@believer258: Rush debatebly counts. It's easy to see how stuff like Working Man or 2112 is Classic Rock, but then when you bring things like Tom Sawyer or Spirit of Radio into the picture, it gets a little more complicated.
AC/DC, if you don't count the Bon Scott era stuff from the 70's as classic rock then you make me a very sad person. Though I usually listen to their 80's stuff as well. Sometimes people describe them as blues rock or hard rock but they identify their music as simple rock n roll.
I like Metallica as much as the next guy (probably more than the average next guy, actually), but that is definitely metal, not rock.
@believer258: Rush debatebly counts. It's easy to see how stuff like Working Man or 2112 is Classic Rock, but then when you bring things like Tom Sawyer or Spirit of Radio into the picture, it gets a little more complicated.
Rush genre is Hard Rock or Prorgessive Rock depending on the period of their career. Started as hard rock, went all progressive then started going back to hard rock (with some progressive elements every now and then). Also, definitely not progressive metal even though they were a huge influence to bands such as Dream Theater.
Classic rock is usually anything that was produced before the birth of the person judging whether something is classic or not. Don't try and fight it, it's futile. Just give in.
Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Cream, Led Zeppelin, The Mothers, The Stooges, Talking Heads, The Ramones, X, The Clash, Elvis Costello, XTC...
but, but Led Zeppelin are hard-rock. The Ramones are punk-rock. Cream are blues-rock. The Mother (of invention I presume) are progressive/psychodelic rock. Chuck Berry is rock n' roll. Talking Heads are new wave/post-punk. I won't even explain the rest. I'll follow @pyromagnestir's advice and just give up really :/
There isn't a lot of classic rock I enjoy listening to. However, I've always enjoyed Donovan and Steppenwolf. I'll even admit to enjoying some good old Motown.
@ungratefuldead: I see, I'm sorry. I'll stay out of the nose picking genre talk, I thought thread was more about the bands and music. My sincerest apologies.
The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Two of the only bands whose core discographies I listen to in their entirety. My favorite of their albums are Abbey Road and Physical Graffiti.
Since this thread has turned into a semantics argument over the term "classic rock," I will throw in my two cents.
Classic rock is any rock music that is old enough to make people in their mid-thirties feel nostalgic about their youth. Though the number is fluid, a good rule of thumb is that it will be around twenty years old. So under that definition, Nirvana is now considered classic rock.
Now you can get into another semantic argument about what defines rock, but my personal opinion is that Metallica has always been more hard-rock than metal. Sure, some of their older songs had some speed to them, but how can anyone listen to a song like "Enter Sandman," or "Unforgiven," and think that is metal. Those are heavily produced rock songs just like Guns N Roses, or Bon Jovi.
Steely Dan. The Doobie Brothers and Supertramp are close follow-ups.
@nekroskop Wait really? For me Queen's only consistently great albums are their fourth and fifth ones (Night at the Opera/Day at the Races) though there's good songs on most of them.
This thread reminds me of the one time I heard a classic rock station play Strawberry Fields Forever and Pour Some Sugar On Me back-to-back, and I decided to never listen to the radio ever again.
This is a tricky one but I think I have to go with Queen, they did some amazing things. On the whole "What is classic rock?" argument, I think we're once again running into the fact that genre classifications get a little vague at a point, but I will say that I don't think you can simply define the genre as "Rock from x number of decades ago" or "Rock released from the 60s to 80s". If you're going to classify something as classic rock you need to pay attention to how the music sounds and was put together, not just the timeframe it was released in.
Fucking yes. Thin Lizzy might not be the best band of all the time, but when i think of "classic" rock, nothing is more classic than Thin Lizzy. They encapsulate everything awesome about classic rock. Such an awesome sound.
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