What Was the Greatest Era for Rock and Roll and Why

[BurtWorm]

This poll inspired by this paragraph in this book review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/books/review/05windolf.html

This music was the soundtrack of the author's teenage years in suburban England, and he still has great affection for it. "Being as impartial and detached here as possible," he writes, "it seems to me that the long 'aftermath' of punk running from 1978-84 was way more musically interesting than what happened in 1976 and 1977, when punk staged its back-to-basics rock 'n' roll revival." Just in case fans of rock's supposed golden age feel left out of this barroom argument, he also writes: "The postpunk era makes a fair match for the 60's in terms of the sheer amount of great music created, the spirit of adventure and idealism that infused it, and the way that the music seemed inextricably connected to the political and social turbulence of its era."

[Radical Activist]

1. Everyone knows rock reached perfection in 1974

As Homer Simpson would say.
Calling 70-74 the glitter/glam age doesn't seem to sum it up well. I think that's when a lot of rock bands started doing music with more depth and skill. A lot of great 60's bands did their best work in the early 70's.

[BurtWorm]

3. The titles of the ages are just meant to evoke memories

I suppose. I think of that as the Bowie, TRex, NY Dolls period. Of course it was also when Eric Clapton, John Lennon and George Harrison--even the Stones--"matured" for lack of a better word. But the new energy of the time was glitter and glam.

[Radical Activist]

6. The second category is what I think of

along with the Band, the Greatful Dead, and a lot of Soul artists doing much of their best work. I wasn't alive then so I wouldn't know what the feeling of the time was.

[Squeech]

7. Who?

I can think of two '60s greats whose '70s work is of comparable quality: the Who and Pink Floyd. (Maybe the Grateful Dead, if you're a really big fan of the Wake of the Flood/Mars Hotel/Blues for Allah era.)

The rest of them were either pale shadows of their former selves (Rolling Stones, Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, etc.), broken up (Beatles, Cream, Country Joe and the Fish), and/or a real important member was dead (Hendrix, Doors, Big Brother and the Holding Company).

[LynneSin]

2. Where is the grunge era

Although that would have been my second choice

[BurtWorm]

4. That's the "alternative" period.

If I'd had more than 10 choices I would have made a separate period for grunge, but as I only had 10, I decided to keep it with the alternative era, just because Nirvana is credited with making "alternative" "mainstream."

[underpants]

11. "OH THANK GOD"

One of my best friends when he heard Nirvana on the local RAWK station. Finally the hairband era was over.

[BurtWorm]

14. I almost called the era after post-punk Hairband

but I didn't want to unfairly eliminate it from the running, if you know what I mean.

[underpants]

35. Yeah so much great music in the 80's

Let's see there was GreatWhiteLionSnake with whatshername dancing on the cars

there was Yes putting out horrid earworms in one last "we have to buy their album they are Yes" cash checking excercise.

Van Halen-okay there WAS Van Halen which is a very good thing

Huey LEwis and the News (think about that one for a while)

The rise and fall of Phil Collins

Say Say Say

The rise of Whitney Houston

"get our of my dreams and into my car" <---- you could have just called the era THAT

Yeah lots to be remembered there.

[BurtWorm]

39. How could you forget Haircut 100?!

:wtf:

[underpants]

43. A-ha

GROUND BREAKING VIDEO!!!

[BurtWorm]

51. Flock of Seagulls!

Ground breaking haircuts!

[kwassa]

5. Early '70s was arena rock bands, too, not that they were good

Rock became big commercial business after Woodstock. Bombastic arena rock was very popular.

[BurtWorm]

9. It was also the era of Roxy Music, King Crimson, BeBob Deluxe

NY Dolls, Bowie, Flamin Groovies, Little Feat. You could make a case for its being a great era on the basis of those bands alone.

[kwassa]

15. Aside from Bowie, how much of this gets airplay these days?

How does it stand the test of time?

Little Feat, maybe.

