by Simon Philo
In January 1972, Bowie told Disc: “It’s the youth that are feeling the boredom most; they are crying out for leadership to such an extent that they will even resort to following the words of some guitar hero.” Ziggy Stardust would be tauter and tighter. Teen focused and teen friendly. Guitar driven, where Hunky Dory had been piano led and largely orthodox in its “grown-up” rock stylings. A song like “Hang On to Yourself” possesses an almost punky swagger that would not have been out of place down in CBGB four or five years later. With its lyrical steal from the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” Cochranesque chords and “c’mons,” it was immediate and accessible without talking down to its younger demographic. Glam.
Chapter 3
“Hang On to Yourself”
In 1972, T. Rex would continue to rule the land, but it would be David Bowie who would take glam to another level. Although under attack from Slade and glam newcomers like Sweet, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople, and of course Bowie himself, the T. Rex palmares for ’72 was in fact nearly identical to that of the previous year. As was the case in 1971, there are two number one singles (“Telegram Sam” and “Metal Guru”) and two 45s that peak at number two (“Children of the Revolution” and “Solid Gold, Easy Action”); and, while The Slider would not perform as well as its predecessor in the UK—where it could only reach number four on the album chart—sales in the US would comfortably outstrip those for Electric Warrior.
Yet, the year’s first significant glam moment concerned neither its reigning monarch nor did it play out musically, on vinyl or live. David Bowie would lay the groundwork for his rise to glam superstar status in a January 22, 1972, interview that featured in the pages of the British music weekly Melody Maker. Appropriately enough, though, this was still very much a “performance.” True to glam, it might seem that what Bowie wore for this interview was almost as important as what he said in it. Introduced to readers as “rock’s swishiest outrage,” Bowie is described by Michael Watts as “looking yummy”:
He’d slipped into an elegant patterned type of combat suit, very tight around the legs, with the shirt unbuttoned to reveal a full expanse of white torso. The trousers were turned up at the calves to allow a better glimpse of a huge pair of red plastic boots with at least three-inch rubber soles; and the hair was Vidal Sassooned into such impeccable shape that one held one’s breath in case the slight breeze from the window dared to ripple it. I wish you could have been there to vada him; he was so super. (Qtd. in History 1972, 13)
This description of how he looks is then followed by a consideration of what it might all mean that pulls few punches:
[His] present image is to come on like a swishy queen, a gorgeously effeminate boy. He’s as camp as a row of tents, with his limp hand and trolling vocabulary. “I’m gay,” he says, “and always have been, even when I was David Jones.” But there’s a sly jollity about how he says it, a secret smile at the corners of his mouth. He knows that in these times it’s permissible to act like a male tart, and that to shock and outrage, which pop has always striven to do throughout its history, is a balls-breaking process. And if he’s not an outrage, he is, at the least, an amusement. The expression of his sexual ambivalence establishes a fascinating game: is he or isn’t he? In a period of conflicting sexual identity he shrewdly exploits the confusion surrounding male and female roles. (Qtd. in History 1972, 15)
According to Van Cagle, the interviewer was shocked by Bowie’s frank declaration of his sexuality. There is, however, absolutely nothing in the interview to support this conclusion. In fact, unlike most journalists at the time, Watts would prove to be a very perceptive reader of (and so be receptive to) the whole Ziggy project. In a review of a gig that took place a few weeks later at London’s Imperial College, he concluded that Bowie was “dedicated to bringing theatrics back to rock music” (qtd. in History 1972, 7); his review of the Ziggy LP also indicated that he was wise to Bowie’s “act.” Indeed, in the January interview, Watts identifies Bowie’s “acute ear for parody [that] doubtless stems from an innate sense of theatre,” those “theatrics that will make the ablest thespians gnaw on their sticks of eyeliner in envy.” It is such “theatrics,” he implies, that also underpin Bowie’s statements about his own sexuality—“He’s gay, he says. Mmmmmm” (14, 13). There is “sly jollity” and a “secret smile.” In short, Watts gets it. “Outrage” and “amusement” are, of course, key to understanding glam. Yet, just because it might be “a fascinating game,” the bravery and certainly the impact of Bowie’s flamboyant, very public self-outing should not be underestimated. At the time, even for someone at Bowie’s then-modest level of celebrity, it was a high-risk move. Indeed, for a career that had barely gotten off the ground, it might have permanently put an end to any hopes he might have had for mainstream pop success.
