“There are no ‘best’ bands, only bands that you personally like or dislike. Whether they sell lots of records or not has nothing to do with it. Most of the music I like isn’t particularly commercial, but that doesn’t stop me liking it. Music isn’t a competition. I’m always amused by the arguments that go on about ‘best’ bands. Some folks make statements about music as if they’re absolute authorities on what’s ‘good’ or not. Best to just say that you like a particular band rather than trying to mark them as if they were kids handing in their homework. Everyone’s tastes are different, if I listed the music I like, I’m sure that a lot of it wouldn’t score at all with some people. Music is a very broad church, there’s something for everyone.” ~ Bill Nelson
Ahem. Well. He’s right, of course. But I’ve already mostly written this so…
This may or may not come as a surprise to anyone who even tangentially knows me (and really, does anyone really know me? I mean, c’mon) knows that my tastes in music often, more likely as not actually, don’t always follow the mainstream path. This was especially the case when I was a teenager, and started reading rock magazines like Creem, Circus, and Canada’s Beetle, and for better or worse these mags shaped my tastes- especially Creem, its “no one is sacred” attitude taught me how to see the Wizard behind the curtain so to speak and also exposed me to such under the radar (well, 70s mid-south radar) acts like Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople, Roxy Music, and so on. My high school peers couldn’t understand what I saw/heard in the likes of Reed and Todd Rundgren and so many others. So as you can imagine, I was never asked to bring records to parties, heh. Hell, I was rarely invited to parties.
Before we go much further, none of the above is to make myself sound like I was more enlightened about music than everyone else in my orbit; on the contrary, I think I missed out on a lot of pretty entertaining stuff by being so reluctant to embrace what everyone else did.
In recent years, as I approach the twilight of my time on this plane of existence, I have found myself looking back with nostalgia and in many cases, simply the desire to see if I missed anything by not listening to some bands more in my formative years. Perhaps my tastes have become less discriminating, who knows. In this spirit, I have thought it might be interesting to list many of these bands and musicians that 17 year old me would be dismayed if he knew that 64 year old me would be digging like he never ever dreamed he would, write a little about each, and give ‘em a letter grade based on my opinion of them now. I’m basing my opinions on the years 1973 through 1978, i.e. my middle and high school years. Could be fun. Let’s find out!
AC/DC Here’s a case right off the bat that illustrates what I’m talking about; these hard rocking hard drinking Aussies were huge among my age group. Everybody I knew had at least one AC/DC album. However, Creem and Christgau looked down their noses for the most part, and when I listened I heard unexceptional hard rock sludge with a vocalist who reminded me of Alex Harvey, who of course I was very much into. These days, though, I’m more familiar with the 80s Brian Johnson version than the 70s Bon Scott, but I do hear some nicely memorable guitar licks and both versions could be bluesy/funky in their own way. So while I still don’t choose to listen, I don’t hate them either. B-
AEROSMITH And here’s a case of a band that didn’t repulse me (musically, anyway, they kinda became repulsive, Tyler anyway, years later) from the beginning, when I saw them do “Dream On” on American Bandstand and glommed on to Get Your Wings courtesy of the late Terry Boeckmann, whose record collection I envied with the heat of a thousand suns. Although these guys have had a career that lasted an improbably (all things considered) long time, 1973 through 1978 pretty much was their peak, at least to me. Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic, Rocks, Draw the Line… killer LPs all. A
THE ALAN PARSONS PROJECT Speaking of Boeckmann, If memory serves he had this outfit’s maiden endeavor Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe, and I couldn’t resist an album with that title so I borrowed it for a while. I liked it a lot but got it on 8 track and for some reason didn’t rebuy until I got the CD many years later. In that time, onetime record engineer Alan Parsons and his collaborators parlayed a clutch of releases with mostly sci-fi themes into chart success if not critical acclaim. Most of my peers had their 2nd release I, Robot, based on the Asimov robot story, and some stuck around for many of the subsequent releases. Me, Robot didn’t yank my crank at all, and the everpresent radio airplay of their hits kept me from wanting to buy any others. As the years went by though, as I became an old man, I found myself looking back fondly on a lot of that APP stuff, and have found the occasional nugget on all of their releases, including those that came out after high school was over. So I suppose for me they get a B, a mix of the past and present for me.
