Glam Rock

by Simon Philo

  Analyzing the UK singles market over a twelve-month period from September 1972 to August 1973, during which time around 2,900 seven-inch discs were released, Simon Frith noted that the majors continued to issue them primarily to generate album sales. CBS, for example, had just fifteen hits from a total of 266 45s released, with approximately one in six of its singles functioning as high-profile “trails” for the artists’ LPs. Even UK labels Island and Charisma operated similarly, experiencing comparable results in terms of the ratio of charting singles to total 45s released. Frith estimated that approximately a third of singles were treated in this way, leaving around two thousand that were presumably aimed squarely at achieving singles chart glory. Of this number, only 180 would be hits—a success-to-failure ratio of one in eleven. In Frith’s view, then, to have one hit with every five singles released means a company is “doing extraordinarily well.” In his sample period, the top-performing label was Bell (with a total of sixteen hits from sixty-nine releases), closely followed by MGM (eight from thirty-three), RAK (seven from twenty-one), and Motown (twelve from forty-six). All, as we can see, did better than “extraordinarily well.” Indicatively, the UK’s major labels did not do well at all. EMI posted a disastrous six for 166, while RCA—despite having Sweet and Bowie on the books—managed just fourteen high-charting singles from a total of 153 releases. Even with Slade on the roster, Polydor could only muster nine hits from 127 releases; and Capitol had the unenviable record of one for 33. Yet, guided by an imported business model, it was the “English pop giants”—EMI and Decca—that were clearly the worst performers, demonstrating that they were “out of touch with the pop market, misjudging taste, unable to sell.” This was a market place dominated by “two movements on disco floors . . . smooth American soul and . . . rough British stomp.” The latter—described by Frith as “crude and brash music for crude and brash dancing”—was now largely composed of glam acts like Slade, Sweet, Wizzard, Suzi Quatro, Mud, T. Rex, and David Bowie. Indeed, none came more “crude” and “brash” than Gary Glitter, whose supercompressed, Neanderthal stomp “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)”—complete with revving motorbike, call-and-response chants, and invitation to join said “gang”—was a month-long UK summer number one. It was “a market that the knowing labels tapped.” Glam acts, together with their canny, more responsive backroom teams, Frith concluded,

  know the fun, the excitement, the violence, even the green hair, belong to the kids. It’s their exhilaration, and the records sound in the background as gestures, walls the dancers put up around themselves. New years, new steps. Glitter rock and glam rock, and all the teens won’t last because the same dance gets boring. But it was the sound of 1972–3, there’s no denying. (492)

  Such wise words here are leavened by a classicist’s obsession with longevity and the barely disguised, rather smug, implication that gaudy, gormless Mayfly pop musicians are not aware that they might have a limited shelf life. In his piece, Frith seemed to want to credit everyone except the performers themselves. Success, then, is down to “the kids,” the business, and, of course, the media, because “even though it’s important to know how records reach you, how they are released and promoted, marketed and distributed, once they’ve gone through this it’s down to you.” Frith also claimed that “one of the joys of singles . . . is the tension between what you like and what everyone else likes, the public struggle between your taste and everyone else’s” (489–95). Surely, if true, this relates to album consumption, where it represents a somewhat rockist path to thin-lipped “joy”? Glam demonstrated that oftentimes substantive “joy” was to be found in the diametrical opposite, in consuming something that everyone else had and everyone else liked. Communal and participatory, it was about being “in the gang.” Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz” (UK no. 2, fall ’73) was supposedly based on the band being bottled off stage (pelted with bottles) at a gig in Scotland. While some—including bassist Steve Priest—attributed this as a response to the band’s glam attire and makeup, it was more likely due to the audience’s dissatisfaction with a set list reportedly short on Sweet’s pop hits.

