Free to follow every thread. No paywall, no dead ends.
Rock music: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Rock music
The first rock and roll record to top the Billboard magazine's main sales and airplay charts was Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock, released in 1954, opening the door worldwide for this new wave of popular culture. Before this moment, the genre was a chaotic fusion of African-American musical genres like rhythm and blues and gospel, mixed with country and western music, creating a sound that would eventually dominate the globe. The foundations of rock music lie in this melding of styles, with early contenders for the first rock and roll record including Strange Things Happening Every Day by Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1944 and That's All Right by Arthur Crudup in 1946. The electric guitar emerged in its modern form in the 1950s, becoming the centerpiece of the genre, supported by the electric bass guitar and a drum kit that combined drums and cymbals. This trio of instruments formed the basic rock instrumentation, derived from the basic electric blues band instrumentation, and typically consisted of between three and five members. The sound of an electric guitar in rock music is typically supported by an electric bass guitar, which pioneered jazz music in the same era, and by percussion produced from a drum kit that combines drums and cymbals. This trio of instruments has often been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments, particularly keyboards such as the piano, the Hammond organ, and the synthesizer. The basic rock instrumentation was derived from the basic electric blues band instrumentation, and a group of musicians performing rock music is termed as a rock band or a rock group. Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple syncopated rhythms in a meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four. Melodies often originate from older musical modes such as the Dorian and Mixolydian, as well as major and minor modes. Harmonies range from the common triad to parallel perfect fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Since the late 1950s, and particularly from the mid-1960s onwards, rock music often used the verse-chorus structure derived from blues and folk music, but there has been considerable variation from this model. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock, and because of its complex history and its tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition. In 1981, music journalist Robert Christgau said, the best rock jolts folk-art virtues-directness, utility, natural audience-into the present with shots of modern technology. Unlike many earlier styles of popular music, rock lyrics have dealt with a wide range of themes, including romantic love, sex, rebellion against the establishment, social concerns, and life styles. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources such as the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music, and rhythm and blues. Christgau characterizes rock lyrics as a cool medium with simple diction and repeated refrains, and asserts that rock's primary function pertains to music, or, more generally, noise. The predominance of white, male, and often middle class musicians in rock music has often been noted, and rock has been seen as an appropriation of Black musical forms for a young, white and largely male audience. As a result, it has also been seen to articulate the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, rock and roll usually implies an identification of male sexuality and aggression. Since the term rock started being used in preference to rock and roll from the late 1960s, it has usually been contrasted with pop music, with which it has shared many characteristics; however, rock is often distanced from pop; the former has an emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and a focus on serious and progressive themes as part of an ideology of authenticity that is frequently combined with an awareness of the genre's history and development. According to Simon Frith, rock was something more than pop, something more than rock and roll and rock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the romantic concept of art as artistic expression, original and sincere. In the new millennium, the term rock has occasionally been used as a blanket term including forms like pop music, reggae music, soul music, and even hip hop, which it has been influenced with but often contrasted through much of the latter's history. Christgau has used the term broadly to refer to popular and semipopular music that caters to his sensibility as a rock-and-roller, including a fondness for a good beat, a meaningful lyric with some wit, and the theme of youth, which holds an eternal attraction so objective that all youth music partakes of sociology and the field report. Rock and roll originated in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the genre spread to much of the rest of the world. Its origins lay in a melding of various black musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country and western. Debate surrounds the many recordings which have been suggested as the first rock and roll record. Contenders include Strange Things Happening Every Day by Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1944; That's All Right by Arthur Crudup in 1946, which was later covered by Elvis Presley in 1954; The House of Blue Lights by Ella Mae Morse and Freddie Slack in 1946; Wynonie Harris' Good Rocking Tonight in 1948; Goree Carter's Rock Awhile in 1949; and Jimmy Preston's Rock the Joint in 1949, also covered by Bill Haley & His Comets in 1952; and Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, recorded by Sam Phillips for Chess Records in 1951. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio, disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music, then termed race music, for a multi-racial audience, and is credited with first using the phrase rock and roll to describe the music. Four years later, Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock in 1954 became the first rock and roll song to top Billboard magazine's main sales and airplay charts, and opened the door worldwide for this new wave of popular culture. Other artists with early rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Gene Vincent. Soon rock and roll was the major force in American record sales and crooners, such as Eddie Fisher, Perry Como, and Patti Page, who had dominated the previous decade of popular music, found their access to the pop charts significantly curtailed. Rock and roll has led to a number of distinct subgenres, including rockabilly, combining rock and roll with hillbilly country music, which was usually played and recorded in the mid-1950s by white singers such as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and with the greatest commercial success, Elvis Presley. Hispanic and Latino American movements in rock and roll, which would eventually lead to the success of Latin rock and Chicano rock within the US, began to rise in the Southwest, with rock and roll standard musician Ritchie Valens and even those within other heritage genres, such as Al Hurricane along with his brothers Tiny Morrie and Baby Gaby as they began combining rock and roll with country-western within traditional New Mexico music. In addition, the 1950s saw the growth in popularity of the electric guitar, and the development of a specifically rock and roll style of playing through such exponents as Chuck Berry, Link Wray, and Scotty Moore. The use of distortion, pioneered by Western swing guitarists such as Junior Barnard and Eldon Shamblin, was popularized by Chuck Berry in the mid-1950s. The use of power chords, pioneered by Francisco Tárrega and Heitor Villa-Lobos in the 19th century and later on by Willie Johnson and Pat Hare in the early 1950s, was popularized by Link Wray in the late 1950s. Commentators have perceived a decline of rock and roll in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1959, the death of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in a plane crash, the departure of Elvis for the army, the retirement of Little Richard to become a preacher, prosecutions of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and the breaking of the payola scandal, which implicated major figures, including Alan Freed, in bribery and corruption in promoting individual acts or songs, gave a sense that the rock and roll era established at that point had come to an end. Rock quickly spread out from its origins in the US, associated with the rapid Americanization that was taking place globally in the aftermath of the Second World War. Cliff Richard is credited with one of the first rock and roll hits outside of North America with Move It in 1959, effectively ushering in the sound of British rock. Several artists, most prominently Tommy Steele from the UK, found success with covers of major American rock and roll hits before the recordings could spread internationally, often translating them into local languages where appropriate. Steele in particular toured Britain, Scandinavia, Australia, the USSR and South Africa from 1955 to 1957, influencing the globalisation of rock. Johnny O'Keefe's 1958 record Wild One was one of the earliest Australian rock and roll hits. By the late 1950s, as well as in the American-influenced Western world, rock was popular in communist states such as Yugoslavia and the USSR, as well as in regions such as South America. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, U.S. blues music and blues rock artists, who had been surpassed by the rise of rock and roll in the US, found new popularity in the UK, visiting with successful tours. Lonnie Donegan's 1955 hit Rock Island Line was a major influence and helped to develop the trend of skiffle music groups throughout the country, many of which, including John Lennon's Quarrymen, later the Beatles, moved on to play rock and roll. While former rock and roll market in the US was becoming dominated by lightweight pop and ballads, British rock groups at clubs and local dances were developing a style more strongly influenced by blues-rock pioneers, and were starting to play with an intensity and drive seldom found in white American acts; this influence would go on to shape the future of rock music through the British Invasion.
What was the first rock and roll record to top the Billboard magazine's main sales and airplay charts?
Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock became the first rock and roll record to top the Billboard magazine's main sales and airplay charts in 1954. This release opened the door worldwide for this new wave of popular culture.
When did rock music originate in the United States?
