The Top 50 Songs To Get High To

We'd bet Barry O. bumped some of these back in the day...

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As you might imagine, combing back numbers of my Listen to This While High column and my own vast library for a reasonable stab at the Fifty Stoniest Songs Ever is a labor and hashish intensive experience. Preliminary fossickings unearthed these half-hundred favorites, many of which may seem unfamiliarly funky if not downright perverse. At long last, here they are: The Top 50 Songs to Get High To.

50. "Pagan Baby," Creedence Clearwater Revival
The opening track off 1970's Pendulum, this is a full-on metallic freakout that will make the listener wish (s)he were high as Hamen's hairpiece.

49. "Shadrach," Beastie Boys
Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. II proved men in their late 40s can only party this hard in Beastie Boys albums, Thorne Smith novels, and (very occasionally) real life. The dankest and best of their joints can still be had in Paul's Boutique, with this Biblically themed yarn kicking the hardest.

48. "We Will Fall," The Stooges
Lester Bangs claimed all kinds of Romilar-inspired virtues for "TV Eye" and "L.A. Blues," but this ferocious dirge from their 1969 debut is Iggy's hands-down MJ champ, if for no better reason than the way it drones in the manner of someone trying to chant through solid brick.

47. "One Born Every Minute (Doc's Theme)," Big Chief
From this early Sub Pop act's 1993 Mack Avenue Skullgame, this is the spliffilated highlight of a brutally sophisticated 1970s soundtrack-funk pastiche still so radically advanced that to find a copy at Amoeba feels like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel.

46. "Hollow Futures," Gary War
Just when you thought the Space Age was over, here comes its repetition as medicated farce.

45. "Raga Bhairav," Charanjit Singh
Off an early-1980s EMI-India album Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, this giddy, proggy dance track is credited by many as an accidental ancestor to house music.

44. "Nude Disintegrating Parachutist Woman," Budgie
1971 gonzo-ass proto metal out of a transatlantically obscure U.K. act known to almost no one outside the deep-metal subcult.

43. "Third Stone from the Sun," The Jimi Hendrix Experience
You can have "The Wind Cries Mary" and "All Along the Watchtower," but for stoned listening, nothing in canonical Hendrix beats this for sustained variation and interest.

42. "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)," The First Edition
Featuring Kenny Rogers, who sings such stuff as Dude Lebowski's dreams are made of.

41. "Fearless," Pink Floyd.
Off Meddle (1971), this is Roger Waters at his dreamiest and most elliptical. The football chant at the end never fails as a WTF?