Song Number 47

Introduced by (a young) Dave Alexander

Song number 47 comes with not one, but two stories from our Riverside years.

First, there was the talent show performance that teachers and administrators tried to stop by pulling plugs, only to have students plug them back in. Add some prematurely launched pyrotechnics and a final shutdown of power to the stage, and you have what Frank has unofficially named the Riverside Riot Song.

But this month’s introduction reaches back even farther.

During our freshman year at John R. Williams, some classmates made a silent film featuring a series of skits. In one of them, contraband bananas were being dealt throughout the school by none other than Dave Alexander.

That old footage still exists, and with a little help from artificial intelligence, freshman Dave has returned to introduce song number 47 in the Riverside Class of 1980 Top 50 Countdown.

Watch the next entry in our Top 50 Countdown below.

Welcome to the August 2026 edition of the Riverside Class of 1980 Top 50 Countdown of songs from our years in High School.

This one arrives with one of those guitar riffs that needs only a few seconds to identify itself. Slow, heavy, and almost impossibly cool. 

The beat settles into a groove that sounded especially good rolling down Route 84, heading through Concord, or coming out of somebody’s car speakers in the Riverside parking lot.

Slowhand delivers it with barely raised eyebrows, but the song is not the celebration some people thought it was. Written by J.J. Cale, the lyrics are laced with warning and consequences.

That distinction, however, was apparently lost on the Riverside administration. 

Crystal Rain wanted to play this song in the Riverside talent show. They were told no. That day the band was announced, stepped onstage, and immediately started playing it anyway.

Teachers and administrators started pulling plugs. Those of us on the stage crew started plugging them back in. 

Then the pyrotechnics went off early so they would go off at all.

Riverside auditorium briefly became the least organized rock venue in Northeast Ohio. 

This continued until they finally killed the power to the entire stage and brought the show to a rather abrupt conclusion.

Rebellious, hypnotic, and built around one of the most recognizable guitar riffs of our high-school years, this song could fill an arena, a car cruising through Grand River, or one suddenly powerless Riverside auditorium.

But that is only half of what makes this month’s introduction special.

Many of you may not know this, and those that do may not even know the footage still exists, but during our freshman year at John R Williams, we made a silent-film out of a series of skits.

One of them imagined a serious crime wave sweeping through the school. The dangerous substance being dealt in the hallways and bathrooms was not a white powdery substance.

It was bananas.

And JRW’s most notorious banana dealer was none other than Dave Alexander, one of the musicians involved in our talent-show uprising a year later. Troublemaker.

So to introduce song number 47 in the Riverside Class of 1980 Top 50 Countdown, we’re using AI to travel back to ninth grade, when bananas were contraband, Dave was the man to see, and Riverside apparently had a much stranger film department than most of us remembered.