Rock and roll originated in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The genre spread to much of the rest of the world shortly after its inception.
Who is credited with first using the phrase rock and roll to describe the music?
Cleveland, Ohio, disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music for a multi-racial audience in 1951 and is credited with first using the phrase rock and roll to describe the music. Four years later, Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock became the first rock and roll song to top Billboard magazine's main sales and airplay charts.
What was the significance of the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on the 9th of February 1964?
The Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on the 9th of February 1964 drew an estimated 73 million viewers, at the time a record for an American television program. This event is considered a milestone in American pop culture and marked a major point in the British Invasion.
Which album is regarded as a starting point for the album era in rock music?
The Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is later regarded as a starting point for the album era. During this era, rock music transitioned from the singles format to albums and achieved cultural legitimacy in the mainstream.
When did the term heavy metal begin to be used to describe some hard rock played with even more volume and intensity?
The term heavy metal began to be used to describe some hard rock played with even more volume and intensity in 1967. The term was first used in music in Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild in 1967 and became associated with bands like San Francisco's Blue Cheer, Cleveland's James Gang and Michigan's Grand Funk Railroad.
By the end of 1962, what would become the British rock scene had started with beat groups like the Beatles, Gerry & the Pacemakers and the Searchers from Liverpool and Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman's Hermits and the Hollies from Manchester. They drew on a wide range of American influences including 1950s rock and roll, soul, rhythm and blues, and surf music, initially reinterpreting standard American tunes and playing for dancers. Bands like the Animals from Newcastle and Them from Belfast, and those from London like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, were more directly influenced by rhythm and blues and later blues music. Soon these groups were composing their own material, combining US forms of music and infusing it with a high energy beat. Beat bands tended towards bouncy, irresistible melodies, while early British blues acts tended towards less sexually innocent, more aggressive songs, often adopting an anti-establishment stance. There was, however, particularly in the early stages, considerable musical crossover between the two tendencies. By 1963, led by the Beatles, beat groups had begun to achieve national success in Britain, soon to be followed into the charts by the more rhythm and blues focused acts. I Want to Hold Your Hand was the Beatles' first number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100, spending seven weeks at the top and a total of 15 weeks on the chart. Their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on the 9th of February 1964, drawing an estimated 73 million viewers, at the time a record for an American television program, is considered a milestone in American pop culture. During the week of the 4th of April 1964, the Beatles held 12 positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, including the entire top five. The Beatles went on to become the biggest selling rock band of all time and they were followed into the US charts by numerous British bands. During the next two years, British acts dominated their own and the US charts with Peter and Gordon, the Animals, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Herman's Hermits, the Rolling Stones, the Troggs, and Donovan all having one or more number one singles. Other major acts that were part of the invasion included the Kinks, the Who, and the Dave Clark Five. The British Invasion helped internationalize the production of rock and roll, opening the door for subsequent British and Irish performers to achieve international success. In America it arguably spelled the end of instrumental surf music, vocal girl groups and, for a time, the teen idols, that had dominated the American charts in the late 1950s and 1960s. It dented the careers of established R&B acts like Fats Domino and Chubby Checker and even temporarily derailed the chart success of surviving rock and roll acts, including Elvis. The British Invasion also played a major part in the rise of a distinct genre of rock music, and cemented the primacy of the rock group, based on guitars and drums and producing their own material as singer-songwriters. Following the example set by the Beatles' 1965 LP Rubber Soul in particular, other British rock acts released rock albums intended as artistic statements in 1966, including the Rolling Stones' Aftermath, the Beatles' own Revolver, and the Who's A Quick One, as well as American acts in the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. Although the first impact of the British Invasion on American popular music was through beat and R&B based acts, the impetus was soon taken up by a second wave of bands that drew their inspiration more directly from American blues, including the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. British blues musicians of the late 1950s and early 1960s had been inspired by the acoustic playing of figures such as Lead Belly, who was a major influence on the Skiffle craze, and Robert Johnson. Increasingly they adopted a loud amplified sound, often centered on the electric guitar, based on the Chicago blues, particularly after the tour of Britain by Muddy Waters in 1958, which prompted Cyril Davies and guitarist Alexis Korner to form the band Blues Incorporated. The band involved and inspired many of the figures of the subsequent British blues boom, including members of the Rolling Stones and Cream, combining blues standards and forms with rock instrumentation and emphasis. The other key focus for British blues was John Mayall; his band, the Bluesbreakers, included Eric Clapton, after Clapton's departure from the Yardbirds, and later Peter Green. Particularly significant was the release of Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton, known as the Beano album, in 1966, considered one of the seminal British blues recordings and the sound of which was much emulated in both Britain and the United States. Eric Clapton went on to form supergroups Cream, Blind Faith, and Derek and the Dominos, followed by an extensive solo career that helped bring blues rock into the mainstream. Green, along with the Bluesbreaker's rhythm section Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, formed Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, who enjoyed some of the greatest commercial success in the genre. In the late 1960s Jeff Beck, also an alumnus of the Yardbirds, moved blues rock in the direction of heavy rock with his band, the Jeff Beck Group. The last Yardbirds guitarist was Jimmy Page, who went on to form The New Yardbirds which rapidly became Led Zeppelin. Many of the songs on their first three albums, and occasionally later in their careers, were expansions on traditional blues songs. In the United States, blues rock had been pioneered in the early 1960s by guitarist Lonnie Mack, however, the genre began to take off in the mid-1960s as acts developed a sound similar to British blues musicians. Key acts included Paul Butterfield, whose band acted like Mayall's Bluesbreakers in Britain as a starting point for many successful musicians, Canned Heat, the early Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, the J. Geils Band, and Jimi Hendrix with his power trios, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which included two British members, and was founded in Britain, and Band of Gypsys, whose guitar virtuosity and showmanship would be among the most emulated of the decade. Blues rock bands from the southern states, like the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and ZZ Top, incorporated country elements into their style to produce the distinctive genre Southern rock. Blues rock bands often emulated jazz, playing long, involved improvisations, which would later be a major element of progressive rock. From about 1967 bands like Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience had moved away from purely blues-based music into psychedelia. By the 1970s, blues rock had become heavier and more riff-based, exemplified by the work of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, and the lines between blues rock and hard rock were barely visible, as bands began recording rock-style albums. The genre was continued in the 1970s by figures such as George Thorogood and Pat Travers, but, particularly on the British scene, except perhaps for the advent of groups such as Status Quo and Foghat who moved towards a form of high energy and repetitive boogie rock, the subgenre became focused on heavy metal, and blues rock began to slip out of the mainstream.
