by Simon Philo
“At its peak,” Alwyn Turner notes, “glam had kept the nation’s youth supplied with brevity and danger, fantasy and fun.”
But its time had passed. The charts were now full of American disco and of British groups recreating the high school pop of the Kennedy years . . . where glam had used early rock and roll as a launch pad into the unknown, this was unthreatening revivalism. (Glam Rock, 145)
Having had the previous year’s best-selling single with the gloriously silly “Tiger Feet,” Mud made number one in the spring of ’75 with a rather pedestrian, desultory cover of “Oh Boy.” While such continued commercial success might have suggested that it was a case of business as usual, the evident contrast between these two tracks could well be taken as a sign that glam was ossifying. “Oh Boy” was blank revivalism, lacking the inventiveness, wit, and emotional investment of a Roy Wood homage or even a 10cc pastiche. Although more lively and likable, “unthreatening revivalism” was a category into which one could also place the bedraped and becreped Showaddywaddy’s cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Three Steps to Heaven” (UK no. 2) and even the Bay City Rollers’ version of the Four Seasons’ “Bye Bye Baby.” Certainly, neither of these constituted a “launch pad into the unknown.” Thanks largely to the six-week residency of “Bye Bye Baby” at the top of the singles chart, the Bay City Rollers would be crowned the UK’s biggest pop act of ’75 as the nation’s media talked up “Rollermania.”
While Sweet’s hard-fought, hard rock reinvention had seen the proto-glam-metal “Turn It Down” stall just outside the Top 40, Queen’s “Now I’m Here” had followed swiftly on the high heels of “Killer Queen” in peaking at number eleven in the early weeks of 1975. Though often dismissed as an ersatz Zeppelin, Sheer Heart Attack (UK no. 2, US no. 12) demonstrated that the band had found its sound and, in the process, established its identity. Coming from a diametrical point on the rock-pop spectrum, this was something that Sweet would have a much harder time achieving. Given the band’s well-documented bubblegum beginnings and its apparent reliance on Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, it was always likely to be a much tougher journey than it had been for Queen. Having now focused all their attention and energy on writing soft rock material for a new band called Smokie, Chinn and Chapman did not have a new single for Sweet. Were it not for the fact that it had been looking to sever ties with the songwriting team, the group might well have felt abandoned. Instead, though, Sweet felt liberated. As drummer Mick Tucker explained, “It was as though a light bulb had been switched on. For the first time, we could see what Sweet should sound like and why we never had in the past. It was amazing” (qtd. in Thompson 367). For Bob Stanley, this was the moment at which Sweet “decided to be a second-rate Led Zep instead of a first-rate Sweet” (338). Such a judgment, however, seems neither fair nor true. The self-penned “Fox on the Run” was a great, possibly the finest, Sweet single—a stomping anthem making up-front use of synths but which was still full of pop hooks and so fully glam. “Fox on the Run” would reach number two in the UK—matching the success of “Ballroom Blitz,” “Hellraiser,” and “Teenage Rampage”—and, more importantly for the band, number five in the US. Reputedly the fourth-biggest-selling single on the planet in 1975, it appeared to vindicate Sweet’s decision to take control of its musical destiny.
