Glam Rock

by Simon Philo

  In November 1973—the very same month in which Pin Ups was released—America’s New York Dolls made their first UK TV appearance on the BBC’s late-night rock show The Old Grey Whistle Test. Dressed in full glam glad rags—women’s blouses, lurid-colored satin pants, boas and scarves, stack heels—and wearing generous amounts of makeup, the band lip-synched to two garagey songs from their debut album. A year earlier, the Dolls’ lead singer David Johansen had told Melody Maker that the band “felt something was lacking in music. It wasn’t exciting any more to us. . . . Everyone’s hanging about on stage, being morose as well,” and the Dolls, he stated, simply “didn’t dig that.” So, like the kid in “Looking for a Kiss”—one of the tracks they performed that night—they were not gonna be “obsessed with gloom.” “The thing about rock today,” Johansen continued, “is that you have to impress somebody—it lost a lot when it became just like that. They forgot that you also have to entertain people” (qtd. in History 1972, 97). Unfortunately for the Dolls, however, the forces of rock conservativism were much closer than they might have imagined that November night. Present in the Whistle Test studio, in the form of the show’s presenter, Bob Harris. As the New York Dolls bravely walked their very campy walk, Harris famously branded them “mock rock” in a sniggering outro to a performance that he—as spokesman for the rock orthodoxy—evidently mistrusted. Harris, then, could only see and hear the Dolls as fake. An impression the band themselves admittedly did little to challenge, in choosing with typical disregard for rock sincerity to lip-synch on pretty much the only TV show at that time that provided a platform for live performance. A more obvious home for the Dolls might have been Top of the Pops, on which everyone lip-synched; but the New York Dolls had not yet placed a single on the UK charts and so no invitation had been forthcoming.

  In the early 1970s, rock’s critical consensus—represented in the UK by the presenters and loyal but relatively small audience of The Old Grey Whistle Test—was characterized by a default hyperromanticism that resulted in a real reluctance to “let go” of the late sixties. His onstage behavior might well have done Marc Bolan few favors in North America; but, in the “land of rock,” his would always be a hard act to swallow. Not least because that was exactly what it was, so obviously, so unashamedly, an “act.” Like the many glam artists who followed in its perfumed wake, T. Rex represented a highly conscious affront to a carefully cultivated, much-cherished, and jealously guarded rock naturalism. Something David Bowie himself acknowledged, when he pointed out that “realism, honesty and all these things that came out of the late 60s had got really boring to many jaded people going into the early 70s” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 143–44). To no great surprise, Bowie would find an ally in opposition to this tiresome worship of all things “real” in Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry, who told New Musical Express that the “whole 60s presentation of rock music, and the implied honesty that went with it, was kind of bizarre and was always alien to me” (qtd. in Stump 73). Yet, while the words and deeds of its three principal architects illustrate the extent to which glam would set itself at odds to the orthodoxy, Bob Harris’s contemptuous and patronizing attitude toward the New York Dolls indicated that the rock mainstream and its many believers were not about to take such heresy lying down. It is clear, for instance, that a commitment to—what Carys Wyn Jones has termed—the “classic rock ideology” fueled British music journalist Nick Kent’s review of the Ziggy Stardust LP. Writing in the countercultural publication Oz, Kent observed/complained that Bowie was trying “to hype himself as something he isn’t” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 151). Like so many in the transatlantic rock press at the time, Kent demonstrated not only that he didn’t “get it” but that he didn’t “like it.” He seemed constitutionally unable to accept that irony, humor, and fiction could be valid elements of rock praxis. In the same year, Kent would also judge T. Rex’s The Slider to be “bogus,” a “crass package of synthetic rock and roll music”; and two years later he would abandon even any pretense of critical objectivity and fairness in simply dismissing Queen’s eponymous debut LP as a “bucket of urine.”

  These hard-line views originate in the late 1960s. As Andrew Blake points out, this was the moment

  at which a canon of (largely white, male) “rock” performers emerged, seeking new musical values and distancing themselves from the commercial hurly-burly of chart pop—and with them grew a school of journalism which was eager to canonise both their work and its own. The Rock Musician is shadowed by the Rock Writer. (Blake 125)

  In a simultaneously aggrandizing and self-aggrandizing move, then, “rock writing romanticises both its subjects and the writers themselves” (125–26). By the early 1970s, the rise and rise of the professional rock critic—an American-led phenomenon—had contributed greatly to rock’s exaggerated sense of its own self-importance, playing a major role in both enshrining and then actively disseminating its accepted “truths.” In October 1970, Sounds had joined NME and Melody Maker in the UK music weekly marketplace. Its pro-rock agenda proved so successful that it effectively forced its two main rivals to freshen up their rosters with young hipsters like the aforementioned Nick Kent, and, in so doing, to pretty much turn away from “pop” altogether.

  Although fully aware of how rock should work—“one of the principles in rock [is] that it’s the person himself expressing what he really and truly feels”—David Bowie told any rock writer who bothered to ask that he “always saw it as a theatrical experience” (qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 209). In so publicly committing to it as “theater,” he would lead glam’s charge on rock’s precious commitment to sincerity and authenticity, inevitably running into considerable opposition from an openly contemptuous rock elite, quick to brand it “mock rock.”

  In one crucial, ostensibly contradictory, respect, it could be argued that glam sought to move rock forward by invoking and, in many cases, actively mobilizing its past. Specifically, the classic rock ’n’ roll of the mid-1950s appealed not only because it was untroubled by “sincerity” and seriousness, but also because it embraced the theatrical without any trace of guilt. In its purest—some would say most rudimentary—form, glam’s revivalist impulse was evident in a drapes-and-crepes act like Showaddywaddy or in the Gene Vincent shtick of Alvin Stardust; but it was also caught in the musical and lyrical echoes found right across the generic spectrum—in Wizzard’s “Angel Fingers (A Teen Ballad)” (1973), for example, or in T. Rex’s and Queen’s direct quoting of Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” in “Get It On” (1971) and “Now I’m Here” (1975), respectively. Of all the first-wave rock ’n’ rollers, it was Little Richard who exerted the greatest influence on future glam stars. To young Brits, he sounded, looked, and behaved like no one else. As a kid growing up in the London suburbs, David Bowie had sent off for signed pictures of his idol and subsequently confirmed that, more than any single performer, it was Little Richard who inspired him to form his first band. Prominent in set lists, Little Richard covers would become glam staples—simultaneously functioning as acts of homage and statements of intent. It was no coincidence, then, that Slade’s first hit single should be a cover of Little Richard’s “Get Down and Get with It.”

