90. The Angels: "My Boyfriend's Back"(Bob Feldman/Jerry Goldstein/Richard Gottehrer)
1963
Chart info: U.S. (#1), UK (N/A)
Available on The Best of the Angels
Not so much about a boyfriend than about one boy coming home to beat the living hell out of another boy, this 1963 single, originally meant for the Shirelles, is one of the most flat-out mean
girl-group tracks ever. College coeds will forever sing it when their high school beaus come to visit, but unless said beau is punching a few suitors in the face on arrival, he's missing the spirit of the whole thing. --Zach Baron
(Dave Alexander/Ron Asheton/Scott Asheton/Iggy Pop)
1969
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on The Stooges
The first thing you hear is the groove: tribal drums falling down stairs, guitar and bass flaring into an eternal Link Wray jungle-stomp, before the guitar flares up into a gooey, miasmic haze. If "1969" was an instrumental, it'd be a psychedelic-funk classic. But of course all anyone talks about is Iggy Pop's bored, detached sneer, the way he dismisses what looks in retrospect like a season of upheaval as "another year with nothing to do." When you've got a groove like that behind you, anything you say starts to take on a blasphemous weight. --Tom Breihan
(Ray Davies)
1964
Chart info: U.S. (#7), UK (#1)
Available on The Kinks' Greatest Hits
Van Halen's equally popular 1977 cover added an orgasmic breakdown chorus of "oohs" and "aahs," but that was just DLR being redundant. Because the original's caustic riff says it all: these guys are packing the biggest set of blue balls known to man. But what makes "You Really Got Me" so fearsome and ferocious after 41 years isn't its everlasting theme of unrequited teenage lust. It's that within Ray Davies' sneering, leering delivery, we hear the threat of violence that will result if he doesn't get what he wants. --Stuart Berman
(Warren "Pete" Moore/Smokey Robinson/Marvin Tarplin)
1965
Chart info: U.S. (#16), UK (N/A)
Available on Tears of a Clown
The hit factory at Motown built songs to last and this Miracles tune is one of its most enduring. "The Tracks of My Tears" is so meticulously constructed that it rolls over the competition. And it's so deceptively simple that its genius actually isn't easy to trace. But from the moment the drums drop over the gentle, twanging guitar intro to Smokey Robinson's vocal improvisations over blasting horns as it fades out, every piece fits together perfectly. --John Motley
(Michael Brown/Bob Calilli/Tony Sansone)
1967
Chart info: U.S. (#5), UK (N/A)
Available on There's Gonna Be a Storm: The Complete Recordings 1966-69
Double-edged sword: If the pseudo-classical pop-rock band the Left Banke's keyboardist, Michael Brown, hadn't been obsessed with guitarist Tom Finn's girlfriend, the band might've lasted longer, but never would've written the fey weeper about secret longing and unrequited love upon which the Left Banke made their name. The saturated strings and mincing harpsichord are moving in and of themselves, but Steve Martin's aching rendition of Brown's teary-eyed proto-emo lyrics are more essential to the song's longevity-- most everyone can identify with the gloomy romance of rain on empty sidewalks, and pining away for your buddy's girl never goes out of style. --Brian Howe
(Joe Melson/Roy Orbison)
1962
Chart info: U.S. (#2), UK (#25)
Available on For the Lonely: 18 Greatest Hits
Roy Orbison never shied from rockabilly swagger, but it was his ballads of unrequited love that made him a legend. In this pocket-sized soap opera, Orbison discovers he's far from over an ex when the touch of her hand sends him over the edge, wringing his eyes out in agony. He's not just "crying," either. He's "cry-i-i-ing" in an angelic falsetto-- with a cooing chorus of voices backing up his sob story. You'd never guess melodrama could be so wrenching until Orbison moves a couple octaves deeper for his show-stopping finale. --John Motley
(Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)
1969
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on Let It Bleed