As the strenuous efforts made by Sweet, David Bowie, and even Chinn and Chapman demonstrated, having reached saturation point at home, success in the States was perhaps a prerequisite for glam’s continuation. This, though, would not be easily achieved. While ex-pat American acts such as Sparks, the Arrows (“My Last Night with You”) and Suzi Quatro were lucratively plying their glam trade in the UK, comparable levels of homeland success had thus far eluded them all. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the New York Dolls, who had once been supported by Quatro, “represented America’s most committed response to the British glam rock movement—not least because they owed their fashion sense to the same west London stores and stalls that were frequented by Bowie and Bolan” (Doggett, Man, 162). Having given their first live performance on Christmas Eve 1971 at New York City’s Endicott hostel, the Dolls’ garagey debut LP finally came out in the summer of 1973 with a cover that could hardly have been more glam. Beneath the band’s name scrawled in garish red lipstick, there slouched the draggy Dolls—all makeup, a mélange of male and female thrift-store clothes, vertiginous stacked heels, and big hair. In an end-of-year poll, Creem readers would vote the New York Dolls both the “Best” and “Worst” new band of ’73. Though championed by some—Ellen Willis and Robert Christgau, for example—and despite touring with Mott the Hoople, the band’s North American appeal would remain largely confined to the boroughs. Consequently, US sales of New York Dolls were low, at around the one hundred thousand mark. Unsurprisingly, while not translating directly into chart success, the UK would prove more receptive. In fact, October ’72 had seen the Dolls supporting the Faces at the latter’s Empire Pool, Wembley, gig, almost a full year before the debut record’s release. Around the same time, Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth—who had championed several homegrown glam acts—appeared more than willing to do the same for the Dolls, introducing the band to his readers as “no lazy, bored 30-year olds in jeans, picking notes and their noses, but kids having a great time. Playing heavy rock like it had just been discovered.” (This was, of course, the gist of what British rock journalists would say about the Sex Pistols and the Clash just a few years later.) “Not for them any boring, endless singer-songwriters; not for them any polite sobering up in the quality of rock . . . not for them any attention to what old men are flogging off as hip.” Instead, he proposed that the New York Dolls would “crush the languid cloud of nothingness that rolls out from the rock establishment, and falls like endless drizzle on the ears,” with music that “may sound like drivel” but at least it is “alive” (qtd. in History 1973, 96). “Sure we have a few technicalities about our music,” admitted the band’s suitably glam-monikered lead guitarist Johnny Thunders,
but, my god, we have feel. We don’t attempt to be a type of Segovia with guitar work, but when we play, everyone casts their shackles aside and dances. We’re playthings; kids want to have us. (Qtd. in History 1973, 97)
As lead vocalist David Johansen confirmed, the Dolls were (self-)consciously plugged into the glam sensibility: “The thing about rock today is that you have to impress somebody. . . . It lost a lot when it became just like that. They forgot that you also have to entertain people” (qtd. in History 1973, 97). Representing the orthodoxy’s line, presenter and DJ Bob Harris had declared the Dolls to be purveyors of “mock rock” in his sniggering outro to a performance on the BBC’s late-night rock showcase The Old Grey Whistle Test. Yet it was evident to all who were prepared to see and listen that the band could “walk the walk.” Produced by Todd Rundgren—who had flirted with glam on his solo LP A Wizard: A True Star and had even had a US hit single with the very on-point “Hello, It’s Me”—and recorded swiftly and cheaply, New York Dolls radiated an unpolished, nervous energy and excitement, its songs always seemingly on the verge of collapsing in on themselves. Recycling familiar rock ’n’ roll riffs, it was—as the best glam tended to be—colorful, cartoonish, campy, and avowedly teen focused. Original songs like “Personality Crisis” and “Trash” pushed all the right buttons, contained all the right reference points. “Jet Boy,” for instance, appeared to be built around gender confusion—“Flying around New York city so high / Like he was my baby.” The ubercamp “Looking for a Kiss” kicked off with Johansen “quoting” directly from the Shangri-Las’ 1964 track “Give Him a Great Big Kiss”—“You’d best believe I’m in love L-U-V!”—and concluded with the singer’s ostentatious schmatz, while the album’s only cover was a version of rock ’n’ roll originator Bo Diddley’s “Pills” (1963).
Prior to reinventing himself as Jobriath, Bruce Wayne Campbell had appeared in both Los Angeles and New York productions of Hair and had featured on a folk-rock album as part of a group ca
lled Pidgeon. His debut solo album was backed by a high-profile marketing campaign, which saw a billboard in Times Square; ads in Vogue, Penthouse, and Rolling Stone; and his striking image on 250 New York buses. His manager, Jerry Brandt, invariably spoke for his charge—deeming the artist “too big to do it himself.” Brandt was a huckster in the Colonel Parker mold, who claimed to have worked with Muhammad Ali and declared that Jobriath would be “the biggest artist in the world,” a “singer, dancer, woman, man,” with the “glamour of Garbo.” He also very publicly, very loudly, and at every opportunity, referred to his client as a “true fairy” (qtd. in highsnobiety.com).