The Album Era
Led by the Beatles in the mid-1960s, rock musicians advanced the LP as the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption, initiating a rock-informed album era in the music industry for the next several decades. The psychedelic lifestyle, which revolved around hallucinogenic drugs, had already developed in San Francisco and particularly prominent products of the scene were Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. The Jimi Hendrix Experience's lead guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, did extended distorted, feedback-filled jams which became a key feature of psychedelia. Psychedelic rock reached its apogee in the last years of the decade. 1967 saw the Beatles release their definitive psychedelic statement in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, including the track Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds; the Rolling Stones responded later that year with Their Satanic Majesties Request, and Pink Floyd debuted with The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Key recordings included Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow and the Doors' self-titled debut album. These trends peaked in the 1969 Woodstock festival, which saw performances by most of the major psychedelic acts. Sgt. Pepper was later regarded as a starting point for the album era, during which rock music transitioned from the singles format to albums and achieved cultural legitimacy in the mainstream. Reflecting on developments that occurred in rock music in the early 1970s, Robert Christgau wrote in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies in 1981: Rock saw greater commodification during this decade, turning into a multibillion-dollar industry and doubling its market while, as Christgau noted, suffering a significant loss of cultural prestige. Maybe the Bee Gees became more popular than the Beatles, but they were never more popular than Jesus, he said. Insofar as the music retained any mythic power, the myth was self-referential - there were lots of songs about the rock and roll life but very few about how rock could change the world, except as a new brand of painkiller. In the 70s the powerful took over, as rock industrialists capitalized on the national mood to reduce potent music to an often reactionary species of entertainment-and to transmute rock's popular base from the audience to market. Progressive rock, a term sometimes used interchangeably with art rock, moved beyond established musical formulas by experimenting with different instruments, song types, and forms. From the mid-1960s, the Left Banke, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys, had pioneered the inclusion of harpsichords, wind, and string sections on their recordings to produce a form of Baroque rock and can be heard in singles like Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale in 1967, with its Bach-inspired introduction. The Moody Blues used a full orchestra on their album Days of Future Passed in 1967 and subsequently created orchestral sounds with synthesizers. Classical orchestration, keyboards, and synthesizers were a frequent addition to the established rock format of guitars, bass, and drums in subsequent progressive rock. Instrumentals were common, while songs with lyrics were sometimes conceptual, abstract, or based in fantasy and science fiction. The Pretty Things' SF Sorrow in 1968, the Kinks' Arthur Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire in 1969, and the Who's Tommy in 1969 introduced the format of rock operas and opened the door to concept albums, often telling an epic story or tackling a grand overarching theme. King Crimson's 1969 debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, which mixed powerful guitar riffs and mellotron with jazz and symphonic music, is often taken as the key recording in progressive rock, helping the widespread adoption of the genre in the early 1970s among existing blues-rock and psychedelic bands, as well as newly formed acts. The vibrant Canterbury scene saw acts following Soft Machine from psychedelia, through jazz influences, toward more expansive hard rock, including Caravan, Hatfield and the North, Gong, and National Health. The French group Magma around drummer Christian Vander almost single-handedly created the new music genre zeuhl with their first albums in the early 1970s. Pink Floyd also moved away from psychedelia after the departure of Syd Barrett in 1968, with The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973 becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time. There was an emphasis on instrumental virtuosity, with Yes showcasing the skills of both guitarist Steve Howe and keyboard player Rick Wakeman, while Emerson, Lake & Palmer, ELP, were a supergroup who produced some of the genre's most technically demanding work. Jethro Tull and Genesis both pursued very different, but distinctly English, brands of music. Renaissance, formed in 1969 by ex-Yardbirds Jim McCarty and Keith Relf, evolved into a high-concept band featuring the three-octave voice of Annie Haslam. Most British bands depended on a relatively small cult following, but a handful, including Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Jethro Tull, managed to produce top ten singles at home and break the American market. The American brand of progressive rock varied from the eclectic and innovative Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Blood, Sweat & Tears, to more pop rock orientated bands like Boston, Foreigner, Kansas, Journey, and Styx. These, beside British bands Supertramp and ELO, all demonstrated a prog rock influence and ranked among the most commercially successful acts of the 1970s, heralding the era of pomp or arena rock. The instrumental strand of the genre resulted in albums like Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells in 1973, the first record for the Virgin Records label, which became a worldwide hit and a mainstay of the genre. Instrumental rock was particularly significant in continental Europe, allowing bands like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can, Focus and Faust to circumvent the language barrier. Their synthesiser-heavy krautrock, along with the work of Brian Eno, for a time the keyboard player with Roxy Music, would be a major influence on subsequent electronic rock. With the advent of punk rock and technological changes in the late 1970s, progressive rock was increasingly dismissed as pretentious and overblown. Many bands broke up, but some, including Genesis, ELP, Yes, and Pink Floyd, regularly scored top ten albums with successful accompanying worldwide tours. Some bands which emerged in the aftermath of punk, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ultravox, and Simple Minds, showed the influence of progressive rock, as well as their more usually recognized punk influences. In the late 1960s, jazz-rock emerged as a distinct subgenre out of the blues-rock, psychedelic, and progressive rock scenes, mixing the power of rock with the musical complexity and improvisational elements of jazz. AllMusic states that the term jazz-rock may refer to the loudest, wildest, most electrified fusion bands from the jazz camp, but most often it describes performers coming from the rock side of the equation. Jazz-rock generally grew out of the most artistically ambitious rock subgenres of the late 60s and early 70s, including the singer-songwriter movement. Many early US rock and roll musicians had begun in jazz and carried some of these elements into the new music. In Britain, the subgenre of blues rock, and many of its leading figures, like Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce of the band Cream, had emerged from the British jazz scene. Often highlighted as the first true jazz-rock recording is the only album by the relatively obscure New York-based the Free Spirits with Out of Sight and Sound in 1966. The first group of bands to self-consciously use the label were R&B oriented white rock bands that made use of jazzy horn sections, like Electric Flag, Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago, to become some of the most commercially successful acts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. British acts to emerge in the same period from the blues scene, to make use of the tonal and improvisational aspects of jazz, included Nucleus and the Graham Bond and John Mayall spin-off Colosseum. From the psychedelic rock and the Canterbury scenes came Soft Machine, who, it has been suggested, produced one of the artistically successfully fusions of the two genres. Perhaps the most critically praised fusion came from the jazz side of the equation, with Miles Davis, particularly influenced by the work of Hendrix, incorporating rock instrumentation into his sound for the album Bitches Brew in 1970. It was a major influence on subsequent rock-influenced jazz artists, including Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Weather Report. The genre began to fade in the late 1970s, as a mellower form of fusion began to take its audience, but acts like Steely Dan, Frank Zappa and Joni Mitchell recorded significant jazz-influenced albums in this period, and it has continued to be a major influence on rock music. In 1966, Bob Dylan went to Nashville to record the album Blonde on Blonde. This, and subsequent more clearly country-influenced albums, such as Nashville Skyline, have been seen as creating the genre of country folk, a route pursued by a number of largely acoustic folk musicians. Other acts that followed the back-to-basics trend were the Canadian group the Band and the California-based Creedence Clearwater Revival, both of which mixed basic rock and roll with folk, country and blues, to be among the most successful and influential bands of the late 1960s. The same movement saw the beginning of the recording careers of Californian solo artists like Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt and Lowell George, and influenced the work of established performers such as the Rolling Stones' Beggar's Banquet in 1968 and the Beatles' Let It Be in 1970. Reflecting on this change of trends in rock music over the past few years, Christgau wrote in his June 1970 Consumer Guide column that this new orthodoxy and cultural lag abandoned