Glam Rock

by Simon Philo

  At the end of the year, there seemed very little for Marc Bolan and T. Rex to worry about. Far from it. The band’s third single, “Jeepster,” had peaked at number two, and so contributed to their unrivaled status as the top-selling singles act of 1971, while Electric Warrior had reached number one on the UK album chart just before Christmas, and would go on to enjoy an impressive two-month run as the nation’s best-seller. Easy to believe, then, how T. Rex could account for an estimated 4 percent of all recorded music sold in Britain that year. Particularly when such impressive sales figures were backed by similarly Beatles-eque scenes around the country on the band’s fall tour. A police escort was now required to get the band in and out of venues, with shows accompanied by piercing teen screams. No longer merely a “local” matter for the music press, the nationals took note and “Trextasy” was duly coined. T. Rex—it was claimed—could also be credited for the spike in ratings for Top of the Pops, increased sales of the pop-orientated weeklies, and even for the proliferation of magazines aimed at teenage girls in which Bolan became something of a fixture. Jackie, for example, was receiving around eight hundred letters each week by the end of 1971. As its editor Nina Myskow explains:

  We went to inordinate lengths to print three-page pin-ups of [Marc Bolan]. Little girls like non-threatening, not overtly sexual boys [and Bolan had] that boyish quality, that cute cheekiness . . . in spades. (Qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 186–87)

  Bolan’s “androgynous beauty,” then, “his peculiar outfits and mannerisms and that aspect of his narcissism that revealed itself as childlike vulnerability,” constructed the near-perfect teen idol (Paytress, Bolan, 199).

  Inevitably, where T. Rex led, others were sure to follow. However, as ’71 drew to a close, the only credible (albeit at this point still distant) rival to Bolan and his band was Slade. With seventeen consecutive Top 20 hits including six number ones, Slade would eventually eclipse T. Rex and in the process become the decade’s most successful singles act. None of this, though, seemed likely on New Year’s Day 1971, when the band played a “homecoming” show at Wolverhampton Civic Hall, the first of what would be more than 150 gigs that year. Starting out as the ’N Betweens in 1966, Slade would still be playing venues like Dudley Zoo five years later. During this time, the band had experienced a number of false starts in the studio. In 1969, they had signed with Fontana Records on the condition that they change their name, and so, as Ambrose Slade, recorded a debut LP, Beginnings. Like the instrumental single “Genesis,” it flopped. However, it was at this point that Chas Chandler, former bassist with the Animals and ex-manager of Jimi Hendrix, became the band’s manager. Chandler encouraged them to write their own material and—presumably because it was then one of the UK’s more high-profile youth movements—to embrace the skinhead look. By 1970 the name had also been trimmed to Slade. Two singles, though—“Shape of Things” and “Know Who You Are”—failed to chart, as did the LP Play It Loud; but then, acting on Chandler’s suggestion, the band recorded a thoroughly road-tested cover of Little Richard’s “Get Down and Get With It.” Although a studio recording, the intention was to capture something of the excitement the band generated live. Five years of touring had been a slog, but the band had never lost its desire to entertain, typically climaxing its crowd-pleasing set of mostly covers with a rabble-rousing version of “Get Down and Get With It.” According to lead vocalist Noddy Holder, “The stamping, clapping, [and] the vocal sound” on the record worked a treat. “The other day, I heard someone say it sounds like hooligan Spector. That’s exactly what it was” (qtd. in Harris, “Whatever,” 51). “Get Down and Get With It” made the UK Top 20 in the summer of 1971.

  As with Bowie and T. Rex, Slade’s success would be sealed by TV appearances made memorable by the visual impact of its two flamboyant front men—lead vocalist Noddy Holder and lead guitarist Dave Hill. Never remotely androgynous, the band did, however, appreciate the value of putting on a show. A commitment to generosity in and through performance, then, made the band undeniably glam. “It was all about major impact to me,” Hill explained. “If I was on Top of the Pops, I was going to be more noticed than anybody else. I knew what I was doing” (qtd. in Harris, “Whatever,” 52). True to his word, on the TV show to promote “Get Down and Get With It,” Hill wore a woman’s pink coat with diamond-studded dungarees; and subsequent appearances—and there would, of course, be many as Slade became glam’s most prolific hit makers—saw the guitarist ramp up the sartorial outrageousness with costumes and looks that were typically debuted on Top of the Pops for maximum impact. Visuals were arguably as important to Slade as they would be to Bowie, just as the pop single was as important to the band as it was to Bolan.

