Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

The 1970s: Rock’s Best Decade Since the Sixties

By Bob Wire, 4-13-11

	The Motor City Madman, before he went all right-wing and gun crazy. I preferred him in the 70s, when he was just regular crazy.

The last new band that really put ink in my Sharpie was Jet. Before that, it was the Black Crowes. That’s a long dry spell, but both those bands hit my sweet spot: the 1970s. Yeah, they’re both derivative as hell, but that’s the point: both bands have a firm grip on the musical idiom of the 1970s, the best and most productive decade in the history of rock and roll.

The Crowes hit the airwaves 20 years ago like a punch to the gut with a swaggering sound that completely ignored the current trends, which were dying gasps of hair metal and the nascent Northwest sludge that would coalesce a few years later into grunge. The Crowes played an unapologetic mash-up of the Stones, the Small Faces and lesser-known British pelvic rockers like Humble Pie and Slade. The big backbeat married to blues-riffing guitars and Chris Robinson’s raspy, braying vocals took me right back to the late Sixties and early Seventies, even though I’d been mostly listening to shit like the Cowsills and the Osmonds then. What can I say? I didn’t have a cool older or brother or sister to bequeath me all her Santana and Zeppelin LPs when she went off to college.

Jet was equally refreshing when they came out of left field (Australia) in 2003 with their debut, Get Born. They weren’t content to ape just the guitar boogie of the T-Rex or Rod Stewart; they ripped off the whole gamut from David Bowie to Elton John and every Brit rocker in between. Their lead howler had the best “Yeah!” this side of Paul Stanley, and he screamed it on almost every song. Get Born wasn’t some kind of pristine revival, it was the organic style that spewed forth from a bunch of twenty-year-olds who’d been steeped in the raw arena rock that was blasting from the shitty Jensen speakers of every Trans Am in America circa 1974. They nailed it. They must have had cool older brothers and sisters.

To my ears, Jet and the Black Crowes were equally revelatory: muscular, no-bullshit rock ‘n roll wearing skintight jeans and long greasy hair. A lot of hardcore Stones buffs grumbled about the obvious stylistic larceny, but the rest of us were content just to dig some new rock to put on between our Beggar’s Banquet and Exile on Main Street CDs. Besides, look at what else was topping the charts in 1990: Madonna, Sinead O’Connor, and some freak show called Deee-Lite. Not exactly the M-M-Monsters of Rock. I didn’t even know how to vogue. And what was hot in 2003 when Jet arrived? Korn? Limp Bizkit? Some other misspelled food? Your honor, the defense rests.

Which brings me back to my assertion that the 1970s was simply the best decade for rock. It’s a subjective sentiment, partly borne of my being the right impressionable age at the right time, but you can’t argue with the ground-breaking and timeless music that was produced during that ten years that stretched between the birth of heavy metal on Black Sabbath’s debut album to the elegy for Bon Scott (the lead singer who died from alcohol poising which, in rock, is known as “natural causes”) on AC/DC’s scajillion-selling Back in Black.

Of course I’m not taking credit for the music put out then, and I do have my favorites and guilty pleasures from every era of rock (I enjoy Mötley Crüe, even though I know they suck). I’m just acknowledging how lucky I was to spend my coming-of-age years during a time when rock and roll became rock. Music was waking up from the woozy-but-weighty haze of the Sixties, when rock and roll was actually being crafted as a change agent. The Sixties did give us a few of the biggest bands ever, but the Seventies had more of the biggest bands ever. The Beatles/Stones/Who triumvirate is a potent argument that the Sixties couldn’t be topped, but the artists who were in their prime in the Seventies were responsible for the lion’s share of rock’s maturity, development and growth. Of course, the Beatles singlehandedly accomplished the full arc of musical metamorphosis in the scant space of eight years, but they are pretty much the greatest band of any decade.