ALICE COOPER I loved the Alice Cooper Band; a quintet whose lead singer happened to be named “Alice Cooper”. However, in this time period the band fell apart and the singer embarked on a solo career. You can look at my previous articles and find out what I thought about Alice’s solo years; my friends, well, they weren’t as big a fan as I was of the older days but some of them did have copies of The Alice Cooper Show and From the Inside, as I recall. Alice solo: C+
ANGEL These guys made a go of it for a while as a “glam-metal” band years before the likes of Poison, Motley Crue, Warrant, and so on. I couldn’t stand ‘em, it was just bland, empty, slicker-than-snot rawk, and their soft-focus pouty schtick made them look silly…but I do remember some of my friends at least had their debut record. Zappa was amused by them, naming one of his late 70s opuses “Punky’s Whips”, namechecking singer “Punky” Meadows. D-
BACHMAN-TURNER OVERDRIVE was guitarist Randy Bachman of the Guess Who, a band that was popular among the cool older kids I knew but the only ones in my peer group who listened to them were Ned and Billy Mack Hill; who had their best-of on 8 track and the Road Food album (with “Clap For the Wolfman”) on cassette. After Bachman had had enough of Burton Cummings and left the GW, he started a band called Brave Belt that muddled along until he hooked up with his two brothers and a guy named Turner. Renamed “Bachman-Turner Overdrive”, they had a song called “Let it Ride” that hit in the US, and they were off to the races for a few years, eventually losing one of the Bachman brothers and replacing him with someone not named Bachman or Turner. Anyway, I bought the 45 of “Let it Ride” when it came out, liked it OK, and I liked its even bigger hit followup “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” but I didn’t buy that, nor did I ever get any of their records. Guess I liked, but not that much. C+
BAD COMPANY were two members of the defunct Free, one refugee from Mott the Hoople, and one guy who played bass and sang on a King Crimson album, and they were on Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records label. They made a vaguely bluesy rock and roll that once in a while would jump out and grab you and was commercially successful for a few years. I have never cared one whit for Paul Rodgers as a singer, still don’t, and I liked Mott with Mick Ralphs on guitar ok but after he left they did The Hoople, which I thought was an incredible record so they didn’t miss him that much, I reckoned, but I found out later that Ralphs’ defection was one of the reasons Ian Hunter left Mott a couple years later so how about that. I liked “Can’t Get Enough” from the self titled debut ok, and I actually liked 3 or so songs from its follow-up Straight Shooter…but that was it. They eventually fell apart but kept going with substitute members well into the 90s, maybe even the 00s, I stopped paying attention long before that. Everyone in my orbit adored these guys but me, but I didn’t especially hate them either, so on the strength of that 2nd album I’ll give ‘em a C+.
BLACK SABBATH These guys were largely responsible for metal as we know it, and they were considered legends (though if you paid attention they were pretty much ordinary blokes, with the sloppy/silly Ozzy Osbourne and the forward-thinking lyricist/floppy-handed bassist Geezer Butler standing out), though by the time I was in middle school they had begun to fray around the edges thanks to overindulgence in cocaine and crooked management, but they still did two magnificent records in late ‘73 and 1975, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage. Many of my pals had their double LP best-of We Sold Our Souls for Rock and Roll. Not me, I didn’t need it, I had all the other albums. However, in 1976 they decamped to Florida, made the incredibly dull Technical Ecstasy, followed that up with 1978’s so-so Never Say Die!, then Ozzy started missing shows and finally they fired his ass and rock history was made when the embarrassed Osbourne started his own band, “Blizzard of Ozz”. No matter what, though, those original Sabs albums kicked my ass, and they were liked by my peers as well. A
BLUE OYSTER CULT I first caught on to “The Thinking Man’s Metal Band” thanks to my friend Henry Middleton, who had longer hair than I did and raved about them to me. So, next chance I got I picked up a copy of their 1975 double live On Your Feet and On Your Knees, and… well, I didn’t know what to make of it. The low-fi sludgy sound of that record flummoxed me, and it wouldn’t be until a later chance hearing via my sometimes-friend Mark Branstetter of their hard-hitting second album Tyranny and Mutation before the light bulb came on in my head. The BOC, then collaborating with producers Sandy Perlman and Murray Krugman, created some kind of strange World War One Lovecraftian monster movie slash biker movie that their lyrics obliquely referred to more often as not… until they all decided to try to be a bit more commercial and they gave us the Agents of Fortune LP with the huge hit “Don’t Fear the Reaper” which begat SNL cowbell skit jokes and a more streamlined, less lyrically oblique type of radio-friendly metal that did pretty well for them until the inspiration evaporated. By the mid/late 80s, they had broken up but have reformed in various configurations since then, as is so often the case, minus key members. Their most recent, covid-era release (with Eric Bloom and “Buck Dharma”) was a lot better than I expected. Those first six albums, though- they were the fukken shit. Not many of my friends agreed though, unfortunately. A-
