IT'S A SIMPLE QUESTION...OR IS IT?

While feeding the kiddo yesterday I had the XM 80's station pulled up on our DirecTV. Steve Perry's "Oh Sherrie" came on and I made the comment at what a distinctive opening the song had. By opening, I meant from the first note through the first line of the first verse. Sheer synthesizer brilliance with a rare kill of the music leading directly into his acapella vocals. This immediately led to a conversation about what the best musical intro of all-time is.

Folks, it's definitely not a clear-cut answer. I pulled up my iTunes playlist of the top 500 songs ever as determined by Rolling Stone and quickly scrolled through the classics. No fewer than 169 struck me as fairly remarkable. Clearly this list need to be cut down. A second run-through of that smaller selection yielded 52 potentials.

It's not a comprehensive list, because I only worked off that Rolling Stone list. How could it be, when there was no Van Halen included in my list of finalists? "Running With The Devil," "You Really Got Me," "Ain't Talkin' About Love," "Dreams," "Right Now," "Jump," "Panama," "I'll Wait"...there might be no group better at grabbing you by the throat and pulling you in right off the bat.

No Def Leppard either. Consider the intros on these hits: "Bringin' On The Heartache," "Pour Some Sugar On Me," "Hysteria," "Photograph."

But if we're looking at the best intros to the best songs, how do you decide from a list that includes:

Satisfaction...Johnny B. Goode...Smells Like Teen Spirit...London Calling...Purple Haze...Born To Run...Layla...Stairway To Heaven...Gimmie Shelter...All Along The Watchtower...Hotel California...When Doves Cry...Superstition...Whole Lotta Love...I Heard It Through The Grapevine...Every Breath You Take...Brown Eyed Girl...I Want You Back...Won't Get Fooled Again...While My Guitar Gently Weeps...Kashmir...Foxey Lady...Let's Get It On...Dream On...Back In Black...Sweet Child O' Mine...Good Times...Sunday Bloody Sunday...Walk This Way...One Way Or Another...Iron Man...Heartbreaker...We Will Rock You...Spirit In The Sky...Beat It...Baba O'Reilly...Pride (In The Name Of Love)...Bitter Sweet Symphony...Ohio...Roxanne...(Don't Fear) The Reaper...Sweet Home Alabama...Sweet Emotion...The Boys Of Summer...Nuthin' But A 'G' Thang...Piano Man...Smoke On The Water...Paradise City...Welcome To The Jungle...Eighteen...I Love Rock 'N' Roll...How Soon Is Now?

Can't be done, folks. If I had to only pick a half-dozen for myself, it would probably have to be London Calling, Born To Run, Layla, Superstition, Pride (In The Name Of Love), and Paradise City (no particular order).

AS IF I NEEDED SOMETHING TO CHEW UP MY SPARE TIME

Came across this little blurb a few weeks back on Yahoo...Sports Illustrated was going to start a website with access to every single article that has ever appeared in 54 years of the magazine's existance.

Seriously, chew on that for a moment. The greatest sports writing of the past half century, available in just a few short keystrokes. Not everything is up yet, but they're well on their way

For the hardcore IU fan, you can read about the championship of 1987. Or the article about Bob Knight that soured him on Curry Kirkpatrick.

How about the greatest literary April Fool's Joke in history?
Want to scroll back though the moments that earned Muhammad Ali the title of The Greatest? You wouldn't go wrong reading about the Thrilla in Manilla, the Rumble in the Jungle, The Fight, and the one with the Phantom Punch.
Sometimes they were really wrong.

Sometimes they did a pretty good job jumping on the bandwagon.

Secretariat has been mentioned in 469 articles over the years. Compare that to Larry Bird's 274, 136 for Magic Johnson, and Joe Montana with 177. Hey, none of them performed quite like Big Red did at the Belmont in '73.

And the covers are great, too. Back during college, I probably had something close to 300 of them wallpapering my dorm rooms. Really wish I'd held onto them in a folder, or at least had a picture that I could have attached here. Classy look, I tell you...