by Simon Philo
In contrast to its gritty, ramshackle predecessor Exile on Main Street, 1973’s Goats Head Soup had apparently signaled the band’s glam embrace on vinyl too, particularly on tracks like the shimmering ballad “Angie” and the louche and supersleazy “Star Star.” Further proof, if any were needed, was supplied by the gauzy portrait of a bescarfed, androgynous Jagger on the album’s cover, which could not have been more on message. It was, however, the Stones’ next record—1974’s It’s Only Rock and Roll—that would unequivocally confirm that the band was now in full glam effect. Something that did not go unnoticed by the critics, who predictably charged the Stones with shameless bandwagoneering and regarded the album as an all-inclusive affront—from its very title to its cover to what lay within—to their firmly held belief in rock music as “transcendence not just cheap thrills” (Appleford 140). The album’s artwork by the Belgian Guy Peellaert—the same artist kindred spirit Bowie had commissioned for Diamond Dogs—figured a sort of glam Nuremberg rally that would remarkably succeed in outcamping the cover of its predecessor, and in so doing contributed greatly to the rapidly hardening critical consensus that viewed this as the moment when the Stones irreversibly tipped headlong into self-parody. However, what really sealed the deal lay “within.” As an apparently brazen act of gormless self-mythologizing, title track “It’s Only Rock and Roll” was taken by the band’s growing army of critics as damning evidence of the Stones’ wholesale defection to glam. After all, what could be less “classic rock” than celebrating the function of music as simple palliative to “ease the pain, ease your brain”? As has been demonstrated, though, uberglam texts like Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and Diamond Dogs had all “dramatized some of the darker obsessions of the early 1970s—apocalypse, angst, insanity and suicide” (Haslam 116). Declinism made vinyl. In fact, get past all the gloss and glitter, and one can find some pretty dark stuff in a lot of glam. “Is there a heaven?” Ferry had asked in the doomy “In Every Dream Home a Heartache.” With echoes of Bowie’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” and “Ziggy Stardust,” “It’s Only Rock and Roll” kicked off with the singer asking whether his audience would be satisfied “if [he] could stick [his] hand in [his] heart and spill it all over the stage.” Throughout, Jagger sounded “both in command and truly spooked as he contemplates the entertainment value of self-mutilation and public suicide. Perhaps real tears and insanity would also be amusing.” These, then, represented “heavy questions.” Even if—in typical Stones and typical glam fashion—Jagger appeared to be “playing them for laughs” (Appleford 139). Was he interrogating the destructive consequences of a wholesale commitment to rockism? If so, then “It’s Only Rock and Roll” was hardly the vacuous call of the self-obsessing glam rocker.
The Stones’ North American tour in the summer of 1975 would deliver even more glam bang for its nine bucks. This comparatively steep ticket price helped finance a highly theatrical show that had cost an estimated $1.6 million. “A lotus-shaped stage with moving petals and the first fully-suspended lights-and-P.A. rig, allowing an unobstructed view from every seat” provided the suitably glitzy backdrop to a performance in which “the corn came thick and fast: Jagger riding that inflatable white penis; a dragon’s head spitting confetti” (Fricke 68). The fans loved it. The tour was a rip-roaring success. Stones albums continued to sell in their millions. Yet, through most of the 1970s, the band was subjected to an evaluative double whammy—one that saw it persistently graded against its ’60s “self” and judged by criteria that were clearly shaped by that classic rock ideology to which virtually all rock journos subscribed. Similar to other glam acts, this would mean that the Stones were constantly being measured against something they never were or ever claimed to be. Perhaps the real failure lay with disapproving critics spooked by the unruly character of popular music in the 1970s. Like glam, the Stones embodied the decade’s “ability to provide for an experimentation with self and with the borders between genres and forms, eras and periods” (Waldrep 5). Something that presented a challenge to those wedded to a very different model of rock practice and performance.
