It's Hard Rock Week!

[dankrsta]

This is one genre that doesn't really need explaining. However, for the sake of clarity, it doesn't mean just any aggressive, loud, macho rock 'n' roll, cause that would be too broad for this weekly celebration. It means a specific kind of rock that emerged somewhere in the second part of the 60s from the psychedelic era, influenced greatly by blues rock, but also keeping some of the rawness and unpolished attitude of garage rock. It could be said that the popularity of hard rock was at its highest in the late 60s and especially early 70s, so much so that many people consider this to be the 'classic rock period'. It's also where the seed of heavy metal was conceived. But, beside being very influential for the whole heavy metal genre, hard rock had more sides than one, thus influencing a wider range of music styles, from glam rock and punk to grunge in the 90s.

For detailed description of the development of hard rock you can of course read the wiki page: Hard rock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Here are some snippets:

In the mid-1960s, American and in particular British rock bands began to modify rock and roll, adding to the standard genre greater blues influence, harder sounds, heavier guitar riffs, bombastic drumming and louder vocals.....From the late 1960s it became common to divide mainstream rock music that emerged from psychedelia into soft and hard rock. Soft rock was often derived from folk rock, using acoustic instruments and putting more emphasis on melody and harmonies. In contrast, hard rock was most often derived from blues-rock and was played louder and with more intensity.

Blues-rock acts that pioneered the sound included Cream, Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Jeff Beck Group.....Dave Davies of The Kinks, Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, Pete Townshend of The Who, Hendrix, Clapton and Beck all pioneered the use of new guitar effects like phasing, feedback and distortion. Even The Beatles attempted to produce songs in the new hard rock style, trying to create a greater level of noise than The Who, from The Beatles (1968) (known as the "White Album") onwards, beginning with "Helter Skelter".....

Groups that emerged from the American psychedelic scene about the same time included Iron Butterfly, MC5, Blue Cheer and Vanilla Fudge.....

By the end of the decade a distinct genre of hard rock was emerging with bands like Led Zeppelin, who mixed the music of early rock bands with a more hard-edged form of blues rock and acid rock on their first two albums Led Zeppelin (1969) and Led Zeppelin II (1969), and Deep Purple, who achieved their commercial breakthrough with their fourth and distinctively heavier album, In Rock (1970). Also significant was Black Sabbath's Paranoid (1970), which combined guitar riffs with dissonance and more explicit references to the occult and elements of Gothic horror. All three of these bands have been seen as pivotal in the development of heavy metal...

Heh, I used to listen a lot of this stuff when I was way younger, more the blues oriented hard rock though than heavy metal. So it's time for some time trip.
I'll start with the most obvious band, Led Zeppelin, the band for which my appreciation went through some extremes, from love to hate, and then indifference. I still like to hear them occasionally, but I tend to like more different songs of theirs now, shorter and to the point, like "Immigrant Song":


Here's one song that summarizes all the stereotypes of rock 'n' roll and fits the "Easy Rider" soundtrack like a glove
Steppenwolf - 'Born To Be Wild'


However, this is the kind of hard rock I like the most, raw, driving, garage rock, sounds more straightforward and simple than it really is
MC5 - 'Skunk'


Now you...