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.