  With a hit single finally under their belt, Slade went into Command Studios in London to record a similarly “live-sounding” set of songs for the Slade Alive! album. On October 30, a new single “Coz I Luv You” was released. It would spend a full month as the nation’s best-seller, and was the first of a spectacular run of twelve consecutive UK Top Five singles that would include five more number ones. Although self-composed, the song did bear a not-altogether-surprising family resemblance to the straightforward stomp of “Get Down and Get With It.” However, classically trained multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Lea’s snaky violin—in tandem with its minor key—would supply the track with distinctiveness. Originally titled “I Love You,” according to Lea it sounded “too weedy” and so was misspelled to capture “the yobby thing we’d got into the records” (qtd. in Harris, “Whatever,” 50). There could be something simultaneously cynical and naïve about such a strategy, of course, but it is also very glam in its desire to connect with its audience. So, while there is always a danger that it could be read as being rooted in a rather patronizing assumption about teen intelligence (or lack of), here, though, Slade is simply talking to rather than down to its audience. Those misspellings—“Coz I Luv You,” “Take Me Bak ’Ome,” “Gudbuy T’Jane,” “Cum On Feel the Noize” and so on—reinforced a sense of ownership and identification generated by songs consciously crafted with participation in mind. This is why the relationship between Slade and its audience was frequently likened to the fierce and noisy tribalism that characterized British soccer in the 1970s.

  Writing in the Times in early 1972, Richard Williams observed that “after a couple of years devoted to worthy but dull earnestness, rock ’n’ roll’s back where it belongs: in the streets, in the sweaty ballroom, the paperboy’s whistle” (qtd. in Turner, Glam Rock, 54). Something for which the uberdemocratic glam could be held responsible. At the time, though, glam was essentially two—albeit very big—acts, T. Rex and Slade. However, others were emerging. In 1971, Sweet, for example, had taken significant steps toward glam and away from the sugary bubblegum pop the band had been peddling up to that point. Two years earlier, as Sweetshop, both “Lollipop Man” and “All You Ever Get from Me” had failed to chart. In 1970, now rebadged as Sweet but still obviously bubblegum, the band released a cover of the Archies’ “Get on the Line.” It too failed to chart. Sweet, though, made its TV debut in December 1970; and it is from this point on, appropriately enough, that fortunes improve. Significant singles chart success is finally achieved in the spring of 1971, when the Nicky-Chinn-and-Mike-Chapman-produced “Funny Funny” makes the UK Top 20. The follow-up, “Co Co,” is even more successful, peaking at number two in the summer. In both cases, these are still recognizably bubblegum tracks, marked, for instance, by the absence of the band themselves in all but vocals. In contrast to T. Rex, Bowie, and even Slade, who would all journey from the world of rock with its countercultural associations, Sweet’s provenance as a bubblegum act means of course that it will come at glam from an entirely different direction. Yet Sweet’s (hi)story is as glam as T. Rex’s. Indeed, taken together, the life cycle of these two acts can tell us much about where glam sits and fits, and about what makes it tick. Sweet’s pre-glam history is as illustrative and instructive as Bolan’s. It tells us, for example, that
glam is inescapably rooted in “pop.” If it were not, then Sweet would (and could) not have played such a major role in recalibrating it for those in their mid- to late teens to enjoy. In the mid-’70s, in an act of perhaps understandable overcompensation designed to wipe the band’s pop past, Sweet would look to reinvent itself as a hard rock act. That “shameful” history, though, undoubtedly served the band well when it came to fashioning some of the purest-grade glam. However, we are getting ahead of ourselves. At the end of 1971, Sweet had a third single of the year in the chart. Stalling at a relatively lowly number thirty-three, “Alexander Graham Bell,” a copy-homage to Slade’s “Coz I Luv You,” would seem to indicate that momentum had been lost.

  Perhaps thinking of those three Sweet singles, Dave Haslam has described 1971 as a “good year for bad records” (50). This is neither accurate nor fair, even if we confine ourselves to the world of the pop single. Any year in which “Hot Love,” “Get It On,” “My Sweet Lord,” “Double Barrel,” “I’m Still Waiting,” “Hey Girl, Don’t Bother Me,” “Maggie May,” and “Coz I Luv You” can occupy the top spot for a combined total of thirty-three weeks cannot be all bad. There was novelty, of course. An uninterrupted ten weeks of it, for example, in the summer, as first Tony Orlando and Dawn with “Knock Three Times” and then middle of the road with “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” made number one. The year had also been neatly bookended by actor Clive Dunn’s “Grandad” and comedian Benny Hill’s “Ernie.” Of all these, Haslam seems particularly disappointed at the success of the “tame” “Grandad,” which he finds “absurd” at a time “up to its throat in despair, violence and extremism” (50). Yet, there is surely no mystery here. It had been released for the Christmas market, Dunn was then a major star in a long-running and very popular TV sitcom called Dads’ Army, and, most important of all, the song’s mawkish nostalgia played particularly strongly to a nation desperately in need of some midwinter cheer from all that “despair, violence and extremism.”

  For David Bowie, 1971 would turn out to be a tale of three LPs—The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Although recorded in 1970, business disputes had delayed the release of The Man Who Sold the World until early ’71. As noted earlier, this album represented a stuttering move to full-on glam. If the music was predominantly brooding, often rather leaden-footed hard rock, bordering on the proggy at times, then the visual message relayed by the record’s UK cover provided a big clue as to the direction in which—whether he knew it himself at the time—he was headed, featuring as it did a reclining, dress-wearing Bowie holding a queen of hearts card.

  Recorded in just two weeks in the summer of 1971, Hunky Dory is perhaps usefully understood as Bowie’s T. Rex (where Ziggy Stardust might well be his Electric Warrior). In the US, Billboard carried an advertisement for the album that boasted of Bowie: “He has the genius to be to the 70s what Lennon, McCartney, Jagger and Dylan were to the 60s.” Clearly, then, RCA believed that it had a rock “classicist” on its books; and, to be fair, there was plenty on the album to back this up, particularly in the strong, then-voguish singer-songwriter flavors of the first three tracks—“Changes,” “Oh! You Pretty Things,” and “Eight Line Poem.” Yet, by the time of Hunky Dory’s winter release—in an echo of what had happened to him between it and The Man Who Sold the World—Bowie had already moved on to explore musical territory that would this time indicate much less continuity with those illustrious ’60s forebears. This was a direction signposted most clearly by tracks like “Andy Warhol” and “Queen Bitch”; but, in their focus on identity, the piano-led “Changes” and “Oh! You Pretty Things” both addressed thematic concerns that would come to be closely associated with glam.

  The garagey, raunchy, yet campy “Queen Bitch” featured Bowie as the song’s narrator, possibly attacking his old friend and rival, the now highly successful Marc Bolan. As Bowie himself would later admit, “We fell out for about six months” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 119). So, the song might have taken the form of a kind of bitchy character assassination. Indeed, Peter Doggett has suggested that Bolanesque flourishes abound here—such as the use of a quirky descriptor for a hat (“bippety-boppety”), for instance—and the track signs off with a decidedly green narrator-Bowie letting us know that he “could do better than that.” Throughout, “Queen Bitch” also has a rather simple, propulsive arrangement that is very reminiscent of T. Rex.

  While it might well have been, in large measure, a “votive offering to the RCA A and R department to prove he could write a tune, and craft a radio-friendly album” (Heylin, Madmen, 172), Bowie had already written and recorded the bulk of his next album by the time of Hunky Dory’s release in December 1971. Indeed, he had been talking up a Ziggy-style project as far back as February—telling Rolling Stone of his intention to create a stage caricature of the rock star and explaining that his “performances” had “to be theatrical experiences for [him] as well as for the audience” (qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 202). Bowie had made these comments during his first, eye-opening if not life-changing, trip to the United States—an experience that would push him further toward his own glam makeover. “I think I’ve been in prison for the last 24 years,” he said. “I think coming to America has opened one door.”

