60s Rock
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50 free 60s Rock trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rock music changed faster in the 1960s than in any decade before or since. It began with surf instrumentals and three-chord garage singles, was turned upside down by the British Invasion, and ended with festival crowds the size of cities, ambitious concept albums and amplifiers louder than anyone had heard before. This quiz covers the whole story: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Beach Boys, the folk singers who plugged in, the San Francisco psychedelic scene, and the heavier bands that pointed the way to the 1970s. Expect questions on famous riffs and album sleeves, on Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont, and on the studio tricks, stage stunts and odd stories behind the band names. The opening questions are ones most music fans can reach, and the later ones reward listeners who know their B-sides. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will pick up a story or two even when you guess. It works as a solo challenge, a pub quiz round or a warm-up for a sixties night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which garage rock hit by the Kingsmen did the FBI investigate in the 1960s, hunting for obscene lyrics?
Louie Louie
Louie Louie was cleared when the FBI laboratory ruled the slurred vocal impossible to interpret. The real words are a lovesick sailor's lament about getting home to his girl.
Q 02Which folk duo hit number one in 1966 after a producer secretly added electric guitar and drums to an acoustic track?
Simon & Garfunkel
Simon & Garfunkel had drifted apart after a flop debut album when producer Tom Wilson remixed The Sound of Silence. Simon, playing small clubs in Denmark, learned of the hit from a copy of Billboard.
Q 03Which guitarist ended his set at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival by setting his instrument on fire?
Jimi Hendrix
Jimi Hendrix set the guitar alight at the end of a 45-minute set. The trick was born in London months earlier, when a journalist urged him to outdo the instrument-smashing stage show of the Who.
Q 04Which songwriter was booed at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival after plugging in an electric guitar?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan played his first concert with electric instruments that night, backed by members of a Chicago blues band. Witnesses have long disagreed over whether the crowd booed the amplifiers or the poor sound and short set.
Q 05Which Beatle did a 1969 rumor claim had died in a car crash and been replaced by a look-alike?
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney was said to have been swapped for the winner of a look-alike contest, with clues hidden on album covers. The craze faded after Life magazine printed an interview with him that November.
Q 06Which band, cast by television producers for a 1966 NBC sitcom, later fought to play on their own records?
The Monkees
The Monkees sang over session musicians on their first two albums, the second issued without their knowledge. After a brief power struggle they gained full control over their recordings in 1967.
Q 07Which singer revived his career with a 1968 NBC television special, performing in a black leather suit?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley had been steered into films and kept off the road by his manager for years. The network wanted a Christmas special, but the director built a raw concert for a younger audience instead.
Q 08Which English singer's label rushed out Space Oddity in July 1969 to cash in on the Apollo 11 mission?
David Bowie
David Bowie's single came out five days before Apollo 11 launched. The BBC then stopped playing the song, about an astronaut adrift, until the crew were safely home.
Q 09Which London band got the distorted guitar sound of You Really Got Me from a speaker sliced with a razor blade?
The Kinks
The Kinks' lead guitarist cut up the speaker cone of his little Elpico amp out of frustration and loved the growl it made. The 1964 riff went on to shape heavy metal and punk.
Q 10Which Beatles album cover shows the band walking across a zebra crossing outside their London studio?
Abbey Road
Abbey Road's cover was shot in ten minutes while a policeman held up the traffic. The building, then called EMI Studios, took the album's name in 1976.
Q 11Which Sunday night variety hour drew 73 million viewers for the Beatles' first live American TV performance in 1964?
The Ed Sullivan Show
The Ed Sullivan Show normally drew about 21 million viewers, so the audience more than tripled that night. It was a record for American television that stood for three years.
Q 12Which producer, often called the fifth Beatle, made comedy records before signing the band to Parlophone?
George Martin
George Martin ran EMI's Parlophone label, where his acts included Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. He went on to work closely on every one of the Beatles' original albums.
Q 13Which string instrument did George Harrison play on Norwegian Wood in 1965, a first for a Western rock record?
Sitar
Q 21Which group guarded the stage at the Rolling Stones' free Altamont concert, which ended in a fatal stabbing?
Hells Angels
Hells Angels were asked to ring the low stage and, by some accounts, were paid with $500 worth of beer. Meredith Hunter, 18, was killed in a scuffle with them during the Stones' set.
