Glam Rock

by Simon Philo

  Busting out at the tail end of 1970 with T. Rex’s “Ride a White Swan,” glam gate-crashed a house divided. It then set about transforming a landscape split asunder by what appeared to be an unbridgeable schism between rock and pop that had been embraced nowhere more enthusiastically than in the States. Here glam found itself dismissed as a parochial pop novelty by those who believed that rock should purvey truth and authenticity. “Like all glam bands,” wrote Lester Bangs with the humorlessness of the true believer, “Roxy Music are more interested in getting their names on the social register and trying on different kinds of clothes than doing anything about real rock and roll.” His conclusion that “in Roxy Music, you see the triumph of artifice, because what they are about is that they are not about anything” (qtd. in Stump 75) encapsulates the critical default position on an entire genre. No great surprise then to find that Dave Marsh—founder of Creem, contributor to Rolling Stone and Village Voice, and biographer of such canonical rock figures as Elvis Presley, the Who, and Bruce Springsteen—should only include three glam tracks out of the one thousand and one listed in a book that claims to identify the “greatest singles ever made.” T. Rex’s “Get It On” (1971), Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” (1972), and an eighties hip-hop reworking by Planet Patrol of Gary Glitter’s “I Didn’t Know I Loved You till I Saw You Rock and Roll” (1972) represents a scandalous return that ultimately reflects poorly on the compiler-critic. “Singles,” Marsh writes, “are the essence of rock ’n’ roll” (Marsh ix). (Spot on, Mr. Marsh. In fact, you share this belief with glam. Although, it would put its fervently held faith in the single into practice at a time when the rock mainstream you lionize would not.) To include so few glam 45s might lead us to conclude that it is perhaps American singles that we are talking about here. After all, even the rock critic’s go-to whipping boy, disco, gets more entries than glam! While any list is of course subjective, it is at the very least revealing of its curator’s values. Subscribing to the classic rock ideology, much like Bangs, Marsh apparently only has eyes and ears for the authentic. That said, you didn’t have to be American to adopt this position on glam. “If you wanna hear a rock and roll band,” wrote a staffer in the UK music weekly Melody Maker, “wipe off that bloody silly make-up and go see Zeppelin” (qtd. in Bayles 255).

  Its faint presence in American-penned Best-Ofs might well suggest that the glam story was both time and particularly place specific—confined to Britain in the first half of the 1970s, to the “holy trinity” composed of Marc Bolan, David Bowie, and Roxy Music, to the multimillion-selling glam-pop of the likes of Slade, Sweet, and the Bay City Rollers. However, it would also ultimately prove to be an unstoppable transatlantic phenomenon. “British,” only insofar as any pop music style can be attributed and then restricted to a single geocultural location. It was the product of cross-fertilization, of a familiar transatlantic trade. Not least because it was so thoroughly obsessed and fueled by America. In the US, resistance that had initially limited its draw to localized, metropolitan scenes would be eventually overcome through the combined efforts of homegrown acts with proven box office appeal (Alice Cooper and KISS) and the high visibility first-generation British glamsters achieved through regular touring and sporadic Billboard successes, but chiefly via a number of—often British—stadium rock acts that consciously adopted many of glam’s ingredients on the way to becoming some of the decade’s biggest stars (Rolling Stones, Elton John, Wings, Queen, ELO). As Peter Doggett observed, “Eventually, everyone who still believed in the power of pop jumped aboard the glam bandwagon” (Shock, 430).

