Have you had enough of Classic Rock?

I think @tablejockey came closest to where I am when he mention the music that inspired it-
* the Chicago electric blues and some of the early UK electric blues players (Mayall, or early Peter Green, who turned in a variety of directions, including later, much more famous bands like Fleetwood Mac, Free during the Kossoff era (pre-Bad Company), Cream, and other classic rock staples;
* the precursor bands, and those that never achieved the fame or made it onto the classic rock playlist, including a lot of more obscure bands (Blackwater Park’s Dirt Box; Krokodil, An Invisible World; Black Cat Bones, Barbed Wire Sandwich; Atomic Rooster, Death Walks Behind You; Leaf Hound, Growers of Mushroom; Lucifer’s Friend, S/T; Flower Travellin’ Band, Satori; Blues Creation, Demon & Eleven Children);
*the proto-bands that were genre defining (early Sabbath on UK Swirl, Tull’s Stand Up rather than Aqualung), genre-blending (Funkadelic- mixing hard psych and funk), or simply time warp stuff (Spirit’s Twelve Dreams).
* psych folk (the 3 peak albums by Fairport Convention), Roy Harper’s Stormcock (featuring Jimmy Page), Trees or Comus, deeper prog beyond YES and ELP (Cressida Asylum), Triumvirat, Patto (both albums): Bachdenkel, Stalingrad).
There are a million bands that were briefly known or only known in a certain part of the world who were playing during the era and are worth exploring.
I will occasionally put on a track from the well-worn warhorses (I prefer Sabbath’s first album over virtually all the others for its slow sludgy grind) or Cream (sadly, the best recording of them live, at the Grande Ballroom, remains a bootleg) or Mountain (great band, now virtually forgotten beyond the radio staple Mississippi Queen).
That era - from ’67 to the early-mid’70s (my cut off is earlier than the radio format) was rich with possibility in an era where hard rock was one element of the sound that was not yet hardened into a rigid genre.

@alexatpos - I can offer a partial explanation in the States and that is the explosive growth of the music business as a youth-aimed product in the later ’60s, when record companies realized that all those kids who liked the ’new’ music were a huge market. That younger market had seen a shift from the big band era before WWII to the rock ’n roll (think early Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis) era in the ’50s, the first British invasion a la the Beatles and Stones and then, after Monterrey Pop, a whole range of sounds, bands, records and "life style" to be sold.
Jazz had no real market in this environment, but what is interesting to me as we entered the ’70s is the re-emergence of some serious players in spiritual jazz scene, on private and small labels, merging jazz with Afro-centric, black power stuff that delved into funk, polyrhythms, eastern influences, gospel and soul. It wasn’t straight ahead jazz, but something very different, and had a socio-political aspect that spoke to the black experience in America during a period of social upheaval and raised consciousness in the communities. This stuff rekindled my interest in jazz in the last few years as a departure from straight ahead styles; it was, with few exceptions, not very well known or sold beyond the local communities where it grew-- Horace Tapscott in LA on Nimbus West, Tribe Records in Detroit, Strata East in New Jersey/New York. Some brilliant stuff, executed by some very well known players who turned inward when it became obvious that jazz was not a mainstream genre. Well worth exploring if you haven’t; I have found some great records from this era- Marchin’ On by The Heath Brothers, Earth Blossom by the John Betsch Society, and of course, Gil Scott Heron’s Winter in America, a sort of soulful lament of spoken word and Fender Rhodes.
I can listen to this and so-called proto-metal (very heavy rock that anticipates the later heavy metal scene, without the cookie monster vocals or guitar shredding) and enjoy it all for what it offers from that era.

And just think, by the time we hit the nursing home, instead of Slim Whitman, they'll be playing Zep for us. (Pop culture reference there to Mars Attacks). They have some really good rules in these homes- like, if you've heard someone go into a rant you've heard before, you raise your hand. Also, if somebody drops dead next to you, you raise your hand. A friend said an oldster she knew had that experience, raised her hand, and when the attendant came over to see whether the oldster who plunked face down on the table still had a pulse, the hand-raiser whispered "Can I have her pudding?"
Sometimes, life is funny.