Glam Rock

by Simon Philo

  is a bewildering construction: a creature of alluring elegance, vanity and irony, who plays around with conventions to his own end. At the same time, he is someone whose transient tastes never shirk from excess, protest or rebellion. . . . From mannerisms to ways of posing and performing, the dandy revels in artifice simply for style’s sake as a mischievous play with masks of calculated elegance. All the same, dandifying one’s act is linked to self-thinking, sensibility and narcissism that exudes a put-on sense of social elevation. . . . All the great dandies have been outsiders; they have been intellectual figures, artists, and disaffected young men, eager to make themselves publicly visible through a conceit that is deemed their birth-right. (15)

  For those of a countercultural persuasion, glam was often their worst nightmare. This despite there being some obvious common ground. Dandyism could, of course, be easily detected in any of those first-wave rock ’n’ rollers lionized by glam musicians and fans. It was surely personified in that favorite-of-all-favorites, Little Richard. However, in the second half of the 1960s, there were none more dandy than those darlings of the counterculture, the Rolling Stones. So, it should not really have been a surprise to anyone, then, when the Stones belatedly embraced glam in the mid-’70s. In fact, given the band’s campy theatrics, narcissism, and rampant hedonism, perhaps the only surprise should have been that this embrace came as late as it did. Glam would launch a campy assault on rock—via gender play operating on a variety of levels from androgyny through transvestism and drag to queering. Back in the late ’60s, though, the Stones had never shied away from striking such poses as blows—as when, for instance, cross-dressing in the promotional film for “Have You Seen Your Mother” (1966) or consciously mobilizing dandyism to attack a repressive British establishment in the promo for “We Love You” (1967). Rock and Roll Circus (1968) saw the band leading from the front, showcasing the kind of campy theatrics that arguably suited the band better—and so represented a “truer” picture of them—than the crude politicking (wrongly) assumed to feature in a track like “Street Fighting Man” (1968). Of course, it was this latter imprint of the band that the counterculture would come to worship, conveniently ignoring the persistent dandyism that can even be discerned on “Street Fighting Man.”

  Just as there had been with the late ’60s “underground” (and the music that spread its word), there was more to glam than met the eye; it arguably represented “the first pop flowering of an increasingly confident gay culture: five years after its partial decriminalisation, Bowie injected homosexuality into the British pop mainstream.” As the reception of “Starman” had demonstrated then, it “both empowered uncertain teens and gave the more resolutely heterosexual a wider palette in which to trip the light fantastic” (Savage, “Kiss,” 82). While the late 1960s had witnessed an increase in public displays of sexuality, sparked by a series of liberal reforms, it was glam that would effectively “carry the news” into the mainstream, helping to process liberal and progressive ideas for mass consumption.

  Although Bowie had included a cover of “Where Have All the Good Times Gone” on Pin Ups, it was another Kinks song that would make a more obvious point of reference for those keen to unearth glam’s prehistory. The skeptical “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” (1966) had attacked foppery, making Ray Davies a rather unlikely advocate; but “Lola” (1970) would take gender confusion into the upper reaches of the pop charts (UK no. 2, US no. 5) and onto the nation’s TV screens—declaring that “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.” Purportedly based on Davies’s date with Candy Darling—a transsexual who would be subsequently immortalized in Lou Reed’s Bowie-produced “Walk on the Wild Side” (1972)—the song is lyrically uncompromising. Lola “walk[s] like a woman and talk[s] like a man”; and an encounter with her leaves the narrator questioning his own sexuality—“I almost fell for my Lola.” However, although it is all very confusing, it is made clear that Lola knows who she is—“It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola.” She alone here is comfortable in her skin; and our narrator evidently admires, even worships, her for this—“I got down on my knees and I looked at her and she looked at me / That’s the way that I want it to stay.” That Lola is a good person—and most definitely not some kind of freak—is confirmed by the full title of the album on which the song would feature, Lola vs. Powerman and the Money-Go-Round (1970). “Lola,” then, might well be heard as a kind of pop outrider, injecting a new conception of politics into the cultural mainstream that would more fully emerge in the early 1970s: a politics in which the “personal is political,” and therefore anticipated ways in which—in typically inchoate style—glam would and could come to have a big role to play.

