10 Perfect Hard Rock Albums Of The 1970s

Yeah....remember just a few sentences ago when we were talking about the old blues rockers getting old?

At the turn of the '60s, you could practically count on one hand that amount of acts who managed to survive the Love Generation, with the Beatles breaking up and acts like The Who reframing their sound entirely. If you asked Mick Jagger and Keith Richards though, the key to immortality is to hunker down and get even more bluesy.

Compared to the background info on Sticky Fingers, this whole thing should have been a disaster, with the band shuffling around lead guitarists and also dealing with different bad behavior from the members that stuck around.

When it came time to actually go into the studio though, there was a lot more polish on here as well, with songs like Wild Horses becoming one of their most celebrated ballads alongside standard blues rock like B*tch.

This was also one of the first albums where we see Keith Richards unveil his signature open G tuning, which captures the Stones vibe perfectly on tracks like Sway, which fit somewhere in between the pure ballad territory and the seasoned rock and roll that they had been milking for a decade at that point. Given the road miles they'd put on their souls at this point, The Stones had truly evolved into the bluesy legends that they had admired growing up.