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Home , Alan McGee, Andy Fraser, British rock music, Charles Shaar Murray, Count Five, Glam punk

THE BIRTH OF 1964-9

Charles Shaar Murray

Hard rock born in spaces too small to contain it, birthed and midwifed by youths simultaneously exhilarated by the prospect of emergent new freedoms and frustrated by the slow pace of their development, and delivered with equipment which had never been designed for the tasks to which it was now applied.

Hard rock was the sound of systems under stress, of energies raging against confnement and constriction, of forces which could not be contained, merely harnessed. It was defned only in retrospect, because at the time of its inception it did not even recognise itself. The musicians who played the frst ‘hard rock’ and the audiences who crowded into the small clubs and ballrooms of early Britain to hear them, thought they were playing something else entirely.

In other words, hard rock was – like itself – a historical accident. It began as an earnest attempt by British kids in the 1960s, most of whom were born in the 1940s and raised and acculturated in the 1950s, to play American music, drawing on , soul, R&B, and frst-generation rock, but forced to reinvent both the music, and its world, in their own image, resulting in something entirely new.

However, hard rock was neither an only child, nor born fully formed. It shared its playpen, and many of its toys, with siblings (some named at the time and others only in retrospect) like R&B, , , art-rock and folk-rock, and it emerged only gradually from the intoxicating stew of myriad infuences that formed the musical equivalent of primordial soup in the uniquely turbulent years of the second (technicolour!) half of the 1960s.

The heyday of frst-generation hard rock began in the autumn of 1964 with the release of its defning single: by . It was reinforced a few months later with the arrival of ’s debut single, I Can’t Explain, which was directly inspired by You Really Got Me’s central innovation: an angular, nagging, driving, endlessly repeated played in ‘power chords’ (made up entirely of the root note and its ffth) performed on a savagely, snarlingly overdriven electric . later, the advent of heavy metal, signalled by the release of the frst , and punk’s frst gleaming in the form of the debut album by The Stooges, made the hard rock of The Kinks, The Who and their successors seem almost mainstream and genteel by comparison.

The Kinks – from Muswell Hill in North – were one of dozens, if not hundreds, of small-time early-’60s bands infatuated with who emerged in the wake of , the frst to attain national prominence and signpost an alternative to the ‘Merseybeat’ bands following in the slipstream of ’ transformation of British pop. The Northern bands’ tradition, exemplifed by The Beatles, The Searchers and, from , suckled thirstily from both (and other classic early rockers like , The Everly Brothers and ) and (not to mention Brill Building/girl-group pop) and specialised in clean, precise vocal harmonies over tight, neat but nevertheless driving guitar-based backdrops.

The blues-oriented bands (mostly from Southern , notwithstanding the excellence and popularity of from Newcastle and – starring infant prodigy Stevie Winwood – from ) were more likely to place their emphasis on a single lead voice and/or a spectacular lead . They classifed their music as ‘R&B’ (), sharing the Merseybeaters’ adoration of Chuck Berry but, initially, focussed primarily on urbanised blues (lionising -based stars like , Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and , and Detroit’s John Lee Hooker) and the proto-soul of , and Solomon Burke.

The R&B scene based itself in a club circuit inherited from the jazz world, and the bands were crewed by an assortment of musicians from a variety of scenes: refugees from rock, pop, jazz and even folk rubbed shoulders with the hardcore bluesers, with R&B as the lingua franca spoken in common by the various tribes. It is, somehow, splendidly appropriate that on the very day when the frst classic hard rock single ofcially reached the Number One spot in the UK pop charts, the group who’d made it were playing a show, booked long previously, at one of London’s premier jazz clubs. The queue to see The Kinks play the tiny , in London’s West End, stretched a full couple of blocks down Oxford Street.

The common ground shared by the Merseybeaters and the R&B groups was ’50s rock in general and Chuck Berry in particular, whose were recorded by both Beatles and Stones as well as by The Kinks, , The Animals, The and a multitude more. However, The Animals – like , another blues-based of the era who successfully straddled the pop/R&B borderline – favoured the organ, rather than the guitar, as their primary instrumental soloing voice. The hard rock strain which emerged from UK R&B celebrated the absolute primacy of the guitar. Specifcally: the guitar RIFF.

Why it was the -based bands who ended up blazing this particular path, rather than their white American contemporaries, is relatively straightforward. First of all, white blues wannabes in the US, particularly those fortunate enough to be located in — say — Chicago, Memphis or , were able to gain access to, and in some cases – like Paul Butterfeld and Mike Bloomfeld in Chicago or in Texas – be actually mentored by, their authentic blues heroes. The result was that their imitations of the music of Muddy Waters or sounded far more like the ‘real thing’ than did the work of The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Pretty Things or The Kinks. Physically separated from their source material by thousands of miles of land and water, and culturally distanced by nationality and history as well as by race, the British bands were forced to replace what they didn’t know or couldn’t understand with what they were able to invent. The resulting creative misunderstandings, based around lyrics they could only partially decipher, a social milieu then but scantily documented and a few album liner notes flled with hyperbole and misinformation – plus the occasional meeting with visiting blues stars – resulted in the invention of something entirely new.

The second major factor differentiating the British and American white blues boys was that the British bands, either signed in the wake of the Stones’ breakthrough to the major UK record labels like EMI, Decca, Philips-Fontana or Pye, or else trying to achieve that enviable status, were expected to function as pop groups and create potential hit singles. By contrast, white American blues bands, like Paul Butterfeld’s or ’s, recorded for folk-based labels like Elektra or Vanguard, for whom the prospect of hit singles was barely on the radar.

In other words, the Brit bands needed driving, catchy songs , with ear-grabbing vocal or instrumental hooks (preferably both), and unusual sounds to make their records stand out from everybody else’s on the radio. Some they either bought in or adapted from classic repertoires – the Stones were late starters as composers and enjoyed their frst few hits by adapting The Beatles’ I Wanna Be Your Man into the style of and ’s Not Fade Away into the style of Bo Diddley, not to mention borrowing It’s All Over Now from ’s group The Valentinos; The Yardbirds’ frst couple of real hits came off-the-peg from , later of – but the defning pioneer hard rock bands, The Kinks and The Who, rolled their own pretty much from the start. Each of those bands contained one of the greatest of their era: The Kinks had at their creative helm and The Who had .

If the British hard rock of the mid-1960s had a single midwife, it would be an expatriate American named (b 1941), the most celebrated aspect of whose varied career being that he recorded The Kinks, The Who and the Great Lost Band who should have completed hard rock’s founding Holy Trinity but never achieved the success and impact they deserved: The Creation. Those early recordings form the basis for much of the hard rock which followed.

“I think it was the putting [of World War II] behind everybody,” Talmy later opined. “Rationing had fnally gone, you had a group of disenchanted and, in their opinion, disenfranchised kids aged 14, 15, 16 and listening to American music. Because English music sucked. And the whole thing just exploded.” Ray Davies wrote You Really Got Me on the in the front room of the Davies family home, stabbing out that insistent two-chord riff in two-fnger chords. His guitarist brother Dave, at 17 fve years Ray’s junior, transferred the riff to guitar, playing it through a tiny, battered 5-watt amp, its natural propensity for when cranked to the max exaggerated by the holes Dave had poked into the speaker’s cone with a knitting needle. The brothers’ band, The Kinks, were signed to , but their frst two singles – one a cover of Little Richard’s , the other an embryonic Ray Davies composition – had both dismally fopped, so if they stood any chance of holding on to their record deal, their third single absolutely had to be a hit.

Their frst attempt to record it did not go well. Talmy’s production was too clean: it failed to capture the raw, roaring aggression the Davies brothers wanted. Money was borrowed to record it again, and the second time around they nailed it. The result was absolutely defnitive. Hard rock was born.

One person on whom the record made an especial impact was Pete Townshend. Talmy had seen the still-unsigned Who and was intrigued by them, but they needed a . Townshend had one, which he had recorded as a home demo. “I Can't Explain … was a kind of meets thing, with me whining away with an ,” Townshend subseqentIy recalled. “I later revamped the song as more Kinks-like when I heard their producer Shel Talmy was interested in us.”

Where You Really Got Me’s core riff tick-tocked between two chords, I Can’t Explain’s cycled through four. ’s new followed The Kinks’ template sedulously, but sparked as it was by ’s uproarious drumming and Townshend’s clangorous 12-string guitar solos, and smoothed only by high-pitched Beach Boyish backing vocals, it was far from beng a mere pastiche.

It is difcult, now, to imagine just from listening to their records what those bands must have sounded like in the clubs and ballrooms. Veteran studio engineers and record company staff producers had been trained to pursue clean sounds above all, just as had generations of guitar and amplifer designers, and the notion that the distortion and feedback created by overdriven power-tubes, worn-out speakers and microphonic pick-ups were now considered desirable by new-jack and their fans ran contrary to everything they’d ever been taught. Yet these notionally unwanted noises, upon which the new bands seized and gleefully exploited, were the sounds of systems being pushed well beyond their formal limits: a potent sonic metaphor for social change.

According to Ray Davies: “[For] artists that came out during the mid-’60s, it was a time of change, it was a time of revolution. We weren’t really trying to , but the times dictated that we would seem to be. And the world was changing. I don’t think the world would’ve been any different had the Beatles not evolved. I think they happened to be the signature on the document that said the world changed. I think it would’ve changed anyway.”

Yes, even the mighty Beatles, widely and erroneously considered to be foating far above the musical fray on their own special Beatle cloud, unaffected by what occurred below amongst the ordinary mortals whom they inspired, were not immune from outside infuence, contributing in their own way to the hard rock shift with guitar-based, riff-driven singles like I Feel Fine (1964), Ticket To Ride, (both 1965) and (1966).

Having created the hard rock subgenre and defned its turf, The Kinks declined to rest on that particular set of laurels. The utterly distinctive and individual songwriting voice Ray Davies so rapidly developed led him and the band onto new paths of irony, whimsy and social realism, drawing ever more heavily on the British music- hall tradition. After a few more virtuoso exercises in riff-based guitar mayhem, including All Day And All Of The Night, I Need You, , I Need You and Where Have All The Good Times Gone, The Kinks became a kinder, gentler and more eccentric band, recording timeless classics like , (this latter a charmingly Dylanesque exercise sung, co-written by, and solo-credited to, ), , Days and , the latter being their farewell to their association with Talmy. The Who, on the other hand, cranked up the mayhem- o-meter with a pair of follow-up singles which made I Can’t Explain (and even You Really Got Me itself) seem positively tame. Anyway Anyhow Anywhere and were, defnitively, the most apocalyptically deranged records on the surface of the earth at that time: singer roared and stuttered Townshend’s Youth Liberation Front lyrical manifestos over what sounded like every in the world being thrown down fights of concrete stairs while electronic devices which hadn’t even been invented yet hummed, whined , bleeped and ultimately exploded all around him with, foating above all that end-of-the-world chaos and carnage, those incongruously sweet high harmonies. If the object of the exercise was to capture the sheer anarchic danger of The Who’s spectacularly violent and destructive stage act, those early Talmy productions succeeded above all expectations.

(It was Townshend who, crucially, made a massive contribution to rock’s visual, as well as sonic, iconography by commissioning the frst Marshall ‘stack’: originally a massive cabinet containing eight 12” speakers, soon modifed after a threatened roadies’ strike into a pair of 4x12s. Then had to have one. Then Townshend had to have two. Then Entwistle had to have two stacks as well. The arms race was on, and The Who were its front-runners. A popular joke in mid-‘60s rock circles was, ‘The Who have decided to stop touring. They’re going to stay in London and play a bit louder.’)

Shel Talmy almost made it a hard rock production hat-trick with The Creation, whose magnifcent (1966) was the lead-off single release on Talmy’s own semi-independent Planet Records label. On the face of it, The Creation had almost everything going for them: a devastating stage act in which singer Kenny Pickett spray- and splash-painted paper backdrops while the band played, a powerful and innovative guitarist in Eddie Phillips, who – legend hath it – was once approached by Pete Townshend to join The Who as second guitarist, and whose patented technique of playing his guitar with a violin bow was later lifted by Talmy’s favourite session guitarist (Ironically, Phillips was later employed as Jimmy Page’s guitar tech.) The Creation even had a superb slogan: ‘our music is red – with purple fashes.’ Unfortunately, their line-up was unstable: Pickett and Phillips got on incredibly badly and, after their initial recordings, were rarely able to be in the band at the same time, plus Planet Records encountered severe distribution problems, which stalled Making Time at Number 49 in the singles charts. This was a shame, since it compared very creditably with all but the very best of The Kinks and The Who, with Phillips’s sawtoothed bowed riff perfectly matched by Pickett’s equally snarling vocal. The way he spits out the words, ‘Makes yer SICK!’ is a classic punk-rock moment ten years ahead of its time.

The followup single – probably the only record of its era to satirise the art-school background of so many of the ’60s Brit hard rockers and blues boys — fared little better, and is nowadays best-known via its by Boney M. A third should- have-been-a-classic single, How Does It Feel To Feel, vanished almost without trace. The band did, however, make sufcient impact on post-punk music-biz entrepreneur Alan McGee that he named his (its best-known acts included Oasis, , My Bloody Valentine and the early Jesus And Mary Chain) after them. He even sponsored a Creation reunion album in 1996, but the band’s luck was running true to form: the album was a disappointment and Kenny Pickett died of a heart attack the following year.

The band who did end up standing shoulder-to-shoulder with The Who at the forefront of British hard rock started life as The Rolling Stones’ ‘baby band’, taking over their Thames Delta club residencies as pop success elevated the Stones to the theatre and ballroom circuit. The initial ace card in The Yardbirds’ archetypal two- -rhythm-section-and-harp-playing-singer line-up was their young guitarist Eric ‘’ Clapton, renowned for complex, searing lead-lines developed from the infuence of urban blues legends like the Three Kings (Freddy, BB and Albert), and Otis , and the frst British lead guitarist to comprehensively upstage his band’s lead singer. When, in 1965, the band chose an arty Graham Gouldman pop song, – accompanied primarily by harpsichord and bongos with featured only in a brief bridge section – as their third single, Clapton departed in a blues-purist huff (not discouraged by the rest of the band) to suckle on the undiluted pure milk (or should that be ‘pure whisky’?) of with ’s Bluesbreakers. There he rapidly acquired the nickname ‘God” (though legend hath it that he was himself responsible for the earliest spray-canned appearances of the graftti slogan ‘Clapton Is God’) and, more importantly, made the alchemical breakthrough of combining an old Gibson guitar with a brand-new Marshall amplifer to create the fat, rich, hyper- sustained guitar sound which would, once and forever, defne hard- rock guitar tone.

The Yardbirds, for their part, fell on their feet by replacing Clapton with another guitar legend-to-be in the form of Jeff (which meant that their singer, Keith Relf, was once again upstaged by a guitarist). With Beck in the chair, The Yardbirds launched a series of startling singles – part art-pop, part-psychedelia, part- R&B, part-proto-hard rock – which rivalled The Who both for innovation and impact. Commencing with – a driving minor-key rockaballad juxtaposing an acoustic guitar backdrop with Beck's eerily -like fuzz guitar – and climaxing with the sinister, march-time anti-war epic (complete with an uptempo fuzz-raga solo section) and the psychotic Eastern European hoedown of ,The Yardbirds irresistably bulldozed their way into the front line of the movement to redefne guitar-based British .

With little more than a clumsily-modifed Fender Esquire, a custom fuzzbox and a beat-up AC30 amplifer to his name, brought a far wider set of resources to bear on the basic riff formulae than most of the frst generation of his peers: an eclectic style drawing equally on rockabilly, blues and jazz, an inquisitive ear for sounds and textures from non-Western cultures, a mean, anarchic and tricky sense of humour, a great haircut and more pure onstage aggression than anyone this side of Pete Townshend himself.

Curiously, two of The Yardbirds’ most infuential recordings weren’t even released in the UK during the band’s active lifetime. I’m A Man and The Train Kept A-Rollin’ (both from 1965) respectively sped-up and heavied-up 1950s classics by Bo Diddley and rockabilly legends The Rock’N’Roll Trio into manic, amphetamined crunchfests which compressed their eruptions of testosteroned energy like a nuclear warhead exploding in a phone booth. Even more so than the band’s impressive homeland hits, these tracks had a seismic impact a few thousand miles across the Atlantic.

Which reminds me: meanwhile, back in the States …

Inevitably, the USA had been the crucible in which the earliest manifestations of the overdriven guitar flth at the heart of hard rock frst crystallised: ‘inevitably’ because it was in the US that electric guitar and amplifer technology frst evolved, and also ‘inevitably’ because once a guitarist had his (or her: let’s not forget jazz guitar pioneer Mary Osbourne) hands on an electric guitar and amp, someone was bound to get curious about what would happen when the volume control was turned up to ‘patent pending.’

If you listen to the hugely infuential ‘ofcial’ recordings which Charlie Christian, the frst genius of the electric guitar, made with Benny Goodman’s various small groups, you hear a clean, relatively ‘polite’ amplifed guitar sound. By contrast, the bootleg recordings of the after-hours Harlem jam sessions with the likes of Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke (not to mention , though due to a quirk of personal taste on the part of the guy who recorded them, Parker’s contributions were erased) which were the spawning- ground of bebop, feature a richer, thicker, rougher-edged tonality. The frst time Mary Osbourne ever heard Christian she initially thought she was hearing a , and those recordings go a long way towards explaining why. Even the great gypsy jazzer turned his amp up loud enough to achieve a , sustainy overdrive on the electric guitar experiments he conducted in his fnal years, while Western Swing maestro guitarist Junior Barnard had already used a distorted sound while playing with Bob Wills' Texas Playboys by 1946. If there was a defning Year Zero for guitar grind, it was 1951 (which, by a sublimely serendipitous coincidence, was also the year of the present narrator’s birth), and if there was a Ground Zero, it was at ’ legendary Memphis Recording Service studio where the raunch bar was raised to entirely new levels, and apart from Phillips himself, the only other participant both records had in common was local hotshot . In early March of that year, bandleader Turner, then primarily a pianist, brought his outft The Rhythm Kings in for a session on the recommendation of BB King. On their way to the studio, guitarist Willie Kizart’s amplifer – which was lashed to the roof of their bandwagon – came adrift and fell into the road. Arriving at the studio, Turner and Kizart found that the amp still worked, but that one of the tubes had come loose from its socket, resulting in a fuzzy, distorted tone. Turner and Sam Phillips both liked the sound, so they left the loose tube just as it was. (Another version of the story claims that it was the speaker, rather than the tube socket, which was damaged by rain that had gotten to the amp, stored in the car’s leaky trunk.)

Nevertheless, the result of the session was what is now generally accepted to be the frst true rock and roll record. , sung by Turner’s tenor saxophonist and credited to ‘Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats’, featured soloing by saxophonist and Turner himself on piano, but it was Kizart’s grinding shotgun- guitar, doubling the bassline, which sounds most startlingly modern. Still, it was small potatoes indeed compared to the awesome mountains of flth erected a few months later in the same studio, once again with Ike Turner in pianistic attendance, by guitarist Willie Johnson on Howlin’ Wolf’s . The B-side of the Incredible Hulk of the blues’ debut single Moanin’ At Midnight (itself no slouch in the Dirt League), it was probably, at the time, the flthiest-sounding record available anywhere on the planet. Almost everything on the record – including Wolf’s awe-inspiring vocal and harmonica and Willie Steele’s drums – was overloading Phillips’ and recording console to the point of near-collapse, as if the energies unleashed in the studio were testing the limits of Phillips’s recording equipment nigh unto destruction, but Johnson’s guitar sounded every bit as apocalyptic as Wolf’s voice: the very frst chord he hits sounds like a not-too- distant earthquake.

