10 Perfect Songs That Started Hard Rock

For all of the filth that mothers claimed were in rock and roll songs back in the day, the early '60s were actually fairly tame. Going through songs by acts like the Beatles or the Zombies, these were either simple love songs to their female fans or tracks that made you want to get up and dance whenever they came on. That was the first half of the '60s, and the argument could be made that the second half began the minute that the Velvet Underground hit the New York scene.

Opening up with a wall of guitars, I'm Waiting for the Man sounds like it could have been written by someone on the street on the seedy side of New York, calling out different street names as he waits for his dealer to score some drugs. It might seem dark and a bit dirty, but there's also a bit of a poetic slant that Lou Reed puts into his lyrics as well, taking as much from literature as he did from the junkies that he saw roaming down the street every day.

In the wake of acts like the Velvets, it became the era of the misfits of rock and roll, from Iggy Pop causing mayhem whenever he went onstage to David Bowie considering this song to be one of the tracks that helped him stretch out his musical boundaries during his Ziggy Stardust period. Rock and roll may have started off in the party scene, but the minute that you heard Reed singing about feeling more dead than alive, nothing really seemed sacred anymore.