There were only a handful of them, American rock bands in the late 1960s who sunk the kind of roots that North American progressive rock could grow from. Spirit was one of them, and by the time they released their fourth album in 1970, they’d covered enough territory that they managed to have both a pop single, in the garage rock monster “I Got Line On You,” and a back catalogue of albums critically respected for their sophistication in arrangement and playing. Although recently dwarfed by the attention given to their instrumental “Taurus,” which Led Zeppelin may have heard and used, probably unwittingly, for “Stairway to Heaven,” Spirit’s albums up through Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus are rich canvases that, some have observed, may seem too eclectic, don’t always sum the band’s talents as they could. So that when you look for a definable Spirit sound, it eludes definition. I can see this, but at the same time Spirit’s appetite for musical movement was its guide, a definable point not being the point at all.
“When I Touch You” was not the song off of Twelve Dreams you’d hear on the air back when rock stations were just rock stations — that was “Nature’s Way,” the centerpiece of a record that dwelt on themes of conservation and modern-day alienation. But “When I Touch You” is where it’s at, an early metal art mammoth lumbering across its own post-Hendrix plain into the 1970s.
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Like Rush, the 
Outside the fact both groups employed players of a violin/viola in their lineups at one time or another, and possessed songwriters of legend, you’d be hard pressed to find common ground for 
Bob Dylan is the rare artist who, at 75, retains the power, energy, and restlessness that distinguished his early work. As both a recording and performing artist, his electricity is unabated, and he continues to make vibrant contributions to the post-folk culture he virtually created. That he has achieved this is astounding; for those of us who have followed his career and know something of its roots and evolution, it is not surprising. He constantly recasts his song catalogue, the depth of which by 1965 (let alone 2016) was unrivaled in the rock/folk/singer-songwriter genre he invented, to match his current sound, and commands a fluidity of vision in his writing that sees beyond the trees and perhaps the forest as well. Witness “High Water,” a tribute to Charley Patton (whose “High Water Everywhere” is a stone cold delta blues barking, howling, classic), from 2001’s Love and Theft. This is a blues about love and the water that rises, that has picked up some oldtime, some drone, shaking and breaking and name-checking muscle cars and evolutionary philosophers. The thing is that it works because when Dylan sings “the cuckoo is a pretty bird” that’s a kind of referenced code that he’s hollering back to Patton. He’s writing a blank check to freely associate (find and listen to a version of “The Cuckoo” and you’ll get what I mean), to make the rhyme work and throw meaning to the wind and to the listener. Harder than it sounds because it’s about the sound, what music is, what makes its power inexplicable. To make that warble on the 5th day of July, and trace your absurd and beautiful melody: it takes courage and a resolution that comes at a price only Dylan, and maybe Patton, knows.
Three months after 
Say what you will about pop radio, you nostalgists and prognosticators of musical doom. I will laugh and scoff with you, because there is, as there always has been, portents of conformity in the monochrome sameness of the popular. But your arguments against are blind to the tail-chasing beast: it’s as often in pop as not that the true revolutions happen, where the work is done, before in creeps mimicry and gold diggery. In the case of Hozier, the revolution is subversion by honoring the blues and soul music his native Ireland so loves. In 2014 into 2015 he produced a bona fide pop radio hit in “Take Me To Church,” which got played on all the I Heart Radio stations in the U.S. In true pop radio fashion it was catchy, easy on the ears, anthem-y. But unusual too — it wasn’t hard to hear beneath the compressed radio waves a rock band sweating it out behind a gifted singer, songwriter, and guitarist. It almost seemed like it was a mistake, because how long has it been since you heard an actual band pumping out the rock on a pop station? The song was from Hozier’s full length, self-titled debut, which, while not a perfect record, isn’t far from it. With lyrics that investigate sexuality, religion, and drugs without robbing any of them of their dark poetry, the album maintains a soulful bounce that only occasionally loses its chug. Them-period Van Morrison would be proud. “To Be Alone,” which Hozier put together, or so I understand because the internet on this point mostly fails me, as a tribute to Junior Kimbrough (who gets a writing credit), does not bear the stamp of Kimbrough’s rough electric blues — although perhaps captures the feel — suggesting instead Peter Green during his brief time as the leader of Fleetwood Mac, it’s lead riff echoing the B riff of Green’s”Oh Well.” The production, too, has that dank, rainy reverb that Green loved, and deals in the dark depths of green manalishis and black magic women. Knowing nothing of the man but his music, I can say that he’s gotten at least that bit right, and while it would be a stretch to say his is the future of pop music, that he found his way into pop’s armored compound is a righteous thing.
“Outlaw country” is an ironic descriptor at best, applied to a music that, without the modifier, began as a lucrative embarrassment to the phonograph salesmen of the 1920s, their newly-minted “hillbilly” record catalogs doing surprisingly well next to the more respectable stacks of whatever maudlin tenor was the operatic toast of the day. Country music’s cornpone reputation grew as its burgeoning industry began to trade on an image based in white southern poverty; but if the marketing suggested the music was as impoverished as its people (a patent falsehood), this achieved for the proponents of such thinking a comfortable outsider-ism, a romantic us-versus-them rewind and replay of Reconstruction that survives in other place in the South as well, through for instance a protracted and continuing — and, unfortunately, necessary — civil rights movement, to this day. So then, what’s this Outlaw business? The term attached to Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and a handful of other country writers and singers who, starting in the late 1960s, were drawn away from the industrial strength, smooth country music produced by “Nashville,” that Tennessee town’s small oligarchy of producers and record labels who held sway over any music distributed under the category of country, and pointedly avoided shifting their audience’s gaze towards the rockier issues or musical themes of the times. Jennings, like Nelson, bucked at this, knew what it meant for their art, and went back to Texas; he turned up the rock’n’roll rhythms he’d played with Buddy Holly, sang what he wanted, and called Nashville out on its phony conservatism. In so doing, Waylon and the country outlaws — and the new southern bands like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd — found a younger, national country audience, and also reminded rockers that their favorite music was as much country as blues.
In 1979, while in New York City and around the time he was adding guitar overdubs to 
Put a couple of decades on the protagonist of 
“Unlikely” is probably the right word, that the hairiest, grittiest, straight-uppenest American rock record of the 1970s, maybe ever, would be made by an English band in tax exile in the south of France lolling in sheer European decadence. That the Rolling Stones attained such a state of grace is only partly surprising, though, given the sheer will of their progress to the point of Exile on Main Street: with Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, and Sticky Fingers the writing was on the wall, but it was this double album that sealed their legend, where the channeling was complete, where without seams the Deep South blackness poured through their pasty, pale, drug-addled limey fingers in drums and basses and guitars and voxes and keys and horns. They hadn’t just gone to the crossroads, they’d set up the tent years before and waited it out, for the spirit to finally visit them. “Satisfaction”? “Get Off My Cloud”? Even “Honky Tonk Women,” with its perfect guitar? Those were killing time, chop builders, and the work they’ve done since has had high points too but has never been more than the downhill coast. Exile’s the big meet up, a meticulously made album with no contrivance, a blues turned over with a rock shovel, originals mixing with covers with barely a hint of borderline, as if this is their music as much as it is yours or mine or 
Progarchy 