Color me raised by a boomer, but this song contains one of the most important pieces of information to come out of the 1960s: Despite all the shit you go through to get what and who you want, and despite any good you might have accidentally done on the side, sometimes you just don't have it. This was a surprising thing to hear from the Stones, but it could have been a Zen koan-- "Try, and do not try. Nothing is achieved." And let's be real: This band never sounded better than in 1969-71. Listen to the girls singing backup. Really, anytime you have the Stones using maracas and bongos, something good is going to happen.* --Dominique Leone
* void after 1975
(Neil Young)
1967
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Written in the throes of an illness, "Down by the River" grew into an epic fever-nightmare tortured enough to state more clearly than any other song why Young was so out of step with his idealistic peers. The silly hippie dreams of redemption-- "she could take me over the rainbow"-- are immediately quashed by murder imagery, sung in pained, off-key Crazy Horse harmonies. Then the rest of the song is a blank two-chord page for Neil to scrawl his jagged guitar tone all over, two marathon solos played with zero technical flash and every note taking another awful stab into that failed hope's body. --Rob Mitchum
(Mark James)
1969
Chart info: U.S. (#1), UK (#2)
Available on From Elvis in Memphis
Perhaps controversially, I find late-period Vegas showman Elvis more thrilling than Elvis in his historic Sun Records days; it's an image that better lives up to the massive mythology he inspired. Fortunately, "Suspicious Minds" offers the best of both worlds: It's gritty and funky enough to recall those Memphis days, but laden with enough garish audio glitter-- the backup singers, the false ending, the swooping strings-- to befit a legend. --Rob Mitchum
(Isaac Hayes/David Porter)
1966
Chart info: U.S. (#21), UK (N/A)
Available on The Very Best of Sam & Dave
Look, it's not brain surgery. You come up with an absolutely undeniable monster of a six-note horn-riff. You put it over a wound-tight funk vamp that breathes and lunges and builds to a fiery climax. You find a couple of guys to bray and scream and plead and rage over it with a sort of churchy zeal. That's it. You are now Isaac Hayes and Dave Porter, and you've written maybe the greatest southern soul song of all time. You'll start getting burger-commercial royalties in about 30 years. --Tom Breihan
80. Bob Dylan: "Subterranean Homesick Blues"(Bob Dylan)
1965
Chart info: U.S. (#39), UK (#9)
Available on Bringing It All Back Home
This flurry feels like a how-to farmer's almanac for the 1960s counterculture-- a speed-freak call from the streets and the Invisible Man's basement, offering tricks, warnings, puns, paranoia, LSD concoctions, protest, and fire-hose toting cops. It's famous for the cue-card toting video from Don't Look Back (complete with Allan Ginsberg cameo). I'd venture to say Dylan was ultimately the more interesting poet and this spazzed Beat stuffing breeds the blues with Jack Kerouac and Pete Seeger. Even the seemingly tossed-off notions-- writing in Braille or watching parking meters-- bloom into great thought lines. Everyone's trying to blend in one way or another-- the plain clothes cops, the hippies not wearing sandals. --Brandon Stosuy
(Caetano Veloso)
1969
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on Gal Costa: Não Identificado
Knowing no Portuguese, I imagine Costa's singing not to a lover but to an actual baby-- a six-monther, cradled in her lap and listening to a voice that's loving and cool. And while she and the slow bossa nova are entrancing, the fantastic strings are the wildcard: dipping and flittering, they collide mid-air like two matched flocks of tropical birds. If it's sexy, it's laughing during the act, and the baby in the crib nearby doesn't mind. --Chris Dahlen
(Sylvester "Sly Stone" Stewart)
1969
Chart info: U.S. (#60), UK (N/A)
Available on Stand!
