238658923659

Chapter 13: Blues Rock: The Infusion of Ol’ Rock ’n’ Roll
243
the Grand Canyon. West wasn’t a speed demon like Page, but his expressive
bluesy bends and huge vibrato, as evidenced on his work in “Mississippi
Queen,” had few rivals. Another Leslie West guitar classic worth checking out
is Mountain’s power ballad, “Theme from an Imaginary Western.”
Blackmore and beyond,
where blues gets scary
One of the true hard rock masters was Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple.
This aggressive, high-volume player freely fused blues and classical ideas
into a startlingly new — and highly influential — style. This sound can be
heard in “Smoke on the Water,” “Child in Time,” “Lazy,” “Mistreated,” and
“Highway Star.”
Other key players of the period included:
Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi (“Iron Man”)
Irish superpicker Rory Gallagher (“Calling Card”)
Robin Trower (“Too Rolling Stoned,” “Bridge of Sighs”)
AC/DC’s Angus Young (“Back in Black,” “You Shook Me All Night Long”)
Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour (“Comfortably Numb”)
Southern Comfort
Like the blues itself, there are few forms of popular music as quintessentially
American as southern rock, which hails largely from the southeastern corner of
the United States (notably Georgia and North Florida). Launched by the Allman
Brothers Band, southern rock was the purest blues-rock sound ever created.
The genre melded blues, country, gospel, and heavy rock.
In all, the ’70s southern rock sound had dozens of hot blues-rock players: The
Outlaws (“Green Grass and High Tides”); The Marshall Tucker Band (“Can’t
You See”); and the fusion-fueled Dixie Dregs, featuring bluesy guitar virtuoso
Steve Morse (“Take It Off The Top”).
TEAM LinG