Music Magazine Classic Rock Special: Legends of the 70s Fourth Edition Back Issue

The music of the 70s is a bit like the moon landings. Sure, the first one happened in the 60s – but there were twice as many in the 70s. More people did it, they did it for longer, and you couldn’t help but think it’d last forever. (It didn’t, of course – but the music of the 70s did at least last longer than manned lunar landings: the last man to walk on the moon did so in December, 1972.) In the 70s, rock music was unstoppable. Alice Cooper once said that the 60s and 70s “were kind of a breeding ground for exciting new sounds, because easy listening and folk were kind of taking over the airwaves… It was a natural next step to take that blissful, easy-going sound and strangle the life out of it.” Certainly, the musicians of the 70s looked at this music that had been invented in the 60s and took it to extremes. Hendrix, Morrison and Joplin were dead. The Beatles split. It was time for a new generation. Heavy metal, arguably born with Black Sabbath’s debut in 1969, took a template established by Cream and Zeppelin and made it louder, darker, meaner. Prog rock smashed boundaries like they weren’t nuthin’. Glam rock wham-bammed and thank-you ma’am’d a uniquely 70s take on rock’n’roll. And then there were all the other genres influencing rock itself: funk, jazz, country, disco, soul, folk, krautrock. (Just listen to David Bowie’s 70s output to see the impact those all had.) The innocent, whimsical 60s were over. Rock music was a business now. Album-oriented rock. Concept albums. International tours. Superstars. Rock gods. Guitar heroes. And everything that came with all that: money, cocaine, groupies – organised excess on a massive scale. It couldn’t last. At the decade’s end, along came punk rock, undermining the decade’s new gods and breaking rock into its component parts (“This is a chord... Now form a band” etc), and setting up the music for the next decade perfectly...