Glam Rock
Page 13
There was more affinity with Bowie than Bolan, but we felt very different even from him. He seemed to have been around a bit, and his band seemed very old-fashioned. It was all very straightforward music, even though he was dressed up in a very extreme way. (Qtd. in Hoskyns 57)
This is what makes Roxy Music simultaneously the most and least glam of acts. While the band do tick a number of boxes—via its camp attack on the rock mainstream, highly developed sense of the theatrical, and pop-oriented outlook—only one of Barney Hoskyns’s glam “signatures” is applicable to them. Even then, only loosely, since the vibrato deployed by Ferry was rarely if ever “faux Cockney” (xii). So Roxy Music’s brand of glam was more self-conscious, arch, cerebral, and “cooler” than the “hot” variant practiced by T. Rex and acts like Sweet, Mud, and Suzi Quatro.
When Brian Eno told Richard Williams in July 1972 that he “realised that there were certain areas of music you could enter without actually learning an instrument,” he was demonstrating exactly the kind of heretical avant-gardist thinking guaranteed to raise the hackles of the mainstream rock cognoscenti. The self-declared Roxy project, then, was to break away from traditional rock—making it, as Stanley Hawkins has pointed out, a project that was unlikely to find favor in one key market in particular:
It was as if everything that Roxy Music stood for was contra the serious-mindedness of American rock, as they altered the pop scene into a domain of soft velvet and swooning boys and girls intent on romance and fancy dress. (18)
On June 30, 1972, Alice Cooper had concluded its triumphant UK tour at the Empire Pool Wembley—then the largest indoor venue in the country. In a Melody Maker interview published the day after the gig, an admiring Roy Hollingworth pronounced the band to be a “complete break away from [the] sophisticated, lame policy of Stateside rock” (qtd. in History 1972, 82). In the interview, the band’s leader Vincent Furnier—by this point well on the way to being identified as Alice—told Hollingworth that Alice Cooper was “a musical Clockwork Orange,” that it was “a drama thing, I love drama.” It was also to be understood as a very explicit challenge to “the state where music was the main thing,” where bands “just stand and play music” (qtd. in History 1972, 83). On August 12, Alice Cooper’s latest single “School’s Out” would start a three-week run as the UK’s best-seller. Unashamedly aimed at teens—as its title clearly indicated—rather than “serious” rock fans, its invitation to rumble plugged into all those classic rock ’n’ roll anthems of the 1950s that had urged their high school audience to “rip it up.” Neanderthal, for sure, but full of humor (“a word that rhymes” with “innocent” cannot be found!), life, and fun. “School’s Out” was anthemic, but glam anthems did not come any more bespoke than a single released on the very day that Alice Cooper made number one. David Bowie had initially proposed Mott the Hoople record a version of “Suffragette City.” He wrote “All the Young Dudes” when the band declined the offer to cover a song that would, of course, soon be known to many. While Bowie—who also produced the single, played rhythm guitar, and contributed backing vocals—denied that “All the Young Dudes” was a hymn to youth, the song undoubtedly functioned in precisely this way for the overwhelming majority of its audience. So, in this respect, it was closer to the inclusive “Starman” than the Bowie track with which it has sometimes been compared, “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.” Accused of being “juvenile delinquent wrecks,” the “dudes”—the shoplifting Wendy, Jimmy who “dresses like a queen” but can “kick like a mule,” the suicidal Billy, Freddy who has “spots from ripping off the stars on his face,” and our narrator—are all representative(s) of a glam community in which the age bar has been set (“don’t want to stay alive when you’re 25”) and where the quarrel is not so much with the older generation as within their own—“My brother’s at home with his Beatles and Stones / We never got it off on that revolution stuff.” For the “dudes,” the name-checked T. Rex is where it’s at, and TV, as opposed to, say, the turntable, is acknowledged as the natural habitat for this new sound and vision. It is, though, in the song’s typically lengthy fade-out where the focus switches from telling us who the “dudes” are to an invitation to join their growing ranks. This section features vocalist Ian Hunter’s ad-libbing, which is perhaps why the song’s author disagreed with those who heard the track as a hymn to youth. For—aside from the song’s distinctive opening guitar motif—this is where the band put its own stamp on the song. With a throaty chuckle, Hunter reaches out to all the young dudes—“I want to see, hear, and talk to you . . . all of you”—and emphasizes this superinclusive embrace by enthusiastically singling out someone wearing glasses and almost demanding, ordering even, that they move to “the front.” Here, then, the song becomes a glam sermon with Hunter in the role of glam preacher leading a glam communion—“Oh yes, we can love.” “All the Young Dudes” would very effectively “carry the news.” It reached number three in Britain, and, in the fall, even made the Billboard Top 40. It outsold the more tentative “Starman.”
