'70s Hard Rock

Deep Purple's Guitar 101 staple, "Smoke On the Water." Alice Cooper's eternal ode to bad-boy summers, "School's Out." The Guess Who's anti-U.S. broadside, "American Woman." What do these disparate anthems have in common? It's the 1970s, of course, when power riffs, heavy guitars, and like-you-mean-it vocals reigned supreme.

It was a decade of ultimate jams, when rock epics could clock in at major running times and still secure their spots on the airwaves. Focus packed syncopated chord progressions, organ, flute, and yodeling into the 6:42 classic-rock standby "Hocus Pocus." And Mahogany Rush pushed the heavy blues of "I'm a King Bee" to 5:58.

The '70s produced many variations on the hard rock theme. ZZ Top took the Texas bar-blues route with the searing roustabout rocker "Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers," while Aussie rocker Billy Thorpe went epic for his "Children of the Sun." On the title track from their second album, Kiss turned it up till it was "Hotter Than Hell."

As the '70s began, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin signaled the end of the psychedelic, peace-and-love aesthetic of the '60s. In its place arose a generation of hard rockers who dedicated themselves to taking the genre in myriad new directions. Acts like Alice Cooper and Kiss emphasized the theatricality inherent in good, hard rock with ghoulish makeup and sensational stage shows, while progressive rockers (Rush) went deep into complex arrangements and instrumental pyrotechnics. Bachman-Turner Overdrive expressed it best: "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet."