It’s impossible to state just how important the 1960s were as a decade. The era was a time of great upheaval, but it was also ten years full of beautiful music and art that transformed everyday life from black and white to technicolor. The songs collected here are some of the biggest hits of the ’60s and some of the more obscure songs from the decade that completely transformed the population as a whole. Listening back to these songs today it’s hard to believe that they’re more than 50 years old. Many of the tunes collected here remain as fresh as they were when they were first released. From Hendrix to The Velvet Underground, and Bob Dylan it’s clear just how many songs from the ’60s are still relevant in the 21st century. There are SO MANY great songs from the ’60s that it’s hard to really place them in a list but tune in, sit back, and kick out the jams!
The final track on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band isn’t just The Beatles at their finest, it’s John Lennon and Paul McCartney at their most collaborative. According to Lennon “A Day in the Life” is an excellent example of one writer setting down a song when it got too complicated and the other picking it up. He told Rolling Stone: The way we wrote a lot of the time: you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa. He was a bit shy about it because I think he thought it’s already a good song … So we were doing it in his room with the piano. He said ‘Should we do this?’ ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’
Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower” is the rare cover song that stands on its own and makes the listener forget the original. The song took about a month to record and hundreds of overdubs, with Hendrix reportedly stating, “‘I think I hear it a little bit differently” every time he wiped out a take.
Released in 1969, this iconic Zeppelin track got its start as a folk song performed by singer-songwriter Jake Holmes, but in the hands of the heaviest band in England, it was turned into a raw and unrelenting dirge about a man scorned.
From the moment that the opening guitar glides into your speakers, it’s clear that something is different about this Stones tune. A crystallization of how the 1960s mutated from a decade of peace and love into something darker in under five minutes, listeners can feel the raw hedonistic despair in every note of this song. In 1995, Jagger explained the song’s apocalyptic concept to Rolling Stone: Well, it’s a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. The thing about Vietnam was that it wasn’t like World War II, and it wasn’t like Korea, and it wasn’t like the Gulf War. It was a real nasty war, and people didn’t like it. People objected, and people didn’t want to fight it … That’s a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It’s apocalypse; the whole record’s like that.
Hearing it now, it’s hard to believe that in 1966 people were confused by “God Only Knows” and the rest of the gorgeous pop tunes on Pet Sounds. At the time the song was believed to be too square, and too weird for audiences. Time has really proven the doubters wrong. In 2008, Wilson briefly discussed the strange key modulations in the song: It’s not really in any one key. It’s a strange song. That’s just the way it was written. … It’s the only song I’ve ever written that’s not in a definite key, and I’ve written hundreds of songs.
“How does it feel?” This one question asked by Bob Dylan in 1965 sums up one of the most fascinating decades of the 20th century and still reverberates today. According to Dylan, when he initially wrote the song as a poem he had no idea that it had the potential to become a song, let alone a beloved folk anthem. He told the Saturday Evening Post: It was ten pages long. It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky. Revenge, that’s a better word. I had never thought of it as a song, until one day I was at the piano, and on the paper it was singing, ‘How does it feel?’ in a slow motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion following something.
Inspired by a road trip that Paul Simon took across the country in 1964 with his then-girlfriend, “America” examines what it means to be in the country both literally and figuratively. Out of all the songs that Simon and Garfunkel released during their time together this is one that shows the true power of Simon’s pen.
Otis Redding is an undeniable singer and soul performer, but the timbre in his voice from the moment he begins singing on this 1965 classic stirs something emotionally that goes unheard in pretty much every other song of the era. Recorded with a backing band that includes Isaac Hayes and Booker T. Jones, this is truly an unstoppable classic of the era.
From the moment of this song, the audience is in full-blown rapture. The sound of the drums, their unique rhythm, and the way they lead into the verse would be one of the greatest musical moments of the ’60s if it weren’t for the gob-smacking, Earth-shattering, heartbreaking chorus. The Ronettes may have had a troubled career, but in 1963 they recorded one of the most glorious pop songs of the 1960s. Weirdly enough, future stars Sonny and Cher sing backup on this iconic track. Cher explained: I was just hanging out with Son [Bono], and one night Darlene [Love] didn’t show up, and Philip looked at me and he was getting really cranky, y’know. Philip was not one to be kept waiting. And he said, ‘Sonny said you can sing?’ And so, as I was trying to qualify what I felt my…’expertise’ was, he said, ‘Look I just need noise – get out there!’ I started as noise, and that was ‘Be My Baby.’
Is there any other song that captures the listless feeling of floating through space in the same way as “Space Oddity?” Rushed to release in 1969 just ahead of the Moon landing, this song is Bowie swinging for the fences and attempting to create something lasting and different from the rest of his catalog up until that point. Bowie went on to become a musical icon in the 20th century, but in 1969 he was afraid that this song would make him a one-hit wonder. In 1983, Bowie noted that his one regret about “Space Oddity” is the fact that he didn’t have any other songs that matched its brilliance at the time: [“Space Oddity” was] a very good song that possibly I wrote a bit too early because I hadn’t [had] anything else substantial [to follow it] at the time.
Is there a more glorious moment in the 20th century than the snare hit in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” one of the most beautiful songs of the ’60s? Written about Brian Wilson’s infatuation with his sister-in-law, this melancholic tune about forbidden love is a huge step away from the early music of the Beach Boys, and it took days and days of work to get it nailed down. Carl Wilson remembers: The one song that sticks out in my mind the most is “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Brilliant parts. It was hard to sing without getting tears in your eyes. We all seem to remember singing it a lot. Many times. Many days.
From the opening moments of “At Last,” it’s clear that Etta James is a bold and independent singer who embodies the blues in ways that are hard to comprehend on the first listen. This song has been covered time and time again but no other version of this song holds a flame to James’ take on this beautiful melody.
How do you pick just a few Beatles songs that define the ’60s? It’s truly impossible. Every listener has a personal connection to a different tune, but “Something” is a special song from the band’s final album of the decade, Abbey Road. It’s oddly rare that George Harrison gets a chance to shine on his own within The Beatles, but this love letter to his first wife Pattie Boyd proves that he was every bit the brilliant songwriter as Lennon and McCartney, the latter of whom said in 2000: It was about Pattie, and it appealed to me because it has a very beautiful melody and is a really structured song … I think George thought my bass-playing was a little bit busy. Again, from my side, I was trying to contribute the best I could, but maybe it was his turn to tell me I was too busy.
Nearly 60 years after its release the anarchic tumult of “My Generation” can still be felt within the very bones of this song. Explosive and destructive, guitarist Pete Townsend claims to have written the song after the Queen Mother allegedly had his 1935 Packard hearse towed out of the Belgravia neighborhood in London because she hated the way it looked. It’s honestly insane if that’s the real impetus behind this groundbreaking song, but it’s also kind of perfect.