BOSTON was a hit among my set from the get-go, although I wasn’t quite as impressed because to me they sounded like a lot of worthier acts all mashed together without a lot of panache. I saw them live when they were on a triple bill with Journey and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, coming on third, and they made me sleepy, no kidding. However, the hits “More Than a Feeling”, “Foreplay/Long Time”, and “Peace of Mind” were everpresent then, and I was amazed/amused/a bit saddened to note, a few years ago, that a chance hearing of “Feeling” on a SiriusXM station filled me with a sense of not-unpleasant nostalgia. Go figure. The band, pretty much a front for the whims and ideas of Tom Scholz, seemed put out one record a decade and were soon gone, though it wouldn’t surprise me if Scholz didn’t have something streaming online somewhere. C+
BUDGIE These guys were Welsh, and I don’t know much more about them other than they put out a shit ton or records with parrots on the covers, some of which I saw in the record stacks of my friends, and they did “I Ain’t No Mountain” which is insanely catchy. C
DEEP PURPLE A band I heard of several years before I actually heard them, they came unglued for a few years after 1975, which almost places them outside the purview of this survey. Still, I had heard “Strange Kind of Woman” from Fireball on a WB/R Loss Leader, and when I ran across an 8-track of the Gillan/Glover era’s swan song Who Do We Think We Are? in 1975 I snapped it up and loved it. I had catching up to do- after that I got Machine Head, from whence “Smoke on the Water” and “Space Truckin’” (more on that in a few) came. My friend Steve Dale had In Rock, which I duly borrowed once or twice. A little later, I picked up the two Coverdale/Hughes era albums, Burn, Stormbringer and the one where Tommy Bolin replaced Ritchie Blackmore (he started Rainbow, more on them later), Come Taste the Band, liked them too. I became a fan quickly, and to this day still, on occasion, whip out a Purps album for fun and enjoyment. My friends (other than Steve) I don’t think knew more than Machine Head, though. I still am amused when I recall, after my traumatic (to me) dismissal from the band I sang lead for in high school, my replacement had some sheets of lyrics that I saw- he had transcribed the words “Aurora Borealis” in “Space Truckin’” as “a roar of boring Alice”. Heh. A
THE DOORS There was an older guy in my neighborhood named Jimmy McLellan, who played drums, loved the Monkees (his nickname was “Monkee”, in fact), and had an 8-track recorder, which he used to make some side cash by recording tapes for people. One he made for me was a mixed bag of Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, and…the Doors. These guys were a bit before the time period I’m trying to assay here; when Jimbo Morrison died in 1970, his candle burned out long before his legend did (sorry Elton and Bernie) so they were still really popular. Morrison was a charismatic guy who seemed to be a lot smarter than he let on; when I heard the Doors via 8-tracks of my neighbor Russ Butler, I loved the bluesy rock stuff but zoned out when Jim went on one of his poetry jags. B
FLEETWOOD MAC were super popular among many girls and some boys that I knew; guess they identified with Stevie and were charmed by Lindsey. Naturally, I didn’t start with Rumors but my first exposure to them was in the Bob Welch era via 1972’s Bare Trees in 1975, so I was like “Well, this is OK but that was the best!” and everyone else was like “Uh.. yeah. But hey, Rumours is awesome!” Saw them on the Midnight Special and other late night concert shows once or twice, both the Welch band and the LindseyStevie version too. Rumours was in heavy rotation at Carmen’s Pizza, one of my teenage jobs (and a whole column in itself). This band has a long and complicated history, so I’m not going any farther there, but I’ve always liked them, at least in two of their incarnations (the Peter Green era, save the instrumental “Albatross”, kinda bores me.), so I list them here. A-
FOGHAT “I wanna take you on a Slowwwwwwwwwww Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide”, I’ll never forget it. That was one of the songs the aforementioned high school rock band where I got my one and only chance to stand out and be musically creative in a group environment covered. I sang that one loud and proud, and I don’t know if my face turned (stone) blue as I held out those words. Fool for the City was the record everybody loved, myself included. Foghat, a quartet of blues rockers descended from refugees from even older British blues rockers Savoy Brown, had put out (I think, too lazy to count) four records before they really hit big with “Slow Ride”. I bought Fool because another guy, Ronnie Riordan, was trying to start a band and wanted me to sing, and I needed to learn songs from that record. It didn’t work out- we never found a bass player- but I liked the record and kept it when the Euphoria thing kinda fell together. Long story. Anyway, by that time I had also bought Fool’s predecessor Rock and Roll Outlaws, and typically I liked that one even better. In the years after the Euphoria thing fell apart (for me, anyway), Foghat did a live album that was a monster sales-wise, everybody, even me, had a copy…and the next studio record was Night Shift, which continued the longish-song thud and blunder that “Slow Ride” presaged. Stone Blue came out the month we all graduated high school, I found it bland. I had moved on from those guys by then, though I had scarfed up a couple of pre-R&RO albums, and especially liked 1974’s Energized with its balls-out hyperspeed cover of “Honey Hush”… but they did an odd thing- they responded to punk and new wave by streamlining and mainstreaming their sound; where 7 minute extended jams were once the order of the day, now there were 3-4 minute songs with verse/chorus/bridge/verse structures. I picked a few of these up before long, especially the two with cool titles- 1981’s Girls to Chat and Boys to Bounce and 1982’s In the Mood for Something Rude, and I especially flipped for the all-covers latter, it’s a fave to this day. By the time of 1983 swan song Zig-Zag Walk, they sounded like Rockpile, about as far from “Slow Ride” as you can get. You never know sometimes. B+
