by Simon Philo
By the end of a year in which he had become a credible rival to Bolan in the UK, David Bowie had still yet to crack either Billboard Top 40. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars had stalled at an underwhelming number seventy-five, while “Starman” had fared little better in reaching just ten places higher. Although Mott the Hoople’s version of his “All the Young Dudes” had nudged into the Top 40 and he had production credits for his work with Lou Reed, Bowie’s relative commercial failure in America might be largely put down to the fact that—as plenty of reviews confirmed—glam was so evidently not a continuation of classic, sixties rock. A fact confirmed in Stateside responses to other glam acts. Late in ’72, Roxy Music had toured the US, supporting Jethro Tull and the Allman Brothers. Opening for Tull at Madison Square Garden proved to be a particularly traumatic experience for all involved. In a review that encapsulated the orthodox line on Roxy Music that would find its most ardent support(ers) in North America, Lester Bangs complained that the band’s “vitality” was “severely limited” by its “artifice” (qtd. in Hoskyns 61). Prior to the tour, the British journalist Caroline Boucher had written in Disc that Roxy Music had “high hopes of America,” betraying her own lack of appreciation of just how entrenched and conservative the US rock scene was when predicting that the band’s “whole schmaltzy act should go down a bundle there” (n.p.). It did not. Perhaps because, as Steve Peacock pointed out in Sounds, the band members “don’t really sound like a band—they tend to come over as a bunch of slightly eccentric people who play musical instruments, thrown together in a loose union that’s straining at the seams with different ideas” (n.p.). There was also very little support from US radio, where the music was an uncomfortable fit for both FM and AM formats. Too flash for the former, too weird for the latter.
In a more receptive context, where the conditions were right, glam fared much, much better. In New Musical Express, Nick Logan pointed out that, with glam acts like Bolan and particularly Slade, British teenagers were “getting their first influential (in the sense of having the bread to influence trends) taste of rock music.” Here were “the younger brothers and sisters of the Stones, Dylan and even Zeppelin fans; the kids who haven’t been programmed and conditioned by the ‘accepted’ norms of snob rock behaviour.” Just as “All the Young Dudes” had described. In his piece, Logan had also identified the gap in the market that the likes of Slade were filling with stunning efficiency. “What seems to have been neglected,” he wrote,
is the middle ground between the straight pop and progressive factions. Not all rock ’n’ roll devotees are graduates hung up on John Cale and Terry Reilly. Some are 16, just out of school and itching to boogie. (Qtd. in History 1972, 30)
Slade’s constituency, then, was drawn from the “the same age range” as T. Rex, “anything from 10 to 15, with a concentration between 14 and 18.” As front man Noddy Holder confirmed “these are the ardent fans.” Nick Logan’s tone could be patronizing; but he did correctly acknowledge that the band’s “predominantly working-class audiences” could identify with Slade as “one of your mates made good” (qtd. in History 1972, 30). In September 1972, Holder had told Melody Maker that Slade’s “records [were] good for discos and dancing, which is good.” “We are playing to a new generation of fans,” he continued, “to kids who don’t know about the Beatles or the Stones. They might know about them, but they associate with the music that’s coming out now” (31–32). Slade was an engaging, visceral experience on vinyl and particularly live. In the same month, reviewing the band’s “stamping, crashing riotous stage act,” Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth noted that “no one sits and listens.” Instead, he likened the audience to “an unruly [soccer] mob” (33). Recorded over three nights in front of an invited audience of three hundred fan-club members, Slade Alive! (UK no. 2) was cannily built around the band’s strengths as a live act. It would spend fifty-two weeks on the UK album chart. There were also four big hit singles in 1972—including two summer number ones, “Take Me Bak ’Ome” and the rabble-rousing “Mama Weer All Crazee Now.” By the end of such a year, no one was surprised when the Slayed? album became only the second glam LP to reach number one.
