Start me up

Recently I was reading a blog where "Welcome to the Jungle" was put forth as the best first album track-one of all time. It's not bad, but I don't think it would crack my top five. Which got me thinking about what I would put up there. Here are some nominees I had, in no particular order:

Led Zeppelin, "Good Times Bad Times"
Kick-ass. Possibly one of Zeppelin's ten best songs, period; for all the different styles they tried and as great as a lot of their more "experimental" stuff could be, for my money they were just drop-dead awesome at the basics of rocking. (See also: "Communication Breakdown.")

The Beatles, "I Saw Her Standing There"
"One two three fah!" In my rankings this is the best song the Beatles put on an album until 1965, and it was the opening track of their very first LP. And since it's a Beatles song, you know it's an all-time classic.

The Doors, "Break On Through (to the Other Side)"
Although they put out fully six studio LPs between 1967 and 1971, the Doors easily peaked in front-to-back quality with their first one, which contains probably three of their five most famous songs, including this one. There's really never been another band that sounded quite like the Doors did on their first album, and this was the song that introduced the world to it.

Boston, "More Than a Feeling"
You could argue this one, I suppose; Boston, to some degree, only has this one album, and while "More Than a Feeling" is a pretty good song, it may not be the all-time classic that some of these songs are. But it at least deserves a place in this narrow discussion.

Cream, "I Feel Free"
Perhaps an unfair comparison with many of the rest of these, as Cream was a fully-functioning supergroup even in 1966. All four of their albums have all-time classic songs on them, but "I Feel Free" is certainly one of the five best they did, and they had the sheer balls to open with it.

U2, "I Will Follow"
Not everyone loves U2, and Boy is a more forgettable album than stuff like The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, but even those who think U2 is a really overrated band, particularly in the last decade, should be willing to admit that for a first song by a group that formed as a cover band in Dublin just four years earlier (famously, before most of the band members were particularly proficient with their chosen instruments), the driving rock of "I Will Follow" is pretty great.

It's also interesting to think about the songs that don't qualify because they came off a second album that just happened to be the first one the artist actually got known for. Take "Blowin' in the Wind," for example, which would be a strong contender for #1 on this list... except that The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was Dylan's second album, following 1962's self-titled album which today is almost entirely forgotten (and not without reason; Dylan's two-disc "Essential" album, released late in his career, contains no tracks from that first album but two from Freewheelin'). 1970's Elton John leads with "Your Song," but his first solo album was 1969's Empty Sky, which, according to All Music Guide, contains no "forgotten gems." Other bands still put what turned out to be their first album's seminal song in a position other than the opener; "My Generation" is track six even though it gives The Who's first album its name, and "American Girl," which I always loved as the opener to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Greatest Hits album, is the last track on Petty's debut.

Pull out "More Than a Feeling" and you might have my top five, though it's of course tempting to include personal favorites like The New Pornographers' "Mass Romantic," Ben Folds Five's "Jackson Cannery," Fountains of Wayne's "Radiation Vibe," and The Killers' "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine."

Did I leave out any supreme classics? What would be your top two or three or five?