(FORTUNE Magazine) – "Me and My Uncle" by Dino Valente, from Dino Valente (Koch)

The Grateful Dead performed "Me and My Uncle" countless times, but it's a song that needs to be sung by a punk. That's what Dino Valente was when he recorded it in 1968. He may have written the smiley hippy sing-along "Get Together," but this is altogether different, an anthem of greed and violence. "Goddamn! He won't grow old," Valente sings about shooting a cowboy over a card game. He gives the line all the surprise, the petty triumph, and the drunken power of every dumb kid with a gun. John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas wrote "Me and My Uncle" but never recorded it until just before he died. It's the dark, nightmare side of "California Dreaming." --Gregory Curtis