Ten killer deep cuts that turn fifty this year

Is there some argument you find yourself constantly having with friends, family, or even total strangers? The other day, I saw an online list of the “most dominant” athletes in any sport. It had the usual suspects – MJ, Tiger, Gretzky. But it omitted both Edwin Moses and Aleksandr Karelin. To me, that invalidates the list. You can look them up if you want, but trust me, both should be in your top ten. This is probably the obscure argument I have had more than any other in my life.

But a close second would be what is and what isn’t a deep cut.

See, when I was growing up, we didn’t use the term. There were hits – the songs you could hear ad infinitum on AM radio – and then there was everything else. An album just needed to have one non-hit song that you kind of liked to qualify as good.

50 years later these deep cuts are still brilliant

But OMG, the arguments I have had in the last decade with anonymous online connoisseurs about what makes a song a “deep cut” can get my blood pressure up just by thinking about it. Fans will tell me “They have played that song in every live show since 1971 – except for that infamous ’87 Winnipeg concert when the water pipes burst and they had to stop early. It IS NOT a deep cut!”

So I gave up subjective definitions of deep cuts because, TBH, I have not been to every live show any band has played since 1971. I have never even been to Winnipeg. But what I can do is look up what songs a given band officially released as singles, and I can peg my own “deep cut” definition to it. If the band didn’t release it as a single, I’m calling it a deep cut.

It’s not a perfect formula, I grant you. Sometimes, songs that are not singles gain a great deal of popularity. Billy Joel released five singles from his 1977 breakout album The Stranger. That’s more than half the album. Yet neither “Vienna” nor “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” were among those single releases. Those went on to become two of his most beloved songs. Are they deep cuts? Of course not, though under a strict interpretation of my formula they would be.

I don’t think I have any egregious examples like that on the list that follows. These are ten stone-cold bangers – blues numbers so deep that you’ll dream of Robert Johnson when you close your eyes, and rockers righteous enough to make your eardrums plead for mercy and for more. They all came out fifty years ago, and they show no sign of midlife crisis. In fact, listening to them will make you ten years younger, and twenty years wiser.

They each came from an album that had one or more bigger hits. They each were worthy of multiple listens back in 1974, and they all deserve at least one more listen today. Ten essential deep cuts that turn fifty this year. But if you don’t like the “deep cuts” designation, just call them ten awesome songs that are just as good today as they were fifty years ago.