Welcome!

As the creator of the music database "The Top 5000 Songs of the Rock Era", and the mathematical formula that is responsible for the world's first "objective look" at the most popular songs of rock & roll, I want to welcome you to the blog.

From as long as I can remember, I have always been fascinated with music in all its many forms, but especially rock.  I learned to play a couple of instruments, was in band and choir in high school and toured the country as part of a select church singing group.  Through it all, I remained focused on popular music, which of course rock and roll dominated.  I came up with a system for ranking the Top 100 Artists of the Rock & Roll Era, and submitted it to a local radio station in Boise, Idaho (KFXD--580 AM).  The special was not only accepted and would run Thanksgiving weekend, 1976, but led to me getting hired as a disc jockey.

I eventually would serve in several capacities at KFXD and its sister FM station X-95, including Research Director, Sports Director, Promotions Director and Music Director over the next ten years.  In this time, I honed my research methods and skills for obtaining the public pulse concerning rock music:  its songs, its artists, its albums, etc.  In 1996, I began working on a mathematical formula that would, for the first time, accept input from a variety of different related factors concerning the popularity of individual songs and produce a ranking of those songs based on the factors and the strengths of each song.

Before, during and since my tenure at KFXD, I have produced numerous song-ranking lists.  I put quotes around "objective look" because even mathematical formulas and statistics are influenced by the maker.  However, in looking at the ranking produced by the formula, I have to say that in my professional opinion, it is the most realistic ranking I have been able to come up with.  I don't agree with all of it, which should tell you that it isn't "my list".  Rather, I believe it paints a logical picture of what the top songs of the rock era are.  The formula considers, among other things, a song's chart strength on Billboard magazine, which graciously gave me permission to use its data, single and album sales, radio station airplay, and special awards and honors for the song and the artist who performed it.

In the months to come, I will assemble artist biographies, statistics about rock music, concert information, song, album and artist rankings and will convey the history of rock music in its various forms in various ways on this blog.  I will feature a "This Day in Music", which is always interesting, do feature articles on the different styles of music and the top artists, both of yesterday and today.  One value I believe I can add to the page is to use my experience to suggest some "unknown" and underrated songs that you may not be aware of.  We all know about the songs that we have heard thousands of times on the radio.  Some of my favorite songs are actually songs that the public is not aware of, either because a song wasn't promoted properly by the record company, got lost in a sea of great songs out at the time, or was merely overlooked.

So I hope you will bookmark this page and visit it often.  If you are a lover of rock music as I am, I hope you will enjoy it and find it a source of entertainment and information.