Classic Rock

Why do we call the songs that came bursting to life in that golden age between the British Invasion and new wave “classic rock”? Because, decades later, they’ve come to form the very backbone of rock itself. Even if you never came within 100 feet of a radio, you’d still be intimately familiar with Led Zeppelin’s whisper-to-a-wail epic “Stairway to Heaven,” the tune all budding rock guitarists practice until their calluses have calluses. Likewise, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Southern rock gold standard “Free Bird” remains the most-requested song on the planet, its name shouted out from the audience pretty much anytime anyone steps onstage with a guitar anywhere. Of course, even when you hear a track like ZZ Top’s Texas-fried boogie “La Grange” for the first time, it’s suddenly impossible to imagine a world without its grease-spattered riff and spectacularly sleazy “how how how . . .”

Psychedelic reinventions and new-wave wonders make the classic-rock cut, in Next Steps.

A classic rock track’s not something an artist can set out to make — it’s defined by the way the world embraces it. When it first burst onto the scene, the quirky-cool throb of the Cars’ “Just What I Needed” was cutting-edge new wave, but by now everyone knows that soaring synth line like a faithful friend. Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” started out as a sparse folk-rock fable but found its place in history with Jimi Hendrix’s firestorm of wah-wah-wailing fretboard frenzy. And the studio version of Peter Frampton’s breezy ballad “Baby I Love Your Way” may have stiffed as a single, but on blockbuster album Frampton Comes Alive! it became part of an arena-filling phenomenon.

From prog to glam, larger-than-life classic rock tunes await you in Deep Cuts.

Classic rock cuts don’t slip in the door when no one’s looking — they crash through the wall, shaking the room with each mighty footstep, making their presence known in no uncertain terms. The Moody Blues obliterated the rock/classical divide by hitching their star to the London Festival Orchestra for the sweeping, string-swathed symphonic rocker “Nights in White Satin.” Prog-rock pioneers Yes took the Moodies’ majestic moves a step further by becoming their own orchestra on the whirling “Roundabout.” And with a little help from David Bowie, Mott the Hoople played the strutting peacock-princes of rock with the gilded glam milestone “All the Young Dudes.”

In the fast-moving music world, where things can turn inside out in an eye-blink, classic rockers are the eternal guardians of the rock ’n’ roll animal in us all. Whether you want to take a Rototom-rolling master class in air-drumming with Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” throw a double-fisted devil sign at KISS’s ultimate party anthem, “Rock ’n Roll All Nite,” or do the backseat boogie to Meat Loaf’s all-revved-up rock operetta “Paradise By the Dashboard Light,” these titanic tunes have remained only a touch less of an American institution than apple pie for decades. And now, we’ve crammed the most crucial rockers from the psychedelic ’60s to the new-wave ’80s into one convenient place, making it as easy as breathing to crank up the classics.