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Published May 29, 2026, 6:00 PM EDT
Jeremy has more than 2500 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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If you're after the best of what rock had to offer in the 1970s, then maybe you're better off sticking to albums, just because it was a particularly good decade for the album, as a medium/art form (if it can be called either of those). People could also buy singles back then, and the radio was a thing, but the music video boom was still a while off, as were (more obviously), the likes of MP3 players, which themselves were then eclipsed by streaming. And all those things can kind of de-incentivize the act of listening to an album in full.
You had the record, you had to flip it over, and it was all undeniably tangible in a way people have since become nostalgic for, or willing to experience for the first time with the whole vinyl resurgence. But if you don’t want to go all the way, or finding time to listen to a whole album is hard, then these classic rock songs from that classic rockiest of decades might all be worth throwing into a playlist. It’s not a long ranking, so there will likely be omissions, and also, there’s a limit of one song from every artist, just to keep things a little more varied and interesting.
10 "Baba O'Riley" (1971)
The Who
The one-song-per-artist limit imposed makes things hard for other artists that are soon to be mentioned more so than for The Who, because “Baba O'Riley” feels like a pretty big standout, at least from the band’s 1970s output. If anything, it’s probably harder to pick an album of theirs from the decade as their best, since Who’s Next (which kicks off with “Baba O'Riley”) and Quadrophenia are both excellent in very different ways.
With this specific track, though, it’s about as grand and cathartic as rock music gets, making it an ideal opening track. It’s also ideally done in terms of riding the line between being a punchy/radio-friendly song and something a little more epic and sprawling in scope, seeing as it has a decently long – but not overly long – intro and outro, both of which are instrumental in nature, and instrumental to the overall song being as good as it is.
9 "Kashmir" (1975)
Led Zeppelin
Though Physical Graffiti, as an album, isn't quite as strong as the likes of the first or fourth Led Zeppelin albums (one of which is self-titled and the other of which is technically untitled), it is still pretty great overall. It peaks with “Kashmir,” which comes right before the halfway point of the album, rounding out the second of four sides, and concluding what’s ultimately the stronger half of Physical Graffiti.
It’s also a possibly contentious pick, for Led Zeppelin’s best song of the 1970s, since “Stairway to Heaven” is also there, but there. It’s been mentioned, and honorably, at that. “Kashmir” rocks harder and feels even more epic, and there’s something about it that sounds more timeless. Though its length does make it tempting to compare to “Stairway to Heaven,” “Kashmir” sounds a bit more like a refinement/expansion of “When the Levee Breaks,” which closes the same album “Stairway to Heaven” is on (the band’s fourth).
8 "Born to Run" (1975)
Bruce Springsteen
Born to Run is probably the best Bruce Springsteen album, and “Born to Run” is a contender for the artist’s best song. The best way to summarize it is always by saying that it encompasses much of Springsteen within one song, doing so better than just about any other track of the artist’s… even songs that are about twice as long as “Born to Run” still don’t feel “as” heavily Springsteen-esque, or like unfiltered Springsteen to such an extent.
“Born to Run” feels like the kind of thing you'd play to someone who’d never heard of the man before, to get across what makes Springsteen so Springsteen-y.
That being said, it’s the more optimistic Springsteen you'll find in “Born to Run,” though since his cathartic tracks are so plentiful, and are the ones that tend to work best when played live (and it’s hard to talk about Bruce Springsteen without mentioning his live shows), “Born to Run” feels like the kind of thing you'd play to someone who’d never heard of the man before (somehow), to get across what makes Springsteen so Springsteen-y. You can really get a handle on how he sounds – and what he likes to touch upon lyrically – across this song’s four-and-a-half minutes.
7 "Marquee Moon" (1977)
Television
Probably the strangest and most obscure song here, “Marquee Moon” is, nonetheless, not the kind of thing you forget all too easily, once heard. It’s the title track from the largely excellent album of the same name, and feels out of time in a way where if you heard it, and were then told it came out in, say, the 1990s, or maybe even as late as the 2000s, you could believe it.
That also says something about Television’s influence, and the band's willingness to do something genuinely unusual; something that people might not generally have “gotten” until later. But “Marquee Moon” can thankfully be gotten/understood/appreciated now, and with hindsight, it’s not too hard to single it out as a highlight of its decade, with far more packed into this one song than you sometimes find in entire albums.
