Live: You Get What You Play For is a live album by rock band REO Speedwagon, released as a double-LP in 1977 (and years later as a single CD omitting "Gary's Guitar Solo" and "Little Queenie"). It was recorded at Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kansas, the Convention Center in Indianapolis, Indiana, Kiel Auditorium in Saint Louis, Missouri and Alex Cooley's Electric Ballroom in Atlanta, Georgia. It peaked at number #72 on the Billboard 200 chart in 1977. The song "Ridin' the Storm Out" reached #94 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. The album went platinum on December 14, 1978. The Japanese CD reissue, released in 2011, restores the album and songs to its original full length by including both "Gary's Guitar Solo" and "Little Queenie", which were omitted in the original single CD release due to time constraints.

Dog & Butterfly is the fourth studio album by American rock band Heart, released on October 7, 1978 through Portrait Records. Heart rebounded from their legal dispute with Mushroom Records over the release of the platinum-selling Magazine in April 1978, as Dog & Butterfly was certified double platinum, spent 36 weeks on the charts, and peaked at No. 17 on the US Billboard 200. The album was the 'proper' successor to 1977's hit Little Queen in terms of musical development and direction, and contained two hit singles: "Straight On", and "Dog & Butterfly".

Rising is the second studio album by the British hard rock band Rainbow, released in 1976. In issue 4 of Kerrang! magazine (cover-dated October 1981), Rising was voted the greatest heavy metal album of all time. In 2017, it was ranked 48th at Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time". Rising peaked at number 48 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. In the UK it would peak at number 11. The first CD issue had a slightly different mix to that of the original LP, including, for example, a longer delay before the band entered after Carey's opening solo in "Tarot Woman", a longer play-out on "Run with the Wolf", and the track "Stargazer" had the vocals mixed without the delay, the extra synthesizer deleted and some of the phased sounds deleted. When remastered in 1999 the original vinyl mix was restored.

Scratch the surface of early-seventies progressive rock and underneath all the classic albums and famous musicians you will find a series of lesser-known bands and artists who failed to hit the big-time but still managed to create all manner of excellent prog. Dig a little deeper and you'll find Mainhorse, a little-known European prog-rock group who produced one excellent album and introduced the world to the enigmatic swiss-born keyboardist Patrick Moraz, who would later on find fame with both Yes and The Moody Blues. The eponymously-titled Mainhorse debut was released to little fanfare in 1971 after the group had signed with Polydor Records 12-months previous, but dis-banded soon after the completion of their one-and-only album…

Short-lived Argentinian supergroup, that came to life in 1975 after the demise of Sui Generis. Initially Polifemo started as a Blues Rock trio with Sui Generis's Rinaldo Rafanelli on bass and Juan Rodriguez on bass along with guitarist David Lebón (ex-Pappo's Blues and a bandmate of Rinaldo Rafanelli in Color Humano). After a first single in 1975 the trio was joined by Espíritu's keyboardist Ciro Fogliatta and Polifemo, who had already singed with EMI, debuted in May 1976 with a self-titled debut.
While the basis of Polifemo's music was still a standard well-played Blues Rock, the presence of Fogliatta and the anxious spirits of the rest of the band make "Polifemo" much more than a rock release full of bluesy solos and grooves…

Despite the presence of a pair of ballads – one of them ("New Horizons") by Justin Hayward the latter's most romantic number since "Nights in White Satin" – Seventh Sojourn was notable at the time of its release for showing the hardest-rocking sound this band had ever produced on record. It's all relative, of course, compared to their prior work…

J.J. Cale's debut album, Naturally, was recorded after Eric Clapton made "After Midnight" a huge success. Instead of following Slowhand's cue and constructing a slick blues-rock album, Cale recruited a number of his Oklahoma friends and made a laid-back country-rock record that firmly established his distinctive, relaxed style. Cale included a new version of "After Midnight" on the album, but the true meat of the record lay in songs like "Crazy Mama," which became a hit single, and "Call Me the Breeze," which Lynyrd Skynyrd later covered…

Blow by Blow typifies Jeff Beck's wonderfully unpredictable career. Released in 1975, Beck's fifth effort as a leader and first instrumental album was a marked departure from its more rock-based predecessors…

Swan Lake was the first of Tchaikovsky's three great ballets– works which added a new level of depth and sophistication to what had been a purely superficial art form. Today the music is so well-known and popular that it's impossible to comprehend the difficulties the composer experienced at early performances. Audiences found the music "too symphonic," and the dancers were put off by the prominence given to the orchestra which, they felt, distracted ballet fans from the action on stage. Of course, all of these supposed "defects" are precisely what we admire about the music today, and this elegant but exciting performance reveals the music in all of its glory.

This Time We Mean It is the fifth studio album by REO Speedwagon, released in 1975. It peaked at number 74 on the Billboard 200 chart in 1975, It was the third and last album to feature Mike Murphy on vocals. The CD version of the album has been out of print for many years, but produced the single "Reelin'" (written by Murphy). The art style on the cover of the album is remarkably similar to the art style of Czech Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist, Alfons Mucha.

Whitesnake are a hard rock band formed in England in 1978 by David Coverdale, after his departure from his previous band Deep Purple. Their early material has been compared by critics to the blues rock of Deep Purple, but they slowly began moving toward a more commercially accessible rock style. By the turn of the decade, the band's commercial fortunes changed and they released a string of UK top 10 albums, Ready an' Willing (1980), Come an' Get It (1981), Saints & Sinners (1982) and Slide It In (1984), the last of which was their first to chart in the US and is certified 2x platinum. The band's 1987 self-titled album was their most commercially successful worldwide, and contained two major US hits, "Here I Go Again" and "Is This Love", reaching number one and two on the Billboard Hot 100.