The 1970s signaled the passing of the dreamy excess that was the fabled 60s. During the decade that included the fabled Summer Of Love, Woodstock, the birth of west coast bands like The Byrds, Love, Buffalo Springfield and their northern counterparts in the likes of Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane, there was one dominant and overriding moment – the birth of the Beatles. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr met and formed a band. From that point on, rock/pop music would be forever changed. Everything flowed from the Beatles: the idea of self-contained bands writing their own songs; the concept of lead and rhythm guitars performing orchestrated parts; the actual sound of electric guitar; anything and everything could be attributed to this Liverpool quartet.
So, the 70s was a distillation of what the
Beatles wrought – big melodic rock songs, twin guitars working off of each other, and the electricity to fuse all of this together. For the first time, metal or heavy metal or heavy music peeked its horned head over the fence.
Led Zeppelin, though they’d been hatched in the previous decade, brought their unique style of blues and rock to an international community.
AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, and Deep Purple would all release albums. The musician as guitar hero would first be crystallized in these very bands, serving notice that Angus Young, Tony Iommi, Joe Perry, and Ritchie Blackmore were on their way to becoming full-blown Guitar Gods (with double capital Gs).
Jeff Beck, already a six-string maestro since his 60s salad days with The Yardbirds and his own self-titled band with then relatively-unknown singer Rod Stewart, would raise the barre chords to an untouchable position with the release of Blow By Blow. In 1975, this will be his first foray into the all-instrumental realm and will signal his departure from any singer-fronted band from this moment on.
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| "The Beatles" |
The Beatles, too, are represented in the 70s; In August 1971, Paul McCartney has formed
Wings and will undertake his first tour. Just a few days after the bassist’s headline, co-Beatle John Lennon will issue his
Imagine album. And George Harrison, within two weeks’ of his bandmates’ announcements, will appear at his mammoth benefit at New York’s Madison Square Garden. On August 1, 1971, the spiritual Beatle rounds up Eric Clapton, Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Billy Preston, and others for his Bangla Desh concert.
On January 18, 1973, David Gilmour and the Pink Floyd will enter Abbey Road studios to begin work on what will become Dark Side Of The Moon. Two months later they’ll have completed this stunning project and see it sitting at Number One on US charts. Over the next 30 years, more than 34 millions copies will find their way onto turntables around the world. As if that statistic isn’t staggering enough, this remarkable record will remain in the Billboard Top 200 charts for 741 weeks (there will be 591 consecutive weeks [if you’re counting, 591 weeks comes out to about 11 years]). Extraordinarily enough, those numbers weren’t adequate enough to secure a Number One spot in England – they had to settle for a runner’s up Number Two.
Guitar playing then, ran wild, ran off the tracks, ran the gamut. It delicately crawled up our spine from Gilmour’s Fender Stratocaster breathing out notes of butterscotch sky; solos all weeping, slowly creeping, delayed, decayed, legato, cavernous, mountainous, shadowy, echoey, symphonic, gigantic, and romantic.
Then it tried to break our backs when Tony Iommi spit up huge globs of electric phlegm on albums like Paranoid and Master Of Reality. His Gibson SG slammed and damned us with violent gut punches. This Englishman with slightly less than 10 fingers – but back in the day, still digits enough to whack the crap out of a local singer calling Ozzy Zig – turned those fists of fury into bare-knuckled riffing machines of mayhem. He choked and bled us. In dungeons the world over, in the very worst places on earth, in the very valley of hell itself, it is Tony’s guitar you’ll probably hear screaming from the in-house PA (assuming hell has electricity). Iommi’s playing is shot through with desperate tension. At times, when it appears that his strings don’t want to bend, he twists and mangles them. There is nothing sublime or subtle about Tony’s playing; his rhythm chops stand up like brute soldiers. They bully their way through the music and many times force the vocal to join in or be mutilated (how many Sabbath songs can you think of where Ozzy simply doubles the guitar riff?). The tonality is decayed and black, serenade for a heart attack; it is fouled and polluted like the Birmingham skies of his youth.
There is Ritchie Blackmore’s Marshall-fueled Strat pouring classical gas over rock; Angus Young’s thump-and-grinding Gibson SG (talking about polar ends, listen to Young’s manipulation of the SG versus the sonics of Iommi’s tortured cacophony) and Joe Perry’s raucous, sometimes mawkish, blues-oozing guitar (difficult to associate the Aerosmith guy with any one instrument; he jumps around).
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| "Jeff Beck" |
And somewhere in the middle and on the outside, seeping through the heart and excavating his way through the tissues of the brain is
Jeff Beck. He is the most gifted player and probably the least understood. He stood at the doors legends walked through when he assembled the two Jeff Beck Group albums:
Truth and
Beck-Ola. He, arguably, could have out-Zeppelined Zeppelin, but he broke that Stewart-fronted band up. He could have played Woodstock but he didn’t. Still, for all of his improbable decisions, his strange and dismissive treatment of the press, and the fact that he loves his cars more than his guitars, Jeff Beck is a wizard. The 1975
Blow By Blow album conjures up bluestring dreams and mythic country bends like yelping prairie dogs and the most dramatic and dolorous and atavistic and frangible sounds ever put on record.
Yes, those are a lot of big words but you need big words to describe him because he is a big player; his is a huge presence; Jeff Beck is voluminous. The man with hands like Michaelangelo’s David has created the lingua franca of the electric guitar – he communicates to rockers and jazzers, country gentlemen and fusioneers. His is the most unique voice to be heard here in the 1970s.
The 70s, outside of the 1960s, was the most fertile decade ever for guitar players. There was more experimentation and expansion and evolution; more attempts and attacks; more tones, textures, and techniques. And certainly, there were a lot more players than just the select group here who, during this decade, truly stretched the limits. But the artists mentioned in this introduction (as well as several others) were, by anyone’s standards, shining lights and visionaries. They do represent a ten-year period during which boundaries were pushed and expanded. These musicians were the voices of the 1970s and what they uttered over 30 years ago still has a resonance and bounces around in our brains like the infinite delay setting on a PCM42.
2007 © Steven Rosen
/ my profile 