A two-album deal with Elektra had come with a sizable advance, reputed to be worth $500,000. Whatever the exact amount, it was a deal that label boss and founder Jac Holzman would soon come to regret. “I made two errors of judgement in my days at Elektra,” he said, “and Jobriath was one of them.” Released in late ’73, Jobriath’s eponymous debut was, in Holzman’s opinion, “an awful album” (qtd. in Cochrane 69). The critics, however, disagreed. In fact, even in the less glam-friendly States, the reviews were generally favorable. Cashbox declared the record to be “one of the most interesting debut albums of the year,” Rolling Stone noted of Jobriath that he had “talent to burn,” and Record World went as far as to predict a “tremendous following” (qtd. in Hoskyns 90). Clearly influenced by Bowie, the work of Elton John, and producer Bob Ezrin’s liaison with Alice Cooper, Jobriath’s rock credentials were further boosted by the backing he would receive from well-respected musicians, including Peter Frampton and Led Zeppelin bass man John Paul Jones. Jobriath was still, though, a heavy glam affair. This was evident for all to hear right from the start. The gospel BVs, crunching guitars, and barroom piano of the histrionic “Take Me I’m Yours”—track one, side one, and lead single to boot—carried the unmistakably powerful whiff of musical theater and the kind of rock operatics that, just a few years later, would be so successfully channeled by Jim Steinman. Lyrically, it was arguably more sexually outré than either Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” or Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”—“I’d do anything for you or to you / . . . / I would love you to use me, abuse me.” In “Take Me I’m Yours,” Jobriath offered himself up as a “slave” to “perversity,” someone willing to be “chained” or tied. Elsewhere on the album, to the musical accompaniment of harpsichord and synths, the narcissistic “I’m a Man” combined a proud statement of sexuality (“I am what I am”) with a plea for acceptance and understanding (“I’m a fragile man . . . soft of touch, a gentle man”). Featuring just piano and voice, with its Broadway vibe and references to Ginger Rogers, Busby Berkeley, Betty Grable, and the Ziegfeld Follies, the ultracamp “Movie Queen” bore a similarity to the kind of material Steve Harley was producing with Cockney Rebel, as Jobriath declared that he had “always wanted a movie queen to call [his] very own.” “Space Clown,” a wide-screen ballad reminiscent of a Bowie track like “Lady Grinning Soul,” managed to heroically introduce two glam staples into a single track by mixing Pierrots with sci-fi.
In the UK, where the album’s release was delayed by several months, the critics were notably less forgiving than their American counterparts. After a clip of him performing had been screened on The Old Grey Whistle Test, serial glam denier Bob Harris had dismissed Jobriath as a Bowie wannabe, while the New Musical Express viewed the LP as symptomatic of glam rock’s dog days, “a brilliantly conceived and designed package built around a run-of-the-mill talented young New York queen.” “You will soon be told,” wrote Ian MacDonald,
that this cat is going to be the big breeze in 1974. Receive this piece of information with sceptical, though polite, curiosity, weigh it carefully, and then watch it crumble and trickle through your fingers. (Qtd. in History 1974, 31)
In the States—where Esquire had come to a similar conclusion in pronouncing the singer to be the “hype of the year”—Jerry Brandt’s huckstering would backfire disastrously. Jobriath came to be increasingly and widely perceived as a novelty in a market that traditionally despised such things. Billing Jobriath as “the true fairy of rock ’n’ roll” was always likely to make securing bookings quite tricky. However, laying the blame fully with Brandt risks overlooking the extent to which Jobriath’s sexuality was simply too open and too frankly expressed for the homophobic times. As band keyboardist Hayden White confirmed:
The damage from that alone prevented us from performing in certain cities because of the fear that the band would get physically harmed. As it was, we were booed off the stage at the Nassau Coliseum for “being faggots”—and that’s New York. (Qtd. in Cochrane 70)
By the beginning of 1975, both Jobriath and the New York Dolls had been dropped by their record companies.