  In Fire and Rain, David Browne claims that the story of the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in 1970 was a “lost” one. But can this be true? Fire and Rain offers a fascinating account of these artists in context, for sure, but their story was never remotely in danger of being “lost.” After all, these canonical acts represent the rock motherlode. Perhaps if one is looking for the real “lost” story of 1970—and of the years that immediately follow—then one should look no further than glam? Browne persuasively identifies 1970 as a “year of upheaval and collapse, tension and release, endings and beginnings” (3). Yet, while he notes that it saw the opening of a “generation gap that cracked rock and roll apart, separating the older fans from the newer, next-generation ones, [that] was now an entrenched part of the culture” (333), rather oddly, his focus remains determinedly fixed on the old guard. Even in the more orthodox US, though, there were signs that other stories were emerging. Stories such as Alice Cooper. However, wedded to the classic rock ideology, the rock press persistently looked to dismiss Alice Cooper as a fraud. Appealing to a largely high school–age demographic, Alice Cooper’s music had little or nothing in common with mainstream rock’s then-dominant strains; and the band’s—and particularly its lead singer’s—appearance and behavior jarred too. Wearing “macabre black make-up” and dressed in “a pink ballerina dress, topped off with a black leather jacket,” the man his parents knew as Vincent Furnier would “prowl the stage, contort his body, and [spit] newspaper directly onto incensed hippie onlookers” (Cagle 108). After recording two albums for Frank Zappa’s Straight Records—Pretties for You (1969) and Easy Action (1970)—the band had signed with Warner Bros. Initially released as a B-side in North America in June 1970, “Eighteen” benefited from generous Canadian radio-play to become a sizable US hit in early 1971 (no. 21). As its title made explicit, “Eighteen” self-consciously reached out to a different audience—to “betweeners” who were typically neither college-age rock fans nor teenyboppers, those the UK rock press would sneeringly dismiss as the “punk and pimply” (qtd. in Hepworth 252). “Eighteen,” then, was a proto-glam anthem—“And I just don’t know what I want . . . / I get confused every day,” living in “the middle of doubt,” but “I’m eighteen and I like it.” Alice Cooper combined its antihippie rhetoric—most often characterized by a kind of late-teen nihilism—with an outrageous theatricality. According to critics Cooper and Gaines, the band’s Killer tour offered fans “the first dramatized rock and roll show with a story concept” (qtd. in Cagle 124), its songs “accompanied by intensified theatrics and extreme special effects” (Cagle 125). The tour would help the Killer album go platinum and garner plenty of press coverage, including three Rolling Stone cover stories and pieces in Time, Newsweek, and Playboy.