  When glam emerged in 1971, the best-selling album on both sides of the Atlantic was Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water—a fine piece of work, for sure, but one that could hardly be said to have bottled the fizz and kick that made rock ’n’ roll such an intoxicating brew back in the 1950s. About as far from Little Richard as you could get, Bridge over Troubled Water was serious, “grown-up” worthy, and, if truth be told, in its solemnity ultimately a little dull. It was, though, indicative of where rock music found itself at the beginning of the new decade. However, while it was quintessential, to find out why, we must travel back several years to the mid-1960s. To the summer of 1965, in fact, and to the moment that gunfire crack of a snare shot ushered in “Like a Rolling Stone.” For Bob Dylan would lead rock ’n’ roll down a path that would undeniably deliver a
ll kinds of riches, but that would also—for the time being at least—cut off the supply line to some of the “good stuff” it had been offering up to this point. Achieving previously unimagined status as a means through which the world might be interpreted, rock music—as it would soon come to be titled—would be seen and heard as capable of many things; but fun, excitement, and glamour would not be among these. This was, of course, a realization that drove Bowie’s enthusiastic reanimations of those mid-sixties songs on Pin Ups. His choices were significant. Jon Savage has identified 1966 as pivotal and transformative—a year, which he argues, “began in pop and ended with rock.” It was, he wrote, “the last year when the ’45 [rpm record] was the principal pop music form, before the full advent of the album as a creative and commercial force” (1966, ix–x). Yet, while it seems that we can all agree on what happened, it is impossible to reach broad agreement on exactly when. So, for what it’s worth, I am with Phillip Ennis, Andrew Grant Jackson, and Greil Marcus among others in homing in on the summer of 1965, when Bob Dylan “proved it was possible to have both artistic freedom and a hit.” With “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan “liberated his peers to write about anything they wanted,” thus making 1965 a “unique ground zero moment when the monochrome door opened onto a kaleidoscopic Oz waiting on the other side” (Jackson 2, 8). Where I and, more importantly, glam depart from Jackson and the rest of the pro-’65 lobby, though, is in not sharing the view that what lay ahead was somehow 100 percent better than what had already been. For, as Nik Cohn points out, “with respect came the first stirrings of self-importance” (4); and while Dylan could certainly be wry and witty in song, what followed in his wake tended to be short on humor. Henceforth, the joyous inarticulacy that characterized rock ’n’ roll would largely be confined to pop; rock, by contrast, would seem to favor the joylessly articulate. Bruce Springsteen described the six-minute-plus “Like a Rolling Stone” as “revolutionary.” It “freed your mind,” he said, “the way Elvis freed your body.” It marked the moment when something as previously ephemeral and trivial as pop mutated into something enduring and significant. As Ennis calls it, ’65 saw rock ’n’ roll “maturing into rock,” achieving “a minimal level of maturity when it stretched beyond its teenage concerns and constituency, past the trauma of puppy love and the problems of parental authority” (313). There are gains, for sure; but it is possible to argue that this “maturity” came at a price. Not least in rock outgrowing its teen audience, and so abandoning the very folks who made it.

  As the 1960s ended, we could argue that another chapter of that familiar popular music cycle—one that begins with innovation and experimentation but that ends with standardization and homogenization—had been played out. As rock ’n’ roll morphed into rock, it was subjected to a classic pincer movement—“internal,” artist-driven pressure to ramp up its seriousness on one side, more familiar industry moves to control and contain on the other. Where Dylan led, others followed. “He showed all of us,” acknowledged a grateful Paul McCartney, “that it was possible to go a little further” (qtd. in Inglis 72). The years 1964 through 1967—the very years Bowie had mined for songs to cover on Pin Ups—had witnessed a spike in guitar sales, with some surveys conducted at the time suggesting that nearly two-thirds of young males under twenty-three were band active. During this time, garage rock—the brand of music performed by most of these amateur outfits and exactly the kind of music that would come to fuel Pin Ups—kept the rock ’n’ roll spirit alive. Spontaneous, amateurish, basic, but energetic, it was (im)precisely the kind of music-making that could easily be taken as a snotty measure of discontent with the finely chiseled “rock” now being expertly crafted by the likes of Dylan and the Beatles. At the same time, the music industry that seemed hell-bent on extinguishing this flame—largely through simply ignoring it—now found an unlikely ally in the form of a rapidly professionalizing rock mainstream, whose rising sense of self-importance and increasing engagement with “serious” subject matter would make garage rock’s less “adult” concerns and unrepentant lack of proficiency seem regressive. “We can do things that please us without conforming to the standard pop idea,” explained George Harrison. “We are not only involved in pop music but all music” (qtd. in Heylin, Act, 113). So, this was a time when rock acts were, often under the influence of psychedelics, stretching themselves lyrically and musically, and when many were flexing their cultural power by demonstrating varying degrees of countercultural engagement. Increasing creative autonomy was obviously a “good thing,” but in the wrong hands it could be a license for pretension and pomposity.

