Rock Comes of Age
The Concept Album
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Concept albums were intended as thematically
and aesthetically unified works, not simply
collections of unrelated cuts:
– The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966)
– The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
(1967)
– The Who’s “rock opera” Tommy (1969)
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By the early 1970s, the twelve-inch high-fidelity
LP had become the primary medium for rock
music.
Rock Comes of Age
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Many progressive rock musicians viewed themselves
as artists, and their recordings as works of art.
The promise of rock music as a zone of interracial
interaction seemed to have largely vanished by the
early 1970s.
Early rock festivals (Monterey in 1967 and Woodstock
in 1969), regarded as the climax of the 1960s
counterculture, had become highly profitable massaudience concerts by the mid-1970s.
A series of bands that sprang up during the early
1970s tailored their performances to the concert
context.
Toured the country with elaborate light shows, spectacular
sets, and powerful amplification systems.
Studio Technology
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New recording techniques and experimentation
High-fidelity stereo sound
Sixteen, twenty-four, and thirty-two-track
recording consoles
– enabled complex aural textures,
– could construct any given track on an LP over time,
and
– could add or subtract individual instruments or voices.
Recordings took much longer to create and
became very expensive.
 A few multitalented musicians could play all of
the instruments on a given track.
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David Bowie, Glam Rock, and Ziggy
Stardust
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David Bowie created the character of
Ziggy Stardust, an alien who visits Earth
and becomes a rock superstar.
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The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and
the Spiders from Mars (1972)
– Concept album centered on Ziggy Stardust
– The Ziggy Stardust concert tour was an
elaborate theatrical presentation with special
lighting effects and spectacular costumes.
David Bowie
Bowie’s ability to create quasi-fictional
stage personae with every new album was
a precedent for the image manipulation of
1980s stars like Madonna, Michael Jackson,
and Prince.
 David Bowie was a pioneer of “glam rock”
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– Emphasized elaborate, showy appearance and
costuming
Joni Mitchell and Blue (1971)
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Consists of a cycle of songs about the
complexities of love
The album is carefully designed to create a
strong emotional focus.
The sound of the LP is spare and beautiful,
focusing on Mitchell’s voice and acoustic guitar.
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“All I Want”
“My Old Man”
“Carey”
“Little Green”
“The Last Time I Saw Richard”
Pink Floyd and Dark Side of the
Moon (1973)
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The album is based on the theme of madness and the
things that drive us to it: time, work, money, war, and
death.
The LP starts with the sounds of a beating heart, a ticking
clock, a type writer, a cash register, gunfire and the voices of
the band discussing their own experiences with insanity
The album’s feeling of unity has something to do with
its languid, carefully measured pace, as well as texture
and mood.
The sound of the record is complex but clear.
Interesting sound effects:
During the song” Money,” sounds of clinking coins and cash
registers are used as rhythmic accompaniment.
The album stayed on the Billboard Top LPs charts for
over fourteen years.
Marvin Gaye and What’s Going On?
(1971)
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“Theme album” that fused soul music and
gospel influence with the political impetus of
progressive rock
The basic unifying theme of the album is social
justice.
The title track was inspired by the return of
Gaye’s brother from Vietnam and is a plea for
nonviolence.
Other songs focus on ecology, the welfare of
children, and the suffering of the poor in
Americas urban centers.
Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and
Pictures at an Exhibition (1971)
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Live album that borrowed its structural
elements from a suite of piano pieces by the
Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky (1839–
81)
Mussorgsky’s composition was inspired by a
walk through an art gallery.
Consists of a sequence of accessible,
reasonably short, easily digestible “paintings”
The album concludes with “Nutrocker,” a
rock ’n’ roll version of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker
Suite.
