Metallica is absolutely wild. This is a band whose last six albums—new studio albums of all new material, released in the 2010s—have debuted at #1 on the Billboard albums chart, tying them in a beautiful improbability knot with Dave Matthews Band.

This folk-rock supergroup fought, broke up, and reunited enough times and ways to make Fleetwood Mac’s heads spin. Each member had a back catalog with at least one other group, and each brought ambitions and ideas whose reach exceeded the grasp of those other gigs.

The English band synthesized the sounds of the first wave of British Invasion bands into an intricate and massively loud new subgenre. Then they began to fall apart.

Like the iconic rainbow prism from Dark Side of the Moon, the English band broke homogeneous popular rock music into a dazzling and beautiful array of parts.

The Eagles are an enigma. They’re both a massive cultural joke and one of the bestselling bands in the world to this day. And their reputation as great white temper babies, earned with public fights and a rotating-door lineup, was so vital to the band’s image that they named their 1994 reunion album Hell Freezes Over.

This spring, you can see the Rolling Stones in their 55th year of touring. The cheapest tickets for the opening show in Miami are nearly $300, and the cheapest tickets at the closing shows in Chicago are also nearly $300, excluding the spaceship upper-atmosphere deck of Soldier Field, which is about $250. And those are just the nosebleeds.

Famous now as the shallow and demispiritual leader of the Parrotheads, Jimmy Buffett also wrote some of the most beautiful and substantial songs of the late 20th century. He lived in various places, flirted with several colleges around the Gulf before getting a degree in history, and worked both as a yachtie and as a music journalist very early in his career.

The commercial heyday of Fleetwood Mac came in the late 1970s, but the band had a long life and rotating cast long before and after that time. I’ve picked 11 songs from that 50-year period as exemplars of the shifting notion and long narrative of Fleetwood Mac.