25 killer singles that are 60 years old

It had been ten years since Bill Haley and the Comets had taken “Rock Around the Clock” to the top of the charts. Rock & Roll was certainly a cultural force by 1964. Elvis had seen to that. Some cultural highbrows still predicted the new music was merely a passing fad, but most agreed with Danny & the Juniors, who proclaimed as early as 1957 that “rock and roll is here to stay.”

Still, not even Danny Rapp could have predicted what was about to happen in 1964. In February of that year, the Beatles launched into “All My Loving” on The Ed Sullivan Show and all the planets in the universe realigned. The subsequent British Invasion changed everything.

The Beatles had already released a couple of albums by that point. So had the Beach Boys. 1964 didn’t come out of nowhere. You could make the case that in terms of artistic evolution, the following year, 1965, was even more significant. Maybe we’ll talk about that next year, in celebration of its 60th birthday. But by any metric, 1964 was among the most explosive years in modern cultural history, and music was at the core of the explosion.

25 songs turning 60 that are as brilliant today as they were in the 1960s

Sixty years later, we’re still assessing and evaluating exactly what transpired in that magical year. So, just as a small taste, let’s highlight 25 great songs that came out sixty years ago. Many of them fit neatly into the rock & roll genre, but there are also plenty of hybrids. These are songs that may have grown out of other traditions but nonetheless had some crossover influence with rock.

Usually, when I put together lists such as this, I limit myself to a single song per artist. I’m going to make a small modification today. Due to endless demand for the new sound associated with the British Invasion, bands were cranking out albums, and labels were repackaging and reissuing them at an unprecedented pace. Capitol Records released five different Beatles albums in the USA in 1964 along with a couple of others in Canada.

So here’s my exception: if a band released more than one album in the US market in 1964, they are eligible for more than one single on this list. They are eligible for however many distinct album releases they had during the year.

Don’t worry – this won’t simply be a list of a bunch of Beatles' songs … or Beach Boys' songs, or Stones' songs. They all had multiple albums released in 1964. Those bands will obviously be represented, but we’ll try to go beyond those foundational recordings. Fortunately, 1964 had an awful lot on offer.

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