The Playlists, Vol. 1: 1970s’ American Rock
I have a few dozen Apple Music playlists, enough that I don’t want to bother counting them. Playlists for me are like filters: they help me focus on a specific aspect of some kind of music, defining a band’s evolution, for example, or isolating the use of a specific kind of instrument. Some of my playlists are just for pleasure, some are for my books.
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/1970s-american-rock/pl.u-d7xVUMramXj
My most recent playlist, 1970s’ American Rock, comes in at over 1700 songs. You’d need five straight days to listen through the whole thing. The playlist started out as a Best of Sammy Hagar playlist, though. I started thinking about Hagar’s career from Montrose in 1970 through his solo records and then his tenure with Van Halen and Chickenfoot, and I thought… what a life of music. But once I started thinking about Sammy Hagar, I started thinking about some of his comments back in the 70s on the superiority of American rock and roll to British (I can’t find them now, though, and don’t misunderstand me: he was massively inspired by Cream), and I realized that in order to really pay tribute to Sammy Hagar, I had to pay tribute to American rock and roll. And so this playlist was born.
This playlist acts like a filter, but what a wild ride. The 1970s started with country rock, folk rock, hard rock…