The foodgates were opening, and electricity was on the loose in the land, in Memphis and Chicago and Detroit, with transplanted Mississipians at the forefront of the revolution. Their acoustic guitars inadequate for the task of competing with the ambient noise of urban taverns, they had begun to embrace the new technology in the late 1940s, and the results were spectacular. recalled that, “the frst guitar player I was aware of was Muddy Waters. I frst heard him as a little boy and it scared me to death”, and certainly the early recordings Muddy cut in Chicago – either solo or fanked only by a single harmonica, string bass or second guitar – before his full band started backing him in the studio fnd him accompanying his magisterial baritone vocals with thick, dirty and driven guitar sounds, rich and redolent with the implicit scent of frying amplifer tubes.

Around the same time that Phillips was recording Wolf in Memphis and was recording Muddy in Chicago, a shy, slight singer/guitarist named John Lee Hooker, who had scored a massive hit with Boogie Chillen in 1948 (the same year that Muddy’s I Can’t Be Satisfed had not only set him on the path to his inauguration as the Godfather Of Chicago Blues, but had laid the foundations for what was to become ) was racking up a series of dark, grinding records which played his resonant baritone moan against a savagely driving guitar which remorselessly pounded out riffs which seemed to stomp with equal intensity be the fast or slow. Like Muddy Waters and Elmore James, whose voice was as wracked and harsh as Howlin’ Wolf’s (albeit considerably higher-pitched) and whose scything lines were as savagely ominous as Muddy’s, Hooker was laying musical time-bombs which didn’t fully explode until the following decade, when the Brit kids discovered them. Pete Townshend was in where one particular debt of honour lay. “Without [Hooker] there would be no ‘’. It is time to give the credit for that little invention to the man who really created it, John Lee Hooker. Take it from me. I know.”

Many of the hardest-rocking records of the 1950s, like those of Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard, put piano and/or at the forefront, but no-one did more to bring the guts and grind of R&B guitar into the forefront of mass consciousness via the pop charts than Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, who also, in the process, ended up providing Brit R&B guys like the Stones, The Kinks and The Yardbirds, not to mention The Animals, The Who, Manfred Mann, The Pretty Things and myriad lesser lights, with signifcant chunks of their early repertoires. Chuck Berry had seemingly infnite variations on the same sprightly clarion-call guitar lick (just like-a ringin’ a bell!) and the wittiest, most ingenious lyrics of any songwriter of the frst rock and roll era – even The Beatles weren’t averse to heisting a couple of his songs – whilst Bo Diddley, essentially, contrived to invent both rap music and psychedelic guitar with a series of booty- shaking, braggadocio-laden singles stuffed with unutterably weird guitar noises. More and more of the building blocks of what was to become hard rock were, inadvertantly and unpredictably, sliding into place.

For Pete Townshend, then still a few years away from stumbling upon the treasurehouse of blues riffage, the ‘eureka’ moment arrived via a record cut in 1958 (when Townshend had attained the intensely impressionable age of twelve years old), and not by any of the urbanised refugees from Mississippi, either. was a Native American guitarist of Shawnee descent, and he was thirty years old at the time he cut the devastating . The record enjoyed a rare distinction: it was banished from the airwaves on the grounds that it contributed to and encouraged juvenile delinquency despite being wholly an instrumental, but the sheer NOISE it made was deemed to be insurrectionary. A slow, menacing stomp distinguished by an earthquakingly intense (ab)use of amp tremolo, it nevertheless swaggered into the Top Twenty, ineradicably changing Townshend’s life and, by extension, the of the decades which followed. "He is the king; if it hadn't been for Link Wray and Rumble, I would have never picked up a guitar," Townshend recalled. “I remember being made very uneasy the first time I heard it, and yet excited by the savage guitar sound.” John Lee Hooker and Link Wray: the twin foundations of Townshend’s early guitar aesthetic. (The story has a moderately entertaining postscript: in the early summer of 1970, The Who were in a studio at work on what was to become Who’s Next when Link Wray dropped by to say hey. Townshend greeted him by bowing down and yelling, ‘Rumble! Rumble!’; Keith Moon by removing all his clothes and recording the next take in the nude.)

However, Link Wray notwithstanding, guitar-driven rock and roll was probably the least fertile area of the American music scene in the years immediately prior to the transatlantic advent of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That doesn’t mean that there was absolutely no good stuff happening: the surf guitar boom spearheaded by and later exemplifed by the likes of The Ventures, The Surfaris and The Shantays (not to mention The Ventures’ UK dopplegangers , who’d started out as backing group for Elvis surrogate ) was a lot of fun; there were ’s toweringly orchestrated ‘little symphonies for the kids’, almost entirely sung by black singers; the exquisite confections of , inching his way from ’ original format of Four Freshmen vocals over Chuck Berry grooves and licks towards his sweetly wistful soundscapes of luxurious melancholy; a steady stream of danceable R&B masterpieces from poppy Motown, gritty Stax, soulful Atlantic and the ever-funky ; the growing stature of Bob Dylan who, still fully acoustic prior to his electric reinvention, had already radically redefned both what was possible within the context of a pop lyric and how a distinctive vocalist with sufcient character and expression could transcend all notions of what constituted an acceptable singing voice (although his frst success was as a composer via sweetened interpretations of his songs by the anodyne Peter, Paul & Mary), and the grizzled veterans of Chicago’s Chess Records still, despite falling sales, adding new musical lustre to their legends.

The frst musical response to the seismic impact of The Beatles in early 1964 came from amongst a younger generation of folk singers for whom Dylan was the totemic fgurehead. Just as The Beatles had begun to take notice of Dylan himself, as exemplifed in I’m A Loser (1964) and You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away (1965), Dylan and his acolytes were keenly aware of the combination of infectious energy and songwriting smarts which The Beatles were bringing to pop. The result was folk-rock: not just Dylan’s own electric experiments, which were clangorous, raw-edged and bluesy, but an entirely new school led by , who bridged the gap between Dylan and The Beatles by putting Bob’s wine into the Fabs’ bottle. Their 1965 debut hit Mr Tambourine Man (which, oddly, actually owed more to a string of early-to-mid-’60s hits by The Beatles’ Merseybeat contemporaries The Searchers than it did to The Beatles themselves) featured Jim (later ‘Roger’) McGuinn’s Dylan- morphing-into-Lennon lead vocal and ringing electric 12-string guitar (as heavily featured by in The Beatles’ 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night and its soundtrack album) framed by lush, soaring vocal harmonies and a frm but gentle backbeat. Despite the success of the New York-based Lovin’ ’s grittier, bluesier take on its basics, folk-rock – from the Byrds to Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and beyond – was iconically Californian: an ineradicably middle-class equivalent of . Or, in the words of MC5 guitarist , a quintessential blue-collar hard rock intellectual if ever there was one, “a goofy ‘la-la’ kind of electrifed … mass-marketed peace-and-fower-power crap”. The proletariat – Kramer again: “our fans were the blue-collar shop rats and factory kids” – required something rather grittier. Fortunately, exactly what was required just happened to be available.

Just as The Beatles had been the primo electric role models for American folk-rockers, The Rolling Stones fulflled the equivalent function for the youths who became the burgeoning garage bands in the suburbs. The Stones’ 1965 hit Satisfaction, with its pounding beat, ’ evilly fuzztoned guitar riff and ’s sneering, epically bratty delivery of his disenchanted post-Dylan lyrics, was as crucial a template as You Really Got Me, or The Yardbirds’ epic showcases for Keith Relf’s fat, andenoidal whine and Jeff Beck’s fuzzed-out berserkery, or the channelled chaos and sophisticated brutality of The Who.

It has been pointed out, with considerable justifcation, that whereas The Beatles were a bunch of Liverpool thugs who had been reinvented as nice little gentlemen by their manager , the Stones were the exact opposite: relatively well-behaved middle- class kids transformed into sullen hooligans by their manager, . Mick Jagger and certainly came from more genteel and sheltered bourgeois backgrounds than had any Beatle (Jagger’s lazy-tongued Mockney slur masked an impeccably middle-class accent) and the Stones had undergone no baptism of musical fre remotely like The Beatles’ legendarily riotous Hamburg sojourn, playing marathon sets to audiences of gangsters, hookers and sailors, fried out of their skulls on amphetamines and booze, wearing head-to-toe leather and enjoying sex with strippers (well, we hope they enjoyed it) before the younger Beatles were even clear of their teens. By contrast, the best the infant Stones could muster by way of decadent hellraising was a modicum of Young Ones-style studenty squalor in the notorious Cricklewood pad shared by Jagger, Richards and Jones. Still, perception is ultimately what counts. The Beatles appeared clean-cut and reassuring and they grinned; the Stones appeared scruffy and menacing and they scowled. As much as the likes of Stones megahits like Satisfaction and Jumpin’ Jack Flash contributed to the sound of hard rock, it was dwarfed by the groundwork the band laid in the fundamental architecture and design of its attitude, look and iconography. The front line of every garage band in the US followed in the footsteps of every other R&B group in the UK and earnestly mimicked Jagger’s calculating pout, Richards’ hard-eyed deadpan and Brian Jones’ silken-haired foppishness, while the rhythm sections simply lurked at the back attempting a reasonable facsimile of and Charlie Watts’ Easter Island poker-faces. Jagger and Richards became the prototype for decades’-worth of hard rock singer/guitarist pairings: Keith Relf and Jeff Beck, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, and Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, and Ron Asheton, and , and Mick Ronson, Rod Stewart and Ron Wood, and , and Eddie , and , Chris Robinson and Rich Robinson, … for all these and more, and for generations yet to come who may not even realise it, the early Stones remain a Grand Archetype.

Just how all this manfested its infuence on a new generation of American youth is documented on Lenny Kaye’s none-more- defnitive compilation Nuggets: Artyfacts Of The First , a collection of tracks by assorted garage bands, suburban warriors, anglo-wannabes and one-minor-hit-wonders, most of whom surfaced for just long enough to leave a blurred thumbprint on history before sliding back into rock’s primordial soup. Records like ’s , ’ Dirty Water, The Shadows Of Nigh’s Oh Yeah and ’ Pushin’ Too Hard were grass-roots (as opposed to THE Grass Roots) manifestations of what was to very rapidly become a thriving native US response to the British hard rock which had itself been a response to the African- American tradition.

Most of the players who formed and manned the Brit bands had been erudite, dedicated scholars of musical African-Americana in general and R&B in particular, obsessively collecting and studying every esoteric vintage record they could get their mitts on, and able to chatter the hind legs off a mule when discussing the greater and lesser arcana of Chicago and Delta blues. They were also enthusiastic contemporary soul fans, immersing themselves in the Stax, Motown, Atlantic and James Brown records popular in the clubs before distilling those often complex orchestral or horn-laden down to their essence in order to approximate the vibe, feel and structure of those songs with little more than a , a guitar or two and an optional keyboard.

For instance, the ’ debut hit single, 1965’s Whatcha Gonna Do About It, was a punchy knock-off of Solomon Burke’s Everybody Needs Somebody To Love (memorably covered the previous year by the Stones as the lead-off track of their second album), enthusiastically performed in a manner reminiscent of Otis Redding or fronting Booker T & The MGs minus The Memphis Horns, but where Stax would’ve supplied a blasting brass riff, singer/guitarist inserted a buzzing, humming feedback guitar break. Similarly, the Spencer Davis Group’s frst few hits, commencing with Keep On Running and showcasing the freakishly mature and soulful voice of then-teen prodigy , were essentially Stax pastiches with crunching fuzz-guitar power chords standing in for the Memphis Horns. Just as the Stones had done with Satisfaction, as it happens: when the track was originally cut, Keith Richards was under the impression that he was simply using his fuzzed guitar to demo a horn part to be overdubbed at a later session. As things turned out, the ‘demo’ was released just as it was, and fundamentally altered the topography of Planet Rock.

(Winwood, incidentally, laid his guitar aside in favour of the for the SDG’s last couple of hits, including the soul-rock classic Gimme Some Lovin’, before shifting, during the summer of 1967, from the hard-rocking pop-soul of Davis’s group to the wispy psychedelic jazz-folk of Trafc.)

A younger band, Free, formed in 1968 and fnally collapsing in 1973 when their singer and drummer went on to form the archetypal ‘70s hard rockers , went even further in translating white soul into hard rock, exemplifed by their signature hit All Right Now before the fracturing of their original ‘perfect’ line-up, mainly due to the dope-related unreliability of their prodigious guitarist and the early departure of composing bassist .

