Dave's Music Database Presents : The Top 100 Songs of the Rock Era 1954-1999

The Grammys. The Billboard charts. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone magazine. National Public Radio. The Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. Q Magazine. Spin. New Musical Express. MTV. VH1. ASCAP. BBC. They’ve all put their stamp on “definitive” lists of the best songs of all time.

They all got it wrong.

Well, not completely wrong, but they all got it a little wrong. All those lists come from some bias or viewpoint that led to inclusions and exclusions that inevitably prompt head scratching.

However, Dave’s Music Database has eliminated the dilemma. Lists from over 100 sources have been compiled into the ultimate cream-of-the-crop list which will draw criticism from none and praise from all.

Well, one can dream.

Dave was born in a one-room log cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky some time in the early 1940s. His family had no electricity or running water. As the ninth of 12 children, he spent most of his time chopping wood and playing with the family's jug band on the front porch. As a teen, he took a custodial job for Sun Records and was there when Elvis Presley first came in to record. By the 1960s, Dave had gone to New York to do backstage work for the Ed Sullivan Show. He was rigging lighting on the night the Beatles first performed. He also did a stint as a roadie with Led Zeppelin in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he was a gopher in the studios at Epic Records when Michael Jackson recorded Thriller. By the 1990s, he was getting coffee for directors on video shoots, most notably for Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Dave also has some swamp land in Florida which he would like to sell you. His less interesting, but accurate, life story is that of a lifelong suburbanite born in 1967 in Des Moines, Iowa, and raised primarily in Kansas City, MO. In his grade school years, he exhibited strong interests in listening to music and writing (not both together, mind you; he has no ability for that). In fact, not only can he not write music, but he can't sing or play an instrument. Who the heck told this guy he could scribe a tome about music? In his adult life, he has worked primarily in the child care field, authoring several books related to his work. To perpetuate his music hobby, he has collected music obsessively, spent hours doing library and Internet research on music, developed his own website, and maintained a blog. This is his first music-related book but based on the glut of unfinished writings on his computer's hard drive, it will certainly not be his last. Dave still lives in the Kansas City area with his wife and two children, for whom he is a stay-at-home dad. Needless to say, his kids have been exposed to A LOT of music. Dave's wife says that if one must be addicted to something, the choices could be worse. He hopes to be out of the rehab facility for the musically-obsessed before the publication of this book.