish thanks you.

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"Angel In Blue"

J. Geils Band

Written by Seth Justman. From their 1981 album "Freeze-Frame".

allmusic says:

majority of the hits by The J.Geils Band lingered in the '30's section of the Top 40, with "Angel In Blue" the only one to actually hit and stop at 40. EMI America single #8100 has a lower catalog # than "Freeze-Frame and "Centerfold", though it was popular in the summer of 1982 while the two aforementioned songs came earlier, reigning in the Top 5 during the winter prior. Arguably the smartest lyric in the J. Geils Band catalogue, this could be the subject matter from "Centerfold" all grown up. It's a song about a stripper, but you wouldn't know it if you didn't listen closely - the melody so strong the words went right over many fans' heads. Those other Boston bad boys, Aerosmith, went Top 3 just six years later with their own "Angel", hard rockers also going ultra-pop a la Alice Cooper in the 1970's. But the Geils band trumps all comers by bringing back Whitney's mom, Cissy Houston, along with Luther Vandross from the Monkey Island album and three other additional vocalists making for a touch of class over a drumbeat much like The Tubes "Don't Touch Me There". "We met in a bar/Out on Chesapeake Bay" is hardly the scenario one thinks of when finding themselves in an episode of Touched By An Angel, and the story is quite sad, that of a person who never had dreams come true because she never had any dreams! Writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine calls this tune

"terrific neo-doo wop." It is that and more, a folk/pop polished ballad different from any of their other nine Top 40 hits, four minutes and fifty-one seconds (on the album) of Peter Wolf reading Seth Justman's post- "Centerfold" wet dream.

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"Ready For Love"

Bad Company

Written by Mick Ralphs. Released as a track of their eponymous album "Bad Company".

It was also a single and it was recorded first by Mott The Hoople while Mick Ralph played with them.

Recorded with Ronnie Lane's Mobile Studio, at Headley Grangea mansion in November 1973.

Mick Ralphs (ex-Mott The Hopple) plays guitar and keyboards; Boz Burrell (ex-King Crimson) bass; Paul Rodgers on guitar, piano, accordion, vocals

and Simon Kirke on drums (both former Free)

...and that´s all I can tell you.

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  • 2 weeks later...

:D thanks mindcrime & edna.

here's the late update for TT #137:

The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten 137

THREE big songs missing this week:

Cruisin' - Smokey Robinson (1979)

Amphetamine Annie - Canned Heat (1968)

Plateau - Nirvana (1994)

If you have any info on any of the songs mentioned anywhere in this thread, please feel free to post your knowledge here. Submissions on songs will be collated and sent to the main site and you will receive credit for your contribution.

The Songfish thanks you.

Edited by Guest
The Unforgiven is already here, yay!
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"Cruisin"

Smokey Robinson

Written by Smokey Robinson and Marvin Tarplin.

It was released a single in 1979, the second from his LP "Where There´s Smoke..." . Performed by him solo without The Miracles and one of his biggest hits. It reached #4 on the pop and R&B charts.

From allmusic:

Who can blame Motown legend Smokey Robinson for going disco? After all, during the late '70s, the genre ruled the upper regions of both the pop and R&B charts. No doubt the singer/songwriter/producer was feeling the pressure to have a hit that capitalized on the trend. Robinson had co-written several hits as a member of the Miracles not only for that group but other Motown acts as well, including Mary Wells and the Temptations ( "My Girl," "My Baby," "Since I Lost My Baby," and "Get Ready"). Robinson decided to redo the latter for his 1979 Warm Thoughts album. Chosen as the first single, "Get Ready" was for the most part passed over. Instead, radio stations began playing a sweet, swaying ballad called "Cruisin'," co-written by producer Robinson and his longtime collaborator/guitarist Marv Tarplin. The massive radio play as an album cut forced Motown to issued it as a single. One of Robinson's best sides ever, "Cruisin'" floated to up to number four on both the R&B and pop charts in fall 1979, pushing Warm Thoughts into the R&B Top Four and the pop Top 14.

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because that song is there under the name "Unforgiven" (without 'The')

...wikipedia and allmusic have it as "The Unforgiven"

does anyone know what version is correct? (I don't have that album, so I can't check) :P

Either is fine, it's usually listed as "Unforgiven, The"

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:D thanks mindcrime & edna.

here's the late update for TT #137:

The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten 137

Plateau - Nirvana (1994)

Actually the song is Plateau - Meatpuppets (1983)

The song Plateau became well-known when the Meat Puppets performed it with the Nirvana during their MTV Unplugged appearance in 1993.

The title of British rapper Plan B's debut album is Who Needs Actions When You Got Words, which was taken from a lyric in this song, and he sampled the Nirvana version on his 2007 mixtape Paint It Blacker.

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The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten #138

Just one song missing this week:

It's The Same Old Song - The Four Tops (1965)

If you have any info on any of the songs mentioned anywhere in this thread, please feel free to post your knowledge here. Submissions on songs will be collated and sent to the main site and you will receive credit for your contribution.

The Songfish thanks you.

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"It´s the Same Old Song"

The Four Tops

Written by Holland-Dozier-Holland. Released as a single in July 1965 and also a track of their second album. Recorded at Hitsville for Motown Records.

From Wiki:

Written and produced by Motown's main production team Holland-Dozier-Holland, the song is today one of The Tops' signature songs, and was notably created--from initial concept to commercial release--in exactly 24 hours.

After "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)" hit #1 in June of 1965, The Four Tops' former label, Columbia Records, wanting to cash in on the group's success, re-released the Tops' 1960 Columbia single "Ain't That Love". A perturbed Berry Gordy ordered that a new Four Tops single had to be released within a day's time.

At 3 o' clock that afternoon, the Holland brothers and Lamont Dozier penned "It's the Same Old Song"; Duke Fakir recalled: Lamont Dozier and I were both a little tipsy and he was changing the channels on the radio. He said, 'It sounds like the same old song.' And then he said, 'Wait a minute.' So he took 'I Can't Help Myself' and reversed it using the same chord changes. By 5 P.M., The Tops had recorded the song and mixing began.

The engineering team worked around the clock perfecting the single's mix and making hand-cut vinyl records so that Berry Gordy's sister Esther in the Artist Development department could critique them and select the best ones for single release. By 3 P.M. the next day, 1500 copies of "It's the Same Song" had been delivered to radio DJs across the country, and the song eventually made it to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. "It's the Same Old Song" is very similar in melody and chord progressions to "I Can't Help Myself", which in turn is even more similar in melody and chord progressions to "Where Did Our Love Go" by the Supremes, who also covered "It's The Same Old Song" in 1967.

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