Listen: Peter Tosh's Pro-Weed Classic 'Legalize It'

Anne Fishbein / Michael Ochs Archive / Getty

Click to listen to Peter Tosh's "Legalize It"

Is there a better day than 4/20 to revisit the title track of Peter Tosh's roots-reggae masterpiece Legalize It? The song, which was released as a 7-inch single for Record Store Day this past weekend, will also appear on a forthcoming deluxe Legacy Edition of the classic album. That set will include extensive liner notes, previously unreleased demos, alternate takes, outtakes and rare dub plate tracks. The expanded reissues of Legalize It and Tosh's second album, Equal Rights, will hit stores on June 21st, but you can pre-order both records from Amazon as well as stream "Legalize It" right now.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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