By contrast, the early American suburban garage-rockers took the music of bands like the Stones, The Kinks, The Yardbirds and The Who as pretty much their absolute starting-point. (We could include in this list, if only for their masterly 1966 debut Wild Thing, though how it could have been remotely possible to simplify the music of The Troggs is in itself something of a mystery.) Bratty vocals, jackhammer drums and fuzz guitars were the order of the day, often with a side-order of cheapo electric organ or wheezing mouth-harp. The British singers had essentially divided into two camps: the soul men (exemplifed by The Animals’ Eric Burdon, The Small Faces’ Steve Marriott, The Spencer Davis Group’s Steve Winwood, , Them’s and – a little later – Rod Stewart and ) who assiduously mimicked, to the point of outright ventriloquism, the likes of Ray Charles, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, and the brats (exemplifed by The Kinks’ Ray Davies, The Yardbirds’ Keith Relf and The Pretty Things’ Phil May), who weren’t going to let their thin, reedy local-accented whiteboy voices prevent them from attempting to take on the mantle of the Real Guys. (Mick Jagger, artfully enough, had a vocal cord in each camp.) It was the latter grouping who provided the most compelling vocal role models for the ‘Nuggets’ garage bands (after all, attempting to sing like Eric Burdon was almost as intimidating a prospect as attempting to sing like Ray Charles) and, a decade or so later, for the UK punk rockers.

Phase One of hard rock was more or less complete. The music was about to enter puberty.

In the summer of 1966, the hard rock stakes were seriously raised. , having jumped ship from The Yardbirds little more than a year earlier, following an ideological confict over their alleged poppist tendencies, to join John Mayall’s BluesBreakers, then found himself chafng under the yoke of John Mayall’s rigorous purism (not to mention his somewhat autocratic bandleading principles and less- than-lavish salaries) and, inspired by the spirit of the age, struck out for pastures new. Clapton’s original concept was for a conventional blues trio along Buddy Guy lines but, from the very frst rehearsal, it became apparent that his new collaborators had very different ideas.

Jack Bruce and Peter ‘Ginger’ Baker were a pair of fery Celts – Bruce a Scot, Baker London Irish – who’d moved from the modern jazz scene into R&B, frst via ’s trailblazing Blues Inc (probably the frst white blues band in the world) and then The Graham Bond Organisation. As vocalist, organist and occasional saxophonist, Bond straddled the jazz/R&B border like a moustachioed Buddha, and despite the early participation of John McLaughlin, the classic line-up of his was guitarless, with the leader framed by Baker on drums, Bruce on bass and the multiple saxophones of Dick Heckstall-Smith. Bruce and Baker admired each other’s playing as much as they loathed each other’s physical presence, and Bruce’s departure from Bond’s group was precipitated by a post-gig fst-fght in the back of the band’s van which climaxed in one party or the other (accounts vary) pulling a knife. Bruce subsequently joined Manfred Mann, playing on their Number One hit single Pretty Flamingo and their ‘jazz’ EP Instrumental Asylum, but not before he sat in on a few gigs with Mayall, where he and Clapton formed their mutual admiration society. Thus it was that when approached Clapton about forming a new band, Clapton agreed, but with one condition: that would be brought in to sing lead and play bass. Baker was sufciently eager to play with Clapton that he swallowed his considerable pride, and so it came to pass that the trio was indeed formed. They called themselves ‘Cream’ because they considered themselves – not without some justifcation – to be the ‘cream’ of contemporary British musicians, but so thick and rich was their collective sound that the name seemed more like a straightforward aural description.

(As the original line-ups of the frst hard-rock generation dissolved and recombined, the concept of the ‘supergroup’ was born: the allstar alliance of renowned players who had already distinguished themselves in previous bands. Cream were merely the frst: in their wake came Crosby, Stills & Nash (& Young); (a singularly ill-fated venture costarring Clapton, Baker and Steve Winwood); Emerson, Lake & Palmer and many others, all falling victim – in different ways, at different times – to a deadly cocktail of overinfated expectations and even more overinfated egos. Cream’s inability to resolve their internal contradictions broke them up within substantially less than three years.)

“Cream was really a jazz band,” Bruce subsequently quipped, “only we didn't tell Eric”. With Bruce and Baker behind him rather than the rather more orthodox and straightforward rhythm sections he knew from The Yardbirds and Bluesbreakers, the youthful, withdrawn and introverted Clapton was overwhelmed by his older, ferier and more pugnacious colleagues, fnding himself overlaying his patented snaky blues lines onto convoluted, thunderous, verging-on-free-jazz semi-improvised backdrops, with everything pumped up – thanks to the use of the massive new Marshall amplifers and cabinets – to levels of volume, textural density and low-end gutpunch previously only associated with megawatt monsters like The Who.

In structural terms, The Who were a four-piece band with a stand-up lead singer who, like Mick Jagger and Keith Relf, restricted his instrumental contributions to occasional bursts of harp-blowing and tambourine-bashing, but their core musical noise was that of what later became known as the ‘power-trio’: a single guitar accompanied by bass and drums. This was by no means unprecedented: guitarist Buddy Guy and harpmeister frequently worked with such a line-up in Chicago; the pre-Beatles cult UK rock band Johnny Kidd & The Pirates had prefgured The Who’s instrumentation, and their guitarist, Mick Green, had been enormously infuential despite joining up too late to have played on the group’s biggest hit Shakin’ All Over, later a Who stage favourite. Britain’s earliest proper had actually been Beatle-contemporary Liverpool band The Big Three. Still, it was given to Cream to codify the power trio as an archetypal rock-band confguration (though, as Clapton has himself pointed out, they rarely functioned as such in the studio, generally additional guitars or keyboards to expand their textural range).

