Why the 70's were the best decade of rock music

[Speed King]

The reason the bands of the 70's were so great all boils down to their influences, The Blues and the Beatles,...and it's interesting that the Beatles were heavily influenced by 1950's American Rock n Roll.

 

[BikerDude]

I've actually thought a lot about this.
I guess that we had a bunch of great bands that had a nack for connecting and extending earlier music forms. Blues and earlier Rock (Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard) and even country music.
The Stones (and others) took all the influences and put them in a big pot of gumbo and simmered till something new and better came out.
Trouble is that you can only really go about one generation with this approach.
It starts to be like old Cassette tapes. Each recording of a recording loses a bit.
So the next generations lost the mojo or the original forms and became copies of the copies.
It got derivative and lost it's inner mojo. Predictable and regurgitated.

 

[Hurdy Gurdy Man]

I agree,Biker Dude.As much as the 1970's gave us a vast selection of many tunes that were surely in the "instant classic" category,much of it was indeed made possible via the avenue of the many templates set forth by the pop/rock renaissance of the '60's.Not all of it,of course.Springsteen and the Punk movement to provide at lease a couple examples,did exemplify significant advancements of artistic medium(just as Nirvana's "Nevermind" set off not only the Grunge explosion of the early to mid-90's,but also a good degree of influence on the society of youth)most well known works of the 70's were results of the extrapolation of revolutionary lyrical and musical concepts that gave rock and roll a new face as legitimate art form.This was when albums by people such as Dylan,the Beatles and Velvet Underground were no longer only designed to sell 45's and fill out LP's with some rather trite material,but in many cases,intended only for the ear of the serious rock appreciator.Just the Beatles alone were great inspiration for many successful 70's artists who began by learning the chords to songs like "I Want To Hold Your Hand".The music of the 60's as well as its timing alongside the many other historical cultural events was part of a period(at least in Western civilization)that will NEVER,I repeat NEVER occur again,like some sort of decade long cosmic intervention...................

 

[charles_ryder]

70's was a greatest rock decade because it was a time when rised up up amazing British and American musicians: Jethro Tull, Van Der Graaf, Groundhogs, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Yes, Queen, Slade, Frank Zappa (his best albums are in 70's), Kansas, Pavlov's Dog, Ten Years After, Alice Cooper, etc., etc. And because it was a time when was formed and rised up all the main rock styles: hard rock, art rock, folk rock, punk rock, heavy metal rock... 80's nd 90's was just an afterwords to this great decade. And in 1994 rock was died. Now we seen his afterlife. There are some interesting bands in our time, but they are not consists the rock as a whole. The spirit of rock was lost. IMHO, of couse.