Rock Music: 1951-1976 vs. 1977-2003

I would have to vote for the earliest rock era. My reasons?

Motown with the likes of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, The Four Tops, The Drifters, The Sherilles, The Temptations, The Supremes, et al.

The British invasion including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Animals, etc.

Early American Rock with the likes of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

American folk with Dylan, The Kingston Trio, etc.

The Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, America, Joni Mitchell, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Traffic, Steely Dan, Leon Russell and others.

The list of powerful, inspired artists (many still active) is too heavily favored during this time frame for a second thought on the subject.

My apologies to all the great music makers left off the above list. Thanks to all for the joy brought to my life through their art!

If we are looking for the golden 25 years of R&R.....how about from 1963 to 1988 or so?

You're right Buscis, in a sense it is age catching up with you.

This is a hard Q for more than one reason. One reason, I think, is that a person’s receptiveness to Rock music is caused by a hormonal imbalance that usually starts to come to an end somewhere in one’s twenties. It is not that you will never grow to love new rock music after a certain age, it is just that it is harder to do so. I have a few favorites that I still listen to and they are all, for the most part, from the first time period (51-76). The few that attract my attention, Peter Gabrial, Neil Young, or somebody, are mostly holdouts from the old days too. My guess is that young folks these days can listen back to Led Zeplin and the Beatles and it may attract their attention. Not much new in the Rock world in the last 20 years has touched me and I think it as much me as the music. It is certainly <3-4% of what I listen to these days.

Any of you older folks getting into new rock?

Sincerely
I remain,

Lugnut, You are so spot-on to mention Motown. It was the absolute foundation for some of the most soulful and inspiring music to ever be recorded. If you think about the volume of music produced by Motown alone, and the incredible musicians that Motown helped to nurture through their careers, it was just so immense.

Where's all that great stuff now? What happened to the "Motown era's" and the "British invasion" era's?

You can call me what you want, music's just not the same.
It's missing the abundance of incredibly talented musicians and the record companies that used to promote them.

Rock has certainly grown to more professional levels if we measure v.s....

Look-up Jethro Tull throughout their career: They always grow and make a progress towards sophistication techniques and were becoming more and more interesting with every new album they made especially during 80's.

Same with King Krimson merged with Yes drummer Bill Brufford in 1976.

Interesting note can be found on Talking Heads started as punk band and than after David Byrne separated from them and merged with Brian Eno producing highly sophisticated and interesting records. Further-on David Byrne merged with Laurie Anderson realy starting a new era of experimental artistic and newly developed rock.

The almost same path took Phil Manzanera towards David Byrne and Brian Eno also with successfull intersection with Robert Wyatt from Soft Machine.

The very trivial example with Paul McCartney who begun to merge with Scoffield, Sanborn, Andy Summers(BTW another great rock evolution example) to produce a very serious level of music compared to trivial Beatles. Even Beatles albums became to be more sophisticated starting 70's due to more desire to progress certainly driven by Paul.

Along with american classic rock Europe developed in mid-70's their own Jazz-Rock less known in US but was different and interesting by its difference.

And that's realy where the v.s. difference lies IMO i.e. higher sophistication, blending with jazz and blues, involving more electronics even involving classical music as well. Also in addition there were Heavy Metal and Hard Rock that were less-sophisticated but was a good way too get the crowd up as I guess was the realy first meaning of rock.