Though considerable, Bowie’s successes would not yet make him a genuine threat to T. Rex, whose crown showed little sign of slipping through 1972. Having achieved commercial near saturation in their native land, Marc Bolan and his band had inevitably turned their attention to the United States and embarked on a concerted campaign to crack this prized market, for obvious financial but—at least to the musicians themselves—no less important artistic reasons. In January, “Get It On”—renamed “Bang a Gong (Get it On)” so as not to be confused with a similarly titled song still fresh in the memory by American jazz-rockers Chase—reached the Billboard Top 10. In February, T. Rex embarked on a two-week US tour, with advance publicity proclaiming the band to be “the new Beatles, the teen idols of the Seventies and the biggest pop sensation in years” (qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 204). However, the tour did not go well. Meager forty-five-minute sets were often greeted with indifference. Shows in Los Angeles and Detroit had been well received; but in Chicago, where the band had been upstaged by its hard rock support act Uriah Heep, the Tribune reported that “the sequins [Bolan] had pasted on his cheekbones sparkled more than his music” (qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 205). The American trip reached its nadir, however, with the February 27 show at Carnegie Hall, where, as manager Tony Secunda explained:
We’d set up this hot media blast for the gig—searchlights lit up the Manhattan skyline, heavy faces were there to see the concert, and what does Marc do? Locks himself in the toilet with two bottles of champagne and gets out of his brain. He walked on stage wearing a T-shirt of himself and fell flat on his face. . . . It was so loud that no one could hear a damn thing—it was awful. (Qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 206)
So, for Secunda—at least as far as T. Rex’s North American hopes and dreams were concerned—that was that. Bolan himself saw it differently. In May, when asked about the real picture in the US, he told a British journalist that T. Rex was “very new, but very big. We’ve got a gold single for ‘Get It On’ and [Electric Warrior] is gold this week. . . . If the thing is done correctly,” he pointed out, the rewards could be “phenomenal there” (qtd. in History 1972, 66). Such comments typify a characteristic mix of (over)confidence and delusion that would become a very familiar feature of Bolan’s public utterances as the year wore on. Yet, it had all started off so well, with little indication of stormy skies ahead and every good reason to be confident of continued, even greater, successes. “Telegram Sam”—the first release on Bolan’s own imprint, T. Rex Wax Co.—had sold more than two hundred thousand copies in just four days to become the band’s third UK number one single in less than twelve months when it held the top spot for two weeks in February. A glam-rap, featuring a cast of fictional characters (“Golden Nose Slim,” “Purple Pie Pete,” “Jungle-Face Jake,” and the titular “Sam”) and real people (Bob Dylan, Howlin’ Wolf, and of course Bolan himself), “Telegram Sam” bore a family resemblance to “Get It On,” deploying a similar riff albeit in a different
key. If it ain’t broke. There is much debate about who or what the song is “about.” Was the “main man” Bolan’s New York dealer? Was he referring to Tony Secunda? Or his accountant, Sam Alder, who had apparently been the first to give the band the news that “Get It On” had made number one? Of course, if the song must be about anyone, then it is surely about Bolan himself. Indeed, there is a Bo Diddleyesque degree of self-regard and self-mythologizing going on here—“I ain’t no square with my corkscrew hair,” “automatic shoes” and “3-D vision”—which simultaneously complements and fuels three minutes and forty-five seconds of full-on swagger and utter self-belief.
Bolan’s Shea Stadium moment then arrived next month, in March, when he performed two shows on the eighteenth to sixteen thousand fans at London’s Empire Pool Wembley. This was the first time that venue had been used for a pop or rock concert; and, for the British media at least, the gigs signaled not only that Trexstasy was a phenomenon that could now be seriously considered in the same breath as Beatlemania, but that it also marked the most visible and audible expression of a new youth movement—glam.