improvisatory, studio-ornamented productions in favor of an emphasis on tight, spare instrumentation and song composition: Its referents are 50s rock, country music, and rhythm-and-blues, and its key inspiration is the Band. In 1968, Gram Parsons recorded Safe at Home with the International Submarine Band, arguably the first true country rock album. Later that year he joined the Byrds for Sweetheart of the Rodeo in 1968, generally considered one of the most influential recordings in the genre. The Byrds continued in the same vein, but Parsons left to be joined by another ex-Byrds member Chris Hillman in forming the Flying Burrito Brothers who helped establish the respectability and parameters of the genre, before Parsons departed to pursue a solo career. Bands in California that adopted country rock included Hearts and Flowers, Poco, New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Beau Brummels, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Some performers also enjoyed a renaissance by adopting country sounds, including: the Everly Brothers; one-time teen idol Rick Nelson who became the frontman for the Stone Canyon Band; former Monkee Mike Nesmith who formed the First National Band; and Neil Young. The Dillards were, unusually, a country act, who moved towards rock music. The greatest commercial success for country rock came in the 1970s, with artists including the Doobie Brothers, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, made up of members of the Burritos, Poco, and Stone Canyon Band, who emerged as one of the most successful rock acts of all time, producing albums that included Hotel California in 1976. The founders of Southern rock are usually thought to be the Allman Brothers Band, who developed a distinctive sound, largely derived from blues rock, but incorporating elements of boogie, soul, and country in the early 1970s. The most successful act to follow them were Lynyrd Skynyrd, who helped establish the Good ol' boy image of the subgenre and the general shape of 1970s' guitar rock. Their successors included the fusion/progressive instrumentalists Dixie Dregs, the more country-influenced Outlaws, funk/R&B-leaning Wet Willie and, incorporating elements of R&B and gospel, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. After the loss of original members of the Allmans and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the genre began to fade in popularity in the late 1970s, but was sustained the 1980s with acts like 38 Special, Molly Hatchet and the Marshall Tucker Band. From the late 1960s, it became common to divide mainstream rock music into soft and hard rock. Soft rock was often derived from folk rock, using acoustic instruments and putting more emphasis on melody and harmonies. Major artists included Carole King, Cat Stevens and James Taylor. It reached its commercial peak in the mid- to late 1970s with acts like Billy Joel, America and the reformed Fleetwood Mac, whose Rumours in 1977 was the best-selling album of the decade. In contrast, hard rock was more often derived from blues-rock and was played louder and with more intensity. It often emphasised the electric guitar, both as a rhythm instrument using simple repetitive riffs and as a solo lead instrument, and was more likely to be used with distortion and other effects. Key acts included British Invasion bands like the Kinks, as well as psychedelic era performers like Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Jeff Beck Group. Hard rock-influenced bands that enjoyed international success in the late 1970s included Queen, Thin Lizzy, Aerosmith, AC/DC, and Van Halen. Also from the late 1960s, the term heavy metal began to be used to describe some hard rock played with even more volume and intensity, first as an adjective and by the early 1970s as a noun. The term was first used in music in Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild in 1967; the term began to be associated with bands like San Francisco's Blue Cheer, Cleveland's James Gang and Michigan's Grand Funk Railroad. By 1970, three key British bands had developed the characteristic sounds and styles which would help shape the subgenre. Led Zeppelin added elements of fantasy to their riff laden blues-rock, Deep Purple brought in symphonic and medieval interests from their progressive rock phase and Black Sabbath introduced facets of the gothic and modal harmony, helping to produce a darker sound. These elements were taken up by a second generation of hard rock and heavy metal bands into the late 1970s, including: Judas Priest, UFO, Motörhead and Rainbow from Britain; Kiss, Ted Nugent, and Blue Öyster Cult from the US; Rush from Canada and Scorpions from Germany, all marking the expansion in popularity of the subgenre. Despite a lack of airplay and very little presence on the singles charts, late 1970s heavy metal built a considerable following, particularly among adolescent working-class males in North America and Europe. In the 1980s, bands such as Bon Jovi, Guns N' Roses, Metallica, Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard saw mainstream success, with hard rock and a fusion of hard rock and heavy.
The Punk Reaction
Glam rock emerged from the English psychedelic and art rock scenes of the late 1960s; it can be seen as both an extension of and reaction against those trends. Musically diverse, varying between the simple rock and roll revivalism of figures like Alvin Stardust to the complex art rock of Roxy Music, and can be seen as much as a fashion as a musical subgenre. Visually, it was a mesh of various styles, ranging from 1930s Hollywood glamor, through 1950s pin-up sex appeal, pre-war Cabaret theatrics, Victorian literary and symbolist styles, science fiction, to ancient and occult mysticism and mythology; manifesting itself in outrageous clothes, makeup, hairstyles, and platform-soled boots. Glam is most noted for its sexual and gender ambiguity and representations of androgyny, beside extensive use of theatrics. It was prefigured by the showmanship and gender-identity manipulation of American acts such as the Cockettes and Alice Cooper. The origins of glam rock are associated with Marc Bolan, who had renamed his folk duo to T. Rex and taken up electric instruments by the end of the 1960s. Often cited as the moment of inception is his appearance on the BBC music show Top of the Pops in March 1971 wearing glitter and satins, to perform what would be his second UK Top 10 hit and first UK Number 1 hit, Hot Love. From 1971, already a minor star, David Bowie developed his Ziggy Stardust persona, incorporating elements of professional make up, mime and performance into his act. These performers were soon followed in the style by acts including Roxy Music, Sweet, Slade, Mott the Hoople, Mud and Alvin Stardust. While highly successful in the single charts in the United Kingdom, very few of these musicians were able to make a serious impact in the United States; Bowie was the major exception becoming an international superstar and prompting the adoption of glam styles among acts like Lou Reed, New York Dolls and Jobriath, often known as glitter rock and with a darker lyrical content than their British counterparts. In the UK the term glitter rock was most often used to refer to the extreme version of glam pursued by Gary Glitter and his support musicians the Glitter Band, who between them achieved eighteen top ten singles in the UK between 1972 and 1976. A second wave of glam rock acts, including Suzi Quatro, Roy Wood's Wizzard and Sparks, dominated the British single charts from about 1974 to 1976. Existing acts, some not usually considered central to the genre, also adopted glam styles, including Rod Stewart, Elton John, Queen and, for a time, even the Rolling Stones. It was also a direct influence on acts that rose to prominence later, including Kiss and Adam Ant, and less directly on the formation of gothic rock and glam metal as well as on punk rock, which helped end the fashion for glam from about 1976. Glam has since enjoyed sporadic modest revivals through bands such as the Darkness and in R&B crossover act Prince. After the early successes of Latin rock in the 1960s, Chicano musicians like Carlos Santana and Al Hurricane continued to have successful careers throughout the 1970s. Santana opened the decade with success in his 1970 single Black Magic Woman on the Abraxas album. From 1973 to 1978 he released a series of four albums that all achieved gold status: Welcome, Borboletta, Amigos, and Festivál. Al Hurricane continued to mix his rock music with New Mexico music, though he was also experimenting more heavily with jazz, which led to successful singles, especially on his Vestido Mojado album. Los Lobos gained popularity at this time, with their first album Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles in 1977. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock reacted by producing stripped-down, energetic social and political critiques. Punk was an influence in the 1980s on new wave, post-punk and eventually alternative rock. From the 1990s, alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop, and indie rock. Further subgenres have since emerged, including pop-punk, electronic rock, rap rock, and rap metal. Some movements were conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock and post-punk revival in the 2000s. Since the 2010s, rock has lost its position as the pre-eminent popular music genre in world culture, but remains commercially successful. The increased influence of hip-hop and electronic dance music can be seen in rock music, notably in the techno-pop scene of the early 2010s and the pop-punk-hip-hop revival of the 2020s. Rock has also embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major subcultures including mods and rockers in the U.K., the hippie movement and the wider western counterculture movement that spread out from San Francisco in the U.S. in the 1960s, the latter of which continues to this day. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the goth, punk, and emo subcultures. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism, as well as changes in social attitudes to race, sex, and drug use, and is often seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult conformity. At the same time, it has been commercially highly successful, leading to accusations of selling out. Rock music is a genre of popular music that originated in the United States as rock and roll in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of styles from the mid-1960s, primarily in the United States and United Kingdom. It has its roots in rock and roll, a style that drew from the African-American musical genres of blues and rhythm and blues, as well as from country music. Rock also drew strongly from genres such as electric blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz and other styles. Rock is typically centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar, drums, and one or more singers. Usually, rock is song-based music with a time signature and using a verse-chorus form; however, the genre has become extremely diverse. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political. Rock was the most popular genre of music in the U.S. and much of the western world from the 1960s up to the 2010s. Rock musicians in the mid-1960s began to advance the album ahead of the single as the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption, with the Beatles at the forefront of this development. Their contributions lent the genre a cultural legitimacy in the mainstream and initiated a rock-informed album era in the music industry for the next several decades. By the late 1960s classic rock period, a few distinct rock music subgenres had emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, southern rock, raga rock, and jazz rock, which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock, influenced by the countercultural psychedelic and hippie scene. New genres that emerged included progressive rock, which extended artistic elements, heavy metal, which emphasized an aggressive thick sound, and glam rock, which highlighted showmanship and visual style. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock reacted by producing stripped-down, energetic social and political critiques. Punk was an influence in the 1980s on new wave, post-punk and eventually alternative rock. From the 1990s, alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop, and indie rock. Further subgenres have since emerged, including pop-punk, electronic rock, rap rock, and rap metal. Some movements were conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock and post-punk revival in the 2000s. Since the 2010s, rock has lost its position as the pre-eminent popular music genre in world culture, but remains commercially successful. The increased influence of hip-hop and electronic dance music can be seen in rock music, notably in the techno-pop scene of the early 2010s and the pop-punk-hip-hop revival of the 2020s. Rock has also embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major subcultures including mods and rockers in the U.K., the hippie movement and the wider western counterculture movement that spread out from San Francisco in the U.S. in the 1960s, the latter of which continues to this day. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the goth, punk, and emo subcultures. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism, as well as changes in social attitudes to race, sex, and drug use, and is often seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult conformity. At the same time, it has been commercially highly successful, leading to accusations of selling out. The sound of rock is traditionally centered on the amplified electric guitar, which emerged in its modern form in the 1950s with the popularity of rock and roll. It was also greatly influenced by the sounds of electric blues guitarists. The sound of an electric guitar in rock music is typically supported by an electric bass guitar, which pioneered jazz music in the same era, and by percussion produced from a drum kit that combines drums and cymbals. This trio of instruments has often been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments, particularly keyboards such as the piano, the Hammond organ, and the synthesizer. The basic rock instrumentation was derived from the basic electric blues band instrumentation, and a group of musicians performing rock music is termed as a rock band or a rock group. Furthermore, it typically consists of between three, the power trio, and five members. Classically, a rock band takes the form of a quartet whose members cover one or more roles, including vocalist, lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, bass guitarist, drummer, and often keyboard player or another instrumentalist. Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple syncopated rhythms in a meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four. Melodies often originate from older musical modes such as the Dorian and Mixolydian, as well as major and minor modes. Harmonies range from the common triad to parallel perfect fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Since the late 1950s, and particularly from the mid-1960s onwards, rock music often used the verse-chorus structure derived from blues and folk music, but there has been considerable variation from this model. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock. Because of its complex history and its tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition. In 1981, music journalist Robert Christgau said, the best rock jolts folk-art virtues-directness, utility, natural audience-into the present with shots of modern technology. Unlike many earlier styles of popular music, rock lyrics have dealt with a wide range of themes, including romantic love, sex, rebellion against the establishment, social concerns, and life styles. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources such as the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music, and rhythm and blues. Christgau characterizes rock lyrics as a cool medium with simple diction and repeated refrains, and asserts that rock's primary function pertains to music, or, more generally, noise. The predominance of white, male, and often middle class musicians in rock music has often been noted, and rock has been seen as an appropriation of Black musical forms for a young, white and largely male audience. As a result, it has also been seen to articulate the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, rock and roll usually implies an identification of male sexuality and aggression. Since the term rock started being used in preference to rock and roll from the late 1960s, it has usually been contrasted with pop music, with which it has shared many characteristics; however, rock is often distanced from pop; the former has an emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and a focus on serious and progressive themes as part of an ideology of authenticity that is frequently combined with an awareness of the genre's history and development. According to Simon Frith, rock was something more than pop, something more than rock and roll and rock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the romantic concept of art as artistic expression, original and sincere. In the new millennium, the term rock has occasionally been used as a blanket term including forms like pop music, reggae music, soul music, and even hip hop, which it has been influenced with but often contrasted through much of the latter's history. Christgau has used the term broadly to refer to popular and semipopular music that caters to his sensibility as a rock-and-roller, including a fondness for a good beat, a meaningful lyric with some wit, and the theme of youth, which holds an eternal attraction so objective that all youth music partakes of sociology and the field report. Rock and roll originated in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the genre spread to much of the rest of the world. Its origins lay in a melding of various black musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country and western. Debate surrounds the many recordings which have been suggested as the first rock and roll record. Contenders include Strange Things Happening Every Day by Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1944; That's All Right by Arthur Crudup in 1946, which was later covered by Elvis Presley in 1954; The House of Blue Lights by Ella Mae Morse and Freddie Slack in 1946; Wynonie Harris' Good Rocking Tonight in 1948; Goree Carter's Rock Awhile in 1949; and Jimmy Preston's Rock the Joint in 1949, also covered by Bill Haley & His Comets in 1952; and Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, recorded by Sam Phillips for Chess Records in 1951. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio, disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music, then termed race music, for a multi-racial audience, and is credited with first using the phrase rock and roll to describe the music. Four years later, Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock in 1954 became the first rock and roll song to top Billboard magazine's main sales and airplay charts, and opened the door worldwide for this new wave of popular culture. Other artists with early rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Gene Vincent. Soon rock and roll was the major force in American record sales and crooners, such as Eddie Fisher, Perry Como, and Patti Page, who had dominated the previous decade of popular music, found their access to the pop charts significantly curtailed. Rock and roll has led to a number of distinct subgenres, including rockabilly, combining rock and roll with hillbilly country music, which was usually played and recorded in the mid-1950s by white singers such as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and with the greatest commercial success, Elvis Presley. Hispanic and Latino American movements in rock and roll, which would eventually lead to the success of Latin rock and Chicano rock within the US, began to rise in the Southwest, with rock and roll standard musician Ritchie Valens and even those within other heritage genres, such as Al Hurricane along with his brothers Tiny Morrie and Baby Gaby as they began combining rock and roll with country-western within traditional New Mexico music. In addition, the 1950s saw the growth in popularity of the electric guitar, and the development of a specifically rock and roll style of playing through such exponents as Chuck Berry, Link