My Top 1000 Songs #386: Cuban Slide

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

I've always kinda taken the Pretenders for granted. I like their music just fine; if you're in the car and a Pretenders song comes on, you're always pretty glad. But I rarely pro-actively listen to their albums. They're sorta like Tom Petty that way for me, an unfailingly reliable act hard not to love but for unknown reasons not typically my go-to music. (Though I got much more into Petty a few years back, after watching the documentary and spending a lot more time digging into his back-catalog; I probably need to do that for Chrissie Hynde and crew as well.)

An exception, though, is "Cuban Slide," an absolute banger. It's got a rollicking Bo Diddley beat and some stellar attention-grabbing guitar from the late James Honeyman-Scott. And the way they roll from that Diddley rave-up into a jangly finger-picked bridge and back out again just floors me. It's absolutely deranged that the band relegated this to b-side status, cutting it from the original 1979 debut LP, but I guess that just makes it all the cooler.

Spine-tingling live performance, 1980: