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In any case, a year later I was back at University finishing off a degree, and a severe drop in my finances wasn't going to permit much in the way of new purchases, and the flow of interesting music was gradually drying up. You could read about Glam Rock in the English music press, but I didn't feel any significant connection with it. 

Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin were huge, but having heard the first Led Zep I'd already written them off as an inferior version of the Jeff Beck Group before the allegations of musical plagiarism kicked in, and while Deep Purple worked well enough in the crowded bar underneath Buchanan's Hotel on a Friday night I didn't feel the need to hear that stuff more than once a week.

In fact, once a week was more than enough...

Most of my attitude towards both outfits can probably be traced to the preponderance of riff-heavy bands with wailing vocalists. Sure, the Purples and Led Zep were far from the worst of them, but the preponderance of rifferamas delivered with the subtlety of a flying sledgehammer made it hard to distinguish between the various practitioners and without access to some external filter in the form of someone whose musical judgement I could trust I wasn't inclined to expend too much effort trying.

Looking at the music in heavy rotation chez Hughesy around 1975 you'd have found the Allman Brothers, The Band, and Little Feat, fairly predictable good taste in music fare, along with more R&B fare by the J. Geils Band. Van Morrison's It's Too Late To Stop Now was a particular favourite.

I'd followed down a number of blind alleys looking for something interesting in the pop-rock sphere, including the first live double by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, and when Springsteen's Born To Run turned up in 1975 it was a reminder of the way things could be if people were inclined to make the effort to rock rather than recline.

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© Ian Hughes 2015