By Don Jacobson

Rolling Stone magazine. God love ’em. It’s kind of like Saturday Night Live – you keep expecting them to go away, but somehow they hang in there, putting out a certain brand of something that keeps drawing us back year after year no matter how much you think it’s nothing but a dirty habit. Despite all the, you know, meaninglessness of these “greatest” lists Rolling Stone seems to do about once a week, they continue to grab attention. It’s force of habit. They’re Rolling Stone. They do lists.
Well, so do we, dammit. Ours is called Playlist, with the big difference being our lists are rarely about the “greatest” of anything, and are usually just collections of random shit that seem to fit well together for whatever reason. But because the master of lists has spoken, we will honor the occasion with our own breakdown of Rolling Stone’s “40 Songs That Changed the World,” which is in honor of the venerable mag’s 40 years of Baby Boomer voice-giving.

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Posted on April 24, 2007

By Don Jacobson

Stop the presses! We find song lyrics that actually put Chicago in a good light. I guess if you stick with something long enough, you’ll see everything. Also, a violent song about a violent town that eerily predicted a violent act by its writer, all in this episode of Chicago In Song.

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Posted on April 17, 2007

By Don Jacobson

When you look at the carefully trimmed beard of Mark Lindsay on the cover of his 1970 solo album Arizona, you can just feel where it’s going: The photogenic facial hair, along with the turtleneck sweater, means it’ll be a trip to easy listening land, an effort to reinvent one of the choicest teen garage rock heartthrobs of the ’60s into a kind of tad-more-happenin’ Glen Campbell. And for a couple of songs, it works.

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Posted on April 8, 2007