My daughter called from college in Chicago the other day (after texting me earlier the prior evening) in the middle of a heated debate with friends about the greatest rock n roll song ever. Her friends were converging on Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen) but she wasn’t so sure and wanted other suggestions. Some of her picks for discussion were Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin) and Free Bird (Lynard Skynard). We talked about some Beatles songs and U2 songs (Sunday Bloody Sunday was one I mentioned as well as With or Without You) but couldn’t identify one in common. I suggested Let It Be and Long and Winding Road but while those are some of my favorites, they don’t necessarily work as strict rock n roll. So I posed the question as a Face Book “status.” Here are some of the suggestions and comments (names not given to protect the innocent) then I will tell you what I think.

-“NO on Bohemian Rhapsody!”

-Like a Rolling Stone (Dylan)

-(I can’t get no) Satisfaction (Stones)…”Bohemian Rhapsody too cerebral”

-Light my Fire (Doors), Layla (Clapton and Derek and the Dominoes), Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin), Gloria, Brown Sugar, Rosalita (Springsteen)

-Louie Louie (but that’s my brother being funny)

-Loving Cup (Stones), Not Fade Away (several artists), Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pink Floyd), It’s all over now, Baby Blue (Dylan), and In Memory of Elizabeth Reed (Allmann Brothers)

There are some great ideas in here! I was especially glad to see Elizabeth Reed and Pink Floyd (thank you, you know who!) in some capacity get in there. But around 1984 or so, I was coming home from a wedding with a bunch of friends who were single (and would, like me, remain so for several more years) and it was one of those three day weekends and they were doing the top 1000 or something crazy on the radio. Anyway, we were crawling into a diner at five in the morning wasted and the top two of all time were played, Born to Run (I was living in New York City at the time and the Jersey vote had to be overwhelming!) and Stairway to Heaven came in first. That probably qualifies as cerebral too. I wrote a poem about this night by the way, still one of my favorites. And of course all of these selections (what is my daughter’s excuse and her friends’?) are biased by the ages of the people who would even be responding to my FB Status. I was never a great fan of Grateful Dead but “Truckin” probably should be in there, and undoubtedly there has to be a Who song or two. While I would put Quadrophenia and Tommy in my list of all time great albums (along with Born to Run, Abbey Road, Joshua Tree, Bittersweet Symphony/Verve, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall/Pink Floyd, and Ocean Rain/Echo and the Bunnymen), I’m not sure there’s a best song of all time. R.E.M. probably has one or two that might qualify. Mercifully, no one mentioned Do You Feel Like I Do/Frampton or some others that I would classify as one-hit wonders. There undoubtedly had to be some songs from the 1950s (Elvis after all is still alive) and early 1960s….

BUT I digress. If you combine all the qualities – noise, dance-ability, movement, love (good rock n roll is about love, protest, or having fun), and cerebral, out of this world instrumental work (the keyboard and slide guitar work in this piece are extraordinary, can you see where I am going now?), unique sound no one has ever duplicated (or I would argue can duplicate, and that is why few bands ever, ever cover this song), memorability, cool lyrics, etc, the greatest rock n roll song of all time has to be Layla, Derek and the Dominoes. The winner!

Continue the conversation. It’s all pointless anyway! What are your picks?