The Seventies actually began on December 5th, 1969, when the Rolling Stones released Let It Bleed, a dark and daring album hounded by the specter of death. Original Stone Brian Jones had drowned in a pool of his own water just six months prior, and the day after Let It Bleed’s release marked the horrific events at Altamont that slammed the door on the flower-child, peace-and-love Sixties that look so groovy and happy now through the Austin Powers lens of selective memory. It’s pretty much agreed among rock aficionados that Altamont was when rock ‘n roll lost its cherry.

As for me, I was losing mine in a sleeping bag in the woods of North Carolina as Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business” chirped out of a battery-powered Sears radio. Trust me, I didn’t even make it to the first chorus. Now every time that song comes on the classic rock station, I smile a wistful smile, and it moves a little.

If the Sixties were all protesty and dreamy and druggy, then the Eighties were synthetic, poppy and hairy. Rock has always been about hair, but never more than in the Eighties, when substance took a back seat to style in a big way. From the Aqua Net mushroom clouds of L.A.’s spandex metal scene to the swoop ‘n spike of punk and new wave after the death of disco, engineered and sculpted hair had more impact on poplar culture than did the music of this largely bereft decade.

The only truly great musicians to make their mark during the Reagan years were Prince, U2, the Police, R.E.M., and Michael Jackson. Bruce Springsteen enjoyed his biggest commercial success during that decade, but many fans would agree that his best, most powerful music is contained on his first four albums, all released before 1980. His masterpiece, Nebraska, is one exception. The other is Born In The USA, one of the few high-water marks of the decade, along with U2’s Joshua Tree, MJ’s Thriller, and Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction. All of these albums were game-changers, and I still listen to them today. But monster classics in the John Hughes decade were precious and few compared to output of the smokin’ Seventies.

What other ten-year span contains so many sea changes in rock music? The Eagles grabbed the baton from the Gram Parson and the Byrds and perfected country-rock. Fleetwood Mac took them one further by epitomizing the whole Southern California glossy pop-rock sound with their post-Peter Green monster album Rumours. Glam rock had guys wearing eyeliner and platforms, paving the glittery road for KISS. Hard rock was at its purest and most powerful thanks to Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Deep Purple and Ted Nugent.

As the U.S. moved into its third century, we endured disco, got spit in the face by punk, and oozed into the icy synths and electronic drums of New Wave, all in the space of about five years. So many of the bands from that decade still bring whoops and cheers when one of their songs comes into rotation at a party or ball game: Blondie. The Cars. The Clash. James Brown. Talking Heads. Styx. Dire Straits. Boston. Thin Lizzy. The Doobies. Allman Brothers. Stevie Wonder. ZZ Top. Steve Miller. ELO. Queen. Santana. Pink Floyd. Bob Seger. Billy Joel. The list goes on, especially if you’re watching one of those Time/Life infomercials.

The list from the Sixties is probably just as long, but there wasn’t nearly the depth to the roster. Tons of one-hit wonders sprung from that decade. And, to be fair, some great artists like the Doors, Dylan, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor got their start in the Sixties and continued to put out music in the Seventies, Eighties and beyond (not so much for the Doors, after Jim Morrison died in a hotel bathtub from natural causes). But they were big enough in the beginning to be branded as Sixties artists.

Although rock and roll was born in the Fifties, it had to grow clear through the Sixties before we got any real idea of its potential. The MTV ‘80s watered down the music by making the visual aspect disproportionately significant. And what about the Nineties? Or the Aughts? The vein of rock might still produce the occasional Nirvana or Pearl Jam or White Stripes, but that goldmine peaked in the Seventies and has been producing slowly ever since. Now rock is so fragmented, so specialized, that it would take a musical revolution of monumental proportions to approach anything as fertile, ground-breaking and lasting as the music of the Seventies. But if it happens, I’m all ears. Give me a tap on the head. I’ll be buried in my Koss headphones, listening to Dark Side of the Moon.

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