  I didn’t believe it till I came here, got off the plane from England, America merely symbolises something, it doesn’t actually exist. And when you get off the plane and find there actually is a country called America, it becomes very important then. (Qtd. in Doggett, Man, 103)

  The scenes and characters he encountered undoubtedly lit a creative fuse. New songs flowed. On this trip, he saw both the Velvet Underground and the Stooges play live, while the former’s Loaded album, featuring tracks like “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll,” supplied an appropriate soundtrack. Keen to claim it for America, Cagle views glam’s commitment to the “notion that fame could result from the self-creation of a particular style and persona (posing)” as distinctly Warholian (99). For Bowie at least, there can be no denying that this was a factor. However, even in his case, there is a danger that Warhol’s influence can be overplayed. As for other glam acts, there is no evidence to suggest that Marc Bolan, for example, consciously drew on this “distinctly Warholian” concept of fame. There were—as we have seen—a host of ingredients in the mix, many of them sourced from much closer to home. For Cagle, though, Bowie was simply “a rock and roll Warhol,” taking “most of his aesthetic and philosophical cues” from the artist, “particularly as the self-invented, media manipulating Ziggy Stardust” (13, 11). It is Cagle’s contention, then, that Andy Warhol, the Factory, and the Velvet Underground effectively birthed glam, in supplying its “primary themes of flamboyance, style and image construction, polymorphous sexuality and multi-media montage” (96). With Bowie, of course, the music often appeared to lend weight to this argument. Listening to “Queen Bitch” or “Suffragette City” or his cover of “White Light White Heat,” we can understand how and why he agreed with Charles Shaar Murray’s suggestion that “[Lou] Reed was to you as Chuck Berry was to the Stones” (qtd. in History 1972, 86). Yet, even in 1971 and 1972, it was evident that Bowie’s reference points and resources were being drawn from a much deeper well—from the wider world of rock and pop, certainly, but just as likely to come from “outside” even that world, from mainstream entertainment or from stage and screen.

  Still, through 1971, there were undoubtedly plenty of direct engagements with that Warholian milieu. In September, Bowie was back in the USA, meeting Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and even Andy Warhol for the first time. On this trip, he also signed a three-album deal with RCA. This gave Bowie what seemed to be a rather modest $37,500 advance per LP. However, the terms of the contract included the record company’s agreement to underwrite both the cost of all PR campaigns and, crucially, of the stage shows too. This would provide important financial backing in areas that would be key for Bowie—and for glam—in the years to come. At the e
nd of the month, he was back home and playing to just 250 people at Aylesbury Friars, performing a set that included “Queen Bitch” and “Andy Warhol” from the as-yet-unreleased Hunky Dory. Yet within a matter of weeks and before that LP came out, Bowie’s attention would turn to recording a new batch of songs. The bulk of Ziggy Stardust was, in fact, recorded over the course of a single week in November 1971. Of the nine tracks recorded at this time, six—of the eventual total of eight that would appear on the final album—would tell the Ziggy story. Although, at this early stage in the project, “Lady Stardust” was penciled in to bring the Ziggy story arc—and hence the album—to a close. By mid-December, then, a provisional track listing had emerged that had the record opening with “Five Years,” then “Soul Love,” and then “Moonage Daydream.” Three songs from these late ’71 sessions—two cover versions and an original—would not, however, make the final cut. Several of the songs that would feature on the Ziggy Stardust LP had, in fact, even predated the July Hunky Dory sessions. Versions of “Hang On to Yourself” and “Moonage Daydream” had been recorded at the beginning of the year, “Lady Stardust” and “Ziggy Stardust” in March, and “Star” in May. According to Clinton Heylin, these tracks were shelved at the time because they communicated “quite a different message, and targeted a wholly different audience” (Madmen, 172). In the summer of 1971, as disappointing sales of The Man Who Sold the World had demonstrated, Bowie did not really have an audience at all. What he did now have, however, was a concept, a product; and if he felt he could not personally deliver the perfect rock ’n’ roll star package, then perhaps someone else could front it for him. Songs like “Hang On to Yourself” and “Moonage Daydream” would be vehicles for an imaginary star. This would allow Bowie to “test out the potency of his dream, without risking” what “reputation” he might still have (Doggett, Man, 111). With this mind, a nineteen-year-old fashion designer, Freddie Burretti, was handpicked as lead singer for a “ghost” band Bowie called Arnold Corns. Unfortunately, Burretti, though nice to look at, could not sing. A single flopped, and the project was dead in the water. Bowie would have to do it himself.