  As the first rock act to incorporate grandiose theatrical sets and to adopt a conceptual approach to all aspects of performance including characterization, Alice Cooper has a role to play in the genre’s creation. In November 1971, David Bowie would take his newly formed band along to an Alice Cooper London show to try to persuade the reluctant Spiders from Mars to follow him and “glam up.” Eighteen or so months earlier, he had told the music press that he was “determined to be
an entertainer: clubs, cabaret, concerts, the lot” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 78), and had begun to make strenuous efforts to put this commitment to entertainment into practice via a new musical project. Having run through alternatives like “Harry the Butcher” and “David Bowie’s Imagination,” he eventually fixed on the name Hype because—as he explained—“now no one can say they’re being conned” (qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 138–39). Producer and fellow band member Tony Visconti has claimed that Hype’s debut on March 28, 1970—at the Roundhouse, the capitol’s countercultural bastion—was “the very first night of glam rock.” “We were derided a lot during [it],” he recalled, “but photographer Ray Stevenson showed me a photograph he took of Marc Bolan resting his head on his folded arms watching the entire performance” (“Hype,” 65). Visconti has also identified Bowie’s 1971 album The Man Who Sold the World—the bulk of which was recorded in those early months of 1970—as important to the birth of glam. There is, however, very little in The Man Who Sold the World to suggest that this is where glam on vinyl might begin. As Visconti himself acknowledged, “David’s new songs were darker and much heavier” (“Hype,” 65). So, in this, then, arguably more attuned to the rock dominant du jour. Featuring riffs reminiscent of Led Zeppelin or even Black Sabbath, a track like the eight-minutes-plus “Width of a Circle,” with its lumpy tempo shifts, “movements,” and humor-free portentous lyrics, is simply not as light on its feet as tracks found on Ziggy Stardust. While the record marked the inaugural extended workout for the musicians who would comprise the Spiders from Mars, the most “glam” thing about it could be found on the cover of its UK version, which featured Bowie reclining on a sofa, holding a queen of hearts playing card, wearing a dress. Nevertheless, “Width of a Circle” was on the set list for the Hype shows—along with the more apt “Prettiest Star” and, rather less appropriately, a cover of Van Morrison’s “Cypress Avenue.” Evidently, at this point, the music had yet to catch up with what must have been quite a startling look. Bowie described Hype as his first costume band, featuring as they did plenty of cartoonish role-playing and “glitter everywhere” (Bowie qtd. in Doggett, Man, 79). Tony Visconti, on the bass guitar, was “Hypeman” with a big “H” emblazoned on his long-sleeved white T-shirt. As “Rainbowman,” a silver-blue-haired Bowie was dressed in a metallic, collarless shirt with tights and thigh-length boots. Drummer John Cambridge wore a cowboy hat, while lead guitarist Mick Ronson had borrowed a gold satin jacket from Bowie to become “Gangsterman.” It was, recalled Roundhouse booking agent Jeff Dexter, “comic book rock ’n’ roll in a nice way” (qtd. in Trynka 65). Not a bad first pass at defining glam.

  Glam is not defined by a single musical style or sound. Pre–rock ’n’ roll Hollywood glamour and flamboyance mixes with kitschy manufactured Brit-rock from the early 1960s; British beat groups, the baroque Beatles, and the freaky Stones mix with the scuzzy, boho garage rock of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, while transatlantic bubblegum and Brit-pop novelties are also fair game. Being typically flighty and promiscuous, glam did not confine its referents to all points west either; also in the mix could be European torch songs and Weimar cabaret. Together, these demonstrate that “the very heart of glam was a desire to play with ideas of drama and decadence, sexuality and showmanship” (Turner, Glam Rock, 21), making it, therefore, a conscious reaction to the rock ideology forged in the second half of the 1960s—one borne of and speaking to the intragenerational discontent and frustration felt by the younger siblings of mainstream rock fans. Yet—as has been noted—although it can offer us some pretty big clues as to what became of the sixties, it was never representative of a wholesale break. Both in practice and sensibility, there were continuities that were clearly “made in the ’60s.” However, true pop music is proprietorial, drawing much of its power, impact, and appeal from the simple fact that it is “ours” and not “theirs”—whether “they” are your parents or your elder siblings. As Peter Doggett has pointed out, by the early 1970s many established artists were “using rock to explore the crises of privileged adulthood.” This, he suggests, meant dealing with “preoccupations” that “were distant from those of the traditional rock ’n’ roll audience: teenagers.” These teenagers “wanted to believe in the majesty and transcendent power of rock ’n’ roll, because it still raised them up, took them away from the tedium of the everyday, provided the rhythm of their daily lives and filled their minds with fantasies of rebellion and stardom.” As Doggett correctly asserts, “Adolescents wanted heroes who were rebellious and carefree; only adults could afford to sympathise with the decadent and jaded” (Doggett, Shock, 422–23). We wanted the pop thrill of “Ballroom Blitz,” then, not the sanctimonious “Almost Cut My Hair.”

