removing music from iPhone 3G

I always manually manage my music on the iPhone & iPods, because I have different things on the different players........
When removing music from the iPhone, it appears to work as the iPods do..you must go under MUSIC and delete from there.... simply deleting a PLAYLIST name, only does that, delete the PLAYLIST name from the list.....doesnt remove the music..... This is easy enough if you have an album , or one specific artist per playlist , , however, it gets messy when you have a Playlist with multiple artists from multiple albums....you have to go through the music list and pick out the songs to delete.....and if you have 100 songs on a playlist , , takes a lot of time.....
Am I missing an easier way to do this?? Suggestions appreciated.......
thanks.
Dell Inspiron Windows XP iPhone / 5G 60GB Video iPod / iPod Shuffle