Everybody had King Crimson's first album, but I never hear it now.v

[BurtWorm]

17. Maybe their time will come again.

There must have been some reason why people listened to that shit. ;)

[Capn Sunshine]

57. If you remember a Foghat concert ca. 1972

you weren't really there.
Dude.

[Ron Green]

8. The peak was just before Don Kirschner took it over.

What was that, 1970? Until then, it was alive and full of creativity, but far evolved from its roots of lame guitar playing and white-boy wannabe's. After the simulcast "Rock Concert" became a corporate-owned series, it's been all downhill from there.

Don't forget that in music as in many things, quality and popularity rarely exist together.

[ET Awful]

10. I'd be more likely to expand it a tad and call it 67-74 or so.

It just seems to me that that's when music went through it's broadest and must significant revolutions.

[BurtWorm]

12. I'm drawing the line at Woodstock/Altamont.

Traditionalist, I know, but I see that break pretty clearly myself. Before then was the flower child revolution. After then, the Nixon clamp/break/shake down.

[ET Awful]

13. Yes, but you had singer songwriters doing wonderful things like Jim Croce

and such who came after that time and, to my mind, deserve inclusion.

[BurtWorm]

16. But, I would argue, their energy was different.

Jim Croce, James Taylor, Carly Simon, etc., weren't about Revolution. It was a fairly more world-weary age (and artform).

[ET Awful]

22. But you didn't ask for uniformity of energy :)

I view them more as a natural progression from the folk-rock genre.

[Benfea]

18. Anything after the mid-80s, thank you very much.

I am sick to death of "classic rock" or anything that remotely smells like "classic rock."

[ET Awful]

19. Unfortunately, the vast majority of music made from the mid 70's onward

sucks harder than a Hoover.

There are some exceptions, but not many :P

[Benfea]

23. You are exactly, precisely wrong.

Anything before the mid 80s sucks harder than a black hole.

[kwassa]

27. Is there a good rock song made after 1985?

There actually was very few new ideas in rock after 1970.

There, I said it. Discuss it amongst yourselves.

[ET Awful]

30. You won't hear me argue.

There were a few bands that originated at that time and kept playing for many years after, but not a lot of new ideas.

There were a few new types of music that weren't "rock" that pushed some boundaries (and yes, I even like a lot of rap and even some electronic music).

But as far as rock goes, it became a re-hashed mess after the early 70's with a few folks here and there coming up with something cool and unusual (note that I'm not comparing these two to each other, but people like Bowie and Zappa both did some very new and creative stuff in the 70's).

[Benfea]

37. Plenty. No good ones before the mid 80s, though. -NT

[BurtWorm]

41. Non-Alignment Pact. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Abba Zaba.

Zig Zag Wanderer. Milkshake Mademoiselle. Teenage Head. Bodies.


That's scratching the surface.

[ET Awful]

28. Mmmmmhmmmm, how many of those 80's bands would exist

if not for the people that preceded them? I'll give you the hint, the answer is between -1 and 1.

[Benfea]

32. What's your point?

The "golden age" of rock 'n roll you refer to is nothing more than a bunch of young white guys imitating old black men, so what exactly was their contribution? Those old black men in turn owe a lot to jazz and ragtime (ragtime being the ultimate ancestor of modern American pop forms as it was the first to combine European melodic structures with African rythyms).

Hippy music—like country and western—is nothing more than a poor imitation of blues. Hell, even speed metal is more original and more satisfying than that.

[ET Awful]

33. Really?

I wasn't aware that say . . . Hendrix was a young white guy imitating an old black man.

Then again, neither were people like Jerry Garcia who was a young guy imitating old white guys and expanding on their ideas.

Speed metal is nothing but talentless hacks with three cords, a heavy-duty guitar pick and a Marshall stack.

People like Hendrix, Garcia, Kakounen, Cassady, made it possible for your "music" (as you call it) to exist.

Little clue for you - The majority of 80's bands were so lost in their own narcissism that they couldn't figure out how to play their instruments beyond their one hit wonder tracks that rendered them as forgettable as the New Kids on the Block.

