If rock music behaved logically - and thank goodness it doesn't know how to - it would surely have understood that the end of the 1960's was no better or more enjoyable than the start of that decade, and that somewhere a mistake had been made. Fortunately, the more wasteful tendencies of the early 1970's, which resulted in the premature deaths of rock stars like Duane Allman, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, didn't become an epidemic, but for the first time in the rock era, British and American tastes seriously diverged. America was attracted - some may say fatally - to the hysteria, the excess and the posturing, not to mention the volume, of Heavy Metal music.
The first metal superstars were Led Zeppelin, ironically a British quartet whose musical abilities were frequently forgotten in the euphoria induced by their loud, hard-driving R&B. They arrived as The Beatles fell apart, and became the biggest act in the world during the first half of the Seventies. More recently, Heavy Metal has become the easiest and most obvious route to wealth and stardom for both British and American bands, while the US has retained an interest in head-banging music, even if a few metal musicians are individually as celebrated as the groups to which they belong.
Britain's first major trend of the 1970's was something called glam-rock, whose stated aim was to restore the fun and innocence to pop music. It's first and probably best practitioners were Marc Bolan and David Bowie. Along with several other acts, they further exaggerated and virtually lampooned psychedelic fashions, at the same time trying, with some success, to ridicule the intellectual overkill of a breed of singer/songwriters who appealed to young adults, and who were threatening to alienate the teenage populations on both sides of the Atlantic with their often overbearing sensitivity. Most of the glam-rockers, like Slade and Gary Glitter, didn't really catch on in the States, because over there the era of the stadium band was beginning in the wake of metal's noisy childhood. Supergroups like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young attracted huge crowds to stadium concerts, although some, like Blind Faith (featuring Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood), found the pressure too restrictive and split long before their sell-by date. British groups formed in the Sixties, like The Stones, The Who, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and, of course, Led Zeppelin, became huge international attractions, even if some of them went off the rails - taking a year and a half to complete a new album and competing to see who could spend the most money on perfecting their latest studio creation almost became an Olympic event.
After 1976, the musical paths of Britain and America became even more widely separated. Britain's disaffected youth, which had collectively been the victim of a major economic recession, showed its resentment at the seemingly endless stream of rich American rock stars singing the praises of sun-bronzed Californian goddesses. Neither did they neglect the British counterparts of these American stars, hurtfully sneering at and vilifying the British rock aristocracy as exemplified by establishment figures like Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Queen and all the others who spent more time in America where they were bigger stars and sold many more albums and concert tickets. The unemployed kids weren't even that excited by the perfect pop songs which became a catchy trademark for Abba, the Swedish quartet whose records outsold everyone else in the world in the Seventies. Potentially the biggest international act since The Beatles, Abba failed to gain entry at the final frontier of America, but nine chart-topping singles in Britain, especially after having the stigma of winning the Eurovision Song Contest delaying their advance, was a considerable achievement. The 1970's was the decade which produced an ABC of accomplished soft rockers: Abba, Bread (whose chart-topping compilation album, "The Sound of Bread", pioneered prime time TV marketing) and the brilliant and desperately romantic (thus sneer-provoking) music of The Carpenters, a brother and sister who further epitomized the Californian dream.
Rock music has always appealed to the non-conformist element with rebellious tendencies, and in 1977 angry British urchins like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Stranglers, The Jam and The Boomtown Rats provided a far less polished but infinitely more exciting alternative to disco music, which was itself epitomised by the keening harmonies of another British group from the 1906's, The Bee Gees. Punk rock brought back the confrontation and outrage which had been absent from popular music since the Sixties, and gave the kids a weapon with which they could again annoy older generations. It couldn't catch on in the same way in America, where things weren't so bleak for teenagers, although British punk rock was ironically inspired by a handful of influential American cult heroes. These punk godparents mainly emerged from urban wastelands in industrial cities like New York, Cleveland and Detroit. Motown had moved out of Detroit to the more glamorous and luxurious surroundings of Los Angeles, California, and thereby forfeited its street credibility, but at the start of the Seventies, America's major Motor City had produced some of the most uncompromising acts in rock history, like The Stooges, fronted by the charismatic and ridiculously named Iggy Pop, and the revolutionary MC5.
Inevitably New York ultimately became America's most innovative musical city of the 1970's, not only producing influential originators like Lou Reed, who fronted The Velvet Underground, but also the neo-transvestite New York Dolls and self-styled punk poetress Patti Smith, plus the vast majority of credible leaders of the so-called New Wave (a term invented by marketing men who objected to their acts being referred to as 'punks'): Television, The Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie. New York was simultaneously also the disco capital of the world, and rode out the 1970's as the centre of the rock universe.
Ultimately, a lot of great music rock music was produced in the Seventies on both sides of the Atlantic, and the profitability of the music industry began to escalate so dramatically that the accountants and lawyers began moving in during the second half of the decade. As a result, rock music has rarely been well enough to leave its sick bed ever since.
Everything seemed to be proceeding in more or less the right direction as the end of the 1770's approached - but new movements in the following decade would only remain popular for months rather than years. The businessmen had overestimated the attention span of the record-buying public, and had foolishly - as become clear in retropect - encouraged punters to expect and demand frequent changes of direction and to constantly discard their heroes in favour of new models. Maybe Andy Warhol had it right when he said that everyone would have just 15 minutes of fame ....