Back in the mid 80's I lived in Arkansas and the ONLY real rock n roll station started about this time of year hyping their big New Years Eve TOP 100 SONG OF ALL TIME!!!!!
They would play several song and then come on and say something like 1 or 2 of those will be in the TOP 100!!!!!! You gotta listen all day and all night NEW YEARS EVE!
They played the whole thing up BIG and everyone was talking about it. We even had a pool going at the shop, Dollar a song, for the number one song OF ALL TIME!!!!!!!!
The pot got up to several hundred dollars by the time New Years rolled around and everyone was glued to the radio to hear the final countdown.
The top ten included things like Hotel California and Layla, Sitting on the Dock of the Bay and When the Levee Breaks. Our pool had several votes for Freebird and Stairway to Heaven as the number one song.
The countdown got to 3 and it was Freebird......
The number 2 finally played and it was Stairway.....
We were all like WTF?!?!?!?!? What could have made number 1?
Everything that was good had already placed farther down the list.
Then they announced...
THE NEXT SONG IS AND ALWAYS WILL BE THE NUMBER ONE ROCK AND ROLL SONG OF ALL TIME!!!!!!!!! ALL TIME ALL TIME ALL TIME ECHO ECHO echo.....
Then
Hey Jude started to play on the radio.
We were shocked at first then we decided that it was a hoax since the DJ's on there loved to pull stupid stunts so the HAD to be faking this and they would play the REAL song after this....
They were not joking..... they had decided the Hey Jude was terrific.
They were nearly boycotted off the air. I quit listening and switched to country because of their dumb asses.
Hey Jude the best? Not by a long shot, a very long shot.
It doesn't even deserve to be in the top 100. While My Guitar Gently Weeps was down around 25 and the highest rated Beatles song EXCEPT for HJ.