Sly Stone's ode to letting music take hold is not about marching on Washington. And it's not about spitting in The Man's face. But it's definitely about freedom at any cost. The baton-pass of Rose, Freddie, and Sly Stone and the basso profundo of Larry Graham elevate what is in some ways Sly's most lyrically toothless number into a rapturous call-and-response jam that rocked thousands at Woodstock (or so Mom told us), and even more than that at supermarkets near you every day. But Sly knew what he was doing, slotting the amorphous and joyful "Higher" as the B-side to the more righteous "Stand!" It predicted everything about the next few years from Sly: joy and pain, fun and fire, truth and fucking, darkness and drugs. The perfect antithesis in a career marked by duality. --Sean Fennessey
(Lou Reed)
1967
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on The Velvet Underground & Nico
Another of Lou Reed's inner monologues detailing the poetry of negation, this depicts the solitary sacredness of a high, the ritual of shooting up/zoning: "I have made the big decision/ I'm gonna try to nullify my life." I could retitle it "I'll Be Your Shattered Mirror"-- the protagonist feels like a fucked-up everyman, despite the first person. Sonically, it builds like it could arc forever: Drink coffee, press play, feel the noisy viola inject a frenzy. All the sounds are intensely perfect, but Moe Tucker's drums are the manic pulse: If she stops, the high's kaput. --Brandon Stosuy
(Ron Grainer)
1963
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album
Where the U.S.'s "Star Trek" sent a sleek vessel into "the final frontier," Britain's "Dr. Who" began with a cranky old alien hurtling around in a phone booth-- and the theme song couldn't be a better fit. While Ron Grainer's swooping melody and throbbing beat have seen slicker arrangements over the decades, this first version is an incredible piece of primitive electronic music. Delia Derbyshire constructed it in 1963 by manipulating sounds from test tone generators and mixing them together almost note by note, yet the cobbled-together, almost mismatched timbres come together in a lumpy, throbbing-- and definitely futuristic-- whole. --Chris Dahlen
(Paul Simon)
1969
Chart info: U.S. (#7), UK (#6)
Available on Bridge Over Troubled Water
Two reasons this is the best of many good S&G songs. First, Paul Simon never wrote a better melody. It bends and turns-- and yes, drifts-- like it's going to lose its way until he tugs it back in for a chorus that every kid in the 1970s memorized before grade school. And then the lyrics, from a guy given to saying too much, are terrifically restrained and open-ended, with only the barest hints of the story fleshed out. It's an impressionistic, painterly approach not far from where Bob Dylan would be a few years later on Blood on the Tracks. --Mark Richardson
(James Brown)
1965
Chart info: U.S. (#8), UK (#25)
Available on JB40: 40th Anniversary Collection
Almost everyone with even a passing interest in JB knows the story of how, while stopping off on tour to record a new single, the raggedy, exhausted band inched as if waist-deep in swamp water through a slower, more grinding version of "Papa's" than the one everyone knows. Someone got the bright idea to get nice with the razor blades and the knob marked "speed everything up," and funk got one step closer to becoming its own genre. Like a lot of music on this list, "Papa's" can seem overfamiliar, but Brown's shift from one of the best ballad singers and soulmen of the early 1960s to the Godfather is still one of the most remarkable transformations in pop history, and this is one of its key moments. --Jess Harvell
(Bob Dylan)
1963
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
With the millions of words written on the political and cultural significance of Bob Dylan's career, it's easy to forget that dude could write a pretty damn fierce breakup song, when he wanted to. "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" may be the most venomous of Dylan's "so long, honeybabe" tracks, in part due to the laid-back, icy delivery of its original version. When he gets to the cruel punch line of "you just kinda wasted my...precious time," it's shrugged off like a business transaction, a relationship diss track he can hardly be bothered to sing. --Rob Mitchum
(Van Morrison)
1968
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on Astral Weeks
Surely, scores of grass-kissing, mass Romantics have tried to hole away with a couple of their jazzbo buds for a couple deep nights in search of the next Astral Weeks. Such is the seduction of the quick muse. Of course, it's going to sound like shit because, however hard your scatman broheim tries to grimace and spasm like he's feeling the force, he's not channeling his past with folky pathos set to stun-- he's not Van Morrison. "Sweet Thing" is that one thing; sprightly bows sloping down streets, flutes searching through the mist, and elated bass leading to a fountain of youth. "It feels right, but I can't say for sure what it means," Lester Bangs said of it. Of course he can't. --Ryan Dombal
(Jimi Hendrix)
1967
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on Are You Experienced?
