'The Needle and the Spoon': Skynyrd's Anti-Heroin Song Saw Disaster

“The Needle and the Spoon” is a thundering wake-up call of a song – pounding away at the senses with a heavy, ominous guitar riff – all rushing on toward inevitable doom in just under four seemingly compressed minutes.

Like many of Skynyrd’s greatest, “The Needle” is deeply personal, torn and frayed with the kind of raw emotion that can only be realized if you’re living it. You can feel the situation coming unglued as frontman Ronnie Van Zant scrambled to contain the damage heroin and a smorgasbord of other “illicits” were wreaking on the seven-man band (himself included) by the early-’70s.

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ONE OF DYLAN'S MOST POWERFUL SONGS
Ain't it just like the night?
Bob Dylan
Written by Bob Dylan

“Visions Of Johanna” is fraught with images of the drifting, unpredictable muse of the heavens, beginning with one of the most powerful lines in rock music:

The ghost of electricity
Howls in the bones of her face…

Dylan’s lyrical work – always spinning along like its own synoptic gospel, telling the same story in the same order with different words – reaches a zenith in “Johanna.”

Dylan dishes two types of muses in the song. One is earthbound, available and sexual. The other is ethereal, capricious and inspirational on a different plane. The latter is the Madonna and/or the Mona Lisa and the Johanna of “Visions Of Johanna.”

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Songs That Shape Rock-n-Roll

DNA Source Songs™ — A deep dive into the gritty, boundary-busting, 800-pound sound spanning Elvis to The Beatles from Neil Young to Nirvana from Led Zeppelin to Jack White and all their artistic, fire-breathing brothers and sisters in arms. These are the elite songs that make Rock-N-Roll the biggest, baddest musical genre on earth.

Mapping The DNA of Rock-N-Roll

SongMango identifies, profiles, analyzes and celebrates the greatest, most influential Rock-N-Roll songs of all time, both past and present. SongMango captures and showcases the elite group of songs that represents the source DNA of Rock-N-Roll – those seminal, bomber songs that embody, enrich and sustain the edgy, high-octane monster musical genre of bands from Cream to The Grateful Dead from Nirvana to Alabama Shakes from Springsteen to Trigger Hippy.

Through its unique “Rock-N-Roll DNA Mapping Project” – an extensive work in progress – SongMango traces and maps out (ultimately, in 3-D double-helix fashion) the songs that have shaped, and continue to shape, the most unpredictable, most raucous musical genre on the planet. The SongMango DNA Map will serve up a detailed, song-by-song visual accounting of the evolution of Rock-N-Roll, where it came from and where it’s going, as well as where its genetic strengths and weaknesses originate.