Jeff Beck This Blows

The Top 100 '60s Rock Albums represent the moment when popular music came of age. In the earliest part of the decade, bands were still regularly referencing earlier sounds and themes. By the middle, something powerful and distinct was happening, which is why the latter part of the '60s weighs so heavily on our list. A number of bands evolved alongside fast-emerging trends of blues rock, folk rock, psychedelia and hard rock, adding new complexities to the music even as the songs themselves became more topical. If there's a thread running through the Top 100 '60s Rock Albums and this period of intense change, it has to do with the forward-thinking artists who managed to echo and, in some cases, advance the zeitgeist. Along the way, legends were made.

Roger Waters was Pink Floyd's grand conceptualist, the driving force behind such albums as Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall. In the wake of Syd Barrett's departure, Waters emerged as a formidable songwriter, but it's this stretch of '70s albums – each one nearly symphonic in its reach – that established him as a distinctive, idiosyncratic voice within rock and, following his departure from Floyd in 1985, he continued to create new works in this vein (notably, 1992's Amused to Death) and capitalized on the enduring popularity of his old band by staging live revivals of Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall in their entireties…