The Rolling Stones and Exile on
Main Street (1972)
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Often cited as the best album recorded by the Rolling
Stones
The double album is held together by its texture, its
rough unpolished studio sound, and its bad attitude
Consists mainly of blues-based rock tunes, material
from the Rolling Stones’ roots
Recorded in the basement of Keith Richard’s home in
France, where they were living in tax exile at the time
Overall impression is one of bleakness and desolation
Demonstrates influences that formed their style: urban
blues, soul, and country music
Led Zeppelin and “Stairway to
Heaven” from Led Zeppelin IV
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Led Zeppelin formed in 1968 in London.
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Jimmie Page, guitar
John Bonham, drums
John Paul Jones, electric bass and organ
Robert Plant, vocals
Guitarist Jimmy Page and vocalist Robert Plant were
fascinated by mythology, Middle Earth fantasy, and the
occult.
They became one of the most enduring bands in rock
history, selling over 50 million records.
Influences drew from various sources: urban blues, San
Francisco psychedelia, the virtuoso guitar playing of Jimi
Hendrix
“Stairway to Heaven”
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Anthem of heavy metal music
Thunderous volume
The eight-minute track was never released as
a single. You had to purchase the album to
own a copy of the song.
The album cover did not bear the name of the
album, band, or record company.
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Led Zeppelin IV eventually sold fourteen million
copies and reached Number Two on the Billboard
Top 10 LP charts; it stayed on the charts for five
years.
“Stairway to Heaven”
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Text composed by Robert Plant
– References to mythological beings
 The May Queen and the Piper
– Rural images
 Paths and roads, rings of smoke through the forest, a songbird by a
brook, the whispering wind
– Helped create a cumulative mood of mystery and enchantment
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Structure of the song
– Basic building blocks are straightforward four- and eightmeasure phrases
– Three main sections
– The arrangement is constructed to create continual escalation in
density, volume, and speed.
Carlos Santana
(b. 1947)
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Born in Mexico, began his musical career
playing in the nightspots of Tijuana
At fifteen, moved to San Francisco, where he
was exposed to many musical influences:
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Jazz, particularly Miles Davis and John Coltrane
Salsa, a New York–based style of Latin dance music
Late 1960s San Francisco rock, including artists
such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Sly and the
Family Stone
Formed his own band in 1968 from middleand working-class Latino, black, and white
musicians from various cultural backgrounds
Carlos Santana
Their first album, Santana, was released in
1969 and reached Number Four on the
Top LPs chart.
 Santana’s success is due in large part to
their performance at Woodstock and their
appearance on the film and soundtrack.
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Abraxas (1970)
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Abraxas was released by Columbia Records in
1970.
It held the Number One position on the LP
charts for six weeks, spent a total of eightyeight weeks on the charts, and sold over four
million copies in the United States alone.
The album produced two Top 40 singles:
“Black Magic Woman” and “Oye Como Va”
The singles were shorter versions of the tracks
on the LP.
“Oye Como Va”
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Number Thirteen pop, Number Thirty-two R&B in 1971
Composed by the New York Latin percussionist and
dance music king Tito Puente
Instrumentation—guitar, electric bass, keyboards,
drums plus Latin percussion
Recording “mix”—tone quality, balancing, and
positioning of sounds recorded on various tracks in
studio
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The band’s sound was centered on the fluid lead guitar style of
Carlos Santana and the churning grooves by the rhythm
section.
The rhythmic complexity of “Oye Como Va” required a clean
stereo image so that the various interlocking parts could be
clearly heard.
“Oye Como Va”
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The arrangement is 136 measures long.
– Only 16 measures are devoted to singing.
– Song lyrics are less important than the
musical groove and texture.
– Nearly half of the recording is devoted to
improvised solos by the guitar and organ.
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The solos were cut when the track was
edited for radio airplay.
“Oye Como Va”
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Carlos Santana’s solos provide a good
example of a talented rock improviser.
– Santana uses the electric guitar to sustain
notes, creating long, flowing melodic lines
that gradually rise in intensity, lifting the
whole band with him.