FOREIGNER I couldn’t stand these guys, their music anyway (I didn’t know them) even though one of them played sax for King Crimson in that band’s early days. It wasn’t quite rock, it wasn’t quite pop, and it wasn’t quite prog. I don’t know what it was but it sure was popular among my peer group. Euphoria did the 1st album track “Long Way From Home” so I did listen to the album for a while. I guess “Feels Like the First Time” was catchy. Going forward, I kinda liked a song or two from the followup albums (“Women”, “Urgent”) but overall ugh. D+
HEART Yet another group I was slow to embrace; of course I heard the hits “Magic Man” and “Crazy On You”, and kinda liked a song from their contractual obligation LP Magazine, cleverly entitled “Heartless”. Ann and Nancy Wilson weren’t the first female rockers, or even the first sister rockers, but these ladies had ambition that allowed them to subsume the guys and boyfriends they assembled to create a group, and go on to become, well, if not A listers, solid B listers. By the time of 1978’s Dog and Butterfly, which I could swear was in all my peers’ collections but didn’t see its release until April of 1978, a little over a month before our graduation, I had begun to kinda like but I didn’t take the plunge and buy until 1980’s Bebe Le Strange (yep, I liked the cover), which falls outside the purview of this survey. Now, I like Butterfly, especially the Zep-styled side two, like its predecessor Little Queen, and don’t hate the first two. I liked the two early 80s releases even more, but that’s not the time period I’m looking at here. A-
JETHRO TULL Now these guys, I loved them from the first time I heard them. Blues/jazz/rock with clever, acerbic lyrics by Ian Anderson (who most people then thought was named “Jethro Tull”). 1973’s A Passion Play is one of my favorite albums, and odds-and-sods marking time collection Living in the Past is right up there with it. Aqualung is an incredible album that has held up pretty well as has 1972’s Thick as a Brick. Not so much 1974’s middling Warchild. After 1975’s excellent Minstrel in the Gallery, Ian Anderson and co. put out Too Old to Rock and Roll (Too Young to Die), a concept record that just didn’t work for me, still doesn’t, although that’s the tour I caught them on. This signaled subtle changes in production values, lyrical content, and instrumentation, as well as Anderson’s increasingly shrill and busy arrangements, and while I liked 1977’s agrarian-concept Songs from the Wood ok, I liked its 1978 follow-up Heavy Horses even less. My cutoff date remains Minstrel; subsequent releases became less and less interesting and I had ceased to care even though I’d duly buy the new CD like Crest of a Knave, listen, and put it on the shelf forever. Some of my friends had Aqualung (yet another album I first heard via Mark Branstetter; I owe ya, Brownie), maybe Brick though I’m not sure, so I think I was really the only one who carried a torch for this unit. A-
JOURNEY I knew the players in Journey before I knew who Journey was…. keyboardist/singer Gregg Rolie was from Santana, as was lead guitarist Neal Schon; I loved Santana albums Abraxas and Caravanserai in this period, so when I found out they were in this group with drummer Aynsley Dunbar (who I knew from drumming with pretty much everybody, from Lou Reed to the Mothers of Invention), I was curious. Saw them live in that triple bill with Boston and Manfred Mann before I ever heard their records. I didn’t really get any of those, the first three anyway, until 1979-80… but, like most of my peers, I did pick up their brand spanking new album (Infinity) in 1977 with a brand spanking new singer, brought in to write more commercially amenable songs, and who sing them in a keening, banshee-like tenor that rock fans loved, and that included my peers, though I didn’t like as much as they did. Steve Perry and Schon went on to take the band to a very successful 80s run, Rolie hung around for a while, Dunbar bailed early on. The more I listened the less I liked so while I did, at some point, pick up late 70s-early 80s releases, I wasn’t all that enamored and some of those singles became annoying. Sometime in 1979 or the early 80s, I bought the 3 pre-Perry albums; they had a whole different sound and slant that emphasized jamming and heavy rock sounds. They’re not bad but not very memorable, really- it’s easy to see why they felt they needed Perry to succeed. That said, as recently as 2023, I cued up Infinity on the ol’ phone on one of my walks, and found myself digging the production by Queen stalwart Roy Thomas Baker, quite dynamic in its highs and lows. Another band that advancing age has made more palatable, I guess, though I’m not going near any of those 80s albums anytime soon. B-
JUDAS PRIEST Yet another band my peers loved that I just couldn’t get into, and that hasn’t changed. For me, D. For them, it would be higher.
KANSAS All the music magazines made fun of these guys, who were for all practical purposes the American answer to Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, and all those British prog bands but were 75% less literary and pretentious about it. All my friends gravitated to them on their Point of Know Return album and its hit song “Dust in the Wind”. Even Euphoria did that one, but it was well after I was pushed off the boat. So as a result, between critical derision and my instinctive fall back when others leaned forward tendencies, I pretty much ignored these guys until 1979 or 80, I forget which, when hearing the peppy then-single “People of the South Wind” led me to make an impulse purchase of that single’s host record, Monolith. That kinda opened my mind to what they were about and made me curious, so I did go back and found myself liking Point and their first hit LP Leftoverture, as well as the inevitable double live record that preceded Monolith. I’m still less familiar with their earliest albums… but for the purpose of this already way long survey, chalk Kansas up as another group I didn’t like then and do like now. B+
KISS Another band my peers embraced with a rabid, well nigh religious fervor. Typically, I didn’t. I have a clear memory of seeing their debut record in the dime store record bin and thinking “These guys are way too late to get on the Glitter/Glam bandwagon”. Shows what I know. Although I did, still do, kinda appreciate the blunt crudeness and ragged guitar sound of their first three records, my auto step back reflex kicked in with the release of KISS Alive, which was required by law to be played at any party in 1975 and 1976. I also never responded to their arrogance and stance towards the women they saw as objects. They weren’t alone, but these guys were the worst. Well, there’s Nugent, but… Anyway, now, I will cue up one of the first three occasionally, and once in a while don’t mind hearing something from Destroyer or Love Gun, (how Spinal Tap-ish)… but I don’t listen to them often. C+
LED ZEPPELIN These guys, well, what more can be said. I loved ‘em and most of my peers did too. Their best albums came just before the period I’ve loosely tied myself to- the excellent Houses of the Holy was 1973. Physical Graffiti was 1975 and it went into heavy rotation with me as soon as I got it. After that it got sketchy. Presence, released in early 1976, didn’t quite satisfy and wasn’t as wide ranging as their best albums, but I did like it and loved Page’s multi-overdubbed guitars. October ‘76 saw the release of the meandering and mostly dull vanity project concert movie The Song Remains the Same, and the accompanying live album came out on the same day. It was just as meandering and dull as the film, only no visuals to divert attention. Then, two years of silence before 1979’s In Through the Out Door concluded things. It’s grown on me, but really none of these had the same mojo as the first six records. Didn’t mean any of us loved them any less. A
LYNYRD SKYNYRD I liked Southern Rock ok, really I did. Just not the ones my friends and acquaintances did. These guys triggered my auto recoil reflex, though because everybody, and I do mean everybody loved this group. Because when you’re a bunch of self-perceived good ol’ Southern boys, don’t know nothin and don’t want to know nothin’…you tend to self-identify, I guess, but the thing is, I did not want to identify with those guys. I wanted more dignified, more cerebral things in my music. While I could appreciate this sort of thing, there wasn’t a lot to engage my imagination, unless I wanted to imagine I was proud to live in Alabama or wanted to be allowed to get out of the barn dance before I got shot by some girl’s boyfriend. This doesn’t explain why I liked Elvin Bishop and Wet Willie, but what can I say. Also, music mags I read tended to appreciate from a distance but also were condescending sometimes. However, as with so many other things, I misjudged these fellas. They were smarter than I thought, and when I actually listened and paid attention, I discovered that they were pretty good. None of them were virtusos or poets, but they did what they did very well. I even came to like the likes of “Gimme Three Steps” (amusing) and “The Ballad of Curtis Lowe”. Of course, I came to these realizations long after high school faded away in the background of the rear view mirror of my life, so they were yet another example of a group I didn’t care for while everyone else were nuts about them. In the spirit of reconciliation, I’ll give them a B.