Notwithstanding the Stateside success of the likes of the Stones, KISS, and Elton John, it often seemed that while glam loved America, America was less inclined to return that affection. It might not have meant less than zero in the US, but its appeal was undoubtedly limited—typically confined to the coastal fringes and one or two big cities in between. Indeed, in glam’s annus mirabilis, 1973, it appeared that the two countries “were as far apart as they’d ever be in the modern pop era.” In this year, there had been an impressive total of ten glam number one singles in the UK. Over in the States—where it seemed that music fans “were still pretending the Beatles hadn’t split”—there were none (Stanley 339–40). Two years later, and not one of Billboard’s thirty-five number one singles achieved a similar feat in the UK. This suggests that the two nations continued to run on divergent pop rails, as does the fact that none of the UK’s seven glam best-sellers came anywhere close to topping the US chart. The difference was perhaps understandably less marked in terms of albums, where, for instance, three LPs—Elton John’s Greatest Hits, Wings’ Venus and Mars, and Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti—were all transatlantic number ones in 1975. It is nevertheless telling that while the last of these would enjoy six weeks at the top of Billboard, it managed just a solitary week as the UK’s best-seller.
Although not in agreement on glam, both nations did, however, share a mutual enthusiasm for disco. In 1974, disco’s breakthrough year, George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” and Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” had been number ones in the US and the UK. Disco could be said to have developed as a response to the failures of rock. It “shared with glam a taste for hedonism, for escapism in the face of economic crisis, as well as a rejection of blues-rock jamming and its acceptance of homosexuality and of those marginalised by society” (Turner, Glam Rock, 144). The disco sensibility, then—in common with glam’s—was characterized by a “determination to laugh, dance, and copulate in the face of the apocalypse,” and so what was often missed about both was their “sensitivity to fragmentation and decay” (Philo, “Sucking,” 296–97). Instead, of course, both genres were routinely dismissed as glib and self-centered by a rock mainstream—and in particular its scribes—disinclined to positively survey the field of ’70s pop music, minded to take a dim view of its apparent lack of purpose and engagement, and unwilling, it seemed, to embrace anything different or new. Glam and disco boldly renounced rock’s core values and eschewed its general direction of travel. To their many critics, then, both were proof that the 1970s could never be a match for the already fabled 1960s. Indeed, by the mid-’70s, the current decade had already become a “forgettable” one—a “forgettability” that owed almost everything to the sixties, “the outsize decade that dwarves all others in recent memory.” So that, “by contrast,” as Alice Echols notes,
the Seventies seemed the decade when nothing, or nothing good, happened—an era memorable for [America’s] hapless Presidents, declining prestige, bad fashions, ludicrous music, and such over-the-top narcissism that Tom Wolfe dubbed it the “Me Decade.” Before the decade was out, this narrative of decline had become routine. (xv–xvi)
You gotta problem with disco (or glam, for that matter), then, clearly, you gotta problem with the seventies. For the latter, as represented by the former, was effectively figured as a betrayal of the beloved sixties—symptomatic of its status as “a trashy postscript” (James Wolcott qtd. in Schulman 145). Glam and disco would often meet with fiercest resistance from those who believed that the music could offer little or nothing of the weighty naturalism, sincerity, and authenticity that orthodox, ’60s-stamped rock delivered. Disco—just like glam—was routinely condemned for witlessly channeling the zeitgeist, for bottling that “me decade,” for soundtracking an “era of narcissism, selfishness, personal rather than political awareness” (Schulman 145). Yet, critics of both genres were surely missing t
he beat. Glam and disco would self-consciously deploy narcissism as a weapon, just as they would harness the cultural-political firepower supplied by and through the practice and celebration of hedonism. In this way, both were rather decadent, potentially subversive, fin de siècle propositions, sharing in an often desperate desire to dance in the face of the impending meltdown—seeking an “escape, an ultimately unreachable exit from a bleak world of stifling families, pinched circumstances, and decaying neighborhoods” (Schulman 144). In May 1975, CBS News reported that “Britain is drifting towards a position of ungovernability.” In July, UK inflation stood at 26 percent and unemployment had risen by 250,000 in the space of just six months, and was fast approaching the one million mark. Disco was born of a similar context. Like glam, it was a “tale played out against a recession”:
The 70s [was] not . . . a particularly affluent decade. The oil crisis had sent domestic prices in America rocketing, and the knocks to the national confidence had led to a period of inflation. Discos suddenly became a more affordable alternative to going out to a gig. (Easlea, Dance, 66)
As with glam, disco was routinely condemned as contrived, mercenary, and fake; the pair was dismissed as shallow, insubstantial, and inauthentic. Yet, of course, both forms were playing by an entirely different set of rules. This made for a mutuality that helped “explain” Bowie’s Young Americans, T. Rex’s notably soulful Zinc Alloy and the Easy Riders of Tomorrow, and Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug.” Just as glam’s embrace of dance music might be seen and heard to have been reciprocated by disco’s embrace of glam, in the form of LaBelle Epoque, Funkadelic, and Chic.
