'60s Rock

The beauty of '60s rock is the fact it was all over the map, an aural "Magic Carpet Ride" emanating from the tiny transistor radio under your pillow. Emerging from the innocent Brill Building girl group sounds, classic AM Top 40 was never better than just before and after the British Invasion, when regional novelty nuggets ("Wild Thing," "Wooly Bully") coexisted with heavy slabs of psych ("Purple Haze," "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida") and generational anthems ("Like a Rolling Stone," "For What's It's Worth," "Sounds of Silence"). From sex to drugs to revolution, these songs mark a moment when music was both medium and message.

Rock 'n' roll defined the tumultuous '60s like no other music could, whether it was the anti-drug cautionary tale of Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Kicks," the rose-colored optimism of "Let's Live for Today" and "Something in the Air," or the melancholic regret of "Long Time Gone." It was a time when the Yardbirds' yearning "For Your Love" and Roy Orbison's celebratory "Oh, Pretty Woman" presented the melodic yin to the beat-driven yang of Creedence's "Bad Moon Rising" and Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'." Best of all, every message, every mood, somehow fit perfectly on the very same radio-station playlist.

Our Deep Cuts offers up the kind of rock that set out to expand the mind. Love's landmark "7 and 7 Is" was a proto-punk workout that climaxed with nothing short of an A-bomb blast, while Blue Cheer's "Summertime Blues" drop-kicked Eddie Cochrane into the heavy metal era with the loudest dose of bludgeoning blooze ever heard to that point. The Amboy Dukes' self-explanatory "Journey to the Center of Your Mind" featured a teenage guitar-slinger by the name of Ted Nugent, while the Velvets' "I'll Be Your Mirror" presented a different kind of drug — one to limit possibilities rather than explore them.

These songs form a connect-the-dots for pop music's mutation into rock. Dylan's epic "Like a Rolling Stone" broke through AM radio's three-minute barrier, while the unexpurgated version of the Doors' "Light My Fire" kick-started progressive FM rock, which began playing politically outspoken acts, like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Starship, and Crosby, Stills & Nash — in the process taking us from the post-Eisenhower innocence of "Hang on Sloopy," "California Dreaming," and "Last Train to Clarksville" to the darker visions of "The Weight," "Down on Me," and "The Loner." America and the world went through incredible upheaval during the '60s, and the music of the time captured every tremor of those seismic shifts.