Which song is 11?
All of them, except for “Lick My Love Pump”.
The loudest show I’ve been to was Mountain. Their best-known song is “Mississippi Queen,” one of the classic of hard rock. Not well enough known to typify the genre, but they were great at it, somewhere underneath the volume.
Well… There’s ‘Cups and Cakes’, and ‘Listen to what the Flower People Say’. And they were a skiffle band, so points off for that.
However, they earn points back for the drummer dying by choking on vomit (perhaps not his own).
Mountain is in the same class as Molly Hatchet, aren’t they? ‘Flirtin’ With Disaster’ could be considered hard rock adjacent, with just a little too much southern boogie to seal the deal. The same goes for Skynyrd.
Well, Cups and Cakes was technically The Thamesmen.
For me it was Motorhead. I’m glad I can still hear.
Motorhead gave me permanent hearing loss. To be fair:
- We were no more than 20 feet away from the amps
- The concert was in a small gymnasium
- It was 1985, and I was 20, so the idea of ear plugs or hearing protectors was completely foreign.
I used to be a lighting tech part time when I was in school, running a Souper-Trouper carbon-arc spotlight. We had to wear headphones to hear lighting cues but they weren’t sound isolating, so the volume had to be cranked over the music so we could hear. I remember after a loud concert being able to hear almost nothing but loud ringing for an hour or so.
I worked lighting for both Heart and Van Halen among others in the late 1970’s . Today I have constant tinnitus and my hearing starts to roll off at 8700k. I’ll probably need hearing aids soon.
But hey, Rock and Roll, amirite?
I don’t think ”loud” really has much to do with a band’s genre but rather their equipment and the venue’s acoustics and house sound system. The loudest concert I’ve been to was X (roots/punk) in a small club. Hard Rock is a general term for a multiple of sub genres. To find the band that typifies it, you have to identify a band that can’t be inserted into any of those sub genres. That pretty much just leaves AC/DC.
Seconded. The loudest band I ever heard was Rockpile, and I think most people would classify them as “pop.”
I don’t think UFO or The Scorpions have been mentioned yet.
Just curious, but: who did BETTER hard rock than AC/DC? I’ve been re-listening the holy trifecta of Let There Be Rock, Highway To Hell, and Back In Black (whole albums, not just the title songs), and I can’t think of better, purer hard rock than that sets of songs.
This certainly captured the essential hard rock sound, a year or so before it became a well-defined thing. (No, I’ve never heard or seen anything but their Woodstock performance.)
The ‘67-‘69 hard blues (and psychedelic rock) trios Cream and the Experience rocked hard, but they weren’t quite hard rock.
My buddy and I attended a Motorhead concert in (I think) 1987. Bogart’s in Cincinnati.
We stayed 20 minutes and then left.
It was unbearable.
Humble Pie is in the same place in the pantheon. (I was reminded of them by Rick Beato’s 100th “What Makes this Song Great,” on Peter Frampton…who didn’t typify hard rock after Humble Pie, that’s true.)
They grew out of the pub rock movement in England, with Nick Lowe building off what he helped create with Brinsley Schwartz. But they had heavy doses of New Wave and Pop as well.
Like for many, AC/DC was the first band I thought of. For me, “Whole Lotta Rosie” typified their hard rock sound (but any of their songs might do as well).
Here’s a glorious AC/DC-Beatles mashup:
Led Zeppelin. As magnificent as AC/DC’s finest work is, Zep’s better. Different, sure, but better.
AC/DC is my choice though because their music is just pure, undistilled hard rock. There is no pretense to it. There is no other kind of music there. They weren’t trying to incorporate sitars or country music or some other style. They aren’t trying to be Taken Seriously As Artists or write deep, meaningful lyrics that’ll change the world. They are CERTAINLY not trying to keep up with music trends; AC/DC does not bother with grunge, synthpop, disco, trance, hip hop, new rock, mumble rap, or whatever the hell Post Malone does. The only thing AC/DC says through their music is “Here are four power chords and some lyrics about sex and being a badass.”
Led Zeppelin is one of the all time very greatests, and obviously way more versatile than AC/DC. The thing is, when I’m listening to LZ, I don’t feel or think I’m listening to hard rock.
As to this, GnR is kind of an oddity. They do not fit into a clear musical category - they aren’t really hair metal exactly, and aren’t grunge. Their run of hits is squeezed between the hair metal era and the rise of grunge, a style of music that was taken really seriously (too seriously, to be honest) by critics and media. GnR doesn’t exactly fit anywhere and unlike other unclassifiable “They are their own genre” acts like U2 or Aerosmith, they didn’t roll out hits for decades.