Wray, and Scotty Moore. The use of distortion, pioneered by Western swing guitarists such as Junior Barnard and Eldon Shamblin, was popularized by Chuck Berry in the mid-1950s. The use of power chords, pioneered by Francisco Tárrega and Heitor Villa-Lobos in the 19th century and later on by Willie Johnson and Pat Hare in the early 1950s, was popularized by Link Wray in the late 1950s. Commentators have perceived a decline of rock and roll in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1959, the death of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in a plane crash, the departure of Elvis for the army, the retirement of Little Richard to become a preacher, prosecutions of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and the breaking of the payola scandal, which implicated major figures, including Alan Freed, in bribery and corruption in promoting individual acts or songs, gave a sense that the rock and roll era established at that point had come to an end. Rock quickly spread out from its origins in the US, associated with the rapid Americanization that was taking place globally in the aftermath of the Second World War. Cliff Richard is credited with one of the first rock and roll hits outside of North America with Move It in 1959, effectively ushering in the sound of British rock. Several artists, most prominently Tommy Steele from the UK, found success with covers of major American rock and roll hits before the recordings could spread internationally, often translating them into local languages where appropriate. Steele in particular toured Britain, Scandinavia, Australia, the USSR and South Africa from 1955 to 1957, influencing the globalisation of rock. Johnny O'Keefe's 1958 record Wild One was one of the earliest Australian rock and roll hits. By the late 1950s, as well as in the American-influenced Western world, rock was popular in communist states such as Yugoslavia and the USSR, as well as in regions such as South America. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, U.S. blues music and blues rock artists, who had been surpassed by the rise of rock and roll in the US, found new popularity in the UK, visiting with successful tours. Lonnie Donegan's 1955 hit Rock Island Line was a major influence and helped to develop the trend of skiffle music groups throughout the country, many of which, including John Lennon's Quarrymen, later the Beatles, moved on to play rock and roll. While former rock and roll market in the US was becoming dominated by lightweight pop and ballads, British rock groups at clubs and local dances were developing a style more strongly influenced by blues-rock pioneers, and were starting to play with an intensity and drive seldom found in white American acts; this influence would go on to shape the future of rock music through the British Invasion. By the end of 1962, what would become the British rock scene had started with beat groups like the Beatles, Gerry & the Pacemakers and the Searchers from Liverpool and Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman's Hermits and the Hollies from Manchester. They drew on a wide range of American influences including 1950s rock and roll, soul, rhythm and blues, and surf music, initially reinterpreting standard American tunes and playing for dancers. Bands like the Animals from Newcastle and Them from Belfast, and those from London like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, were more directly influenced by rhythm and blues and later blues music. Soon these groups were composing their own material, combining US forms of music and infusing it with a high energy beat. Beat bands tended towards bouncy, irresistible melodies, while early British blues acts tended towards less sexually innocent, more aggressive songs, often adopting an anti-establishment stance. There was, however, particularly in the early stages, considerable musical crossover between the two tendencies. By 1963, led by the Beatles, beat groups had begun to achieve national success in Britain, soon to be followed into the charts by the more rhythm and blues focused acts. I Want to Hold Your Hand was the Beatles' first number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100, spending seven weeks at the top and a total of 15 weeks on the chart. Their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on the 9th of February 1964, drawing an estimated 73 million viewers, at the time a record for an American television program, is considered a milestone in American pop culture. During the week of the 4th of April 1964, the Beatles held 12 positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, including the entire top five. The Beatles went on to become the biggest selling rock band of all time and they were followed into the US charts by numerous British bands. During the next two years, British acts dominated their own and the US charts with Peter and Gordon, the Animals, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Herman's Hermits, the Rolling Stones, the Troggs, and Donovan all having one or more number one singles. Other major acts that were part of the invasion included the Kinks, the Who, and the Dave Clark Five. The British Invasion helped internationalize the production of rock and roll, opening the door for subsequent British and Irish performers to achieve international success. In America it arguably spelled the end of instrumental surf music, vocal girl groups and, for a time, the teen idols, that had dominated the American charts in the late 1950s and 1960s. It dented the careers of established R&B acts like Fats Domino and Chubby Checker and even temporarily derailed the chart success of surviving rock and roll acts, including Elvis. The British Invasion also played a major part in the rise of a distinct genre of rock music, and cemented the primacy of the rock group, based on guitars and drums and producing their own material as singer-songwriters. Following the example set by the Beatles' 1965 LP Rubber Soul in particular, other British rock acts released rock albums intended as artistic statements in 1966, including the Rolling Stones' Aftermath, the Beatles' own Revolver, and the Who's A Quick One, as well as American acts in the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. Although the first impact of the British Invasion on American popular music was through beat and R&B based acts, the impetus was soon taken up by a second wave of bands that drew their inspiration more directly from American blues, including the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. British blues musicians of the late 1950s and early 1960s had been inspired by the acoustic playing of figures such as Lead Belly, who was a major influence on the Skiffle craze, and Robert Johnson. Increasingly they adopted a loud amplified sound, often centered on the electric guitar, based on the Chicago blues, particularly after the tour of Britain by Muddy Waters in 1958, which prompted Cyril Davies and guitarist Alexis Korner to form the band Blues Incorporated. The band involved and inspired many of the figures of the subsequent British blues boom, including members of the Rolling Stones and Cream, combining blues standards and forms with rock instrumentation and emphasis. The other key focus for British blues was John Mayall; his band, the Bluesbreakers, included Eric Clapton, after Clapton's departure from the Yardbirds, and later Peter Green. Particularly significant was the release of Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton, known as the Beano album, in 1966, considered one of the seminal British blues recordings and the sound of which was much emulated in both Britain and the United States. Eric Clapton went on to form supergroups Cream, Blind Faith, and Derek and the Dominos, followed by an extensive solo career that helped bring blues rock into the mainstream. Green, along with the Bluesbreaker's rhythm section Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, formed Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, who enjoyed some of the greatest commercial success in the genre. In the late 1960s Jeff Beck, also an alumnus of the Yardbirds, moved blues rock in the direction of heavy rock with his band, the Jeff Beck Group. The last Yardbirds guitarist was Jimmy Page, who went on to form The New Yardbirds which rapidly became Led Zeppelin. Many of the songs on their first three albums, and occasionally later in their careers, were expansions on traditional blues songs. In the United States, blues rock had been pioneered in the early 1960s by guitarist Lonnie Mack, however, the genre began to take off in the mid-1960s as acts developed a sound similar to British blues musicians. Key acts included Paul Butterfield, whose band acted like Mayall's Bluesbreakers in Britain as a starting point for many successful musicians, Canned Heat, the early Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, the J. Geils Band, and Jimi Hendrix with his power trios, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which included two British members, and was founded in Britain, and Band of Gypsys, whose guitar virtuosity and showmanship would be among the most emulated of the decade. Blues rock bands from the southern states, like the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and ZZ Top, incorporated country elements into their style to produce the distinctive genre Southern rock. Blues rock bands often emulated jazz, playing long, involved improvisations, which would later be a major element of progressive rock. From about 1967 bands like Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience had moved away from purely blues-based music into psychedelia. By the 1970s, blues rock had become heavier and more riff-based, exemplified by the work of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, and the lines between blues rock and hard rock were barely visible, as bands began recording rock-style albums. The genre was continued in the 1970s by figures such as George Thorogood and Pat Travers, but, particularly on the British scene, except perhaps for the advent of groups such as Status Quo and Foghat who moved towards a form of high energy and repetitive boogie rock, the subgenre became focused on heavy metal, and blues rock began to slip out of the mainstream. Led by the Beatles in the mid-1960s, rock musicians advanced the LP as the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption, initiating a rock-informed album era in the music industry for the next several decades. The psychedelic lifestyle, which revolved around hallucinogenic drugs, had already developed in San Francisco and particularly prominent products of the scene were Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. The Jimi Hendrix Experience's lead guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, did extended distorted, feedback-filled jams which became a key feature of psychedelia. Psychedelic rock reached its apogee in the last years of the decade. 