So, was he—as Watts seemed to be suggesting—guilty of using his sexuality as a PR stunt, of “shrewdly exploit[ing] the confusion surrounding male and female roles”? Possibly. It was delivered with a “swish,” after all. This interview would certainly make a bigger splash than the recently released Hunky Dory. Although not immediately in terms of sales, it did have impact. For Boy George, for example, it was a public statement that represented an act of bravery on Bowie’s part. It was “a risk that nobody else dared take and [which] in the process changed many lives,” including his own (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 138). It also had force for heterosexual males like John Lydon. It was—he remembers,
as challenging to the world as you could ever hope to be at that point, and that was a damn brave statement to make, and yobs, hooligans, basically working-class [guys] really liked him for the bravery, for the front of it. It was taking on the world, going that’s what I am and fuck you! (Qtd. in Sounes 154–55)
While there is a sense in which—as part of team Bowie—she would have probably said it anyway, his wife Angie made the still credible assertion that “social ethics and structures started to change” in the wake of the interview. “Gay people breathed more easily, without fear of recrimination,” she noted. “People were actually speaking about a subject that in the past had remained strictly taboo” (qtd. in Cagle 142). However, even though with glam it was sometimes difficult to separate the two, could Bowie walk the walk as he talked the talk? Later in the year, there would, of course, be that memorable prime-time TV performance of “Starman,” in which he tenderly drew Mick Ronson to him as the two men harmonized into a shared mic. More explicitly—here, literally so—the erotic fantasy of new song “Moonage Daydream” did not bury its transgressive message somewhere in its outer reaches, its nether regions. “Place your space-face close to mine, love,” Bowie sings, as he exalts the “church of man-love” as “such a holy place to be” and promises to be a “rock ’n’ roll bitch for you.” Indeed, at one point, reference is even made to a “pink monkey-bird,” which was gay slang for a recipient of anal sex—the kind of activity that will presumably make song’s narrator “jump into the air.” So “Moonage Daydream,” then, was a prime demonstration of the way in which glam could channel new takes on gender and sexuality. In the fall of 1972, the stand-alone single “John, I’m Only Dancing” (UK no. 12) would see Bowie revisiting this “holy place,” presenting a tableau vivant of the gay club scene and—reputedly—name-checking actual and potential male lovers. These songs help illustrate the extent to which David Bowie saw himself—as others would see him—as genuinely transgressive. As he explained:
We took ourselves for avant-garde explorers, the representatives of an embryonic form of postmodernism. [Whereas] the other form of glam-rock was directly borrowed from the rock tradition, the weird clothes and all that. To be quite honest, I think we were very elitist. (Qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 203)
So, for Bowie, Marc Bolan and the rest were merely practitioners of end-of-the-pier campery. Yet of course—whether consciously invoked or not—a dandy is still a dandy, someone whose assault on convention is largely measured by the extent to which it encourages others to follow.
Besides, as Bowie himself confirmed at the very end of “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” we were “not alone.” There was some further evidence to suggest that the times were a-changing. Two high-profile movie releases, for instance—one set in a dystopian future and one in a fin-de-siècle past but both appropriate to the present—served to demonstrate this much. January saw the UK theatrical release of Stanley Kubrick’s controversial movie version of A Clockwork Orange. Its distinctive clothes and footwear would, of course, influence glam’s wardrobe, while Bowie would use William/Wendy Carlos’s version of “Ode to Joy” to presage his arrival onstage on the Ziggy tour. Later in the year, the Weimar-set Cabaret would arguably be even more influential in complementing, and in some cases directly impacting, the glam work of not only Bowie—on tracks such as “Time” and “Aladdin Sane,” for example—but also of Roxy Music, Cockney Rebel, and Sparks.
In January 1972, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) called its first ever national strike. This precipitated a crisis that led to the UK government issuing the first of what would turn out to be several declarations of a state of emergency over the next few years. It heralded the beginning of a period in which the country seemed to be forever teetering on the brink of total collapse. In 1972, the total number of days lost to industrial action hit its highest level for nearly fifty years, unemployment was rapidly approaching one million, and there were five hundred deaths in Northern Ireland. In this context, what did it tell us that the year’s biggest-selling single should be Judy Collins’s version of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” on which she was backed by the Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards? Number one for five weeks in the spring, it could be dismissed as yet more evidence of the UK’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for pop novelty. It was in bad company, after all. Chicory Tip’s “Son of My Father,” Lieutenant Pigeon’s “Mouldy Old Dough,” and Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling” formed a cheesy trinity of best-sellers that could all be straightforwardly (and understandably) read as escapist. Simply doing, then, what pop has always done. “Amazing Grace,” however, is perhaps better grouped with two other UK number one singles from 1972—Harry Nilsson’s melodramatic “Without You” and Don McLean’s mournful “Vincent.” Far from looking away, all three songs face the misery head-on, with “Amazing Grace” even offering the listener, in its promise of redemption, a way through it. This is how pop texts could be seen and heard to relate to their context. Rising and falling in these “difficult” times, glam could and would function in similar ways; and, while it would not engage in politics as ’60s rock had done, this did not mean that it could not be, that it was not, politically engaged. As Bowie explained:
In the 70s, people of my age group were disinclined to be a part of society. It was really hard to convince yourself that you were part of society. It’s like, “OK, you’ve broken up the family unit, and you say you’re trying to get out of your mind and expand yourself and all that. Fine. So now that you’ve left us, what are we left with? Cos here we are without our families, totally out of our heads, and we don’t know where on earth we are.” That was the feeling of the early 70s—nobody knew where they were. (Qtd. in Doggett, Man, 13)
While this “feeling of the early 70s” is perhaps not as instantly discernible in the work of Slade or T. Rex, it is understandably easier to catch in Bowie’s, fueling pop in a time of what the novelist Jonathon Coe has described as “ungodly strangeness.” On The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the opening track “Five Years” is a glam-rock prophecy. Crisscrossing the Atlantic, its preapocalyptic scenarios jump from an English market square to a stylized urban America—all cops, Cadillac wheels, and ice cream parlors—but which together suggest the end is fairly nigh. The track has been described as journalistic; but while it is bringing us “the news,” it is clearly not doing so in, say, the manner of a folk-protest song. Instead, it delivers (melo)dramatically, theatrically, cinematically. Here, pacing and arrangement are key. A simple drum part portentously fades in, to be joined as the picture and the emotion build by piano, acoustic guitar, bass, and finally strings. By the end of the song, Bowie is hysterical, on the edge, his “brain hurts a lot,” screaming and shredding a vocal that had started out coolly documenting seemingly random scenes. Then, all that is left is for the returning solo drum part to take the listener out of the track. More than simply setting the tone, “Five Years” functions as a kind of overture for Ziggy’s rise and fall.