  At once the most and least glam of acts, Roxy Music released their second LP For Your Pleasure in March 1973. According to Island’s marketing director, Tim Clarke, the band “took something that might have been pop but actually had as much to do with King Crimson. It was not teeny bop” (qtd. in Hoskyns 60). Although by no means “teeny bop,” opening track “Do the Strand”—described by Bryan Ferry as “purely a dancer” (qtd. in History 1973, 66)—was undeniably glam in its solipsistic commentary on dance crazes both real and imagined. Reminiscent of “Virginia Plain,” in its furious pace, wordplay featuring un-rock-like vocabulary and references to “quadrilles,” “Mona Lisa,” “Lolita,” and “Guernica,” and campy good humor, “Do the Strand” jarred with much of the rest of an album that mined the vagaries of modern life and love in appropriately muted musical hues. Perhaps this is why it was released as a single in the States. This was also presumably the thinking behind selecting the album’s only other upbeat track, “Editions of You,” as its B-side. Commended by Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth as the product of “masterful thieving” (qtd. in History 1973) with an electric piano intro similar to the Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and guitar parts apparently lifted from the Yardbirds’ “Fortune Teller,” “Editions of You” was the closest thing to rock to be found on For Your Pleasure. Yet, while musically familiar, its lyric explored decidedly un-rock territory. Typically Roxy.

  No love is unique or special, sings Ferry, just as there is no one authoritative masterpiece or art object in the age of mechanical reproduction . . . there’ll be another shag along in a minute, is basically Ferry’s message. This is modern (“in modern times the modern way”) and super-urban. (Stump 83)

  No surprise, then, to learn that “Do the Strand” b/w “Editions of You” failed to chart in America.

  Less novel, innovative, and experimental in its instrumental textures than the band’s debut LP, For Your Pleasure came across as a more cohesive and confident piece of work. In part, this might be explained by the knowledge that Brian Eno was soon to leave the band. As “Editions of You” had demonstrated,

  Eno’s funny noise solo can’t compensate for the increasing subordination of his tapes in the mix; the enjoyably metallic and abrasive clash of Ferry’s electric piano and Manzanera’s typically odd-ball rhythm guitar lines created a racket of its own without needing Eno’s trickery to distress the surface. (Stump 82)

  For Your Pleasure would be the last Roxy Music LP to feature Eno, the power struggle within the band resolving itself with Bryan Ferry emerging victorious. But not before listeners had been treated to “Bogus Man”—a nine-minute-plus improvisatory, sprawling jam about a sex pest that has been described by Brian Eno as like something German electro pioneers Can were doing at the time. Elsewhere, the glam torch song “Strictly Confidential” encapsulated the album’s predominant mood. Moving from love letter to suicide note, for much of the track it seemed that only MacKay’s mournful oboe accompanied Ferry on a journey into the pit of despair—“There is no light here / Is there no key?” Although a solid case could be made for any song on the album, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” is rightly regarded as its standout track, perhaps because this sinister, unsettling ode to a blow-up sex doll succeeded in capturing a palpable sense of a nation at its lowest ebb in a time of great instability and high anxiety, a country tasting the bitter fruits of rising extremism, rupturing and unraveling. “Is there a heaven? I’d like to think so,” but every step takes our narrator “further from heaven.” In a Melody Maker interview at the time of the album’s release, Ferry identified “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” as a “recitation rather than a song”—a status that his interviewer, Roy Hollingworth, looked to confirm when he declared it to be “one of those questioning pieces that throws one into a state of doomed confusion” (qtd. in History 1973, 66). For this reason, it is also archetypal,
quintessential Roxy Music. In many ways, bottling what the band represented in the space of a single track. Like much of For Your Pleasure, it is about atomization, alienation, detachment, decline, and fall.