1967 saw the Beatles release their definitive psychedelic statement in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, including the track Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds; the Rolling Stones responded later that year with Their Satanic Majesties Request, and Pink Floyd debuted with The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Key recordings included Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow and the Doors' self-titled debut album. These trends peaked in the 1969 Woodstock festival, which saw performances by most of the major psychedelic acts. Sgt. Pepper was later regarded as a starting point for the album era, during which rock music transitioned from the singles format to albums and achieved cultural legitimacy in the mainstream. Reflecting on developments that occurred in rock music in the early 1970s, Robert Christgau wrote in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies in 1981: Rock saw greater commodification during this decade, turning into a multibillion-dollar industry and doubling its market while, as Christgau noted, suffering a significant loss of cultural prestige. Maybe the Bee Gees became more popular than the Beatles, but they were never more popular than Jesus, he said. Insofar as the music retained any mythic power, the myth was self-referential - there were lots of songs about the rock and roll life but very few about how rock could change the world, except as a new brand of painkiller. In the 70s the powerful took over, as rock industrialists capitalized on the national mood to reduce potent music to an often reactionary species of entertainment-and to transmute rock's popular base from the audience to market. Progressive rock, a term sometimes used interchangeably with art rock, moved beyond established musical formulas by experimenting with different instruments, song types, and forms. From the mid-1960s, the Left Banke, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys, had pioneered the inclusion of harpsichords, wind, and string sections on their recordings to produce a form of Baroque rock and can be heard in singles like Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale in 1967, with its Bach-inspired introduction. The Moody Blues used a full orchestra on their album Days of Future Passed in 1967 and subsequently created orchestral sounds with synthesizers. Classical orchestration, keyboards, and synthesizers were a frequent addition to the established rock format of guitars, bass, and drums in subsequent progressive rock. Instrumentals were common, while songs with lyrics were sometimes conceptual, abstract, or based in fantasy and science fiction. The Pretty Things' SF Sorrow in 1968, the Kinks' Arthur Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire in 1969, and the Who's Tommy in 1969 introduced the format of rock operas and opened the door to concept albums, often telling an epic story or tackling a grand overarching theme. King Crimson's 1969 debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, which mixed powerful guitar riffs and mellotron with jazz and symphonic music, is often taken as the key recording in progressive rock, helping the widespread adoption of the genre in the early 1970s among existing blues-rock and psychedelic bands, as well as newly formed acts. The vibrant Canterbury scene saw acts following Soft Machine from psychedelia, through jazz influences, toward more expansive hard rock, including Caravan, Hatfield and the North, Gong, and National Health. The French group Magma around drummer Christian Vander almost single-handedly created the new music genre zeuhl with their first albums in the early 1970s. Pink Floyd also moved away from psychedelia after the departure of Syd Barrett in 1968, with The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973 becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time. There was an emphasis on instrumental virtuosity, with Yes showcasing the skills of both guitarist Steve Howe and keyboard player Rick Wakeman, while Emerson, Lake & Palmer, ELP, were a supergroup who produced some of the genre's most technically demanding work. Jethro Tull and Genesis both pursued very different, but distinctly English, brands of music. Renaissance, formed in 1969 by ex-Yardbirds Jim McCarty and Keith Relf, evolved into a high-concept band featuring the three-octave voice of Annie Haslam. Most British bands depended on a relatively small cult following, but a handful, including Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Jethro Tull, managed to produce top ten singles at home and break the American market. The American brand of progressive rock varied from the eclectic and innovative Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Blood, Sweat & Tears, to more pop rock orientated bands like Boston, Foreigner, Kansas, Journey, and Styx. These, beside British bands Supertramp and ELO, all demonstrated a prog rock influence and ranked among the most commercially successful acts of the 1970s, heralding the era of pomp or arena rock. The instrumental strand of the genre resulted in albums like Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells in 1973, the first record for the Virgin Records label, which became a worldwide hit and a mainstay of the genre. Instrumental rock was particularly significant in continental Europe, allowing bands like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can, Focus and Faust to circumvent the language barrier. Their synthesiser-heavy krautrock, along with the work of Brian Eno, for a time the keyboard player with Roxy Music, would be a major influence on subsequent electronic rock. With the advent of punk rock and technological changes in the late 1970s, progressive rock was increasingly dismissed as pretentious and overblown. Many bands broke up, but some, including Genesis, ELP, Yes, and Pink Floyd, regularly scored top ten albums with successful accompanying worldwide tours. Some bands which emerged in the aftermath of punk, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ultravox, and Simple Minds, showed the influence of progressive rock, as well as their more usually recognized punk influences. In the late 1960s, jazz-rock emerged as a distinct subgenre out of the blues-rock, psychedelic, and progressive rock scenes, mixing the power of rock with the musical complexity and improvisational elements of jazz. AllMusic states that the term jazz-rock may refer to the loudest, wildest, most electrified fusion bands from the jazz camp, but most often it describes performers coming from the rock side of the equation. Jazz-rock generally grew out of the most artistically ambitious rock subgenres of the late 60s and early 70s, including the singer-songwriter movement. Many early US rock and roll musicians had begun in jazz and carried some of these elements into the new music. In Britain, the subgenre of blues rock, and many of its leading figures, like Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce of the band Cream, had emerged from the British jazz scene. Often highlighted as the first true jazz-rock recording is the only album by the relatively obscure New York-based the Free Spirits with Out of Sight and Sound in 1966. The first group of bands to self-consciously use the label were R&B oriented white rock bands that made use of jazzy horn sections, like Electric Flag, Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago, to become some of the most commercially successful acts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. British acts to emerge in the same period from the blues scene, to make use of the tonal and improvisational aspects of jazz, included Nucleus and the Graham Bond and John Mayall spin-off Colosseum. From the psychedelic rock and the Canterbury scenes came Soft Machine, who, it has been suggested, produced one of the artistically successfully fusions of the two genres. Perhaps the most critically praised fusion came from the jazz side of the equation, with Miles Davis, particularly influenced by the work of Hendrix, incorporating rock instrumentation into his sound for the album Bitches Brew in 1970. It was a major influence on subsequent rock-influenced jazz artists, including Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Weather Report. The genre began to fade in the late 1970s, as a mellower form of fusion began to take its audience, but acts like Steely Dan, Frank Zappa and Joni Mitchell recorded significant jazz-influenced albums in this period, and it has continued to be a major influence on rock music. In 1966, Bob Dylan went to Nashville to record the album Blonde on Blonde. This, and subsequent more clearly country-influenced albums, such as Nashville Skyline, have been seen as creating the genre of country folk, a route pursued by a number of largely acoustic folk musicians. Other acts that followed the back-to-basics trend were the Canadian group the Band and the California-based Creedence Clearwater Revival, both of which mixed basic rock and roll with folk, country and blues, to be among the most successful and influential bands of the late 1960s. The same movement saw the beginning of the recording careers of Californian solo artists like Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt and Lowell George, and influenced the work of established performers such as the Rolling Stones' Beggar's Banquet in 1968 and the Beatles' Let It Be in 1970. Reflecting on this change of trends in rock music over the past few years, Christgau wrote in his June 1970 Consumer Guide column that this new orthodoxy and cultural lag abandoned improvisatory, studio-ornamented