If further proof of this were needed, at over one hundred thousand, the band’s follow-up to Electric Warrior had received advance orders of Fab proportions. The bulk of The Slider was recorded very quickly in the space of a week in Paris in April, with some overdubbing done in Copenhagen and LA. At the time, producer Tony Visconti had been aware that some of the “magic” had disappeared. “There was no innocence any more. We were making calculated T. Rex recordings. There was a formula.” This was a “slide” that was presumably exacerbated by Bolan’s emerging stimulant-fueled megalomania—“In the hit parade? What are you talking about, man? I am the hit parade” (qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 86)—that, in turn, fed discontent in the ranks.
Kicking off the album, “Metal Guru”—which became the band’s second UK number one of 1972—was reminiscent of Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” and true to the obviously winning blueprint was as musically direct as any T. Rex single released thus far. Lyrically, it was also characteristic in its by now familiar, unique-to-Bolan wordplay—what exactly was a “silver stud sabre-tooth dream”? When quizzed, Bolan himself had this to say about the song’s meaning:
I relate “Metal Guru” to all the gods around. I believe in a god, but have no religion. With “Metal Guru” it’s like someone special; it must be a god head. I thought how god would be; he’d be all alone without a telephone. I don’t answer the phone anymore. I have codes where people ring up at certain times. (Qtd. in History 1972, 93)
This is a very revealing (self-)analysis. Does Bolan now think he is a “god head”? Is it he, not Bowie, who has “slid” into being Ziggy “making love with his ego”? “Lady Stardust” may well have been written about Bolan, but it would now seem that “Ziggy Stardust” was just as applicable. Mixing industrial-strength self-importance with some degree of astuteness, Bolan had also pronounced the Rolling Stones to be “just not that important anymore” because “they’re finding it difficult to live within the context of 16-year-old kids” (qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 210); and was even feeling confident—or possibly delusional—enough to take on the Beatles too. He told Melody Maker’s Welch and Watts that
Lennon’s thing for me was slightly too political. Rock ’n’ roll is an up, and I like music to think to, obviously, and I don’t listen to just anything, but I found [Some Time in New York City] slightly depressing as an album. . . . Rock ’n’ roll is enough if you pick up a guitar and play it well, that’s enough of a message. (Qtd. in History 1972, 66)
On the release of The Slider in July, Bolan proclaimed it to be “the only album in which I’ve said what I think I am” (qtd. in History 1972, 92). If so, what did it tell us about Marc Bolan? “There was a period when I covered everything in a very poetic style,” he told Michael Watts. “The images were poetic. They’re no less now, but they relate to people rather than the landscape of my head” (93). In its title at least, a track like “Main Man” might well have promised that here was a lyric that would indeed “relate to people.” However, Bolan confessed that it too was “a song about me” (93). The Slider, then, was very much a case of business as usual, featuring that familiar menu of rock ’n’ roll–sourced rhythms and motifs—in the case of the latter, for example, a surfeit of references to cars and car parts—lush strings, castrato BVs, and Bolan’s unique Byron-in-outer-space lyrical take.
In the fall of ’72, as the stand-alone single “Children of the Revolution”—a glam anthem neither as effective nor affective as “All the Young Dudes”—was climbing to number two on the UK chart, T. Rex had returned to the US for a longer, two-month tour. Lessons, though, had clearly not been learned. Still billed as “the new Beatles,” extended solos and jams soon backfired, as the support act, the Doobies, consistently blew the headliners away. This time, furthermore, Bolan could not even take solace in his unrivaled status as the biggest star back home, as he had been able to do back in the spring. For now, there were a host of credible challengers at home—the Osmonds (whose glam-style single “Crazy Horses” would peak at number two later in the year), David Cassidy, Slade, Sweet, and Gary Glitter. Plus, of course, his old friend and rival David Bowie. On July 8, Bowie had played London’s Royal Festival Hall, and a star was born. Writing in Melody Maker, Ray Coleman identified this as the moment “at which it’s possible to declare: ‘That’s it—he’s made it’” (qtd. in History 1972, 110). Exactly a week later, he played the Friars Aylesbury for the third time in a year. This time with American journalists in attendance. On the same day, Coleman’s review of that Festival Hall show had appeared, signing off with the perceptive conclusion that “Bowie is going to be an old-fashioned, charismatic idol, for his show is full of glitter, panache and pace—a flashback to pop-star theatrics of about ten years ago” (110).