Nevertheless, the catalysing event in the history of British hard rock occurred in the autumn of 1966, when former Animals bassist Chas Chandler, having decided to hang up his Epiphone and go into management, arrived in London with his frst client, a young African- American singer/guitarist he’d discovered in a New York club, and set him up with a Brit rhythm section to form the Cream-styled Jimi Hendrix Experience, juxtaposing Hendrix’s extravagantly spectacular guitar with the simple, steady bass of and the famboyant, jazzy Moon-meets-Baker drum stylings of . The advent of Hendrix put a very big cat amongst some very startled young pigeons. As the irrepressible, inimitable Jeff Beck put it, “ … I heard about Jimi Hendrix from [a] guy [who] said, ‘You should check out this guy Hendrix … he plays guitar with his teeth. He’s just unbelievable, he blows everyone away. He looks like the Wild Man of Borneo, but sings a little like a black Bob Dylan.’” Beck checked Hendrix out at a club date where “he came out with Dylan’s Like A , and I thought, Oh Christ. Alright, I’m a postman. I’m a painter and decorator! It wasn’t just me, y’know, Eric [Clapton] and everyone else got pasted too … Jimi was doing so much of the stuff we wanted to do … in his showmanship, the way he attacked the guitar. His whole persona and the way he just exuded sex. We didn’t have any showmanship, just the odd moody look here and there …”

Legends abound concerning Hendrix’s initial, incendiary impact on the London scene: of Chandler slipping Hendrix on to jam at a Cream gig and blowing Clapton off his own stage with his own band, of Pete Townshend arriving at a Hendrix show just as an ashen-faced Jeff Beck was leaving (‘What’s the matter, mate? Is he that bad?’ Townshend asked. ‘No, man,’ Beck replied, ‘he’s that GOOD!’), of Clapton phoning Townshend and asking him out to a movie as a pretext for a summit to discuss this new threat to their respective hard-earned statuses. Within a few months of his arrival, Hendrix had scored his frst hit single with Hey Joe, soon to be followed by the epic mash-up of psychedelic and hard rock that was Purple Haze, and the Bob-Dylan-meets-Curtis-Mayfeld lilt of The Wind Cries Mary. After a mere nine months in the UK, his frst album ? was battling it out at the top of the charts with the mighty Beatles’ all-conquering Sgt Pepper, and he was returning to the US to triumph at the Monterey Pop Festival and reconquer his homeland. It was a supreme irony that the standard-bearer at the vanguard of the new white Brirtish hard rock was, in fact, a black American. Soon Cream followed the Experience to the US and found a spiritual home on the burgeoning ballroom circuit exemplifed by ’s Fillmore theatres in New York and San Francisco. Minds were duly blown, and the game was on.

Nevertheless, prior to the arrival of Cream and Hendrix, the progress of hard rock had been less than straightforward. In the questing, inquisitive spirit of the times, hard rock was simply one of the available options. Artists were reluctant to settle for, or into, a single style, preferring to explore the smorgasbord of possibilities opened up by the pioneers. Even Cream’s frst single, Wrapping Paper, had been a whimsical, nostalgic driven by Bruce’s rolling barroom piano and crooned vocal, rather than thumping blues-rock powered by Clapton’s pumped-up guitar.

In other news, The Rolling Stones had developed a bad case of harpsichords and simpering, exploring a vein of Beatloid art-song which ultimately culminated a year later in the faux-psychedelic sub-Pepper disaster of Their Satanic Majesties Request, while The Who frittered away much of the vinyl acreage of their second album, , on comedy songs, the rockingest of which, Boris The Spider, was written by bassist John Entwistle rather than Pete Townshend, and sung by him rather than by Roger Daltrey. Although Townshend’s burgeoning interest in Henry Purcell and the classics ended up going rather too fa-la-la for comfort, the experience in the dark art of combining elaborate construction with brutish execution which he and the band gained from the comoposition and arranging of the nine-minute ‘mini-’ title track later stood them in good stead come -time.

The Kinks had mined a richer creative vein with Ray Davies’ exercises in magical social realism than a rigid adherence to their primal hard- rock template could have provided, whilst The Yardbirds fnally got around to releasing their only studio album from their Jeff Beck- centric fuzzbox-fever Golden Era. Entitled simply Yardbirds (though, in the tradition of ‘The White Album’ and ‘Beano’, it’s better known nowadays as ‘’, after rhythm guitarist ’s cover cartoon caricaturing studio engineer Roger Cameron), it was the primary textbook of their impressively distinctive approach to their source materials. As Simon Napier-Bell, their manager and co-producer at the time the album was made, described their initial impact on him, “the group had a musical quality that headed in a completely new direction – bluesy, but also sinister and heavy. They clearly had found of something quite new – not pop, not blues, not rock’n’roll … they weren’t necessarily great musicians apart from Jeff and [bassist/co-producer/songwriter/musical director] Paul [Samwell-Smith], but they had great ideas … they took country blues and doubled up the bass and the guitar on these big heavy low-down riffs.

“It was something that hadn’t been heard before, and that was what rock evolved from. The Yardbirds, by experimenting, had inadvertently invented rock. The Yardbirds were the beginning of rock music. “The Beatles had the classy songs, The Rolling Stones invented the image. But The Yardbirds were the ones who did something totally new.

“The ‘60s were full of bridges … The Beatles were … a bridge between rock and roll and rock without the roll. We think of them as the Big Thing, but in a sense they were just an interim. The Big Thing, really, was rock in America, and that all evolved from The Yardbirds.” Or, as Jeff Beck himself put it in his own unique manner, “Big loud chords, fuck-off guitar sound — WE started all that. GOOD MORNING!”

Of course, Napier-Bell may be slightly biased, as indeed may Beck himself, but even as The Yardbirds themselves ran out of creative steam following – in rapid succession – the departure of their auteur Paul Samwell-Smith; his replacement by Jimmy Page; Beck’s ousting and the group’s fall into the somewhat unsympathetic production hands of , who cared nothing for hard rock and everything for pop hits, the template they had created provided the foundation for two superb spin-off bands: one both hugely successful and hugely infuential, the other merely hugely infuential.

The latter, though chronologically the earlier, was simply called , which co-starred vocalist Rod Stewart and bassist Ron Wood. An enormously exciting unit overfowing with raw talent, they had everything a great hard rock band needed except a plentiful source of frst-class original material and the personal chemistry required to keep a band working together. Jeff Beck disliked Rod Stewart’s songs (which were in the soul-folk vein which dominated his frst few solo ), and Rod Stewart disliked Beck. He did, however, like Ron Wood (as do most people), and the band barely managed to squeeze out an authoritative (albeit consisting entirely of covers and rewrites) 1968 debut, Truth, and a patchy follow-up, Beck-Ola, before disintegrating in 1969, with Stewart and Wood replacing Steve Marriott – who’d just left the quirky, vaudeville soul boys Small Faces to form the hard-rock – in what became simply the (no longer entirely small) Faces, one of the most popular bands of the early 1970s.

Shortages of neither material nor cameraderie were a problem for , formed by Page almost a year later, after The Yardbirds fnally collapsed in 1968 with a string of dates still unfulflled. Based as faithfully on the Yardbirds template as was Beck’s group, Led Zep was a canny mix of London session smarts, courtesy of the enormously experienced Page and the equally resourceful bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and an infusion of younger, rowdier blood from an area of the UK’s industrial Midlands ominously nicknamed The Black Country. Singer Robert Plant and drummer ’s native scene was Birmingham, where Plant’s siren wail was legendary and Bonham was notorious as a drummer so loud that bands in which he played were often evicted from clubs where they’d been booked to play. Their musical paths often crossed those of a jazz-blues band called Earth, co-fronted by guitarist and singer , and shortly to strip their music down to a dark, down-tuned monolith of roaring riffage and change their name to Black Sabbath.

Their debut was to signal a cultural shift from the primarily lower- middle-class Thames Delta/London bands (Stones, Kinks, Who, Yardbirds et al) who had spearheaded the R&B movement a few years before to a newer, grittier, more northern, more working-class and more pessimistic style.

Despite their awesome command of monstrous power riffs and Jimmy Page’s much-publicised obsession with Aleister Crowley, Led Zeppelin still had formidable afnities with the fower-power era (blame Robert Plant for that) and to delicate acoustic folkery, but Black Sabbath rarely bothered with any of that sissy hippie stuff: their music was uncompromisingly focussed on doom, deviltry and the apocalypse. Though many of their more muscular and monumental pieces – the bulldozing being merely the most prominent – were hugely infuential on the burgeoning metal movement, Led Zeppelin always disdained the ‘heavy metal’ tag, Sabbath championed it. They were, after all, from Birmingham, where the hard-rock fag had already been fown by , whose 1966 debut hit, Night Of Fear, laid its foundations on an ominous, muscular bass riff puckishly quoting a motif from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture juxtaposed with an equally ominous lyric howlingly harmonised like The Beach Boys on a very bad trip indeed.

(‘Heavy metal’, incidentally, was a term originally derived from nuclear physics: William Burroughs had toyed with it in his novel Nova Express, but it had entered the musical lexicon via the phrase ‘heavy metal thunder’ in the lyric of the biker anthem , written by the splendidly named Mars Bonfre for Steppenwolf, probably the most convincing American hard rock band ever to be composed of Canadians led by an expatriate East German.)

But what Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath really had in common was that they were both the last groups of the ‘60s and the frst groups of the ‘70s, with their roots frmly sunk in the hard rock tradition of the second half of the 1960s, but whose infuence would most fully fower in the decade to come. This was something they shared with the two most signifcant bands to emerge from the closest American equivalent to the dark satanic mills of the Black Country. If the US hard rock of the era had a domestic epicentre, it would have to have been Detroit and its immediate Michigan environs. MC5 -- an abbreviation of Motor City Five – were a uniquely powerful aggregation, with roots were sunk deep in the fertile soil of the piledriving beats of primal rock and roll, the fash and funk of the great soul revues and the roiling inspirational chaos of radical free jazz, expressed through the monumental energies of the new rock. Or, as guitarist Wayne Kramer put it, “Our idols were James Brown, Chuck Berry and , and we had learned our lessons well from The Who and The Rolling Stones.”

The 5’s ‘baby band’ The Stooges, fronted by the charismatically possessed Iggy Pop, also borrowed from the sonic palette of Cream, Hendrix and The Who, but stripped away their elaborated structures, rhythmic complexity and emphasis on virtuoso soloing, and applied it to telegrammatic, haiku-like epistles from what Pete Townshend would, a few years later, dub ‘Teenage Wasteland.’

The success that the MC5 should have had – and which The Stooges also only enjoyed during their decades-long afterlife in terms of critical recognition and legend quotient rather than immediate public acclaim and fnancial reward – went to another Michigan band who virtually created the post-Woodstock lumpenhippie audience. In the words of Homer Simpson, ‘WHAT? You've never heard of Grand Funk? Mark Farner's wild, shirtless lyrics? The bong-rattling bass of Mel Schachter? (pause) The competent drum work of ?’ (Brewer himself riposted, not unreasonably, “What better person to represent a Grand Funk fan than Homer Simpson?”)

Where MC5 were defantly aligned with the counter-culture via not only their own convictions but the theory and practice of their activist-revolutionary manager , were the creation of a small-time music-biz insider. Originally The Pack, backing group for singer , they became Grand Funk Railroad when Knight opted to retire to the backroom as manager/producer/svengali and reinvent the trio as All-American populist rabble-rousing hard rockers, with the MC5’s political rhetoric softened and vagued up and all their soul/jazz favours fltered out, fused with a reductive variant of the aural assault of Cream, Hendrix and The Who, similarly stripped of the jazz, blues and structural nuances and boiled down to pure sledgehammer riffage. With the backing of a major label in the form of , Grand Funk enjoyed a few years as America’s biggest and most commercially successful home-grown hard rock band, but history has not been kind to them and, unlike the MC5, they are virtually forgotten today (except, of course, by Homer Simpson).

In 1969, with Cream but a distant memory and Hendrix on semi- sabbatical after his triumph with Electric Ladyland, a revivifed Rolling Stones, with replacing Brian Jones opposite Lord Keef in the guitar department, bestrode the expanding American tour circuit in their newly-defned role as The Greatest Rock And Roll Band In the World , cutting the template for just about everything they did for the next four decades, not to mention a fair few generations of successor bands. After their ‘experimental’ stage had burned itself out, they had declared themselves once again open for hard rock business the previous year with the menacing stomp of the classic Jumpin’ Jack Flash, just as The Who had rediscovered that snarls suited them better than simpers with I Can See For Miles. Armed with a killer new repertoire spiked with songs like Honky Tonk Women and Street Fighting Man, they were at their most formidable, Jagger and Richards at their most charismatic. However, the fact remains that Led Zeppelin, for the duration of an active career that lasted a dozen years – overlapping with Hendrix and at its inception and and Van Halen at its fnale – and an afterlife that continues to this day, outsold them fvefold, and bestrode the 1970s as hard rock’s unquestioned colossus.

Hard rock was never superceded and never went away, forming as it did the basis for so much of the guitar-driven pop and rock – metal, glam, punk and THEIR various descendants – of the decades which followed. Hard rock was the underpinning of the poppy glamrock (or should that be ‘rocking glam pop?’) of Brits like Queen, David Bowie & The Spiders From Mars, T. Rex, and : in the US, it was the main dish served by , and, in its glossiest, most radio-friendly form, by any number of bands named, Chicago-style, after a variety of cities and states or, Santana-style, after the surname of its founder member.

It was never defeated and it never retired, retaining its status as guitar rock’s mainstream throughout the 1970s and beyond. However, with the release of the frst albums by Black Sabbath and The Stooges, it was no longer the biggest, the baddest, the darkest or the loudest. Those honours fell to two meaner, angrier younger brothers, one darker and weightier and the other leaner and scrappier. Heavy Metal had arrived, with punk peeking over the horizon, and rock would never be quite the same again.