MONTROSE wasn’t quite a huge favorite in my crowd, but some of us had their albums. I think I had seen their debut record with Sammy Hagar on vocals, but didn’t commit till I heard Ned and Billy Mack Hill’s copy of 1975’s post-Hagar Warner Bros. Presents…Montrose! which I liked quite a bit, especially a handful of tracks. So I went out and got the debut, which was and remains an ass-kicking set of songs, and 1974’s Paper Money, which is a bit deficient in the kicking of the ass but has its charms just the same. The first one that came out in “real time”, ‘76’s Jump On It, didn’t quite grab me, though, and Ronnie Montrose himself put out an album under his own name which didn’t quite yank my crank either, so that was it for me and Montrose. Still and all, though, those first three are remarkably good records. B+
NAZARETH was in a lot of my friends’ record collections, especially 1975’s Hair of the Dog and 1976’s Close Enough for Rock and Roll. This bunch of Scots had a great sound, and Dan McCaffrey had a great rock and roll singing voice. I had first heard their earlier albums via a band/drummer friend of mine (eventually he’d be a cousin of mine by marriage) named Gary Smith; 1972’s Razamanaz and 1974’s Rampant remain faves to this day. Everybody burned me right out on that Close Enough album though, and good old Euphoria worked up two songs from Hair- the title track and the whiny slow blues Miss Misery, ensuring that I would forever have the mixed feelings about those songs and albums that I do about every song and album we drew from. Summa bitch indeed. When they lost their mojo in subesquent years, they lost it fast despite scoring a big hit with Boudleaux Bryant’s “Love Hurts”. Zal Cleminson of the Alex Harvey Band wound up as their guitarist, but I couldn’t care less by then. B+
TED NUGENT was probably always a shit human being, but he hid it better in the mid-late 70s and he was HUGE for a while there. My peers loved him, I kinda sorta liked. To this day, when I hear tracks like “Free for All” and “Cat Scratch Fever”, I’ll hold my nose and nod my head. I’ll say this, he was a hell of a guitar player too. But the less Nugent I get in my head, the better off as a human I am. So, C.
PINK FLOYD I first heard in a Sears department store, where someone was demonstrating a stereo system and chose Dark Side of the Moon as their demo album. The selection was “Time”, with all the alarm clocks, and I was blown away. I got Dark Side soon after. It depressed the hell out of me, easy to do even then, but I still thought it was a great record.Then, they took two years to follow it up with Wish You Were Here, and for some reason it didn’t give me the same vibe that Dark Side did, so I didn’t buy it for a long time. My friends did, though, as well as that one’s follow-up Animals. Animals seemed to be especially popular. I don’t remember when, but I did get those two eventually, well after high school days though. I also learned a lot about the group history; Syd, pre-Dark Side albums like Meddle and Atom Heart Mother, all that. By the end of the time period we’re concerned with, though, bassist and principal songwriter Roger Waters had turned the band into a vehicle for his childhood upbringing issues via the hugely popular The Wall; I liked a few tracks from that one but found Waters’ ever-presence offputting, so I preferred to go backwards through their catalog instead. So, I was kind of a fan, at least of the 70s stuff, but not as much as many I knew were; they inspired a weird sort of stoner fanatacism that kept me at arms’ length. Kinda like the Grateful Dead, I guess, but less bluesy and more British spacey. B
RITCHIE BLACKMORE’S RAINBOW The notoriously cranky Blackmore, who ran off his singer and bassist in the Mark II version of Deep Purple, saw his band bring in new guys who, much to his horror and dismay, wanted to introduce elements of funk and R&B into the mix. Despite the result falling short of the Parliament/Funkadelic funky standard, it was still too much for Blackmore, who gathered up his toys and decided to create a new band. He recruited a handful of studio musos and poached tiny titan vocalist Ronnie James Dio from a going-nowhere band called Elf and the result was, well, a vaguely funky and hard rocking record that I liked quite a bit. The follow-up Rising was even better, and Dio was never in better form vocally or lyrically, in my opinion. Its follow-up, a double live, and that one’s successor Long Live Rock and Roll had none of the mojo of the first two records, so I tuned out. I may have missed a lot of great music, but by the 80s Blackmore had joined Deep Purple again with the guys he ran off at the top of this paragraph, and muddled around for a few years. On the strength of those first two records, though, here’s a big fat B+ from me.l