A showcase for Hendrix's wholly original guitar techniques, "Manic Depression" is dizzying with its odd time signature and winding, cyclical melody. And while Hendrix will always be the focal point of his songs, the Experience shouldn't be entirely written off. Drummer Mitch Mitchell is a beast here, pounding every drum in the kit, often leaving bassist Noel Redding to keep things grounded. Lyrically, the song is typical Hendrix-- women, drugs, music, and just getting along, man. But that's neither here nor there: When you're watching the World Series, what the announcers are saying is beside the point. --Cory D. Byrom
70. Patsy Cline: "Crazy" (Willie Nelson)
1961
Chart info: U.S. (#9), UK (#14)
Available on 12 Greatest Hits
With top 10 performances on both the country and pop charts, "Crazy" was the first indication that Patsy Cline's appeal is pretty damn universal. On this Willie Nelson-penned heartbreaker, the music-- all loping bass and twinkling piano runs-- plays it cool, but Cline's voice is so cuttingly clear and emotive it's like she's right there in the room with you. As she sings, "I knew you'd love me as long as you wanted/ And then some day, you'd leave me for somebody new," there's palpable sorrow and self-loathing in her delivery that makes misery sound exquisite. --John Motley
(Milton Leeds/Nicholas Roubanis/Chaim Tauber/Fred Wise)
1963
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on King of the Surf Guitar: The Best of Dick Dale
According to headshop t-shirts, Charlie don't surf, but if he did, this is what would've been blasting out of his Victrola. Dick Dale made surf music for bikers: "Misirlou" isn't an occasion to catch a wave, it's an invitation to a knife fight, and that bee-swarm guitar line takes on all comers--- a cha-cha rhythm, a trumpet chorus, even a piano solo-- and slays them all. "Misirlou" wasn't just punk rock before punk existed-- it was punk rock even before rock'n'roll became boring enough to make punk necessary. --Stuart Berman
(Gerry Goffin/Carole King)
1960
Chart info: U.S. (#1), UK (#4)
Available on 25 All-Time Greatest Hits
Carole King was a better songwriter than singer/songwriter, though Tapestry is probably about due for a too-ironic revival. On this 1960 release, the Shirelles take the Brill Building doo-wop and enchantment-under-the-sea strings of King's "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" and sanctify it with modest, youthful wisdom. Other 60s girl-group ballads would be huger, or more dramatic, but the understated pathos of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" is singularly combustible. I feel the earth move. --Marc Hogan
(Neil Young)
1969
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
The "riff" in this one is a sludge of lumbering power chords and the solo is a single note; even at the beginning of his Crazy Horse era in 1969, Young's guitar playing had already started to crystallize into something shambolic and occasionally counterintuitive. The sweetness in the burr is all the melodic things happening: the conversations between the vocal harmonies, the guitars and bass, the high and low ends. So what if it's one of Young's most superficial songs-- in so many other ways, its ragged musculature perfectly encapsulates everything he ever did best. --Mark Pytlik
(John Holt)
1967
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (N/A)
Available on On the Beach With the Paragons
Violin isn't common in reggae, but damn it sounds good on this gem from the rocksteady era. I'm amazed you can fit this much melody in one song-- John Holt's lead vocal swoops and dives, his phrases expanding and contracting like the very tide itself, while the doo-wop interjections of his mates weave around him like chips of glass in a kaleidoscope. Duke Reid's band lays down a classic track stuffed with details-- a muted guitar hook, a ridiculously sublime violin solo, the way the chorus sounds great no matter what order its halves are sung in-- and the result is one of the best Jamaican tracks in pop history. --Joe Tangari
(John Phillips/Michelle Phillips)
1966
Chart info: U.S. (#4), UK (#23)
Available on If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears
Apparently it's so dreadful not to live in California, it drove the Mamas & Papas to create one of the most beautifully eerie harmony-pop songs in rock history. Thanks to the limitations of 1966 production, John and Michelle Phillips' reverb-waterlogged four-part arrangement sounds apocalyptically choral, making the experience of actually suffering through four seasons sound positively ghastly. --Rob Mitchum
(Max Crook/Del Shannon)
1961
Chart info: U.S. (#1), UK (#1)
Available on Greatest Hits
So spare it's almost not there at all, Shannon's masterpiece is teen heartbreak in haiku, winnowed down from a 15-minute vamp into a perfect 2:20. A #1 smash in 1961, rock'n'roll through and through, "Runaway" is also a proto-synth pop hit, introducing the electric musitron with a wicked solo. Shannon's hiccuping, froggy falsetto details the most basic of breakup stories, and yet it resonates like cosmic truth. Despite lacking the "yeah, well fuck you too" vitriol of garage groups like the Seeds, hundreds of punks and proto-punks heard, for better or worse, a whole aesthetic universe in "Runaway". It's one of the most coverable songs of all time. --Jess Harvell
(Vinicius de Moraes/Norman Gimbel/Antonio Carlos Jobim)
1963
Chart info: U.S. (#5), UK (#29)
Available on Getz/Gilberto
While the titular object of desire is described as walking "like a samba," the breezy wisp of a song she saunters through has become synonymous with bossa nova, which emphasizes subtle melodic phrasing over dance-oriented cadence. Bossa nova pioneer Tom Jobim's bittersweet ode to the unattainable allure of youthful beauty turned the still-young Brazilian genre into a household name in the United States. Astrud Gilberto's dreamy lilt and João Gilberto's succint flecks of guitar describe the mesmerizing syncopation of rolling hips, while Getz blows his sax as sweetly as any drug-crazed wife-beater ever did. --Brian Howe
(Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)
1968
Chart info: U.S. (N/A), UK (#21)
Available on Beggars Banquet
On this searing call-to-arms the Stones set the impending revolution under an appropriately intense summer sun, and heat rolls off of it in waves. Brightly jagged guitars glitter like blacktop mirages; thunderous percussion cracks asphalt; Jagger's voice is a wowing police siren. The music is emphatic; the prognosis is dire but vague; and the upshot, ambivalent: "What can a poor boy do except sing for a rock ‘n' roll band?" Thankfully so: If they cared too much, they wouldn't be the Stones. --Brian Howe
(Lamont Dozier/Eddie Holland/Brian Holland)
1966
Chart info: U.S. (#1), UK (#8)
Available on The Ultimate Collection
This Motown masterpiece has been rerecorded as rock, country, and new wave pop. No wonder: Its unceasing beat, bright guitar chirping, horn blasts, and bubbling bass line make it arguably the most rock-influenced hit of the group's career, and suited for any setting. Nobody has sold it better, however, than Diana Ross, who somehow manages to sound heartbroken and sassy at the same time. --Cory D. Byrom
100. The Isley Brothers: "It's Your Thing"
99. Jimi Hendrix: "All Along the Watchtower"
98. The Zombies: "Care of Cell 44"
97. The Maytals: "Pressure Drop"
96. The Shangri-Las: "Give Him a Great Big Kiss"
95. Sam Cooke: "Cupid"
94. Simon & Garfunkel: "Mrs. Robinson"
93. Can: "Yoo Doo Right"
92. Nick Drake: "River Man"
91. The Who: "Substitute"
109. The Byrds: "Eight Miles High"
108. Harry Nilsson: "One"
107. Bob Dylan: "Visions of Johanna"
106. Desmond Dekker & the Aces: "007 (Shanty Town)"
105. Simon & Garfunkel: "America"
104. King Crimson: "21st Century Schizoid Man"
103. Merle Haggard: "Mama Tried"
102. Sly & the Family Stone: "Everyday People"
101. Pink Floyd: "See Emily Play"
129. Harry Nilsson: "Everybody's Talkin'"
128. Buffalo Springfield: "For What It's Worth"
127. George Jones: "She Thinks I Still Care"
126. Led Zeppelin: "What Is and What Should Never Be"
125. Miles Davis: "Shhh/Peaceful"
124. The Velvet Underground: "Venus in Furs"
123. The Supremes: "I Hear a Symphony"
122. Patsy Cline: "I Fall to Pieces"
121. Glen Campbell: "Wichita Lineman"
120. ? and the Mysterians: "96 Tears"
119. Silver Apples: "Oscillations"
118. The Bobby Fuller Four: "I Fought the Law"
117. Ben E. King: "Stand By Me"
116. Jefferson Airplane: "White Rabbit"
115. The Kinks: "Victoria"
114. Nancy Sinatra: "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'"
113. The Easybeats: "Friday on My Mind"
112. Steve Reich: "It's Gonna Rain"
111. Stevie Wonder: "I Was Made to Love Her"