What Everyone Gets Wrong About '70s Rock Music

It's often tempting to bundle decades of human civilization into neat little packages with definable borders for cultural phenomena, but in reality, trends, fads, and movements swell and recede across time in a far blurrier and indistinct manner. Were the '80s all hair metal, for instance? Were the '90s all grunge? Were the '00s all ... OK, we don't know what the '00s were supposed to be except full of sticky-looking lip gloss and oversaturated colors in music videos. And the '70s? It wasn't all disco. In fact, it was very much all about rock.

The fact that the '70s rocked will come as no surprise to folks who were alive then. In popular, highly reduced conception, the black-and-white '50s were maybe Elvis and Frank Sinatra, the '60s were the Beatles and a shaggy-haired summer of love, and then — snap! — everyone started wearing bell-bottoms and doing that John Travolta pointing-the-finger-at-the-ceiling dance move from "Saturday Night Fever." But what about Led Zeppelin? Or Creedence Clearwater Revival, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Queen, Aerosmith, Eagles, The Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, and many, many more? 

Classic rock bands overwhelmingly dominated the '70s and accounted for seven of the decade's top-10 albums. Another top-10 album belonged to Elton John (1972's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road"), while the last two were soundtracks to John Travolta movies: 1977's "Saturday Night Fever" (aka, the Bee Gees' claim to fame) and 1978's "Grease." Notice that these albums show up towards the end of the decade, when disco was at its most popular. Ultimately, the most common modern misconception about '70s rock was that it was as unpopular, or non-mainstream, as rock sadly is now.

It's contradictory to say that the most mainstream, popular music of the '70s was "countercultural." In fact, by the '70s, the '60s countercultural movement had become the dominant culture of the day, musically or otherwise, centered on the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe. Taking off bit by bit through the '60s, in lockstep with the Civil Rights movement, anti-war sentiment, openness about sexuality, drug use, and so on, '60s counterculture found footing in bands like The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, Jefferson Airplane, and even specific songs like "My Generation" by The Who. We will point out that all of these bands, and many more, are rock. That era's rock music culminated in 1969's legendary Woodstock festival and, in retrospect, comprised the beginning of the golden age of classic rock, which many consider lasted from 1964 to 1982.

All this is to say that rock dominated popular music at the start of the '70s. A survey of albums from the early through mid-70s reveals a gamut of huge names and huge albums, including Black Sabbath's self-titled album (1970), Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Cosmo's Factory" (1970), David Bowie's "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" (1972), Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" (1973), four Led Zeppelin albums – "Led Zeppelin III" (1970), "IV" (1971), "Houses of the Holy" (1973), "Physical Graffiti" (1975) — and too many more to list here. 

Come 1977, Zeppelin played the largest show of the entire decade at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, to a crowd of 76,229 who paid $10.50 each. Until then, the largest show that decade was in 1973 at Tampa Stadium, another Zeppelin concert. Without a doubt, the '70s were a time of rock outings worthy of being called "classic."

Even though rock dominated the airwaves through the '70s, it wasn't the only type of music to exist. Disco, so memorable for its musical and visual distinctiveness, right down to the shimmering disco balls and popped collars, took root in the early '70s in New York City. More or less a European import (disco is short for discothèque in French) and dating back to early club music in the '30s and '40s, disco wound its way to England by 1964 and New York City by 1965, when the earliest DJs showed up in clubs blending music from one record to the next, live. 

It took until the mid-70s for disco songs to muscle into the music charts with artists like Donna Summer ("Love to Love You," 1975), Diana Ross ("Love Hangover," 1976), and of course, the Bee Gees via "Saturday Night Fever" (1977). That's when disco figuratively blew up, had a handful of years in the sun, and then literally blew up by 1979. That year, 5,000 fans at a White Sox game marauded the field during a disco performance, tore it up, and set bonfires while radio host Steve Dahl detonated a collection of disco records in a shower of vinyl. This "Disco Demolition Night," set to the crowd's roar of "Disco sucks!," was perceived by many as the death of disco.

Our point is that '70s rock wasn't an underground, countercultural musical scene overshadowed by disco. Rather, it was the other way around. The '80s, though, saw both types of music peter out and fade, or at least evolve into new forms.