The Best Music of the 1960s, Minus the British Invasion Bands

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and we started talking about the music of the 1960s.   My friend is a couple of years older than me.   He was born in 1963, I was born in 1965.  Neither one of us was really aware  of what was going on musically in the 1960s because we were so young.   However we could look back from the vantage point of today  and decide which music came out of that decade still sounds great today.    Well, as I'm sure you can imagine - the music that kept coming up in our conversation was The Beatles.   And it is true, the music The Beatles created in the 1960s (not all of it - but a good portion of it)  still holds up today.    Then we started talking about the Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin.   All of them great bands that started their careers in the 1960s.   I could see my friend and I had similar taste.  We both thought that those British bands did some great work in the 1960s that still sounds good today.   So, I came up with a radical thought.  I said to my friend - why don't we experiment a bit??  Lets try to find American music made in the 1960s that still sounds great today.   Both of us really had to do some research.  Off of the top of our heads,   neither of us could come up with much of anything.    So, we studied and we came up with a list of songs created by American artists in the 1960s that still sound terrific today.    Even though I am going to numerically list the songs - there really is no order, in other words, #1 doesn't mean it's the best song, and the last song on the list doesn't mean it's the worst.  So here we go:


1. "Voodoo Child"  - Jimi Hendrix Experience
2. "Spinning Wheel" - Blood, Sweat and Tears
3. "Happy Together" - The Turtles
4. "Up, Up and Away" - The 5th Dimension
5. "Hot Fun in the Summertime"  Sly and the Family Stone
6. "Mrs. Robinson" - Simon and Garfunkel
7. "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" - Chicago
8. "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" - Frankie Valli
9. "One" - Three Dog Night
10. "Good Vibrations" - The Beach Boys
11. "Green Tambourine" - The Lemon Pipers
12. "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" - Marvin Gaye

These 12 songs are the best we could come up with in the category of American made music in the 1960s.  As with all lists though, it is subject to other opinions which are certainly welcome.  Can you come up with some American made music of the 1960s that is better???? 

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