RUSH My peers embraced this Canadian three-piece’s 2112 album from 1975 with a kind of religious fervor; I didn’t share their conviction but I did kinda like the previous two records Fly By Night and Caress of Steel. They always sought to blend Prog with their hard rock sound, and by 1981 became interesting for a while when blending in some reggae to boot on Moving Pictures and every album after that for several years, eventually sounding like a heavier Police to me. Anyway, these guys were excellent players, drummer/lyricist Neal Peart wrote serious, intellectual-ish lyrics, Geddy Lee’s voice was often amusing, and overall I didn’t hate them as much as I probably should have. C+
BOB SEGER & THE SILVER BULLET BAND were God to most of my peers. In 1976, the journeyman Detroit rocker with the gruff, growly voice managed to streamline his sound into a passable R&B-rock sound that with the one-two punch of Live Bullet and Night Moves. I’m not exactly sure how and where and why my peers glommed on to Seger, but you couldn’t go to a party in 1977-1978 without hearing one of those albums played on someone’s stereo. He was the very heart of soulish-rock for them; me, I shrugged and didn’t hear anything that I didn’t hear done, and done better, by Van Morrison, Chuck Berry, and others. BUT, as the years went by, and I got older and theoretically wiser, I became aware that Seger had a whole bunch of records out before that aforementioned one-two punch, and some of them were really damn good. Also, the curious phemomenon that has hit me in my dotage (see Boston above) has also influenced my perception of Bob’s stuff, so these days I occasionally listen, and wish I could score some original copies of Smokin’ O.P.’s, Mongrel, Beautiiful Loser, and Seven. 16 year old me would have said C-!! but 64 year old me says, no, son, B+.
QUEEN First heard these guys via some of my more open-minded friends, and while I will never cease to be amusedly amazed that so many of my homophobic peers embraced flamboyant Freddie Mercury like they did, most did indeed like this group a lot. There was enough ROCK on the early Queen LPs to satisfy that itch, I guess. I loved the more Proggish and fantasy-oriented Queen II, dug Sheer Heart Attack though I’ll always be pissed that my bought-in-1974 copy didn’t get the lyric sheet included. Night at the Opera and Day at the Races, especially, were popular… I liked “Bohemian Rhapsody” but a lot of the former sounded unfocused for lack of a better word and I didn’t really give the latter a good listen till Euphoria decided to cover “Tie Your Mother Down”, another song that asked me to sustain a note (“Toniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight”) for a ridiculously long time. I did like it, though, and found a lot to like on subsequent releases, even after they adopted the trendy Mack Europop sound. I liked a lot of 1979’s Jazz. While I’ve had my moments of being less than enraptured, by and large I liked Queen, so did my peers, and I still listen to them once in a while, although it’s mostly Queen II I queue up. A-
REO SPEEDWAGON This was a group that inspired evangelism among their fans, and most of my peers were among that number. They weren’t terrible, but their yappy-voiced lead singer grated on my ears. I didn’t buy until 1980’s Hi Infidelity, which was prompted by hearing the anthemic “Keep On Loving You” a lot. Got tired of it pretty fast, though, and never replaced the cassette I purchased. That album is outside the purview of this survey anyway, so… I will give them credit for the amusing album title You Can’t Tune a Piano But You Can Tuna Fish. D
THE ROLLING STONES The Stones seemed to be from a different generation than ours, really, though this was the era of It’s Only Rock and Roll through Some Girls; some had collections like Hot Rocks or the one that gave me my first real exposure to their music, Made in the Shade. So while they weren’t a core group for my peer group, they were listened to and regarded as cool, I think. A
SCORPIONS Kraut rockers that, despite a couple of risqué album covers, left me cold. I think everybody I knew had at least one of their albums; I didn’t buy one till 1979, when Lovedrive’s Hipgnosis cover tempted me. Bland, by-the-books 70’s-80’s metal, even after the 1979 release supposedly introduced elements of “melody” and “hooks”…but at least the singer didn’t try to hide his accent, which at least gave their songs a humorous side. D
STYX Oh, where to begin with these guys. Pretentious, wacky arena-rock knuckleheads who aspired to so much and somehow managed to get their grandiose dreams out there despite a total lack of intellectual imagination and subtlety… they were everywhere in the mid-late 70s, mostly thanks to mega-hit “Come Sail Away” from The Grand Illusion, and everyone loved their harmonies and crunchy guitar sound, it seemed. I guess. Honestly, as a teen I never understood what everyone liked about them. I first heard them via their minor hit song and stately anthem “Lady” from their second album, my friend Greg Branstetter (not to be confused with Mark) had that one. Wouldn’t surprise me if he had others, as well as the Hill Brothers, memory fails me. Between the cleverly titled Styx II (with “Lady”) and Grand Illusion, they released several albums of a consistent quality that I managed to hear from