THE 1970s. The decade where rock giants laid the foundations for some of the heaviest music around.
Black Sabbath invented an entire genre, while the likes of Kiss, Priest and AC/DC would take rock music to some of its greatest heights
MUCH OF WHAT happened amid the hard rock and metal scene of the 1970s was forged upon flashiness. It was all about who could play the loudest, longest and fastest. Arguably the decade’s biggest and most influential band, Led Zeppelin forged a career founded upon excess in just about any category that you could name, performing lavishly overblown concerts that lasted for anything up to three and a half hours and travelling the world on their own private plane, while their fearsome manager Peter Grant carved up the industry, cutting unprecedented deals with record companies and promoters to ensure that even more dollars ended up in the pockets of his artists.
Like Zeppelin, Black Sabbath’s career had also begun during the previous decade, but the 1970s saw them record some of the biggest-selling and most important releases of the era. Though they would crash-land with the below-par album Never Say Die! and the sacking of Ozzy Osbourne, the reinvigorated Sabs returned the following decade with Ronnie James Dio at the mic to force a fascinating rivalry with their ex-singer, whose own solo career was destined to prove stratospheric.
Another English band, Deep Purple, shared in the domination of the first half of the 70s before drugs and infighting consumed them. Birmingham’s own Judas Priest were also born in the late 1960s, and although their biggest triumphs came while conquering America during the
Sabbath recorded Some of the era’s most important releases
mid-80s, Rob Halford and company made some of the most glorious heavy metal of the 1970s, their leather and studs image every bit as vital as albums such as Stained Class,
Killing Machine and the in-concert masterpiece, Unleashed In The East.
With economies struggling and everyday life becoming more and more drab, pretty soon everyone and their dog wanted to be a rock star – on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Americans added image-consciousness and market awareness to the job description. Alice Cooper was the super-villain of 1972; when the US shock rocker arrived to play his first British concerts, morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse attempted to have the singer and his band banned. A delighted Alice sent her flowers. “We were thinking, ‘Thank you. You’ve helped us to sell out Wembley and get to Number One,’” he said.
Kiss ramped things up further still. By the time of their double live album, Alive II, in 1976, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons had a show that simply boggled the mind, involving more explosives than a military battle, an elevating drum riser, twin platforms that raised the guitarist and bassist out and above their audience, 20-foot-tall flamethrowers and a guitar that fired rockets into the sky.
New kids on the block Van Halen would mobilise a different type of flashiness. Eddie Van Halen revolutionised guitar playing with his finger-tapping style, while David Lee Roth took the role of fronting a hard rock band to previously unexpected, peacock-inspired extremes. Released in 1978, their self-titled debut included EVH’S showcase Eruption and turned the musical world on its head.
However, some of the decade’s biggest bands just concentrated on keeping things simple. A hard-driving fusion of rock’n’roll, hard rock and steampacket blues served to make Australia’s AC/DC unique via a sequence of electrifying releases such as High Voltage, Let There Be Rock and Powerage. With their lead singer, Bon Scott, at the peak of his game, the band’s Highway To Hell album pushed them into the Premier League of rock music. Scott would die in February 1980, but against the odds AC/DC pushed on with replacement Brian Johnson on vocals to become one of that decade’s defining and biggest-selling acts.