  In his study of Britain in the early 1970s, the historian Dominic Sandbrook wrote that, at this moment, the country “stood on the brink of a profound transformation, caught between past and present,”

  its political consensus fragmenting under the pressure of social change, its economy struggling to cope with overseas competitors, its culture torn between the comforts of nostalgia and the excitement of change, its leaders groping to understand a landscape transformed by consumerism and social mobility. An old world was dying; a new was struggling to be born. (State, 13)

  When excitement in these troubled times was often of the nervous kind, comparisons were frequently and seriously drawn between seventies Britain and thirties Germany; and while it has been said of David Bowie—notably on the evidence of Weimar-soaked tracks like “Time” and “Aladdin Sane”—that he spoke “directly to the chaos that was modern Britain,” of “the failure of post-war dreams of progress” (Turner, Crisis?, 25), For Your Pleasure—released a few weeks before Aladdin Sane—suggested that there were others mining the same rich thematic vein. This was something Bowie himself acknowledged when his opinion of Roxy Music was sought in a Melody Maker interview in May. “Maybe they are the nearest thing to being decadent at the moment,” he declared. “And I love them” (qtd. in History 1973, 103). Ramping up the decadence several notches, however, Aladdin Sane would give For Your Pleasure a run for its money. Indeed, the two works might well be viewed as cut from the same cloth—projects emerging from and responding to the same context.

  In the early months of 1973, David Bowie had experienced marital meltdown, a punishing work schedule, a rising sense of personal alienation, and an increasing reliance on hard drugs. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in burnout. In the summer, Ziggy would be “retired,” to be replaced by Aladdin Sane—a modified Ziggy perhaps inevitably shaped by this burnout, but also by Bowie’s lengthy late ’72 firsthand exposure to all things American. “In my mind,” he explained, Aladdin Sane “was Ziggy Goes to Washington” (qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 231). Released in April, the album came across as the diary of a madman; a journal charting explorations in a sometimes terrifying internal land that appeared to make it a more personal, more emotionally direct affair than his previous LP. The two-and-a-half-month US tour in the fall of 1972 had been undertaken at a relatively stately pace, which had enabled Bowie to immerse himself more fully in American life and culture than he had ever done before. Yet, while Ziggy had received a warm welcome in the nation’s progressive oases—in its coastal cities, for example—“the leper Messiah” had been less well received in Middle America. Aladdin Sane was, then, fired by his unmediated engagement with the US, but it was also consciously tailored to win over more Americans. As Clinton Heylin has pointed out, it was “Bowie’s idea of a landgrab,” where “the territory in question was America” (Madmen, 232). As such, though, it did not appear to have been entirely successful. While it would give Bowie his first Billboard Top 20 album, by June it had only sold a respectable but hardly headline-grabbing 320,000 copies in the States.

  Lead single “The Jean Genie” had posted advance warning, but the album’s intent is clear to see and hear from the outset. With its now-familiar cast of characters, location, and vibe, opening track “Watch That Man” is, for example, close to a retread of “The Jean Genie.” While Mick Ronson throws some recognizably Keith Richards–like guitar shapes, it told a rather hermetic tale that was as self-absorbed and self-mythologizing as anything the Rolling Stones were turning out at the time. Indeed, the murky mix of “Watch That Man,” with its front-and-center wailing female BVs and barroom boogie piano work, is highly reminiscent of Exile on Main Street (1972). Inspired by Iggy Pop’s stories of late ’60s Detroit, recounted to him in October ’72, “Panic in Detroit” offered a typically tongue-in-cheek Bowie take on the counterculture. Having drawn the comparison between White Panther leader John Sinclair and Che Guevara, the narrator then tries to secure the autograph of the former, who has—we are told—inspired him to trash a slot machine. Here, it is also worth noting the narrator’s humorous fixation with the rebel leader’s “diesel van.” On message for glam, once again, we are witness to an ambiguous embrace of counterculture values in this far-from-earnest picaresque narrative. Moving us from Detroit to Los Angeles, the crunching rock of “Cracked Actor” provides an appropriate sonic accompaniment to a rumination on layers and levels of prostitution in Hollywood—on money for sex, sex for drugs, sex for fame. The fifty-year-old actor—once famous but now over the hill and so “stiff in his legend”—despises the drug-addled whore who, by turn, despises him. Seedy, sweaty, lewd, and antimythic, the song channels the kind of queasy decadence that would make Roxy proud. Released as a single to accompany the album’s release, “Drive-In Saturday” (UK no. 3, US dnc) delivered a message from a postapocalyptic world of “fall out saturation” in which a version of the 1950s appears to be invoked as a prelapsarian time when people knew how to (make) love. This does not make it sound like an ideal pop single; but it is characteristically warm, humane, and humorous. Set in the postsexual future, the song advocates accessing old videotapes of movies—as a “crash-course for ravers”—that will teach the sex starved how to love again.