  If all this makes glam sound rather frivolous and reactionary, then by conventional yardsticks perhaps it was. Yet it represented a different kind of politics made for a different time. Particularly in its emphasis on roles and transforming identities; in its challenges to the rock mainstream; and in its “shock value [and] confrontation with conformity through the use of flamboyant costumes and cosmetics that delighted teenage fans precisely because it annoyed an older generation” (Turner, Glam Rock, 12–13). It enacted a rock ’n’ roll reboot, for sure; but it was also representative of the more fluid politics of the 1970s. Reviewing the audience at a Bowie show at New York’s Carnegie Hall in September 1972, Roy Hollingworth captured something of this when he concluded:

  I’ve never seen quite such a strange gathering of people who resembled Christmas trees on legs. There was much glitter, and several men dressed as ladies. As somebody quite rightly said, “The 60s are well and truly over.” (Qtd. in Cagle 163)

  Such tableaux vivant would, of course, be replicated not only at other Bowie shows, but also at Roxy Music gigs and at many other glam shows thereafter. Wedged between the supposedly more creative, liberating, and liberated 1960s and the conservative neoliberal reformation of the 1980s, the 1970s—particularly its first half—are routinely dismissed as a regressive era of cheesy style and political stagnation. A liminal vacuum of a “space between,” best forgotten. Yet look and listen closely. These turbulent and tumultuous years generated dynamic and transformative cultural expression that is easily the equal of anything produced in those more storied times. Vibrant, conflictual, and quintessential, glam demonstrates the “unstable nature” of an era whose “very ambiguity” supplies “its generative and disruptive influences.” If, for example, the ’70s “constitute a laboratory for experimentation with self-creation,” then clearly this music is very much on point (Waldrep 4, 2). So, “get” glam and you go a long way toward “getting” the seventies.

  At a more local level, this drive to self-invent can help explain glam’s “big bang.” Through 1970, David Bowie had demonstrated that the genre was in a developmental stage—principally with those Hype shows, but also via “mission statements” that would emerge during interviews. On the evidence of The Man Who Sold the World, though, his sound had not yet caught up with his vision. Inventions are, of course, often the product of several pioneers working independently of each other at the same time. It would then be another veteran of the British ’60s popular music scene, Marc Bolan, who would win the race to bring glam into the world. “What I’ve been trying to do,” Bolan explained, “is recapture the feeling, the energy, behind old rock music without actually doing it the same technically” (qtd. in Doggett, Shock, 428). Fittingly for what was T. Rex’s breakout single, “Ride a White Swan” offered a perfect demonstration of glam’s Janus-faced, irresistible blending of rock and pop, old and new, counterculture and mainstream. In this, it therefore represented an obvious contrast to the 45 that would ultimately keep it off the top spot. While it might not have sold as many copies as Dave Edmunds’s straightforwardly retro-revivalist, reverential, and “archaeological” version of “I Hear You Knockin’,” “Ride a White Swan” possessed something that its unidirectional rival clearly did not have. In the words of T. Rex’s publicist
B. P. Fallon, “There was too much gray. What was needed,” he proclaimed with a characteristic mix of hucksterism and perceptiveness,

  was something flash and loud and vulgar, and, to some people, annoying. Marc [Bolan] was very shiny. He brought that in, and it actually opened the door for Bowie. Suddenly men were checking their eye make-up. And the music was much more forthright and jumping, much more below the belt. (Qtd. in Hoskyns 5–6)

  Recorded on July 1, 1970, “Ride a White Swan” was simple, repetitive stuff. Just three chords courtesy of Chuck and Eddie, a blink-and-you-miss-it lead solo, handclaps on the offbeat, a barely walking bass line, low-key Tony Visconti–arranged strings, and a dozen or so lines of hardly deep (albeit evidently counterculture-soaked) lyric. At a shade over two minutes, it was a bold, Technicolor statement in pop economy, advocating the guiltless pursuit of pleasure via lines full of “spells” and “stars” that were at once both absurd and joyous—instructing listeners to “wear [their] hair long,” to “wear a tall hat like a druid in the old days” and “a tattooed gown,” and, perhaps most oddly of all, to “take a black cat and put in on [their] shoulder.” Released in October, “Ride a White Swan” would eventually peak at number two on the UK singles chart at Christmastime. Glam was up and running.