[Benfea]

40. Great. So you were able to identify one drug-addled young black guy

…imitating young white guys imitating old black men. Your point?

Oh, that's right. You managed to bring up an even more drug-addled nitwit who couldn't do anything coherent if his life depended on it. There's a very good reason people had to do so many drugs in order to listen to (or make) stuff like that.

[ET Awful]

45. LMAO . . . you want to talk drug-addled? Let's talk Kurt Cobaine

who was so strung out on drugs that he blew his brains out. . . there's some real talent for you.

Or maybe Billy Corgan, want to talk about him? Or Bradley Nowell maybe? Layne Staley? Hillel Slovak?

Couldn't do anything coherent? I'm going to venture a guess that you've never actually LISTENED to the music.

Sorry, but someone who denigrates Hendrix is beyond help. Hendrix had more talent in his pinky than the vast majority of guitarists since.

[BurtWorm]

34. You make a very good case.

:toast:

I think it's not a good idea, though, to write off whole eras of music because representative forms of it don't appeal to you. Don't write off music from the 1960s until you've listened to Safe as Milk by Captain Beefheart or Supersnazz by Flamin Groovies and you still want to. And people who want to write off music from the 1980s as unoriginal should listen to Pere Ubu and PiL.

[Benfea]

38. You can't build a case around exceptions.

Since by definition, we're talking about generalities by era.

[BurtWorm]

46. However, these songs demonstrate the sort of energy going on

in those eras that you might miss if you think only of the surface.

By the way, could you name a few songs from after 1985 that have as much power as Anarchy in the UK, Diamond Dogs, Search and Destroy, etc., etc., etc...

[Squeech]

44. Wrong

Everything about your analysis is completely wrong.

Country and western as "hippy music"? You might want to run that by Jimmie Rodgers and Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn and Merle Haggard (who wrote "Okie From Muskogee" to bash the hippies) and...

The British Invasion era bands weren't imitating old black men, they were imitating the *young* black men who were their contemporaries: Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Otis Redding... And what was unique and cool about them was that they combined the R&B chord changes they didn't quite know with Church of England hymn singing and music hall sounds they'd grown up with. That's why the Beatles were so different from anything else.

Ragtime wasn't the first music to combine those strains, it was just the popular music of the era when the gramophone was invented, so we have recordings of it. There were hybrids before ragtime that we don't get to hear because the technology wasn't there. Ragtime had its impact on jazz, especially stride piano, but not so much on blues, because ragtime and jazz were played in the cities, while blues was the music of rural farm communities until the '50s (when the children of sharecroppers could escape and make their way to the factories around Detroit and Chicago).

[ET Awful]

47. Bingo. Well put Squeech.

Nice to see someone with some real knowledge of music history offer their input.

[Squeech]

50. Thank you

Just to clarify, I don't think stuff is brilliant just because it's old. (And I hope I don't think "classic rock" is classic just because it happens to be the music of my testosterone-soaked youth.) But I've been listening to rock since it was "'n roll," and-- with the occasional exception, say Pere Ubu or Tortoise-- I'm not hearing anything in the *form* that wasn't already there in 1968.

The technology moves on, of course, and the mere existence of the sequencer has changed popular music more than anything since Les Paul built a guitar made of solid wood with a pickup-- but it's not conceptually different music than Mick and Keith and Brian and Charlie and Bill were doing in 1965, and arguably it's a lot less compelling. Certainly it's less threatening to the status quo ante, which was a lot of its appeal back in the day. I pity you young whippersnappers who never got to hear rock music as a revolutionary act. (Well, maybe Sleater-Kinney...)

[BurtWorm]

20. "Classic rock" is a misnomer

and really does a disservice to the music, pulling it out of the context that gave it urgency and making it seem as sterile as a museum piece. Not to say that I can tolerate listening to nothing but Led Zeppelin, The Doors and Cream, but hearing "Strange Brew" for the first time coming out of stereo speakers in 1968 was a totally different experience from hearing it coming from a car radio for the 3,000th time in 2006.