  The nail in the coffin for garage—driven in hard by both rock acts and the business—was a shift in emphasis from the single to the album format. This, of course, suited rock’s recent musical developments to a tee. Acid rock, hard rock, and nascent progressive rock, for instance, would all flourish in long-player form. Two summers after Dylan had shown what might be possible with Highway 61 Revisited—which had featured “Like a Rolling Stone” and the eleven-minute “Desolation Row”—the rock LP arguably came of age, its status as an artistic document cemented by the June ’67 release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Here was an album whose success not only ushered in the era of album-oriented rock—and so radically reshaped how popular music would work economically—but which also confirmed that rock LPs would be taken seriously by not just the musicians, the business, and the fans but by the critics and reviewers too, who in turn would play their part in conferring the status of “art” upon them. Held in the same month, the Monterey Festival was envisioned by its organizers as an event that might validate rock music as an art form comparable to jazz and folk. While it is debatable that the festival achieved this aim, Monterey unequivocally signified the arrival of rock music as “big,” if not “show,” business. Something confirmed by the attendance of A&R men from all the major record labels, armed with checkbooks, and eager to sign up rock acts to their companies’ rosters.

  The net result of all this was to effect a concurrent hardening and widening of the difference and distance between both rock and pop, and rock and rock ’n’ roll. These were divisions that the likes of Bowie, Bolan, and Ferry would eventually come to straddle and, in some cases, even collapse. However, this seemed very unlikely, if not impossible, in the late 1960s. Two very distinct markets had emerged by 1968—different arenas in which popular music would be both produced and consumed. This was the year in which—in the United States—sales of albums surpassed sales of singles for the very first time. This was a commercial watershed, for sure, but it also indicated that the album had now become rock music’s natural format. It even had another powerful ally in the form of the many FM radio stations springing up across the country that would happily play album tracks, that would not refuse to play anything more than four minutes long. All this left garage rock in a difficult place. It was the very antithesis of what the industry wanted. Not least because major-label rock acts shifted more LPs. By 1970, then, garage is dead in the water. Killed off by a lethal combination of factors that include: rock’s increasing stress on virtuosity, technical chops, or, at the very least, proficiency; that widespread and widely shared assumption that only the album is the true test of a musician’s worth; the fact that the album is now established as the industry’s format of choice; and, as previously noted, the growing number of FM radio stations willing to playlist album tracks, and on which the music of the rock mainstream will invariably sound “better” than ragged garage. So, garage finds itself on the “wrong side” of the divide—that is, the one not with rock—banished to the pop musical hinterland by the perfect storm of factors outlined above. In hindsight, that it should find itself out in the cold should not have been a surprise. Paths that had, if not crossed, then certainly ran closely adjacent back in the mid-1960s, were now well and truly divergent. Symptomatic of the many degrees of separation between rock—significant and weighty—and pop—ephemeral and trivial. The f
ormer was built to last; the latter was built for speed.

  So, what did this weighty rock music look and, more importantly perhaps, sound like as the 1970s dawned? Although there was variety enough under the “rock” header to warrant the identification of four distinct substyles, it was still the case that each of these channeled common feelings of disappointment and disillusionment, that each expressed a shared desire to withdraw or retreat, and that each typically wrapped this all up in a musical package marked by its unmistakable seriousness. Given the drivers that contributed to it, perhaps we should not have been surprised by such a state of affairs. For these compose a “litany” that has subsequently come to be almost as familiar as that which explains the death of rock ’n’ roll at the tail end of the 1950s. It includes, then, the untimely deaths of some of its principal players (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison); the assassinations of public figures who personified progressiveness and hope (Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy); the escalation of the Vietnam War; the damage caused by the widespread availability of hard drugs; the psychic cost and bitter symbolism of events in the summer of 1969 at Altamont and in the Hollywood Hills; and even the complicity of the music industry itself. It is in and out of this context, then, that rock’s (re)turn to and (re)discovery of musical “roots” becomes entirely understandable. This can be heard in the country stylings of Bob Dylan on John Wesley Harding (1968) and Nashville Skyline (1969), of the Byrds on Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968) and Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde (1969), and of the Band on Music from Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969).