December also saw the release of Sweet’s “Blockbuster,” marking the band’s emergence as a fully fledged glam act and the end of a process of reinvention that had picked up considerable speed back in the summer with the single “Little Willy” (UK no. 4). Though still bubblegum flavored, “Little Willy” was clearly a more tangy proposition to the previous sugary efforts like “Funny Funny,” “Co Co,” and even “Papa Joe” (UK no. 11). Aside from the obvious entendre work going on, it featured a guitar riff “that signalled strutting sexuality not innocent childhood fun.” Its follow-up, the Duane Eddy–riffing “Wig Wam Bam” (UK no. 4), would then signal Sweet’s further distancing from bubblegum pop. This single—the first on which all band members would play—had a harder rock sound supplied by its “fusion of metal guitars and tribal drum-beats,” and was accompanied by some memorable TV performances featuring Native American costumes and liberal amounts of glitter. As Peter Doggett describes it, the overall effect was “cartoonish, but not like the Archies,” a parody of “sex, machismo, the pretensions of rock, ultimately adulthood—all in the spirit of pop. Here was irony, commerciality, artifice, compressed into an irresistible package” (Doggett, Shock, 427–28). Here was glam in excelsis.
As 1972 ended, David Bowie was six months into what would turn out to be a two-year reign as the UK’s biggest rock star. And what did the man who had, by this point, wrested the glam throne from Marc Bolan think about his court and kingdom? In September, he was quoted as saying, “I think glam rock is a lovely way to categorise me, and it’s even nicer to be one of the leaders of it” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 154). This, at exactly the moment Bolan chose to distance himself from the whole glam thing. Looking to abdicate, perhaps because he knew that he had already lost his crown. Looking to retreat with as much dignity and self-respect as he could muster. “I don’t feel involved in it, even if I started it. It’s not my department anymore, and personally I find it embarrassing” (156). He can, though, barely disguise his jealousy.
Chapter 4
“Cum On Feel the Noize”
Coming to bury it in self-flagellating punk times, Charles Shaar Murray was forced to concede that glam “hit rock and roll like an unnaturally luminous tidal wave” (Shots, 223). Without a doubt, 1973 felt the full force of this glittery wash as it broke over Britain and made for a glam annus mirabilis. The year was top-and-tailed by two number one singles—Sweet’s “Blockbuster” and Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody.” In between, there were seven further best-sellers. All told, glam acts occupied the top spot for a total of twenty-eight weeks. Slade’s three number one singles all went straight to number one in their first week on release, something last seen in the UK in April 1969, when the Beatles’ “Get Back” achieved the same. Furthermore, the genre’s commercial success was not confined to the short-form format. Six different glam LPs made number one in 1973—two from David Bowie and Slade, one apiece from Alice Cooper and Roxy Music. Bowie would set a record for time spent on the UK chart in a calendar year, as his six albums racked up a combined total of 182 weeks.
There was, however, one notable absentee from this roll of honor. While intimations of decline had been evident toward the end of the previous year, 1973 would confirm that T. Rex’s reign as the undisputed kings of glam was well and truly over, with the band’s three single releases signaling both creative and commercial diminishing returns. Recorded on tour in Japan in December 1972, “20th Century Boy” was the equal to anything T. Rex had put out up to this point. “I move like a cat, charge like a ram, sting like a bee / Babe, I wanna be your man,” its familiar musical and lyrical ingredients combining very effectively indeed. However, it would “only” reach three on the UK singles chart, breaking a two-year run of eight T. Rex hits that had either made number one or two. In the sum
mer, crowded out by a host of glam 45s, “The Groover” (UK no. 4) would prove to be the last T. Rex single to make the Top 10 in Bolan’s lifetime. As with “20th Century Boy,” all those components that had served Bolan so well over the past thirty-six months were present and correct—the blazing self-regard (“Some call me Arnie, some call Slim / It don’t make no difference ’cos I move right in”), the call to teenage arms (“the kids yell for more, more, more!”), all the sonic tricks and treats. Perhaps, though, the “kids” were getting tired of the formula—a conclusion that would be more confidently drawn when November release “Truck on Tyke” (UK no. 12) failed to make the Top 10. It demonstrated that T. Rex was running on empty. Bolan knew it and would admit as much at the time; and poor sales would suggest that the “kids” knew it too.