If glam was to succeed in the States, then, perhaps it would have to do so by harnessing some of its elements to a more conventional rock style. Glam by stealth. A process that was already well under way, but which was much more audible and visible in ’75, when one of the year’s biggest box office draws was a showman like Elton John. Of homegrown acts, Aerosmith’s lead vocalist Steve Tyler confessed to an admiration for the New York Dolls, noting that his partnership with lead guitarist Joe Perry owed as much to Johansen and Thunders as it did to Jagger and Richards. Indeed, Columbia Records had been persuaded to sign Aerosmith on the strength of the band’s showcase gig at Max’s Kansas City, a venue that had become something of a New York base for glam and where the Dolls would regularly perform. Although quickly morphing into something akin to the schlock rock of Alice Cooper, KISS had in fact started out as an approximation of the New York Dolls; and, as Gene Simmons admitted, of all the glam acts, “Slade were certainly our greatest influence, not only in the drafting of rock songs, but also as performers” (qtd. in Turner, Glam Rock, 138). From February 1974, when the band’s eponymous debut LP was released, KISS would ruthlessly sell its own variant of glam to millions of American fans. Yet, Stateside success would continue to elude the band KISS happily acknowledged as its role model. In fact, Slade’s concerted but ultimately doomed efforts to crack the US market would prove nothing short of disastrous, resulting in commercial marginalization at home. According to Dave Thompson, glam’s failure to fly in America “was simple, Americans hate having fun” (278). On one level, of course, this is a ridiculous generalization. Yet there could well have been a kernel of truth in it insofar as their rock music culture was concerned. After all, the fall of 1975 witnessed the solemn canonization of Bruce Springsteen as the real rock deal, when, having been declared in all seriousness to be the “future of rock ’n’ roll,” he appeared as a Time magazine cover star and was touted as “rock’s new sensation.” There was little that was solemn or serious about avowedly pop glam. This meant that while its practitioners did make LPs, it was at heart “a singles-oriented phenomenon”—a modus operandi ill suited to American FM radio and now even to AM radio, which was busy forging an alliance with soft rock. However, from the fans at least, there was clearly still a demand for dressing up and putting on a show. Hence, a phenomenon like KISS, whose cartoonish, comic-book shtick made their brand of glam unlike like that of Sweet, let alone of David Bowie or Roxy Music. Lumpy hard rock tracks like “Strutter” and “Rock and Roll All Nite” were long on familiar heterobanalities and short on campy humor; but rockets were fired from guitars, the bass player breathed fire, the drummer levitated, and all members of the band wore towering heels, acres of spandex, and face paint that they were never seen without in public.
In her review of David Bowie’s Carnegie Hall show back in September 1972, Ellen Willis had complained of feeling “unsatisfied” and even “the slightest bit conned.” Coming across as “more like an aesthete using stardom as a metaphor,” Bowie-as-Ziggy did not look or sound right “in the American context” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 160). This was a similar conclusion arrived at by Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, who also believed that very different contexts had played a defining role in determining Bowie’s succe
ss or otherwise, since the singer “had a very campy, gay sensibility which has always been part of the English popular culture, and not so here, not as ingrained.” Perhaps Bowie—and by extension glam—was simply “a little too precious for the American audience” (qtd. in Sounes 256)? If so, this would mean that it would have to find another way in. On the Rolling Stones’ ’72 tour, Mick Jagger had worn a Ziggy-style one-piece. Yet, this was not the conclusive proof of bandwagonism, some spangly flag of cynical convenience, that it was sometimes taken for. For the Stones were arguably glam before glam, theirs by no means a sudden embrace of narcissism, camp theatrics, and rampant hedonism. The band would often be credited with playing a major role in shaping what the ’60s had come to mean, but its sensibility and practice could be said to have marked it as a ’70s outfit even before that decade had begun. Then, when it did arrive, it was clear that the Rolling Stones were neither hairy-assed, plod rockers nor plaid-clad troubadours. Leaving no one in any doubt, that 1972 North American tour was “bigger, louder and more extravagantly visual than anything staged by contemporary American bands” (Sounes 140). There was fire-breathing dragon artwork and a sixteen-foot-by-forty-foot mirror onto which six spotlights shone and reflected light onto the stage and into the crowd. Jagger wore the aforementioned Ossie Clark–designed jumpsuit perforated with eyelets and lashed together with cord—a costume accessorized with bangles, bracelets, a cross on a chain, and a pink sash that he would undo, burlesque-style, as the show progressed. Très Mercury, darling. (But pre-Freddie, of course.) Immediately after completing these US dates, Jagger flew back to London to catch David Bowie’s triumphant Ziggy show at the Rainbow—where he would, of course, witness a similarly attired performer.
