My Top 1000 Songs #949: Ventura Highway

[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.]

Reaching deep into the Guilty Pleasures bin, and once again surprising myself with a helping of America. The opening track from 1972's Homecoming--but, c'mon, we're not fooling ourselves, we all know this song from 1975's America's Greatest Hits, the album every household seemed to own back in the 70s--is another song unabashedly indebted to CSNY. But the jangly acoustic guitar hook offers endless bounce, and the SoCal sunny harmonies are undeniable. It avoids the lyrical fumbles of some of their other work (well, not really--"alligator lizards in the air"? "the days surround your daylight there"?), an amiably pleasant Laurel Canyon souvenir that you want to mock for its post-hippie faux-Americana sincerity (a la Blue Jean Committee), yet it's all but impossible not to get suckered in and enjoy immensely.

Live 1975:

And decades later...