productions in favor of an emphasis on tight, spare instrumentation and song composition: Its referents are 50s rock, country music, and rhythm-and-blues, and its key inspiration is the Band. In 1968, Gram Parsons recorded Safe at Home with the International Submarine Band, arguably the first true country rock album. Later that year he joined the Byrds for Sweetheart of the Rodeo in 1968, generally considered one of the most influential recordings in the genre. The Byrds continued in the same vein, but Parsons left to be joined by another ex-Byrds member Chris Hillman in forming the Flying Burrito Brothers who helped establish the respectability and parameters of the genre, before Parsons departed to pursue a solo career. Bands in California that adopted country rock included Hearts and Flowers, Poco, New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Beau Brummels, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Some performers also enjoyed a renaissance by adopting country sounds, including: the Everly Brothers; one-time teen idol Rick Nelson who became the frontman for the Stone Canyon Band; former Monkee Mike Nesmith who formed the First National Band; and Neil Young. The Dillards were, unusually, a country act, who moved towards rock music. The greatest commercial success for country rock came in the 1970s, with artists including the Doobie Brothers, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, made up of members of the Burritos, Poco, and Stone Canyon Band, who emerged as one of the most successful rock acts of all time, producing albums that included Hotel California in 1976. The founders of Southern rock are usually thought to be the Allman Brothers Band, who developed a distinctive sound, largely derived from blues rock, but incorporating elements of boogie, soul, and country in the early 1970s. The most successful act to follow them were Lynyrd Skynyrd, who helped establish the Good ol' boy image of the subgenre and the general shape of 1970s' guitar rock. Their successors included the fusion/progressive instrumentalists Dixie Dregs, the more country-influenced Outlaws, funk/R&B-leaning Wet Willie and, incorporating elements of R&B and gospel, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. After the loss of original members of the Allmans and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the genre began to fade in popularity in the late 1970s, but was sustained the 1980s with acts like 38 Special, Molly Hatchet and the Marshall Tucker Band. From the late 1960s, it became common to divide mainstream rock music into soft and hard rock. Soft rock was often derived from folk rock, using acoustic instruments and putting more emphasis on melody and harmonies. Major artists included Carole King, Cat Stevens and James Taylor. It reached its commercial peak in the mid- to late 1970s with acts like Billy Joel, America and the reformed Fleetwood Mac, whose Rumours in 1977 was the best-selling album of the decade. In contrast, hard rock was more often derived from blues-rock and was played louder and with more intensity. It often emphasised the electric guitar, both as a rhythm instrument using simple repetitive riffs and as a solo lead instrument, and was more likely to be used with distortion and other effects. Key acts included British Invasion bands like the Kinks, as well as psychedelic era performers like Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Jeff Beck Group. Hard rock-influenced bands that enjoyed international success in the late 1970s included Queen, Thin Lizzy, Aerosmith, AC/DC, and Van Halen. Also from the late 1960s, the term heavy metal began to be used to describe some hard rock played with even more volume and intensity, first as an adjective and by the early 1970s as a noun. The term was first used in music in Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild in 1967; the term began to be associated with bands like San Francisco's Blue Cheer, Cleveland's James Gang and Michigan's Grand Funk Railroad. By 1970, three key British bands had developed the characteristic sounds and styles which would help shape the subgenre. Led Zeppelin added elements of fantasy to their riff laden blues-rock, Deep Purple brought in symphonic and medieval interests from their progressive rock phase and Black Sabbath introduced facets of the gothic and modal harmony, helping to produce a darker sound. These elements were taken up by a second generation of hard rock and heavy metal bands into the late 1970s, including: Judas Priest, UFO, Motörhead and Rainbow from Britain; Kiss, Ted Nugent, and Blue Öyster Cult from the US; Rush from Canada and Scorpions from Germany, all marking the expansion in popularity of the subgenre. Despite a lack of airplay and very little presence on the singles charts, late 1970s heavy metal built a considerable following, particularly among adolescent working-class males in North America and Europe. In the 1980s, bands such as Bon Jovi, Guns N' Roses, Metallica, Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard saw mainstream success, with hard rock and a fusion of hard rock and heavy. Glam rock emerged from the English psychedelic and art rock scenes of the late 1960s; it can be seen as both an extension of and reaction against those trends. Musically diverse, varying between the simple rock and roll revivalism of figures like Alvin Stardust to the complex art rock of Roxy Music, and can be seen as much as a fashion as a musical subgenre. Visually, it was a mesh of various styles, ranging from 1930s Hollywood glamor, through 1950s pin-up sex appeal, pre-war Cabaret theatrics, Victorian literary and symbolist styles, science fiction, to ancient and occult mysticism and mythology; manifesting itself in outrageous clothes, makeup, hairstyles, and platform-soled boots. Glam is most noted for its sexual and gender ambiguity and representations of androgyny, beside extensive use of theatrics. It was prefigured by the showmanship and gender-identity manipulation of American acts such as the Cockettes and Alice Cooper. The origins of glam rock are associated with Marc Bolan, who had renamed his folk duo to T. Rex and taken up electric instruments by the end of the 1960s. Often cited as the moment of inception is his appearance on the BBC music show Top of the Pops in March 1971 wearing glitter and satins, to perform what would be his second UK Top 10 hit and first UK Number 1 hit, Hot Love. From 1971, already a minor star, David Bowie developed his Ziggy Stardust persona, incorporating elements of professional make up, mime and performance into his act. These performers were soon followed in the style by acts including Roxy Music, Sweet, Slade, Mott the Hoople, Mud and Alvin Stardust. While highly successful in the single charts in the United Kingdom, very few of these musicians were able to make a serious impact in the United States; Bowie was the major exception becoming an international superstar and prompting the adoption of glam styles among acts like Lou Reed, New York Dolls and Jobriath, often known as glitter rock and with a darker lyrical content than their British counterparts. In the UK the term glitter rock was most often used to refer to the extreme version of glam pursued by Gary Glitter and his support musicians the Glitter Band, who between them achieved eighteen top ten singles in the UK between 1972 and 1976. A second wave of glam rock acts, including Suzi Quatro, Roy Wood's Wizzard and Sparks, dominated the British single charts from about 1974 to 1976. Existing acts, some not usually considered central to the genre, also adopted glam styles, including Rod Stewart, Elton John, Queen and, for a time, even the Rolling Stones. It was also a direct influence on acts that rose to prominence later, including Kiss and Adam Ant, and less directly on the formation of gothic rock and glam metal as well as on punk rock, which helped end the fashion for glam from about 1976. Glam has since enjoyed sporadic modest revivals through bands such as the Darkness and in R&B crossover act Prince. After the early successes of Latin rock in the 1960s, Chicano musicians like Carlos Santana and Al Hurricane continued to have successful careers throughout the 1970s. Santana opened the decade with success in his 1970 single Black Magic Woman on the Abraxas album. From 1973 to 1978 he released a series of four albums that all achieved gold status: Welcome, Borboletta, Amigos, and Festivál. Al Hurricane continued to mix his rock music with New Mexico music, though he was also experimenting more heavily with jazz, which led to successful singles, especially on his Vestido Mojado album. Los Lobos gained popularity at this time, with their first album Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles in 1977. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock reacted by producing stripped-down, energetic social and political critiques. Punk was an influence in the 1980s on new wave, post-punk and eventually alternative rock. From the 1990s, alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop, and indie rock. Further subgenres have since emerged, including pop-punk, electronic rock, rap rock, and rap metal. Some movements were conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock and post-punk revival in the 2000s. Since the 2010s, rock has lost its position as the pre-eminent popular music genre in world culture, but remains commercially successful. The increased influence of hip-hop and electronic dance music can be seen in rock music, notably in the techno-pop scene of the early 2010s and the pop-punk-hip-hop revival of the 2020s. Rock has also embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major subcultures including mods and rockers in the U.K., the hippie movement and the wider western counterculture movement that spread out from San Francisco in the U.S. in the 1960s, the latter of which continues to this day. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the goth, punk, and emo subcultures. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism, as well as changes in social attitudes to race, sex, and drug use, and is often seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult conformity. At the same time, it has been commercially highly successful, leading to accusations of selling out.