Another vote for Led Zeppelin, if only because they immediately spring to mind when I envisioned bell-bottoms and shaggy hair. The overplaying of “Stairway” always struck me as the quintessential feature of Classic Rock.
All all great. Lot’s of one hit wonders out there too. ‘Stuck in the middle with you’ came on and I certainly recognized it. My wife said it’s by ‘Stealers Wheel’.
I knew the song, not the band name.
Same with Mountain Chefguy.
If II have to pick one it’d be Led Zeppelin.
Was playing in my work lobby yesterday as I left work. “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right!” 
Heh. I listen to the POTUS channel (Politics In The United States) on Sirius XM Michael Smerconish. The theme song is that song - “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right!”
The story is - Keith Moon said their music would go over like a Lead Balloon. Led Zeppelin was born. Very cool if true.
It’s a toss up between The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin for me. I’m a huge fan of The Beatles, but the majority of their music isn’t what I would call classic rock. I would say that early Aerosmith is more classic rock than The Beatles.
Are you referring to Classic Rock as in the radio genre or something else?
To me it wouldn’t be a single band. When I think of classic rock what comes to mind is an amalgam, something like one of those composite portraits made up of hundreds of images or a giant word cloud of bands and artists.
This.
Hmmm. The other day, we put on Creedence Clearwater, and my Wife said they are the epitome of classic rock. That’s what started my OP.
So I’m thinking one band. And, I’m fishing as well. My wife and I play this album and that album over Alexa or other services. We are both mid 60’s.
We also love The Indigo Girls (going to their concert in Dillon) and KT Tunstall. Oh and the Cowboy Junkies. They can ‘Rock Out’ too. We aren’t completely stuck in the 70’s. But it’s more folk like for the most part IMHO.
CSN&Y is classic rock to me to.
I have to also agree with folks that the Stones, Zep and the Who are what people call classic rock.
I took a rock history class. I appreciate the influence of all the artists that came before, but they didn’t match what feels like “rock” to me. It felt more like “oldies” or “stuff my parents would have liked”. Then came the lecture about the influence of blues, and the professor played snippets of Led Zeppelin. That is rock.
I think you said they were sorta folk/rock or something to that effect. Seems to me that the question - to identify one single classic rock band - woul drule out an group that was sorta any other category/subgenre. As in my observations about the Eagles - California rock. JMO of course.
As with so many threads, I suspect that could be debated/fleshed out through the discussion. What are your thoughts - either as to w/in the radio genre, or alternative definition of the genre?
I’d assume it has to pretty much be limited to some part of the period from early 60s to mid-late 80s. Other than that, I suspect a few variables could be debated. I don’t listen to much (any?) classic rock radio, but I think I have a pretty good idea of their limited playlists. I’d factor in some degree of popularity and longevity, and - if possible - primacy.
Also, if their sound was copied/adapted by other groups. If a band is too unique, that might rule them out. And we all seem to be trending towards pretty heavy rock. No love for the likes of Bowie? Genesis? Alice Cooper?
I think the question itself narrows the candidates greatly.
Yeah, for me, Aerosmith came up as my second thought, after Zeppelin, for some reason. Guitar-heavy, blues-based rock is what I think of as the epitome of classic rock.
OK, I’m going to throw Tom Petty into the mix. But I suppose he is at the end of the classic rock period. And is also sort of folk. The first concert I saw was opened by Heart. Then it was KISS. Everyone was there to see Heart.
That fits my mental model of “classic rock” pretty well. I’d put the time frame as starting in 1964 (the start of the British Invasion), and ending in 1990 or 1991 (the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind, and the rise of grunge rock). There are some classic rock artists (e.g., Aerosmith, Tom Petty) whose hits from 1991 and later do get play on the format, but those artists, themselves, were already well-established by then.
And, within that, I focused on the bands which (a) one will undoubtedly hear within an hour or so of turning on a “classic rock” radio station, and (b) would be conspicuous in their absence if a classic rock station did not strongly feature them.
Agreed; Bowie, Genesis, and Cooper all belong in the classic rock format, though for various reasons (Bowie’s experimentation and avant-garde periods, Genesis being prog-rock early and pop-rock later, and Cooper’s macabre, theatrical image) they don’t necessarily epitomize the core of the genre/format.
Of course Led Zeppelin had some excellent albums and the Rolling Stones are still rocking!
But this is the absolute epitome for me:
The Who - Won’t Get Fooled Again (Shepperton Studios / 1978) (youtube.com)
From the comments to the video:
7:37 to 7:56. Keith Moon’s drum solo, Roger Daltrey’s scream, Pete Townshend’s knee slide and John Entwistle’s backstep :). All in 20 seconds. What a band!
“We couldn’t make records as good as The Beatles, but we could blow them off the stage.” – John Entwistle
‘60s rock was a hydra. San Francisco was deliberately different from LA. British rock, despite the R&B records arriving in Liverpool first where the Beatles heard them, was a London-curated art form. East Coast rock was overloaded with the legacy of 50’s doo-wop, or latched onto the NY art scene. The Midwest, despite giving humanity Surfing Bird, was just a garage band factory. And Southern Rock considered itself the original item.
Jimi Hendrix unified all of them, and influenced virtually everything that came after
In my non-expert opinion, what is generally considered “Classic Rock” today denotes bands of the '80s. If there is one such band that can serve as their epitome, I’m not sure which band that is, but I probably don’t care for their music.
Cream predates Zeppelin in this regard by a couple years and both bands were part of the “Brit Invasion,” a notable sub-category of 1960s rock. Not saying they can’t be called “Classic Rock,” but I simply call them “the best.”
Bob Seger. Even when freshly released in the 70s, his music suddenly made the decade feel twenty years older, as if we were already living in the 1990s gazing back at our younger selves in nostalgia.