Artist	Song
Jethro Tull	Aqualung
Queen	Bohemian Rhapsody
Ten Years After	I'd Love to Change the World
Argent	Hold Your Head Up
Deep Purple	Smoke on the Water
Aerosmith	Dream On
Focus	Hocus Pocus
Who	Baba O'Riley
Blue Oyster Cult	(Don't Fear) The Reaper
Kansas	Carry On Wayward Son
Styx	Come Sail Away
Journey	Wheel in the Sky
Emerson, Lake & Palmer	Karn Evil 9
Led Zeppelin	Stairway to Heaven

Comment:

Arena Rock 70s is an attempt to pull together the biggest progressive, boogie rock, southern rock, hard rock and proto-metal songs from the 70s on a single 80-minute CD. These songs would all likely be in any Top-100 all-time "Classic Rock" list, but the genre presented here is much narrower. These "Arena Rock" songs were rarely if ever played on top-40 radio, but WERE played a lot on the freeform FM stations. They are loud rock songs with a darker vibe than straight-ahead "rock 'n roll" songs, and they are by artists that tended to take themselves pretty seriously. Think black-light poster on paneled suburban basement wall, a particular odor hanging in the air.

Although there are exceptions, Arena Rock '70s tends to favor the pre-1977 years. I think this is because studio innovations in the late 70s gave this kind of music a production sheen that glossed away some of the raw energy it had in the earlier years. Also, the "glam" ethic merged with "serious" progressive/hard rock in the late 70s to produce showier, more personality-driven groups like Kiss, Van Halen, Meatloaf, Cheap Trick and others. These artists are eligible here because their music was released in the 70s, but they seem closer in spirit to the '80s than to the likes of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Ten Years After.

ABOUT THE SERIES:
The goal of the "Hits by Decade" series is to create definitive mixes of a specific genre of music in a given decade (Arena Rock 70s, Psychedelic 60s, Indie 80s etc.). Most genres tend to "live" in a particular decade (acoustic pop in the 70s or grunge in the 90s, e.g.), but where this isn't the case and a genre spans more than one decade (as with punk, arena rock, etc.), the strict adherence to the decade framework in compiling these things can have interesting effects: most notably it tends to illustrate how a type of music evolved. Nevertheless, I've tried in the series to break out genres that came and went within a single decade, sometimes (as with Surf music, for example) within just a few years inside of a single decade.

Feedback: