What is the greatest American-born rock band of all time? It sounds like an easy enough question, but my goodness, it is anything but that.
Podcast host Jack Wagner recently tweeted about the thought experiment, and the post caused ripples of debate in our Slack newsroom. So we decided to make a list.
This was a deliberately hard exercise for so many reasons, though, and it’s not just because most of the great bands you’re thinking about (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, AC/DC, Queen, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, U2, Oasis, Sex Pistols, Joy Division) are actually not bands from the United States. There were other hurdles we needed to jump through, too.
How exactly does one define greatness? Is it your personal favorite band, or is it based on accomplishments and influence? We all had our own definitions so we had to trust our gut here.
How does one define an American band? We disqualified Fleetwood Mac because Mick Fleetwood and the late Christine McVie are British; CSNY did not make the list because Neil Young is Canadian and Graham Nash is English; The Band didn’t count because several members (including the late, great Robbie Robertson) are Canadian; The Jimi Hendrix Experience had an American frontman but the rest of the band was English. You get the idea.
How do we define a rock and roll and roll band? Not only is it hard to define rock and roll (Do funk bands like Parliament count? What about R&B groups like Earth Wind & Fire?) but it is also tough to know what even counts as a band. So many of the greatest musicians who immediately came to mind (e.g. Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Prince, Joan Jett, Patti Smith) were primarily known as solo artists. This was tough to evaluate but our writers tended to favor bands with a more traditional rock and roll instrumentation.
Here was our methodology: Our staff was allowed to vote for any domestic rock band. They were asked to rank each band from No. 1 overall to No. 10 overall. Bands that got first-place votes received ten points while bands that got tenth-place votes earned one.
We calculated the results and bring them to you, the reader. This article says the results are definitive, and it is definitively our list. But really, it is actually imperfect, and mostly, this was simply the closest we could get to agreeing.
Other bands that received votes from multiple staffers include Journey, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Hall and Oates, The Grateful Dead, Simon & Garfunkel, Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Strokes.
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