@Scott Blitstein

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Pete Townshend smashed them. Jimi Hendrix set them on fire. B.B. King nearly died trying to rescue one from a burning building. And Keith Richards apparently slept with them—which, as he put it, is how he managed to record the riff to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in the middle of the night without quite waking up. A great rock guitarist isn’t necessarily a virtuoso, but someone who shifts your understanding of what the instrument can do. So while this playlist pays deference to the fast (Eddie Van Halen), the smooth (Eric Clapton), and the powerful (Jimmy Page), it also makes room for primitives like The Stooges and Nirvana, Dave Davies of The Kinks, and Chuck Berry—players who weren’t flashy, but whose approach introduced sounds nobody had quite heard before. In six strings and a hundred songs, here’s what rock music sounds like.

Getting kicked out of Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention was probably the best thing that ever happened to the peerlessly quirky singer/guitarist Lowell George, who then found his true calling with Little Feat. Loved for their idiosyncrasy, the group merged earthy, warm and comical takes on rock, folk, blues and New Orleans R&B. 1973's Dixie Chicken introduced their classic sextet lineup and their free-flowing live shows became a trademark. The band split after George's death in 1979, but the remaining members began a longstanding reunion in 1988.

With their jazz-schooled chops and studio-crafted elegance, Steely Dan symbolized the softening of rock throughout the ’70s. But though their music projected an air of affluence, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were more interested in lyrically interrogating the era’s decadence, staging each song as a swanky high-society party infiltrated by prostitutes, gamblers, and other wayward souls desperate to make a dollar. They projected a streetwise edge on early standards like the Santana-esque “Do It Again” and “Reeling in the Years.” But, like The Beatles before them, Fagen and Becker stopped touring to reinvent Steely Dan as a studio-based, session-player-powered entity, pursuing a more finessed fusion of jazz, rock, and soul that achieved its apotheosis on 1977’s <i>Aja</i>. And yet, as their music became more sophisticated, Fagen’s lyrics turned more seedy and cynical, lacing the proto-disco groove of “Peg” with suggestive casting-couch intimations, while using the smooth strut of “Hey Nineteen” to catalog the dysfunctional relationship between an older man and his teenage lover. After splitting in 1981, Steely Dan enjoyed a surprise second act beginning with 2000’s <i>Two Against Nature</i>, winning a Grammy for “Cousin Dupree.” The 21st century saw Steely Dan become a more active touring act than ever before, and Fagen kept the show on the road even after Becker’s death in 2017.

For the rockers who swaggered and strutted through the ’70s, bigger nearly always meant better. Songs that were built to have maximum impact in stadiums and arenas somehow sounded even larger on home hi-fis thanks to multitrack recording technology and other studio advances that made the drums of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and The Who’s Keith Moon sound like cannon fire. Even the mellower, headphone-ready sounds of Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, and the Eagles boasted unprecedented breadth and richness. Yet the decade’s sound was defined just as much by leaner, meaner takes on rock fundamentals, courtesy of artists such as AC/DC and Alice Cooper.

The former Christine Perfect joined her new husband John McVie's band in 1970, just as original guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer were making their troubled exits. For the first half of that decade, her warm, smoky voice and romantic songwriting were the sole constant of a fluctuating lineup. Even when Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined, Christine McVie remained the band's anchor.

When you get down to it, there’s a way in which all rock is Southern rock: a mix of Black blues, white country, and church music repurposed for less-than-godly means. And if you’ve ever spent time in the American South, you know that Tom Petty’s Florida and ZZ Top’s Texas might as well be in different countries. Still, there’s a thread that runs through the tracks here, a legacy connecting the swagger of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Drive-By Truckers, the rustic expansiveness of the Allman Brothers and My Morning Jacket—not to mention a sense of directness that speaks to the lives of regular folks in ways the broader culture sometimes overlooks.

Heading out on an epic road trip requires an equally epic soundtrack. While these so-called open-road rockers can explicitly mention cars or driving (for instance, AC/DC’s barn-burning “Highway to Hell”), in other cases, they’re classic rock anthems and laidback jams capturing the freedom and possibility of the open road itself. This vibe is embodied by the main character of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ “American Girl”—“raised on promises” and prone to look for silver linings—and by the wistful nostalgia of Bruce Springsteen’s brawny, hopeful “Glory Days.” Yet an open-road rocker might just as easily be a song with a rebellious streak—as evidenced by the raucous riffage driving Joan Jett & The Blackhearts’ fist-pumping “I Love Rock ’N Roll,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s defiant political statement “Fortunate Son,” and the gang’s-all-here hard-rock vibe of Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back In Town.”

As the 2000s began, hard rock had a nu-metal hangover: Limp Bizkit’s rugged riffage still had teeth, while P.O.D.’s thundering anthems and Papa Roach’s slash-and-burn approach rose to prominence. The genre was given an electrifying creative jolt by Linkin Park, a California group whose hip-hop-tinted take on nu-metal—and frustration-filled lyrics that zeroed in on the pain of personal shortcomings—felt fresh and energetic, not to mention all too relatable to a generation paralysed by post-September 11 uncertainty and turmoil. In fact, although ’90s superstars such as Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers continued to churn out comfort-food hits, a new breed of ambitious hard rockers captured the decade’s winds of change. Muse and My Chemical Romance unleashed heroic glam epics, Evanescence embraced an operatic vocal delivery and radio-ready acts like Shinedown merged unstoppable hooks with roiling emotional angst.