“Walk Right In” by the Rooftop Singers.
“Gimme Three Steps” – Lynyrd Skynyrd
“I need a Lover Who Won’t Drive me Crazy” – John Mellencamp
Tool has a million of these. “Third Eye” has a reeeaaaaaally long intro.
Dire Straits: Tunnel of Love, and Telegraph Road.
Pretty much the entire repertoire of Dream Theater, and half of Rush and Yes.
“Rock Me” by Great White
“Hotel California” by The Eagles.
This one is cheating, technically, but what the hell.
On Elton John’s album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, the song “Love Lies Bleeding” is preceded by “Funeral for a Friend,” an instrumental. Because the one cut flows seamlessly into the next, I always regarded “Funeral for a Friend” as an extremely long intro to “Love Lies Bleeding.”
My experience is based on the vinyl album; I never owned the CD, and I do not know whether a break was interposed between the two songs upon remastering.
The Who and Pete Townshend are perhaps the biggest contributors (or should one say offenders?) to this style of songwriting. Off the top of my head:
“Baba O’Riley”
“Won’t Get Fooled Again”
“Who Are You”
“Eminence Front”
“A Little is Enough”
“Face the Face”
“Come to Mama”
“Let My Love Open the Door”
and at least a few others have lengthy, sometimes synthesizer-only intros that run for a minute or more.
Sweet Jane by Lou Reed
Van Halen’s cover of Pretty Woman
And Big Ol’ Jet Airliner (or whatever it’s called) by the Steve Miller Band.
And that one by Boston…you know which one I’m talking about, right?
Some really old ones:
“I Can’t Get Started” by Bunny Berigan
“Kaye’s Melody” by Sammy Kaye
“When Did You Leave Heaven?” By Guy & Carmen Lombardo
A newer one: “Black Magic Woman” by Santana
There’s an unusual NON-music intro, which has no perceptible connection with the rest of the song:“Mr. Bojangles” by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In the spoken prologue, an old man tells about his old dog “Teddy,” who can, supposedly, sing “Old Rugged Cross.”
Pinball Wizard has a fairly long intro that’s all on the right channel of your stereo system, until the SCHHWONNNG! suddenly blows your left speaker off the wall. Remember this. It’s a good way to check if you hooked up your speakers correctly. I know because when our college radio station converted to stereo FM, for a while we only had a left channel VU meter. So the disk jockey would keep desperately raising the level of the intro (none of which was IN the left channel, to start) until the Moment of Truth when you could see lightining bolts erupting from the transmitter on Hungarford Hill.
Extra points if you can identify the station from the transmitter location.
“I’d Do Anything For Love” by Meatloaf.
“Firth of Fifth,” by Genesis (in their early, Peter Gabriel days)
A lot of 80’s thrash metal songs have really long intros. Examples include “Sight of the Wise” by Sacrilege, “Death Camps” by Sacred Reich, and “Pleasures of the Flesh” by Exodus.
Another song that’s recently been getting lots of airplay on VH1 Classic is “Honey Bucket” by the Melvins. The intro lasts for over 1½ minutes but the entire song is barely three minutes long!
Just as a side note, it seems that long musical intros that were much more common in the 1970s have gone the way of the dodo in contemporary rock songs.
The beginning of “Stairway To Heaven” is heavenly.
Also “One”, IMO the best rock intro ever…even better than “Stairway”
…and don’t forget Isaac Hayes’ “Shaft,” which is almost entirely musical intro…
I wanna be adored - The Stone Roses