When people come up to me on the street and say, "Hey, Sugar-Tush, what's the Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band of all time?"--a question I'm asked at least twice daily--my answer depends on my mood and how I feel about British people. If I'm feeling charitably disposed toward our Limey progenitors and partners-at-war, I might say Slade or The Sweet or even Mott the Hoople. If I'm in a nationalistic mood, I'll toss out The Standells or Johnny Burnette's Rock 'n' Roll Trio. These days, I feel confident to announce that The Raspberries--and no one else--are indeed The Greatest Rock Band Ever. I've reached this conclusion for three reasons:

1) they rocked harder than almost anyone;

2) despite this, their songs were sweeter than a bowl of Cap'n Crunch;

3) they weren't British.

It's 2004, for cunt's sake, and "rock band" is synonymous with "nostalgia act." After several years of clinical research, it's undeniable that rock 'n' roll music was never really able to change anything besides people's haircuts. At base--and at its best--it is a mating soundtrack for human insects to hook up and reproduce. Great rock 'n' roll leads invariably to pregnancy, and I'd wager that a few hundred babies were birthed as a result of "Go All the Way," The Raspberries' first monster hit which roared from AM radios in 1972.

Sweet bleeding Jesus, those opening power chords--the massive rusty grinding gears of a dying industrial Midwestern town, the ugly flat Midwest exploding in boredom--and then comes the unmistakable gaybird trill of Eric Carmen, a giant lonely effeminate purple dinosaur roaming the countryside looking for a purple girl dinosaur to love. Above the sonic blast fluttered Carmen's almost-a-girl voice singing about GETTING INSIDE A GIRL'S VAGINA, which is what it meant to "Go All The Way" back in 1972. (Today, the song might simply be called "Fuck.")

HARD (the penis). SWEET (in most cases, the vagina). GOING ALL THE WAY. The ultimate song for the Urban Mating Soundtrack called rock 'n' roll.

HARD. With their massive layered production piling one Gigantor guitar over the next, there was an inherent LOUDNESS to The Raspberries. It was music played in all capital letters, thanks mainly to guitarist Wally Bryson (don't you hate the name "Wally"?), a vaguely Injun-looking Clevelander adept at jet-plane power chords. The 'berries bore the unmistakable lion's-roar of Midwestern power rock, from Nugent to Alice Cooper to the James Gang, and, yeah, even to the Stooges and MC5, although, let's be honest with ourselves, neither of the latter ever wrote a song as catchy and hard-driving as "School's Out" or "Cat Scratch Fever."

SWEET. But despite all the Sturm und Drang, there has never been a prettier love song than The Raspberries' "Let's Pretend." I have actually cried--MORE THAN ONCE--at this song, and I state this as a red-blooded heterosexual male and a card-carrying member of most heterosexual organizations. 99% of their lyrics are about love and romance (and the implied vaginal secretions), all purtied-up with sugar-dipped symphonic production awash in cavity-inducing harmonies.

The Raspberries released one album bearing a scratch 'n' sniff patch that smelled like raspberries. And despite the fact that they rose from the industrial muck of Cleveland--a city of horrid ghettos and fine corned-beef sandwiches, a town so polluted that the Cuyahoga River CAUGHT FIRE in 1969--The Raspberries were so shiny-clean, you could eat dinner off them. They inhabited a non-dysfunctional world where injustice and venereal disease and the Vietnam War didn't exist. There's an unflappable cheeriness smeared like raspberry jam