This blog’s predecessor – 5 Perfect Songs – appeared on Pencil Storm 11/16/2024

Ricki C.’s Perfect Songs definition; a tune in which I wouldn’t change one word of the lyric or one second of the music or arrangement.  There’s not very many of those in my musical universe, here’s numbers 6 through 10 off the top of my head……

THE ROLLING STONES / “BROWN SUGAR” / released 1971

THE IAN HUNTER BAND (featuring MICK RONSON) / “Once Bitten Twice Shy” / first released 1975

As with the previous blog, some live material will be presented; this version is from Rockpalast 1980, with the opening “allo, allo, allo, allo” rendered in German. This tune is - quite simply, in my humble opinion - the greatest set-starter EVER in the history of rock & roll music. 

TOM RUSH / “NO REGRETS” / released 1968

This song came out in 1968, the same year I joined my first rock & roll band and the same year I first kissed a girl.  And if you think those two actions – joining a band and kissing a girl – were not DIRECTLY related, you’d better think again, mofumbo, they were INTEGRAL.   (The first kiss in question was with a pretty girl named Joyce, on her doorstep, after a Canned Heat and Blood, Sweat & Tears double-bill at Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio.  The kiss was in a suburb called Grove City, and I remember every moment/detail of it today - 56 years later - as if it was yesterday.  Such are first kisses.)  (Or they should be, at least.)

But I digress…..did “No Regrets” become my go-to “getting my heart broken” soundtrack tune from that day forward until 1977 when I first heard Elliott Murphy’s “Rock Ballad”?  You bet it was.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & THE E STREET BAND / “INCIDENT ON 57TH STREET / first released 1973

I’ve read NOVELS that don’t impart as much feeling, content, heartbreak, longing & resolution as this song delivers in 7:44.

THE WHO / “WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN” / first released 1971

Quite simply, the Greatest Rock & Roll Song Ever. It’s sad, but I have a really hard time now listening to The Who, after what I perceive as all Pete Townshend’s “sins against rock & roll.” The endless money-grubbing “farewell tours”; his apparent lack of ANY kind of sense of humor after about 1976; truthfully, the fact he continued The Who after the death of Keith Moon. (Even Led Zeppelin had the good sense and decorum to break up the band after John Bonham died. Moon and Bonham were absolutely VITAL to those bands, not just drummers.)

Am I saying I kinda wish Pete Townshend HAD died before he got old? I guess I am, though I fully acknowledge how harsh that is.

Ricki C. is 72 years old. The first perfect rock & roll song he ever heard was Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” when he was five years old, riding in his sainted Italian father’s Oldsmobile. He figures the last perfect rock & roll song he ever hears will be by either Elliott Murphy or Ian Hunter, sometime in the future.

But he’s perfectly open to a newcomer.