Q 22Which 1966 Beach Boys album did Brian Wilson create as his answer to the Beatles' Rubber Soul?
Pet Sounds
Pet Sounds closes with Wilson's own dogs barking as a train goes by. He had told his wife he would make the greatest rock album ever, after Rubber Soul struck him as a record with no filler.
Q 23Which 1966 Beach Boys single took seven months and four Hollywood studios to record?
Good Vibrations
The sitar first crossed Harrison's path in April 1965 on the set of the Beatles film Help!. John Lennon then asked him to add it to the song.
Q 14Which Rolling Stones founder drowned in his swimming pool in July 1969, weeks after leaving the band?
Brian Jones
Brian Jones had been dismissed less than a month earlier from the group he helped to start. His Sussex farmhouse had once been the home of A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Q 15Which 1968 Beatles single ran for over seven minutes and ends with a singalong coda lasting four of them?
Hey Jude
Hey Jude began as a song to comfort John Lennon's five-year-old son Julian while his parents were splitting up. It was the longest single to top the British charts up to that time.
Q 16Which Texas-born singer shot to fame at Monterey in 1967 fronting Big Brother and the Holding Company?
Janis Joplin
Janis Joplin grew up in the Gulf Coast town of Port Arthur. Her San Francisco band was little known before the festival, and the concert film that followed helped launch her as a star.
Q 17Which hard rock band, first billed as the New Yardbirds, did guitarist Jimmy Page put together in 1968?
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin had to drop the old name after a former bandmate sent a cease and desist letter. The new one is said to come from a joke that the group would go down like a lead balloon.
Q 18Which Los Angeles band took its name from the title of an Aldous Huxley book on psychedelic experience?
The Doors
The Doors borrowed their name from The Doors of Perception, a title Huxley had himself taken from a line by the poet William Blake.
Q 19Which 1969 rock opera tells of a deaf, dumb and blind boy who becomes a spiritual leader?
Tommy
Tommy gained its best-known song late in the sessions, when Pinball Wizard was written to win a kind review from a critic who loved pinball.
Q 20Which pop artist managed the Velvet Underground and designed the banana on the cover of their 1967 debut album?
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol made the band the house act at his studio, the Factory, and helped pay for the recording sessions. Early copies of the sleeve let buyers peel the banana's skin off as a sticker.
Good Vibrations used up more than 90 hours of tape over about 20 sessions, when most pop singles took two days. Its eerie whistling line comes from an Electro-Theremin, played by the instrument's inventor.
Q 24Which guitarist of the Yardbirds and Cream was hailed as God in graffiti sprayed on a London wall in the 1960s?
Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton earned the tribute from an unknown admirer in Islington after his spells with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. His nickname Slowhand was a pun on the slow handclaps he drew while changing a broken string.
Q 25Which English band topped the British and American charts in 1964 with The House of the Rising Sun?
The Animals
The Animals recorded the song in a single take in May 1964. A traditional folk ballad played by an electric band, it has been described as the first folk rock hit.
Q 26Which Los Angeles band popularized folk rock in 1965 with a jangling twelve-string cover of Mr. Tambourine Man?
The Byrds
The Byrds mostly just sang on their debut single: only Roger McGuinn played, on a Rickenbacker, beside the hired Los Angeles session players known as the Wrecking Crew.
Q 27Which band led by John Fogerty sang of bayous and the Mississippi despite coming from the San Francisco Bay Area?
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Creedence Clearwater Revival knew the South mostly second-hand: its members met at junior high in El Cerrito, California. They spent years as the Golliwogs, a name they hated from the start.
Q 28Which singer quit the Great Society in 1966 for Jefferson Airplane, taking White Rabbit and Somebody to Love with her?
Grace Slick
Grace Slick was asked to join when the Airplane's first singer left to raise her child. She said she switched because the new band was run in a professional manner, unlike her old one.
Q 29Which San Francisco band, first called the Warlocks, became the house band at Ken Kesey's Acid Tests in 1965?
Grateful Dead
Grateful Dead was a phrase Jerry Garcia picked out of a dictionary after the band learned that another group called the Warlocks had already put out a record.
Q 30Which London band released The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, then lost songwriter Syd Barrett to mental illness?
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd got its name from two bluesmen in Barrett's record collection, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Barrett left the group in 1968 as his mental health declined.