In Bob Stanley’s view, “like rock ’n’ roll, and rave to come, glam’s lack of a manifesto allowed all kinds of oddballs a stab at glory” (343). It is perhaps inaccurate to claim that glam lacked a “manifesto,” but the fact that it was not beholden to one musical style undoubtedly meant that the more creative glamsters—those who were always pretty “fluid” anyway—continued to demonstrate that there was some mileage left. In the early spring of ’75, “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)” made it to the very top of the UK singles chart. Less angular than either “Mr. Soft” or “Judy Teen,” it represented Cockney Rebel at its most pop, yet without sacrificing any of the cockeyed wit that had characterized those ostensibly less commercial offerings. In fact, “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)” was arch, mannered, and allusive. Something that could also be said of Sparks’ singles in 1975. As “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” had demonstrated, looking for a plan or “manifesto” as far as Sparks was concerned was always likely to be a source of major frustration. However, the band’s progressively more outré three single releases in 1975 did at least appear to be (sort of) linked. Reminiscent of “This Town,” January’s “Something for the Girl with Everything” was perhaps the most conventionally pop of the trio of 45s. With its Weimar vibe and cry of “All for one and one for all!,” July’s “Get in the Swing” featured a tuba, a French horn, a violin, and a dialogue with God. “Looks Looks Looks”—which just made the UK Top 30 in the fall—had apparently attempted to recreate a pre–World War II big band sound, in part, by employing former members of the Ted Heath Orchestra. With BVs inspired by Sinatra records, it made for an unlikely single. Nevertheless, it was very glam in its balmy eclecticism, humorous wordplay (“You’ve got a built-in seat that makes you look effete”) and camp puns (“A face can launch a thousand hips”).
Through the year, less fleet-of-foot glam acts were navigating the changing pop landscape in more prosaic fashion with mixed results. Mud, for example, continued to enjoy chart success as a fully fledged rock ’n’ roll revival act (“Oh Boy” and “One Night”); Suzi Quatro’s “Your Mama Won’t Like Me” (UK no. 31) represented an ill-starred, ill-advised, and ill-conceived flirtation with disco; and November’s lame cover of “Papa Oom Mow Mow” (UK no. 38) demonstrated little more than the fact that Gary Glitter had run out of gas. In May, Slade’s “Thanks for the Memory (Wham Bam Thank You Mam)” had climbed into the UK Top 10. In doing so, it would at least outperform the previous single, “How Does It Feel?” Yet, the chart gain was marginal and, ultimately, could not disguise the undeniable fact of the band’s declining commercial fortunes. (There would, in fact, be a near-six-year hiatus before Slade revisited the UK Top 10.) Although “Thanks for the Memory” featured both trademark humor (“an onion keeps everyone away”) and ribaldry (“love-smell on your sheets”), it was still hard not to interpret this subdued single as a farewell (“thanks for the ball”), particularly as the band had now very publicly declared its intention to relocate to the States in the hope of achieving success in a market that had, thus far, resisted its charms. As it looked to complete its transformation into a hard rock outfit, this was also a move made by glam rivals Sweet. Sweet’s second self-penned single, the hubristic “Action” (UK no. 15)—complete with cash-till sound effect—had launched a bitter, ballsy attack on those the band believed had either tried to block or exploit its success: “So you think you’ll take another piece of me to satisfy your intellectual need.” As contemporaneous interviews often bore out, Sweet’s “enemies” included now-former songwriter-production duo Chinn and Chapman, and, on occasion, even Queen, whose “Bohemian Rhapsody” did bear a resemblance to the highly compressed, multitracked sections of “Action.” In early ’76, the synthy, operatic single “Lies In Your Eyes” (UK no. 35) would carry on communicating this burning sense of being slighted—this time none too deeply buried in its familiar lover spurned narrative. By this point, however, as Brian Connolly explained:
Everything we did from then on was geared completely towards America. We didn’t care about the UK anymore, we didn’t care about Top of the Pops, [BBC DJ] Tony Blackburn and Melody Maker. If we could have upped sticks and emigrated, become American citizens and wiped out the past five years, just been a brand new band making the music we were making, we would have. . . . We knew exactly what we were doing. (Qtd. in Thompson 426)
