'70s Hard Rock

You're cruisin' in your buddy's van — you know, the party house on wheels with the sweet airbrush job and avocado-green shag. It's the first day of summer vacation, and you've got Alice Cooper's "School's Out" blasting like a badass advance guard from the dashboard 8-track. On deck, it's Nazareth's "Hair of the Dog," so you pump your devil horns accordingly, letting the world know who it's "messin' with." You chase that burning shot with Sweet's super-glam kiss-off "Fox on the Run" — three power-chord-perfect minutes you wish could last forever. Thing is, with our '70s Hard Rock Basics, it can.

No, you're not trippin' — that is nearly nine minutes of bone-crushing riffage stomping through Blue Öyster Cult's "Godzilla" — and yeah, that guy is speaking Japanese. And the yodeling? That's Dutch prog-rockers Focus loading their own 6:42 saga, "Hocus Pocus," with some kind of surreal, math-rock sorcery. It's heavy, we know, but that's not the half of it. Step on up to your speakers while we fire-up Deep Purple's "Highway Star." If Jon Lord's V-8 88s don't kick your brain into overdrive, Ritchie Blackmore's scorched-earth guitar break will, no doubt, do the trick.

Just consider us your '70s record-store sage — that guy behind the counter where you score your LPs and velvet blacklight posters. This wizard sizes you up and strokes his beard like some freaky retail Gandalf before dropping the needle on cuts so damn good, you're wondering how they slipped below your radar. We're talking about Humble Pie's "30 Days in the Hole," with that whiskey-scorched Steve Marriott wail; or Queen's "Keep Yourself Alive," with the Brian May axe-grinder that twists your brain's pleasure center between forefinger and thumb just like May grips his halfpenny-coin pick. You want a Kiss belt buckle with that?

The righteous thing about '70s hard rock is that there's something for every stripe of disciple. If rock-monster face paint, handle serpents, and spitfire are your game, there's Alice Cooper and Kiss to light you up with hotter-than-hell soundtracks. Or maybe you're the type who likes to hole up in your basement bedroom with Rush, logging hours on the headphones, trying to map out those mindbending chord progressions or nail that calculus-complex Alex Lifeson guitar fill. Then again, perhaps your idea of hard-rock utopia is a hot summer day out on the lawn, cold one in hand, and big, bad slabs of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mountain sizzling through the speakers you hauled out from the den. However you take your '70s hard rock, just hit play — leave the rest to us.