Oh man...the drug called nostalgia is running high. It’s pretty telling that the window of "greatest music ever" is limited to one decade of their life. It’s as if Boomers are ashamed of all the great music they grew up listening to as kids and teens. And then decided to fossilize their listening catalog in vinyl amber. That decade had a lot of throw-away pop and rock music and was just as disposable as any other. I’m trying to imagine the Beatles and Stones never bothering to listen to any new music. Imagine they just sat at home and only listened to BBC broadcasts instead of discovering Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Robert Johnson, Elmore James, the lyrical disposability of Leib and Stoller, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Sam Cooke, etc, etc.
I’m a Gen-Xer and I absolutely don’t think that decade was the greatest ever. It was top notch but not the greatest as it implies that nothing great existed before or since. My parents ran a record store in the 70s and 80s and I grew up listening to all genres and time frames of music. I grew up listening to jazz greats from the 40s, 50s and 60s, Delta blues, R&B and rockabilly from the 50s (an era of music for which the artists the OP lists drew all their inspiration from), 60s R&B, 70s progrock and album rock, and then on to influential genres of the late 70s punk, garage, krautrock, funk, disco, industrial and electronic music, reggae, dub, early DJ culture. 80s power pop, new wave, synthpop, 90s industrial, grunge, rap, EDM, etc., etc.
GenX has 40+ years of great music and influential artists that sadly you may never know the aural pleasures of because you stop listening to music made after 1974. I feel bad for anyone who never opens up their listening ears to new genres and artists. The beauty of music is discovering the new. Sure I can put the Drifters or the Cadillacs box set I have on or replay Let It Bleed or Rubber Soul for the 10,000 time and enjoy music from my childhood but I can also put on some New Pornographers, Calexico, Depeche Mode, Broken Social Scene, Radiohead, Winton Marsalis, Anders Osborne, Bjork, or Richard H. Kirk and further my listening experiences.