Songs that have stood the test of time.

Little Wing!!

If I'm understanding you, such a song would combine great music with great lyrics that touch timeless, intergenerational themes?  Songs like:

"Yesterday" 

"Wind Beneath My Wings"

"Bridge Over Troubled Waters"

I rarely remember "Don't Worry Baby" Tom, and I can't figure out why. It was definitely the high point of their set when I saw The Beach Boys at The San Jose Civic in the Summer of '64, my first live concert. When Brian got to and sang the line "and she makes love to me" the girls in the audience went INSANE. The following summer I saw The Beatles at The Cow Palace, and the screaming was throughout the entire performance. The year after that everyone was sitting on the floor smoking jazz cigarettes. Things had changed that rapidly.

And The Beach Boys had been completely written off. That is, until "Good Vibrations" came on the radio. But "Don't Worry Baby"---real good song. I'm gonna listen to it right now! 

Ah, The Band (from me? :-). They had quite a few I could name, number one being "The Weight". Timeless elegance, the songs lyrics passed between The Band’s three lead singers. I defy anyone to name another band of which that can be said!

I began listening to and buying music before our current "Rock" music was the dominant music of the day---"Pop" music. This era really kicked into high gear with the appearance, out of nowhere, of The Beatles. Yes, there were Rock Bands before they arrived in the U.S. (I actually consider them a Pop Group not a Rock Band, but that’s a separate discussion). Paul Revere & The Raiders, etc. But Rock music didn’t dominate the airwaves and charts before The Beatles.

What made The Beatles so revolutionary was that they didn’t just perform their music, they wrote it as well. Actually, they came to that late; their debut album contains only about half self-written songs, the others being Rock ’n’ Roll and Pop songs that had been hits for earlier artists. And those songs were usually not written by their performer. Pre-Beatles, there were songwriters, there were singers, there were recording musicians, there were arrangers, there were orchestrators, and there were producers. Extremely rarely did any two of those intersect in one person. THAT is the era of the great Pop standard songwriters. You know the names, the songs recorded over and over again. The reason for that is that, being "only" a songwriter, one had to be a REALLY good one to make a living at it. The writers in the Brill Building in NYC sat in little cubicles, trying to come up with the next hit for The Drifters or Neil Sedaka, competing with the other Brill Building songwriters.

In the Rock era, the song itself is often not the most important ingredient. It may be the singers voice or the guitarist playing that listeners are focused on. A Rock band can be a really good one (as musicians and/or singers), sell lots of records, and draw large audiences, without necessarily having "good" songs. From our current era (the "Rock" one, from the early 60’s onward), there actually were some songs written the equal of the pre-Rock era songs. I nominate the following two, my favorite songs of all time:

---"What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted". An achingly beautiful song written by Motown’s William Weatherspoon, Paul Riser, and James Dean, and sung by Jimmy Ruffin. Motown’s legendary bassist James Jamerson plays a fantastic part, using inversion (playing not the root note of the chord) to great effect (James is Paul McCartney’s bass model). The great Joan Osborne performs a fantastic version of the song in the Motown documentary.

---"God Only Knows": I can not hear this song without crying. Written, orchestrated, and produced by one of the only two geniuses Rock ’n’ Roll has produced, Brian Wilson. If there has ever been a better song written, I haven’t heard it. The chords, their voicings, the movement of the bass through those chords, the melody, the harmonies, the counterpoint---all miles beyond what anyone else in "Rock" has ever done. Pure brilliance found on the Beach Boys Pet Sounds album.