The bands gaining ground include the E Street Band, Doors, Replacements, Ramones, and Beach Boys. New entries incude The Eagles, REM, and Sonic Youth.

My put-down in the original post has rallied the Dead supporters -- they are trying to move the Jerrys past the Brothers. Which reminds me of a most excellent rock and roll joke:

What did one Dead Head say to the other Dead Head when the drugs ran out? "This music sucks!"

Here's the latest ranking.

Allmans
Dead
E Street Band
Doors
Replacements
Beach Boys
Ramones
Aerosmith
The Band
ZZ Top
Metallica
Velvet Underground
Nirvana
Phish
REM
Guns N' Roses
Pearl Jam
Eagles
Black Crows
Creedence
CSN&Y
Foo Fighters
Fugazi
Jefferson Airplane
Little Feat
NRBQ
Rush
Stooges
Talking Heads
Tom Petty and Heartbreakers
White Stripes
Wilco
Sonic Youth
REM
Crazy Horse (Neil Young)
Clutch
Chili Peppers 

Quickly: Give me your vote for the greatest American rock and roll band.

Content: A few years ago I went to an Aerosmith concert with two of my sons and some of my childhood friends. En-route, we argued about who was the greatest American rock and roll band.

There's rough consensus that the Brits dominate the overall list (The Who, Beatles, Stones, Zep, Cream, et. al.).But who would be at the top of the American list? 

We had two rules: 1) You can't choose an individual, so that eliminates Dylan, Elvis, and arguably Jimi, and Bruce. 2) We tolerated a smattering of Canadians, so that keeps The Band and Crazy Horse in the running.

At Davos the big question was: "When are we going to get out of this economic mess?" So I decided to take an informal poll of attendees. The question I asked was: "When will world GDP start to increase again?" Strangely, the early poll results were quite negative -- the average was hovering in the mid-2011 range. But as the World Economic Forum wore on, there was creeping optimism -- I started to get more 2010s (and an occasional 2009) than 2011s. My sample cut across a wide swath, from CEOs to journalists to academics to political leaders -- 55 votes in total.

According to my unscientific Davos poll, world GDP will turn and begin to grow again in April of 2010.

Depressing? Not necessarily. Davos rarely gets it right. Remember, this was the group that was highly bullish only 12 short months ago.

I'll be attending the World Economic Forum in Davos next week -- look for posts here as I gather up blasts of insight from the gathering.

I'm running a session on January 29th at Davos that will analyze how social computing will transform corporations and markets. Discussion leaders will be: Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Robert Scoble of Fast Company TV, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital (late of Facebook), and others.

We're going to be working to answer the questions listed below.

If you want to understand the financial meltdown, read Niall Ferguson's article in Vanity Fair: "Wall Street Lays Another Egg." It logically lays out the causation of the disaster, complete with historical backdrop.

If you're busy, here's my instant summary:

Factor One: Real estate

The belief, going back to Roosevelt, and most recently promulgated by G.W. Bush, that all citizens should own a home.

Factor Two: Converting mortgages into securities

Wall Street bundled mortgages into securities, supposedly attenuating risk, but actually making it hard to ultimately assess the value of the loans. 

Factor Three: Subprime mortgages

The securitization of mortgages theoretically made it possible to take on riskier loans (subprime mortgages), as long as they were bundled with better risk loans. This strategy worked as long as real estate prices kept rising and interest rates remained low.