Use Your Illusion-era Guns N’ Roses is sometimes invoked as a shorthand for absurd rock excess, financial, chemical and musical. Most of those charges stick, sure, but then you get a song like “November Rain,” which encompasses a grand, orchestral rock ballad, a pummelling baroque outro, and not one but two truly world-class guitar solos from Slash. You need an ego as big as Axl Rose’s to even swing for something like this, and you definitely need one of that size to pull it off. With a song this genuinely epic, the music video’s helicopter budget was absolutely money well spent.
2. Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row” (11:21)
Most of the other songs here are artful, ambitious multi-part affairs. Not so for Bob Dylan. He had enough good verses—10 of ‘em—to run “Desolation Row” for more than 11 minutes if he sang them back to back. So he decided to do exactly that. And it works—boy, does it work. Like a lyrical magpie, he drags in characters high and low, real and imagined, into his surreal montage: Cinderella, Romeo, Cain and Abel, Einstein (“disguised as Robin Hood”), and a squabbling Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, among many others. Dylan’s driving guitar and weirdly mesmerizing vocal keep us hooked, as does the way each verse finds a way to end back on Desolation Row itself.
1. Led Zeppelin, “Stairway to Heaven” (8:02)
Is it purely coincidental that we’ve set the time threshold at eight minutes, given “Stairway to Heaven,” the shortest track on this list, only just clears that hurdle? Perhaps not. But not only is it a very, very good long song by a band that recorded quite a few of them—for many it is the platonic ideal of the long song. The stately acoustic intro, the arrangement slowly ramping up in the middle, the guitar solo—that fucking guitar solo—and the headbanging hard rock final section: it all showed that rock music could be more than three-minute riffs; that it could aspire to the ambition and grandeur of classical symphonies. If that isn’t worth eight minutes of your time, then nothing is.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
