Hard Rock: The Decade of Excess

If the sixties were the revolution, the seventies were the empire. Hard rock turned rock into the biggest entertainment machine on the planet: stadium tours, private jets, riffs carved in marble. At Rebobinados we believe that decade deserves telling without the usual double trap: neither the fan's idealisation nor the cynic's easy contempt. It was glory and it was decadence, almost always in the same song.

1968-1971: the foundations

Hard rock was born of electric blues, hardened. Everything that would fill the stadiums of the seventies had already been invented in the bars of Chicago twenty years earlier, as we tell in The Day the Blues Went Electric; what changed was the scale.

When Led Zeppelin released their debut in January 1969, the message was unambiguous: this is blues, but at a volume the blues never imagined. Jimmy Page came out of the Yardbirds with a master plan; John Bonham brought the heaviest drums ever recorded; Robert Plant, a howl that defined for good what "rock singer" means.

That master plan included a new way of recording. Page placed the microphones far from the drums rather than on top of them, capturing the whole room instead of the dry impact: that's why Bonham sounds as though he's playing in a cathedral. It's a trick of engineering, not of force, and it defines the sound of the decade.

Deep Purple arrived by way of virtuosity: Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord turned guitar-and-organ duels into an extreme sport. And in 1971, Led Zeppelin IV delivered the genre's Rosetta Stone: "Stairway to Heaven", eight minutes running from medieval whisper to electric avalanche. No radio station asked for it as a single. It didn't need to.

The age of the airships

What followed has no precedent in the history of show business. Led Zeppelin broke attendance records that had belonged to the Beatles. They chartered a Boeing 720 — the famous Starship — to go from stadium to stadium. In 1973, the box office on their American tour surpassed everything known.

Rock was no longer counterculture: it was the culture, with offices, accountants and managers like Peter Grant. He's worth pausing on, because his mark outlasts the aeroplanes: until then local promoters kept most of the gate and the artist took a flat fee. Grant turned it around and negotiated ninety per cent for the band. Every musician who lives off touring today works under a split that started there.

Meanwhile, "Smoke on the Water" immortalised the real fire at the Montreux casino, AC/DC took the riff to its purest essence from Australia, and Aerosmith built the bridge between British blues and American swagger.

The price of the party

But music's living memory obliges us to tell the other side. The decade of excess collected its bill with terrifying punctuality. Drugs went from sacrament to routine and from routine to illness. Three-hour concerts concealed tours that ground bodies down.

In September 1980, John Bonham died after a day of vodka. Led Zeppelin, with a dignity few empires have shown, dissolved rather than replace him: the statement they released said simply that they could not continue as they had been. Five months earlier, Bon Scott had died in similar circumstances; AC/DC chose the opposite path, carried on, and recorded the best-selling album of their career. Neither decision was wrong, and that's the size of the problem: two enormous bands, the same tragedy, months apart.

By then punk had already passed sentence: the dinosaurs were the enemy, and we make the case in Punk: Three Chords and the Truth. And it had a point. The hard rock of 1979 looked far too little like that of 1969: more pyrotechnics, less danger.

What we stand by

Here is our position: excess wasn't an accident of hard rock, it was its fuel. The same extravagance that bought aeroplanes recorded "Whole Lotta Love". You can't have the ambition without the abyss, and pretending otherwise is to misunderstand the decade.

Nor should we forget the other debt. A good many of those riffs came straight from blues songs whose authors weren't in the credits, and several of those cases ended up in court decades later, with Willie Dixon leading the way. The empire was built on a loan that took a long time to acknowledge.

Fifty years on, those records remain the standard against which every guitar band is measured. Out of them, hardened further still, came the metal that would dominate the following decade. Empires fall, yes. But it's worth remembering, every time those first bars of "Black Dog" sound, that this empire genuinely existed. And that, unlike almost all the others, it left anthems instead of ruins.