other people, because I didn’t buy any of ‘em until Euphoria decided to cover Illusion’s dismayingly misogynistic and condescending “Miss America”.. which I could sing pretty well and at 17 I wasn’t enlightened enough to say “Hey-” so anyway, that necessitated me buying the album to learn the song. Now, even then I liked Prog; I had discovered Yes, ELP, King Crimson, Genesis, and others in that time, and Styx aspired in a lot of ways to the lofty themes and complicated arrangements of that genre, but they were too rooted in the Chicago blues/rock public school system mindset to really inhabit what they were trying to do.. so we got a lot of dime store psychiatry (as in the positivity sermons “Fooling Yourself” and the title track, and the “hey, we’re ordinary guys just like you” of “Superstar”) and received fantasy tropes (songs about castle walls and the whole WTF Close Encounters scenario in “Come Sail Away”) and I understand perfectly why critics scorned them but the ordinary people liked them, because they weren’t more clever or smart than they were. Critics, on the other hand, despised anyone who aspired to something more involved than 4/4 and 3 chords, so they derided these guys for years. Not to pick on Grand Illusion, all of their subsequent records are full of fantasy twaddle, populist sentiment, and grandiose gestures (cf: “Babe”, quite pretty in its earnest way, or “Lords of the Ring”, which is yet isn’t about Tolkien) and until Dennis DeYoung stopped getting along with the guitarists, it seemed like they’d go on forever. I had no use for them as a (angry) young man, but now, as an old and tired adult, I feel more receptive to what they were trying to do; sure, they didn’t have a natural talent for the kind of lofty narratives they aspired to, but they did cobble together something close, immaculately played and sung, and oh so sincere about it (Which is not to say that they didn’t have a sense of humor, as forced sometimes as it seemed) and these days I’m finding myself listening to and buying those old Styx records, perhaps in a vain attempt to recapture my lost teenage years, who knows. Sometimes I think, and I’m dead serious, I’d like to meet Dennis Deyoung, and just shoot the shit about whatever. I think it would be interesting if nothing else. B+
THIN LIZZY had a very charismatic lead singer/bassist named Phil Lynott, who looked like some kind of rakish Irish Pirate Gypsy or something. Many, including most of my mates and my wife, loved “The Boys are Back in Town” and “Jailbreak” and thought he was a genius. I didn’t. C’est la vie, but those two songs are kinda catchy. I tried listening to other records, full of neither here-nor-there midtempo R&B-ish rock, but they left me cold. C
When I listened to ROBIN TROWER I heard Hendrix, and it was a blues-based unimaginative sort of rock that bored me then, so I didn’t listen much. Now, why I liked that other professional Hendrix imitator Frank Marino and not Trower, I can’t say. I remember liking an instrumental on one of his albums called “Caravan to Midnight”. I didn’t know, though, that he had left Procol Harum to do his own thing, which might have persuaded me to listen more (probably not). In recent years, I have made more of an effort and while I don’t hate it, I don’t like it much either. Sounds like good music to have on in the background at a party or while you’re washing dishes or something. I still like “Caravan”, though. C+
UFO was an English kinda rock kinda metal band that I never got. I just couldn’t hear what others heard when I listened. Still don’t; I guess like Wishbone Ash and the Moody Blues, I’ll never get them, and I can live with that. D
VAN HALEN had just released their debut album in 1978, my senior year of high school, so really they weren’t a big part of my high school experience. Everybody had and loved that debut album, though, and Eddie Van Halen’s guitar style was really quite unique so I bought it too and kinda liked it. I’m not sure they ever topped it, to be honest. B+
There are other acts from this era that I listened to a lot, but I don’t recall my friends in general listening to, liking, or even knowing about for that matter such as Bowie, Van Morrison, Todd Rundgren, Uriah Heep, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Be-Bop Deluxe, Tommy Bolin, the James Gang, Grand Funk Railroad, the Who, the Beatles, Beatles solo + Wings, the Kinks, Status Quo, Roxy Music, Yes, Genesis, T. Rex, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, and so on, so I didn’t put them on the list. Not many women on it either, huh. Even as a teen I was digging Maria Muldaur, Bette Midler, Wendy Waldman, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, Suzi Quatro, Fanny, Pentangle with Jacqui McShee, Mary Hopkin, and others but as far as I know few of my peer group liked any of them.
So what does this prove? Not much, really. I guess it’s a topic that’s been on my mind in recent months, nay, years… and this is my way of working through it. Cheaper thhan therapy, anyway. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.