As Clinton Heylin persuasively argues, Marc Bolan’s “ambition burned brighter but briefer than Bowie’s because to him becoming the quintessential star was an end unto itself” (Madmen, 167). This was what made Bolan the quintessence of glam, of course. As Ziggy had powerfully demonstrated, stardom and fame were genre staples, obsessions even. Yet so were transformation and reinvention. Bolan, for instance, had appeared to pay little attention to his music in drawing from—draining?—a shallow well. This, though, was something that could not be said of one of glam’s most successful newcomers, Wizzard, who would have two UK number one singles in 1973 (“See My Baby Jive” and “Angel Fingers”). Wizzard’s Roy Wood clearly paid a great deal of attention to song craft. He “loved pop. He was a super-fan. He wanted to be all of pop, all at the same time” (Stanley 345). His songs were warm re-creations of Spector’s Wall of Sound that plugged into the joyous melodramatic excess of pop music in more simple times. At the end of the year, Wizzard’s “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” would provide a richer musical counterpoint to Slade’s less sophisticated festive stomp. The latter easily outsold the former, but the Wizzard single still sold a million copies in these most glam of days.
It is a measure of glam’s grip on British pop culture that even those who had ridden it to fame should now be lining up to attack it. Possibly raging against the dying light of his own superstardom, Marc Bolan pronounced glam rock to be “dead.” “It was a great thing,” he said. (Presumably, when T. Rex ruled.) “But now you have your Sweet, your Chicory Tip, your Gary Glitter. . . . What those guys are doing is circus and comedy” (qtd. in Haslam 128). Even the more secure David Bowie was not above disparaging his glittery fellow travelers. He was particularly bitchy about Sweet, who “were everything we loathed; they dressed themselves up as early seventies, but there was no sense of humor there” (qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 202). However—perhaps for reasons discussed below—it could be argued that it was in fact Bowie who was suffering from a humor by-pass here. The campery of bands like Sweet was merely a pantomime, rather than proposing something genuinely transgressive. Yet, although the likes of Bowie favorites Mott the Hoople were—as Philip Auslander has pointed out—“clearly men who had adopted feminine decoration,” their makeup taking “on something of the aura of such traditional male uses . . . as war paint” and so constituting more a “collision of male and female codes than a true subsumption of both to a third possibility” (62–63), this function should not be underestimated. The charge that the members of Sweet were bricklayers in makeup was neither inaccurate nor derogatory.
Bowie’s “personal” attack on Sweet might well have been fueled by events in the early months of 1973, when his single “The Jean Genie” came off second best in a battle with Sweet’s similar-sounding “Blockbuster.” Recorded in New York in October, its title emerging from playing around with the name of mime-mentor Lindsay Kemp’s hero, Jean Genet, “The Jean Genie” very effectively channeled the Velvet Underground sleaze that so evidently entranced Bowie. Written for Warhol scenester Cyrinda Foxe and loosely basing its main protagonist on Iggy Pop, it has an ur-glam riff that is reminiscent of the one deployed by the Yardbirds in their version of “I’m a Man.” Soaked in Americana—“New York’s a go-go” and “talkin’ about Monroe”—it unequivocally celebrates the druggy, sexy, scuzzy demimonde of Gotham’s cultural outsiders through some wry wordplay. The “outrageous” Genie “lives on his back,” is motored by “Snow White,” and “keeps all your dead hair for making up underwear.”