While both Slade and Sweet envisioned success in America arising from their muscular embrace of a less glitzy, more prosaic form of hard rock, David Bowie appeared to see things very differently. “But now I’m all through with rock and roll. Finished. I’ve rocked my roll. It was great fun while it lasted, but I won’t do it again” (qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 287). Musically, he did seem to be distancing himself from orthodox rock. March 1975’s Young Americans LP was clearly a long way from contemporaneous rock albums like Bad Company’s Straight Shooter, the Eagles’ One of These Nights, and Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. It also seemed to be a long way from Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and Diamond Dogs. Yet, as one of glam’s principal architects, even those more recognizably rock albums that had preceded Young Americans had been motored by a conscious antirock sensibility. They were all also driven by a modus operandi fueled by reinvention and transformation. Clinton Heylin, though, has called it differently. In his view, Bowie simply opted for soul in one final, desperate bid for US success:
He had tried and failed to sell the States on a form of English rock as glam as “Get It On,” and as camp as “Blockbuster,” so it was time to come clean: he didn’t have the patience (or the money) necessary to wait for middle America’s mall-children to catch up. (Madmen, 290–91)
But why go for an African American popular music form to reach white middle America? Surely a less risky move would have been to get Mick Ronson back on board and make more straightforward rock? Still, whatever drove Bowie’s decision, it undoubtedly paid off. David Live—a recording of a show from the latter part of the Diamond Dogs tour when it had morphed into a soul revue—had made the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic in late ’74. Young Americans would put in a similar performance, its title track supplying him with his first Billboard Top 10. Greater chart success then followed in the summer, when the seriously funky “Fame,” the second single to be taken from the album, would see Bowie claim his first US number one. In early ’76, in th
e first of three shows at the venue that kicked off his North American tour, David Bowie would perform to seventeen thousand fans at LA’s Forum. Dressed in a white shirt, black pants, and a waistcoat, his copper-red hair swept back, he opened the set with “Station to Station”—the title track from his latest album that would go on to peak at number three on Billboard and so become his most commercially successful LP in the US to date. Closer to disco than even than its predecessor “Fame,” a new single, “Golden Years,” had given Bowie yet another transatlantic Top 10 and earned him a Rolling Stone cover. According to Howard Sounes, the secret of Bowie’s American success was no secret at all. It was down to the fact that he “persisted”—he “toured, he did call-in shows, and appeared on American television, promoting himself tirelessly” (256). This work ethic, though, hardly set him apart from less successful glam peers like Slade and Sweet, for whom success in the States would not be earned by simply laboring long and hard.
Early ’76 saw Roxy Music achieve its one and only Billboard Top 30 hit with “Love Is the Drug.” Up to this point, one might well have concluded that American audiences had been baffled by a band whose shape-shifting tendency played out very poorly indeed in the home of rock naturalism. Perhaps more than any single act, Roxy Music’s lack of US success—the pursuit of which has been memorably described by Dylan Jones as “like trying to catch a fly with chopsticks” (43–44)—highlighted the significant transatlantic divide in both taste and practice that would come to characterize much of the decade. For one thing, Roxy’s “air of sexual ambivalence . . . was enough to complete their demonization in a male dominated rock culture still caught up in the denim-clad tailwinds of hippiedom” (Rigby 53). Indeed, the band had been subjected to homophobic abuse from the outset. This made it all the more ironic that when American chart success finally arrived, it should ostensibly be delivered via disco—a style subject to similarly sourced rockist-fueled condemnation as effeminate and fake. Opening with the scene-setting crunch of gravel, the slam of a car door, the turning of ignition, and an engine’s throaty roar, the highly cinematic audioscape of “Love Is the Drug” was very glam in construction. With typical Roxy acidity, the sleazy lyric that followed had absolutely nothing to do with “love.” Instead, it was about cruising—“I troll down town, the red-light place” and “parked my car, staked my place in the singles bar.” Sex, then, is the real “drug” here. “I suppose it’s a sort of disco record,” confessed Bryan Ferry, before adding that “new customers [were] always welcome” (qtd. in Rigby 148). Yet, the track also retained much of Roxy’s, and glam’s, characteristic tongue-in-cheek humor—as when, for instance, “the lights go down, you can guess the rest.”