Through the first half of 1972, glam gathers pace and traction. In addition to continued singles successes with “Look Wot You Dun” (UK no. 4) and “Take Me Bak ’Ome” (UK no. 1), Slade Alive! (UK no. 2) gives Slade its first hit LP, while the almost identical levels of transatlantic chart fortune achieved by the ostensibly non-glam but increasingly glittery Elton John with “Rocket Man” (UK no. 2, US no. 6) and Ringo Starr with his T. Rex homage “Back off Boogaloo” (UK and US Top 10) would only serve to demonstrate that it might be here to stay. It was, though, the arrival of two long-form glam works that settled any doubt. Kismetically, Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Roxy Music’s eponymous debut were both released on June 16. These two albums simultaneously broaden and deepen the genre; but, importantly, they would do so without leading it away from the pop mainstream. This constituted a rather unfamiliar trajectory. Such “stretch” more often than not has the effect of moving things in the opposite direction; but with glam, as has already been suggested, things were different. Ziggy Stardust would eventually peak at number five in the UK and spend more than two years on the album chart. It was glam’s first, coherent long-form statement. Something, however engaging it might have been, Electric Warrior could never claim to be. Ziggy Stardust can be considered quintessential because it is about stardom, because it is “an essay on fame” (McKay 28). The working title for “Lady Stardust,” for instance, was “A Song for Marc.” It makes reference to a long-haired performer with makeup on his face and an “animal grace,” whom people cannot help gawking at. It could, of course, have been about Bowie himself; but its original title suggests otherwise. Besides, when Bowie tells us that “the song went on forever,” it could well be a bitchy dig at “Hot Love” with its lengthy sing-along fade-out. It could also be that Bolan is on Bowie’s mind at the end of the next track on the album, “Star,” when he exhorts us to “get it on.”
Originally conceived as a song cycle documenting the life of a rock star, it falls some way short of being a fully realized concept album. As Bowie himself confessed, “There [had been] a bit of a narrative, a slight arc and my intention was to fill it in more later . . . [but] I never got round to it” (qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 205). Perhaps conscious of the need to “sell” the project/product a little harder, he told US radio:
What you have . . . is a story which doesn’t really take place. It’s just a few little scenes from the life of a band called Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which could feasibly be the last band on earth. (Qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 206)
Sitting side by side, “Star” and “Hang On to Yourself” do work very effectively as ruminations on fame. On what it might take to achieve (“I can make a transformation as a rock ’n’ roll star”), what it might offer (“so inviting, so enticing to play the part”), and what ultimately it might cost. Much of this price is graphically demonstrated in the fate of Ziggy Stardust, and specifically in the song that is up next on the album and which, of course, bears his name. The character of Ziggy was believed to have been constructed from Bowie’s knowledge of an unholy trinity of larger-than-life rock casualties—Stooges front man Iggy Pop, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and Vince Taylor. He had come across the Legendary Stardust Cowboy—a Texas-born pioneer of psychobilly with an obsession for space travel—when the two had been on the same record label in the late 1960s. Featuring an odd array of instruments including dobro and bugle and an even odder vocal performance, the Cowboy’s 1968 antisong “Paralyzed” had evidently intrigued Bowie. “I
immediately fell in love with his music,” he later recalled on bowie.net. “Well, actually the idea of his music” (qtd. in bowiewonderworld.com). Yet, of the three outsized characters, it was undoubtedly the delusional Taylor—an LSD casualty who once told a French audience that he was the Messiah—who would prove the single most influential (rock and) role model. As Bowie explained: “He always stayed in my mind as an example of what can happen in rock and roll. I’m not sure if I held him up as an idol or as something not to become. Bit of both, probably” (qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 22). Ziggy is a “special man,” a “leper messiah,” the priapic rock-star-as-savior, “the Naz” with “snow-white tan” and “god-given ass,” but someone who will ultimately take “it all too far,” and so meet his fate at the hands of the very “kids” who worship him.