6 "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975)
Queen
Speaking of songs that have at least an album’s worth of ideas and sounds packed into them, here’s Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which does that kind of thing in a heightened way, like the goal was to top the different sections seamlessly passed between by The Beatles when they did “A Day in the Life.” Maybe that’s a fair comparison. “A Day in the Life” is possibly a little more challenging, but maybe “Bohemian Rhapsody” also confounded people, to some extent, when it was first released.
It’s such a staple of pop culture now, and the song for which Queen is (arguably) best known, to the point where it doesn’t really feel weird anymore. But it’s a ballad, then there’s a bombastic guitar solo, then there’s an opera part, then it goes into more traditional hard/classic rock for a bit, and then it goes back to being a ballad. It works, somehow, but of course it does. It’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and you very likely already knew what an undeniably big deal it was/is.
5 "Free Bird" (1973)
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Lynyrd Skynyrd is a baffling name for a band, but Lynyrd Skynyrd kind of leaned into/acknowledged this by calling their first album Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd. Thank you, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Unlike some of the other albums being mentioned here, when talking about great songs, Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd isn't the most consistent of listens, but some downtime and lesser songs are easier to forgive when things ultimately conclude with “Free Bird.”
“Tuesday’s Gone” and “Simple Man” are good songs that appear before then, and are fairly lengthy ones in their own right, but “Free Bird” is ultimately the grandest, longest, and best song of the band’s debut album, and their entire discography, really. Almost half the song is one of the best guitar solos ever, and the kind of thing you can, if you're in need of a shot of energy, listen to loud, and reliably find it’ll make you feel at least a little more awake.
4 "Comfortably Numb" (1979)
Pink Floyd
If not for the two cathartic guitar solos heard in “Comfortably Numb,” it might be hard to deem this Pink Floyd song as classic rock. Even taking into account the solos, it’s a very somber-sounding song from a particularly heavy album, The Wall, but it’s also an undoubtedly beautiful song that could well be a candidate for the crown of Pink Floyd’s best track (though the band was more of an album-oriented one, than a singles one).
It’s a pivotal part of The Wall, as a concept album, and also Pink Floyd: The Wall, which is the 1982 film version (or adaptation?) of that same album. It’s an emotionally complex and musically varied song about disassociating, feeling isolated, and then also being (quite literally) numbed by drugs. Not fun subject matter, to say the least, but you do really feel it, and there’s also a lot to feel here.
3 "Layla" (1970)
Derek and the Dominos
Kind of the opposite, structurally speaking, to “Free Bird,” “Layla” is a song that has its first half be bombastic and classic rock in sound, all before there’s a transition to a mellower second half. Or, if you want to compare it to “Free Bird,” then it’s got one half with lyrics, and then a second half that’s instrumental, here being an iconic coda that uses both guitar and piano.
It’s easy to see why the album “Layla” appeared on was ultimately called Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, since it really is the stand-out song. It’s also the stand-out song for Derek and the Dominos as a whole, since it was a short-lived band that only ever did the one album (but far from the only noteworthy Eric Clapton-related band/project from around that time, with the bands Cream and Blind Faith not lasting too long, either).
2 "Heroes" (1977)
David Bowie
Of all the great songs that ride the line between being triumphant and soul-crushing, none work on those two fronts quite as effectively as “Heroes,” which might well be the closest thing David Bowie has to a signature song. It’s not easy to find one, given he has so many, and because his discography was ultimately so varied, but “Heroes” is kind of his “Born to Run,” his “Bohemian Rhapsody,” or maybe even his “A Day in the Life.”
Or it’s possibly more than that. It’s “Heroes,” and it’s the highlight of the album of the same name (which is iconic, and yet there still might be half-a-dozen or so albums by Bowie that are even stronger). It’s a song that represents rock, as a genre, at its best, and it’s all rather perfect in ways that have always been – and will continue to be – hard to sum up with words.
1 "Starless" (1974)
King Crimson
While King Crimson is a bit more out there than most classic rock artists, they're going in the #1 spot here because “Starless” is just too good a song. And, more than any of the other epic tracks already mentioned, it feels like it goes way beyond what you'd expect a typical song to do. Also, shout-out to Robert Fripp, who’s the guitarist and only constant member of King Crimson, and also contributed to the aforementioned “Heroes.”
This song sounds heavy, ominous, and sad in a weird sort of way for a while, then it gets weirder/more mysterious at a point, all before exploding into something strangely invigorating and bombastic in its final minutes. It offers so much, and even if you do have to give it quite a bit of your time to listen to (it’s about three or four times longer than the average song), it’s ultimately rewarding, and the kind of listening experience that somehow never gets old, nor ever stops being capable of, like, stopping you in your tracks.
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