472 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
with solos by Carlos Santana’s guitar and the bluesy Hammond B3 organ of
Gregg Rolie (who went on to found the band Journey).ARENA ROCK AND THE PUNK BACKLASH
The 1960s had seen the “British Invasion” of the United States by groups like the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones, English bands infl uenced by A merican blues and
rock and roll and in turn infl uencing the next generation of American rockers
with their innovations. The 1970s, in contrast, was a time of growing separation
between British and American rock. The emergent trend in England in the early
1970s was progressive rock, typifi ed by concept albums featuring large-scale
compositions often based on New Age versions of Eastern spirituality, expressed
musically by some of the same Indian-inspired devices used by John Coltrane,
such as drones and static harmonies. Although British prog-rock bands such as
Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer were popular with U.S. listeners,
no American bands made a signifi cant contribution to the movement.
Instead, the United States in the 1970s saw the development of a mainstream
popular music that, inspired by the psychedelic rock concerts of the 1960s, kept
the focus on spectacle while gradually retiring the countercultural ideologies of
the hippies. Central to this music was the corporate strategy of tying a band’s tour-
ing schedule to the release of what their record company hoped to be a mammothK Carlos Santana
(guitar, right, with David
Brown, bass) performs at
Woodstock in 1969.the rock mainstream172028_19_468-494_r3_sd.indd 472 23/01/13 11:04 AM