MOG

1. The Bonzo Dog Band, "The Intro and the Outro." I suppose it would be more accurate to call them "The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band," for that was their name at the time. Whatever. This might be an odd choice to kick off the Summer of Love Random Ten, but was suitably bizarre, and is still a favorite of mine.

2. Toussaint McCall, "Nothing Takes the Place of You." One-hit wonders don't get any better than this. McCall deserved more. Video courtesy of thunderbird1958.

3. Big Brother and the Holding Company, "All Is Loneliness." Big Brother existed before Janis. They were a lot better with Janis, of course, and they were always her best band. Their first album was a studio quickie that was dismissed at the time for its inability to capture the live Janis experience. But there are some good songs here, and very little Janis caricature. The video/audio is an excerpt of Moondog, who wrote this one.

4. Jackie Wilson, "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher)." Wilson was one of the great live performers, and it's disappointing that I wasn't able to find a more representative video so show that. This was his last song to hit the pop Top 10.

5. Aretha Franklin, "Respect." The greatest woman in rock and roll history, singing her greatest song. You can't write a history of popular music without including this one.

6. Moby Grape, "8:05." One of the loveliest ballads you'll ever hear. Moby Grape's first album is now considered a classic, but on its release, it was buried by the record company's over-promotion (they released five singles simultaneously). It wasn't the flop history makes it out to be, but neither was it the smash some felt it deserved. The video is from the underrated Mike Douglas show ... Mike calls them "The Moby Grapes," but he has them on the show, which is what matters. They open with "Omaha" before going into "8:05."

7. Etta James, "I'd Rather Go Blind." Another fine r&b artist singing her greatest song.

8. Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness." Shuffle play doesn't know that I posted a video of Otis singing this one just a few days ago on my blog, so it pops up again. I'll add a different video, but the effect is the same: the greatest soulman with one of his greatest songs (there are a lot of "greatests" today).

9. Jefferson Airplane, "Embryonic Journey." Summer of Love, one of the most important San Francisco bands ... must be a psychedelic wonder track! Nope, it's Jorma Kaukonen's timeless and lovely acoustic guitar masterpiece. And he wrote his own masterpiece (this is no white summer).

10. Beatles, "All You Need Is Love." OK, I cheated a bit. Shuffle play had this one earlier in the list, but it was too perfect a closer, so I moved it. The Summer of Love is generally used to refer specifically to San Francisco, but there is no Summer of Love without the Beatles, as all the hippies in The City knew. On June 25, 1967, various countries participated in "One World," the world's first live international satellite television show. On this show, which aired as the Summer of Love was beginning, the Beatles performed "All You Need Is Love" for the first time. The song was commissioned for the telecast, and the performance was seen by 350-400 million people worldwide. At the time, this seemed like the beginning of a new era ... in retrospect, it could just as easily be seen as the beginning of the end. The video is apparently colorized ... I don't remember that it was in black-and-white originally, but I'm not sure we had a color TV at the time, so what would I know.