True to the emerging glam modus operandi that Bowie himself would play such a major part in defining, the Ziggy show was a conscious fusion of the popular and the avant-garde—constructing a space in which Broadway theater and classic rock ’n’ roll fused with more avant-garde practices sourced from mime and that boho Warholian demimonde. Reviewing Bowie’s August gig at London’s Rainbow Theatre for New Music Express, Charles Shaar Murray was then at least half-right in describing it as a “spectacular in the grand tradition . . . your real old Busby Berkeley production. Bring on the dancing girls” (111). Half-right, for that disruption of conventional rock performance (which he acknowledged) was to be achieved via an eclectic mix of artistic forms and practices (which he evidently did not). That Shaar Murray should miss this is rather surprising, given that in a July 22 interview Bowie had told him that he “was not a musician” and that he did not “profess to have music as my big wheel,” noting that “theatre and mime” were just as important (86). Perhaps Shaar Murray did not want to believe him? With their dry ice, scaffold towers, costume changes, choreography and mime, and portentous use of Beethoven’s Ninth, the Ziggy shows were theatrical rock par excellence. “Perhaps the most astounding feature was the costuming”—writes Van Cagle—but
the overall effect of the lighting, Bowie’s precise movements, and the numerous changes in apparel was to provide audiences with visual images that aided in the overall creation of the bisexual/alien Ziggy character. (Cagle 165)
With Roxy Music as support act and Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, and Elton John in attendance, the Rainbow Theatre show had featured the rolling, big-screen projection of stills of pop icons—Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and even Marc Bolan—implying that here was a starry pantheon to which Bowie/Ziggy could now be added. Theatrical moments abounded. However, one of the most powerful came at the very start of the show, when a spotlit Bowie sang “Lady Stardust” solo at the piano.
In the fall of 1972 Bowie took the Ziggy show to the US, opening on September 22 in Cleveland, moving on to Memphis on the twenty-fourth and then playing New York’s Carnegie Hall on the twenty-eighth. While US media rea
ction was generally positive, it was also evident that, perhaps unsurprisingly, middle America was less enamored. In fact, Bowie would even fail to fill San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. The tour was undertaken at a relatively stately pace, its schedule of twenty-one shows in sixteen cities over two and a half months giving Bowie the opportunity to immerse himself more fully in America. Most of the next LP, Aladdin Sane, was written on this tour—material that was clearly the product of a deep engagement with a country and culture that had fascinated him since childhood. This engagement was also evident in Bowie’s personal and creative involvement with its citizens. Late in ’72, Bowie would oversee the final mix of Iggy Pop’s Raw Power LP. More noteworthy, however, August would find Bowie sprinkling some glitter over RCA label mate and artistic soul mate Lou Reed’s second solo album, Transformer. As producer, Bowie has tended to receive much of the credit for the record’s success. Certainly, in the UK and Europe at least, his name undoubtedly lent the project a fashionable glam sheen that must have helped Reed, whose debut solo effort had tanked. However, while Bowie had indeed spent some time in the control booth and contributed keyboards, acoustic guitar, and backing vocals to some tracks, he was less hands on than either engineer Ken Scott or Spiders guitarist Mick Ronson, who as coproducer, chief arranger, and musician had a much bigger part to play. The first single from the album, “Walk on the Wild Side,” was an international hit—including reaching number sixteen on Billboard—despite the controversial nature of subject matter that it did nothing to hide—“But she never lost her head / Even when she was giving head.” As Cagle points out, it was “the first American rock song to make explicit references to gay sexuality, prostitution, speed, hustling and transvestism” (152). Elsewhere on Transformer, “Make Up” managed to outcamp even “Walk on the Wild Side.” Here, our narrator observes, with evident delight and unconcealed lust, his male lover’s makeup regimen—“You’re a slick little girl” and “Oooh! It’s oh-so nice.” Another visit to the “church of man-love.” “Perfect Day” is, though, arguably the most overtly glam track on the album. Piano led and orchestral, theatrical in its tableau of images and musical construction, this inclusive, immersive anthem celebrated the transformative and transformational—“I thought I was someone else, someone good.” Such audible glamness was complemented by the visual glamness of the record’s cover art—on the front, an overexposed Mick Rock photo of a heavily mascaraed, androgynous Reed, and on the back, a photo of a man and woman by Karl Stoecker, who had shot the cover of the Roxy Music debut LP. Released in November, the LP would make the UK Top 20 and, perhaps more surprisingly, the US Top 30. In North America, critical reaction could be less than positive, even downright abusive. Nick Tosches in Rolling Stone, for example, dismissed most of Transformer as “artsy fartsy kind of homo stuff.” Simply not manly enough, then. Robert Christgau gave it a “B−,” while it was awarded just two stars in the Chicago Tribune.