  Measured against the typical mayfly life span of some pop moments, glam’s five years or so is not too shabby at all. Similar in longevity to first-wave rock ’n’ roll or grunge; longer lived than acid rock or punk. Time enough then to refresh, reinvigorate, and redirect. The “high” glam years cover the half decade between 1971 and 1976—from “Hot Love” to “Bohemian Rhapsody”; but there have been a number of significant pop hybrids that have evidently drawn deeply from its sweet well in the forty years since Queen uttered their final multitracked “scaramoosh”—from glitter funk and disco (Parliament-Funkadelic, Labelle, Chic) to punk and New Wave (New York Dolls, the Tubes, Blondie), New Romanticism (Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Human League) to “hair metal” (Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister), grunge (Nirvana) to Brit-pop (Oasis, Suede), to the twenty-first-century synth-pop of self-conscious changelings like Marilyn Manson. (And, whether we like it or not, there would probably be no MTV without glam.) The critical default is to apply the “glam” label in a narrow fashion, to refer to a relatively brief time period and to a relatively small number of acts. Thereby implying—if not flat-out stating—that it had very little if any broader significance; that it blazed a bubbleheaded trail that would see post-’60s pop culture sliding into self-indulgence and excess; that it constituted a sort of pop regency. Perhaps it needs to be explained this way to fit that dominant narrative. You know, the one that has punk cleansing the palate. From “Lady Stardust” to Lady Gaga, this book will not only tell the story of how glam influenced its times and how those times influenced it, but also of how we all continue to live in a world shaped by glam.

  Chapter 1

  “Children of the Revolution”

  Glam’s explosive arrival in the first few months of the first year of the new decade invites us to see and hear it as some kind of clean break, as a full-scale popular musical regime change, “a total blam blam!” It is inevitable, then, that it should find itself defined—as it so often has—in counterpoint to the much-fabled ’60s. In this dominant reading, glam’s performers and its audiences are literally, as Marc Bolan described them, “children of the revolution.” So, the standard line goes, to find out what became of the ’60s, one only has to listen to glam; and, given the significance attached to that decade, this has meant that glam is more often than not understood as a set of negatives, a bratty musical offspring destined to disappoint. Yet, as what follows in this chapter will demonstrate, it was evidently as much a carrier of continuities in practice and of those sensibilities that fueled it, as it was a conscious reaction to and outright denial of so much of what that previous “golden” decade had held so dear. If glam is a “child” of the ’60s, surely it must have some of it in its DNA? Tempting though it might be to view it as such, it is clearly not forged in the contextual vacuum of outer space. (And, anyway, which ’60s are we talking about here?)

  David Bowie released Pin Ups (UK no. 1, US no. 23) in November 1973, at the end of a year in which it would be no exaggeration to claim that glam had come to dominate British pop life. In addition to the thirty weeks its singles had spent at the top of the charts, six different glam albums had also been the nation’s best-sellers for a total of eighteen weeks. The year 1973 was the genre’s annus mirabilis. Strange, then, that this should be the moment that Bowie chose to put out an LP of ’60s cover versions. Or maybe not. For some, Pin Ups was taken as a sign that David Bowie wanted “out,” that he had somehow lost faith in the glam project he had done so much to drive at the very moment of its triumph. How else could one explain the most un-glam lead single “Sorrow” (UK no. 3)? It, like the rest of the album, was widely understood as a self-indulgent love letter to rock in a less complex time. Yet another of those seemingly ubiquitous exercises in nostalgia currently being undertaken right across the cultural dial, whose principal function appeared to be to offer everyone involved a warm and welcome escape from the troubled contemporary. What was surprising—and for just as many disappointing—was that this time, this familiar conservative message was being disseminated by pop’s great modernizer. However, what was missed by nearly everyone at the time was that Pin Ups was as glam as Bowie’s previous two releases, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and Aladdin Sane (1973). It was, for example, entirely on point for glam that Pin Ups should not be an act of full-on Lennonesque personal revelation, but rather something closer to “an
exercise in pop art: a reproduction and interpretation of work by other artists, intended for a mass audience” (Doggett, Man, 187)—a strategic and highly conscious mobilization of a past that speaks to and of the present. In this respect, Pin Ups is not a rock covers LP at all. It is a glam covers LP. The ethos and creative drivers that fuel each are strikingly different. As a culture of the “authentic,” rock tends to view the cover version with suspicion. How can performing someone else’s material reveal your “true” self and express your “truth”? The cover version must be little more than an ode to Onan. Pointless and self-indulgent. Self-abuse rather than self-revelation.

  For others, Pin Ups was a brazenly cynical gesture, designed to allow an exhausted Bowie to rest up while continuing to separate the fans from their money. Admittedly, the case for the prosecution was a stronger one here. After all, the album was the product of just three speedy weeks labor in Paris in July; and recording nonoriginal material meant that Bowie’s music publishers, with whom his management company was in dispute at the time, would get nothing from its sales. However, tempting though it might be to conclude that this represented the main reason for the album’s appearance, it ignores its thoroughly glam-soaked content. In the fall of 1973 David Bowie is, inarguably, the UK’s biggest rock star. Despite retiring his alter ego Ziggy Stardust in the summer, he simply has no need—at least because he is neither cash strapped nor creatively spent—to record an album of cover versions just a few months after the release of Aladdin Sane. Pin Ups, then, is no “place-holder project” (Reynolds, Shock, 366). Far from it. Delivered with absolute confidence by an artist who is neither floundering nor unsure of his next move, it is in fact shaped by the very sensibility that Bowie himself had done so much to forge and spread. So rather than being a cul-de-sac, an anomaly, a curio, it represents simply the next step in an extended project, whose beginnings lay with The Man Who Sold the World (1970) and which would only end with Blackstar (2016).

  At the time of its release, Michael Watts’s perceptive review in Melody Maker was one of very few to spot what might have been going on here. Pin Ups, he concluded, was “a pastiche that’s as funny as it’s marvellously insightful” (qtd. in History 1973, 143). Indeed, what makes its tracks—even “Sorrow”—“marvellously insightful” is the way in which they shed considerable light on glam’s agenda, its modus operandi. As Bowie himself explained, “These are all [songs by] bands which I used to go and hear play down the Marquee [club] between 1964 and 1967” (qtd. in Reynolds, Shock, 367); and, in fact, with the single exception of his version of Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play” (1967), Pin Ups takes us back to the years 1964 through 1966—“to the very peak of 60s creativity, a time when Britain’s pop culture was at its most optimistic and confident” (Turner, Crisis?, 148)—signaling that the decade’s midpoint marked a defining moment for glam. Rather than giving us an insight into David Bowie the man, then, we are in fact learning more about what makes glam tick. This is what we value, says Bowie. Not because it tells you who I am or where I’ve come from. Because I’m still an actor, after all. Pin Ups was pointedly not fashioned out of material from the late sixties, and therefore, by design and execution, signaled a rejection of the dominant rock practice and values of that storied time. Far from being the “peculiar undertaking” (Reynolds, Shock, 366) that some have described, in a consciously anticanonical move, the LP mobilizes evidently valued source material to deliver a kind of glam primer or prehistory. “We had to develop a completely new vocabulary,” Bowie explained “as indeed is done generation after generation.” Something, he argued, which would be primarily achieved by “taking the recent past and restructuring it in a way that we felt we had authorship of” (qtd. in Du Noyer 77). This was an MO explicitly acknowledged in the Roxy Music song “Re-make/Re-model” (1972), and one that would come to guide their pop practice as much as Bowie’s.

  Perhaps feeling compelled to comment on Pin Ups because it featured two of his own compositions, the Who’s Pete Townshend observed that “if someone like Bowie, who’s only been a big star for 18 months or so, feels the need to start talking about his past influences, then obviously the roots are getting lost” (qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 251). In proposing that there is something more going on here than mere water-treading, Townshend has at least seen and heard more than the vast majority of the album’s reviewers then and now. With Pin Ups, Bowie is indeed in search of “roots.” Though not, however, as Townshend implies, in the sense of this being a desperate act of pop musical archaeology, driven by the artist’s disconnection from a creatively barren present. For the songs on Pin Ups are not presented as museum pieces, as dead objects, or as artifacts that in their recovering/y signal a desire to live in the past. Covers albums are typically viewed as emerging from a “bad place”—being either the product of a dearth of ideas or hubris (or both). But this does not explain Pin Ups at all. “Sorrow” aside, it bristles with life, energy, and joy. While never disrespectful, its confident reworkings are hardly timid or reverential. So, all very glam then. Much in the way Bowie’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” on Aladdin Sane succeeded in giving it a thorough glam make-over—as vampy piano work, a camp spoken-word interlude culminating in an orgasmic yelp, and a Stylophone conspire to deliver a more lascivious, more louche version than the original.

  Pin Ups kicks off with “Rosalyn.” At under two and a half minutes, it is a suitably (s)punky shot in what is, appropriately enough given glam’s love of the format, a collection of twelve 45s. “Rosalyn” is the first in a series of conscious throwbacks that are only throwaway in the sense that the best pop is and always should be. There is plenty of frantic energy and swagger here in the dosing of a simple Bo Diddley riff but also a palpable jittery anxiety that, while evident in the nervy, snotty, and hormonal garage rock of the original, might suggest that Bowie’s present has shaped this reworking of one of British beat group the Pretty Things’ earliest singles. Elsewhere on the album, there is plenty more nervy joy to be found. As when, for example, the cover of the Mojos’ 1964 single “Everything’s Alright”—which has been every bit as chaotic, teetering on the verge of collapse, and ramshackle as the original—closes with a Beatles-patented vocal climax and chord sequence recalling “She Loves You.” But there is much more neurosis too. Exceeding even the skittish “Rosalyn,” Bowie’s vocal histrionics on the garage rock staple “Here Comes the Night”—on which he also plays some appropriately ragged saxophone—render it borderline hysterical; while the half-speed, squealing-sax-filled cover of the Who’s “I Can’t Explain” helps transform a lyric featuring a “worried man” who is “dizzy in the head” from a song about the intoxicating effect of love into a Poe-esque tale of mental decline. In common with a number of tracks, “Friday on My Mind” has been criticized for its mannered and arch delivery. Surely, though, that is the point here? In tandem with what Simon Reynolds describes as the “sickly glace sheen” (Shock, 368) of its production, this is what makes it a living glam performance rather than a rictus-stiff act of reverence. This is true of all bar one of the album’s tracks. Only Bowie’s cover of “Sorrow”—a 1966 Merseys single that was itself a version of a song originally recorded by American garage band the McCoys—is the least glam cover on Pin Ups. Certainly, it has none of the histrionics but also none of the effervescence that mark the other eleven pieces. By far the most reverent track on the record, it is somewhat out of step with the lively irreverence that characterizes the rest of it.

  Glam sought to plug into and then channel the visceral, hyperthyroidal energy of rock ’n’ roll—its very essence, its life force. On Pin Ups, Bowie’s cover of “Don’t Bring Me Down” would thicken the archetypal gutbucket, rhythm ’n’ blues riffing of the Pretty Things’ original to take us back to a moment in the mid-1960s when rock was still urgent and fun. However, glam would frequently reach back further still in its quest for these essential ingredients in looking to rock ’n’ roll’s mid-1950s “golden age�
� for inspiration. In its heyday, so-called classic rock ’n’ roll was perceived and received by supporters and opponents alike as an apocalyptic force, barbaric and uncouth, a direct threat to propriety and taste. Backed by its noise, its rhetoric would instruct its young fans to “rip it up,” to behave antisocially, to resist, to challenge social control. Inchoate and impulsive though it was, it could be mightily disruptive. And, of course, it was not through the music alone that this message could be delivered. Classic rock ’n’ roll existed as a mad package of both sound and vision, relying on the latter for maximum hedonistic effect to deliver pop that was “titanic, idolatrous, unsane, a theatre of inflamed artifice and grandiose gestures” (Reynolds, Shock, 2). Now vigorously pursuing what seemed in many respects to be a similar project—albeit this time in the face of an opposition led somewhat ironically by a disapproving rock mainstream rather than an alliance of educators, parents, and racists—glam could not help but feel like the sound and sight of a highly self-conscious regime change, as it reached out to those younger siblings of ’60s rock fans who “never got it off on that revolution stuff” and who, in fact, found it all to be rather “a drag” (“All the Young Dudes”).