Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, "Jungleland," live in Tempe, Arizona in 1980. This is my personal favorite of Bruce Springsteen's several epic, long songs. This song contains one of my all time favorite lines anywhere, "...and then the poets down here don't write anything at all, they just stand back and let it all be."
I've written somewhere over 2,800 blog posts in the last 16 years, and have told hundreds of little stories about my days in BMX freestyle in the 1980's and 1990's. I've written about many other things as well. These days, I'm doing most of my writing on my Substack site. Since this blog hit 1,000 posts, I've throttled back on the new posts. It still gets a bunch of views from various links. But I just do posts here that seem really interesting to me at the time. This is an idea that popped into my head a couple days ago, while listening to some classic rock songs.
My first car was a 1971 Pontiac Bonneville. It was a gigantic four door sedan powered by an Oldsmobile 455 V-8, and it was about 18 1/2 feet long. A land yacht. That car was big, powerful, horrible on gas, and a blast to get loose in, on snowy roads in the winter. It could hold 10 or 12 drunk high school kids, and my taxi driving career really began in Boise, Idaho, in 1983, when I would be the designated driver, and drive a bunch of teens home from parties. These, big, long, hard rock songs remind me of my land yacht Pontiac. Big and comfortable and a memorable part of a certain era.
There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of great Rock n' Roll songs that have been sung, recorded, and often covered by others later on. But there's this subset of Rock songs that are really long, let's say, over 5 minutes, and epic rock as well. Here are a bunch of my favorite long, epic rock songs.
Special bonus for making it to the bottom of the list:
Just for the record, I listened to every song in its entirety while working on this blog post, except for "In A Godda Da Vida." I had limited online time at the library, so I skipped over that 20 minute epic. When I started out on this idea, I thought there were about 10 or 15 classic, long songs from the 1970's and early 1980's. Then I got into this blog post, and just kept finding more epic, long songs. I didn't link every song, there are quite a few more, but I got most of the classic rock bands known for long songs, and then brought it right up to the present day. 91 epic songs and performances over 5 minutes each. Enjoy.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
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