Its adult content did not prevent “The Jean Genie” from climbing to number two on the UK chart. This made it Bowie’s most successful single to date, exceeding even “Space Oddity,” which had peaked at number five back in 1969. Had it not been for “Blockbuster,” though, “The Jean Genie” might well have made it all the way to number one. For fans of Bowie and indeed for the singer himself, the fact that the two songs shared a near-identical riff and chord sequence was particularly galling. Written and produced by Chinn and Chapman, “Blockbuster” would turn out to be Sweet’s only UK best-seller, representing the very pinnacle of a sixteen-hit-single chart career. Between the summers of 1972 and 1974 the band enjoyed a run of seven consecutive Top 10 singles. Not one of these would feature on an album. As Andrew Collins—whose first purchased 45 was “Blockbuster”—pithily puts it, Sweet “knew if you couldn’t suck it in three minutes and 13 seconds, it wasn’t worth a fuck” (n.p.). Johnny Ramone once described his band’s songs as “dessert-only.” Unsurprisingly given Sweet’s bubblegum provenance, this descriptor captures the essence of “Blockbuster” too. A three-minute-ten-second glam panto—a musical Hanna-Barbera animation where Bowie’s picaresque tale of New York is more like an R. Crumb cartoon—“Blockbuster” was a fairground ride from first to last. All wailing sirens and wailing BVs, the theatrical build of guitars and drums, the stomp and thump, the bump and grind. All this in the opening half minute before the lead vocal comes in. When it does, that lyric is no less effective, arguably more affective, than Bowie’s. It is, after all, yet another illustration of glam’s superinclusive embrace. Indicatively, the word “you” is used eight times in the first of its short verses. While not as sleazy as “The Jean Genie,” there is “definite dirt under its fingernails, [making it] the perfect blend of the spotless and spotty for your blooming generation” (Collins, n.p.). It can, however, compete with the Bowie track in its campness—especially so when bassist Steve Priest channels his best Blanche DuBois to interject hysterically, “We just haven’t got a clue what to do!” and even outdoes “The Jean Genie” in its liberal dosing of humor and joy. Here then was a masterful glam confection—now mixing to perfection raw ingredients seen and heard on the previous two Sweet singles, “Little Willy” and “Wig Wam Bam.”
“Blockbuster” was the UK’s best-selling single for five weeks. In early March, it was overhauled by Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize.” Sweet might have been on a roll, but Slade were—as the New Musical Express noted in a review of a Glasgow gig later that year—“still the guv’nors when it comes to raising the masses” (qtd. in History 1973, 94). There was no better illustration of the band’s preeminence than a single by a group called Geordie that made the UK Top 20 in the fall. “Can You Do It” featured future AC/DC vocalist Brian Johnson apparently trying to out-Noddy Noddy, while, lyrically and musically, the song could well have been written and performed by Slade, with its football terrace stomp and chant—“C’mon, c’mon. c’mon, c’mon, keep movin”—and very familiar couplet, “Can ya squeeze me? Can ya tease me?”
In 1973, the UK’s major record labels did have some glam on their books. EMI had T. Rex, CBS had Mott the Hoople, Bowie and Sweet were both signed to RCA, and Slade was with Polydor. All, though, had been signed before glamming up, suggesting that luck more than conscious design or business smarts had delivered the rewards they were now reaping. A host of successful glam players were to be found on smaller, independent labels. On RAK and Bell, Suzi Quatro, Mud, Garry Glitter, and the Glitter Band offered a teen-friendly, unpretentious counterpoint to the rather po-faced pomp of often major-label, album-oriented acts like Pink Floyd. RAK was the UK’s “House of Glam,”
and would have its first number one single when Suzi Quatro’s “Can the Can” hit the top spot for a week in June. While its familiar tribal beat recalled the early Invasion hits of the Dave Clark Five, “Can the Can” could still offer greater musical and lyrical interest than, say, the meat-and-potatoes boogie of Status Quo. With its Alice Cooperesque guitar licks, fronted by a woman who was clearly in charge, it would speak directly to its female fans.