  Aladdin Sane’s five determinedly America-facing, noticeably more orthodox rock tracks—“Watch That Man,” “Panic in Detroit,” “Cracked Actor,” “The Jean Genie” and the swaggering, sexually open cover of “Let’s Spend the Night Together”—provide a sharp contrast to five songs facing a diametrically opposite direction, but which, in their fervid theatricality, their over-the-top-ness, are of course very glam indeed. Written on the ship back to Britain, “Aladdin Sane (1913–1938–197?)” highlighted significant dates in parentheses—two of which referred to the year immediately before the outbreak of World Wars I and II, while the third “197?” seemed to imply that a third world war was imminent. Pianist Mike Garson, a new addition to Bowie’s band, would contribute much to the album, and particularly to this track, “Time,” and “Lady Grinning Soul.” Coming straight after “Watch That Man,” “Aladdin Sane” offered a jarring musical contradistinction to the album opener’s regular blues-rock. It was jazzy, avant-garde even, with its squawking sax and Garson’s astonishing atonal wig-outs and messed-up misrenderings of the Great American Songbook. A companion piece to both the title track and, perhaps less obviously, “Lady Grinning Soul,” “Time” has a Weimar vibe, redolent of Christopher Isherwood’s tales of decadent, prewar Berlin. Replete with references to whores, wanking, “Quaaludes and red wine,” Bowie’s lyric—“love has left you dreamless”—is ably supported by Mike Garson’s Cabaret-style glissandos, runs, and fills. On “Time,” “the feeling of the words moving at different speeds—glamour and apocalypse, frivolity and war—was emphasised by the way the song was constructed. The verse represented a virtually identical theme over and over, while the accompaniment constantly shifted its ground, using chords that only a pianist could have conceived” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 168).

  Although it was perhaps the salesman in Bowie who had described the album as an “interpretation of what America means to me . . . a summation of my first American tour” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 176), Aladdin Sane was more thematically ambitious than the musings of a rock star often to be found on that “difficult second album.” It was about personal disintegration in a fragmenting world. In May 1973, Bowie confirmed as much when he told Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth that “after what I’ve seen of the state of the world, I’ve never been so damned scared in my life” (qtd. in History 1973, 102). True to glam, and very much in the Weimar spirit, it did practice a desperate hedonism as a coping mechanism to counter impending meltdown. Let’s party like it’s 1973. So, while it might have represented a concerted play for US success, this was possibly one expla
nation for the album being unlikely to propel Bowie to North American superstardom. The striking, uncompromisingly glam cover might well have been another. Brian Duffy’s iconic image presented the singer as otherworldly, androgynous, artificial; his heavily made-up face bisected by a red-and-blue lightning bolt, his “snow-white tan” torso scarred by a single corrosive teardrop on his left-side collarbone.

  Clearly, none of this bothered the Brits. Quite the opposite, in fact. Released in the UK on April 13, 1973, preorders of one hundred thousand helped propel Aladdin Sane straight to number one. It would be the nation’s best-selling album for five weeks, and would then spend a further eighteen months on the chart. Critical reaction, though, was mixed. “How deep does it go?” inquired Chris Welch in Melody Maker, “is [Bowie] really saying anything much at all?” before proceeding to answer his own questions in declaring the LP to be “superficially stunning and ultimately frustrating” with “much to dazzle the eye and ear, but little to move the mind or heart.” Charles Shaar Murray in New Musical Express begged to differ, concluding his review by stating: “One thing I know is that Aladdin Sane is probably the album of the year, and a worthy contribution to the most important body of musical work produced in this decade” (qtd. in History 1973, 69).