[kwassa]

24. Or listening to "Jumpin' Jack Flash" whenever it came out

blasting down a country road about 80 mph with my best friends with the radio turned up and all the windows rolled down on a hot summers day. I thought I had reached perfection at that point.

It was the first time I heard that song and it is still fixed in my memory.

[Benfea]

26. You would listen to that song on PURPOSE?

Why?

[kwassa]

29. The Rolling Stones are the greatest rock band ever.

and this is one of their best songs.

[ET Awful]

31. The oldest, yes, but the best . . . nah.

:P

They had some GREAT stuff in the early years (and agreed, that is a very good song of theirs), but after the mid-70's, they went WAY downhill.

[Benfea]

42. That may indeed be their best song...

…which really isn't saying much.

[Benfea]

25. Meh. That kind of thing goes on all the time.

Remember "new wave" in the 80s?

"New wave" is an industry term for the emergence of a new genre or subgenre. The name of the "new wave" genre thus tells you nothing about the genre itself, and now the industry has to scramble to find a new word to use for that particular phenomenon.

[ghostsofgiants]

56. I have excellent news for the world...

There is no such thing as new wave. It does not exist. It's, uh, it's a figment of a lame cunt's imagination. There was never any such thing as new wave. It was the polite thing to say when you were trying to explain you were not into the boring old rock n' roll but you didn't dare to say 'punk' because you were afraid to get kicked out of the fucking party and they wouldn't give you coke anymore. There is new music, there is new underground sound, there is noise, there is punk, there is power pop, there is ska, there is rockabilly but new wave doesn't mean shit.

[XemaSab]

21. 6 months in late 1991

:headbang:

[rppper]

55. more than 6 months....90 through 93....good years....

guns and roses put out the use your illusion lp's....there is some great music on those discs....louder than love by soundgarden came out and alice in chains put out their 1st record...white zombie, ministry....metal was morphing into something different...hair bands were dieing out....helmet made a couple of great albums, tool had just come out...rock had a good punk/metal sound going on...the age of the guitar solo was closing. lots of the original grrrl bands, like L7, were geting big. off-shoot bands like cracker were making good rock....a lot of one hit wonders i recall, but the music was fresh then...they are still re-hashing the early 90's sound in singers like gavin degraw and 3 doors down today.

[last_texas_dem]

36. Too hard to say, really

If I had to pick my ideal "decade" of rock it would probably be, say, 1965-1974 or so. Just those ten years are encompass such a wide range of styles and developments in sound. It's hard to think of any other period of ten years in the history of rock with that much variety of good stuff coming out. But it would be hard for me to break it down much further than that. The greatness of late sixties rock is rarely disputed, but I love early seventies stuff, too, and not just stuff by the few critically-respected bands/artists who were releasing music then.

[taterguy]

48. 1983-1993

Because that's when I was 16-26 and attended the majority of rock shows I've been to. I suspect most people feel that way but that's just a guess. If anyone got to see a better show than the Golden Palominos in 1986 and 1987 then color me envious.

[ghostsofgiants]

49. I had to go with '79 to '84.

Most of my favourite older albums came from that era.

[BurtWorm]

52. Ah...ah...ah...AH-

CHOO!

:kick:

[BurtWorm]

53. CHOOOOOOOOOO!

[Rabrrrrrr]

54. The Progressive Era

[leftofthedial]

58. '67 - '74 (inclusive)

then shit happened

But that was an incredible, unbelievable 8 years

[Initech]

59. I have to go with now.

Think about it - the combination of internet downloads, Myspace, iPods, XM, Sirius satellite radios, and free-form college radio have opened up an entirely new, genre-less and anti-commercial kind of music.

Today, finding new bands is almost as much of an experience as it is listening to them. Also with multi-media, concerts have become major audio / visual experiences.