David Bowie Made Me Gay

by Darryl W. Bullock

  Shel Talmy, who produced both the Who and the Kinks as well as Dave Davies’ brace of solo singles, also produced The Creation, a band whose (posthumous) B-side ‘Uncle Bert’ (1969) features a line about Bert coming home with his trousers hanging down after being caught cruising on Hampstead Heath. Fittingly, in 1965 he also produced two of the earliest 45s by David Bowie, ‘I Pity the Fool’ (as the Manish Boys) and ‘You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving’ (released under the name Davy Jones). Talmy had once been approached, early on in their career, by British folk rock band The Strawbs. Led by Bowie’s friend Dave Cousins, the act lampooned Bowie as a glitter-encrusted sexual predator on ‘Backside’ (credited to Ciggy Barlust & The Whales From Venus): ‘The boy stood on the burning stage, his back against the mast; he did not dare to turn around ‘til David Bowie passed’. The bitter attack came after Bowie had poached both The Strawbs’ producer, Tony Visconti, and their keyboard player, Rick Wakeman. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bowie would not talk to Cousins for years afterwards.

  Long John Baldry is probably more famous for the artists he discovered than for his own career, but without him the lives of Elton John, Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck, Ginger Baker, Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll and the Rolling Stones would have been very different. Nicknamed ‘Long John’ because he stood 6′ 7″ tall, Baldry was an integral part of the British Blues boom of the 1960s: a gay man at the centre of a scene whose origins had been dominated by LGBT artists. Pianist Reg Dwight, a member of Baldry’s group Bluesology, took his stage name from his mentor and sax player Elton Dean.

  He enjoyed his biggest success in 1967, when the single ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’ reached Number One in the UK: the following year his single ‘Mexico’ was used by the BBC during their coverage of the Olympic Games. Baldry is said to have been the inspiration behind Elton John’s hit ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ when he stepped in to prevent his piano player from marrying a woman he wasn’t in love with. ‘I was going to marry her because she said she was pregnant,’ Elton told biographer Paul Myers. ‘John had said to me “Why are you getting married to this woman? You’re more in love with Bernie [Taupin, Elton’s songwriting partner] than you are with this woman” … That song is about John Baldry saying, “You’ve got to call the wedding off”. He really did change the course of my life.’14 Like many of the other gay acts of the era, Baldry fell victim to blackmail. ‘John was blackmailed on a couple of occasions,’ his sister Margaret told Paul Myers. ‘I used to meet a lot of these young guys who were way beyond their years, and they were clearly out to get his money’.

  In 1979, he released the album Baldry’s Out! The album featured the song ‘A Thrill’s A Thrill’, an obvious pastiche of ‘Walk On the Wild Side’ both musically and lyrically and Baldry’s coming-out song. He had been out to family and friends for years (he was noted for his occasional camp mannerisms and never tried to hide his sexuality from those who knew him, even during the pre-Wolfenden years), but this was the clearest indication yet to record-buyers that he was gay. On the title track of Baldry’s Out! Baldry sings that ‘they took me away to the funny farm’: a second coming-out of sorts, as he had suffered from episodes of cripplingly dark depression for most of his life which would result in the occasional violent outburst and he spent part of 1975 in a psychiatric unit. Around the same time that the album (and Baldry) came out, he moved permanently to Canada and met New York-born Felix ‘Oz’ Rexach: the two became lovers and would remain together until Baldry’s death in 2005, after a four-month battle with a chest infection. He was 64.

  Born in a dressing room trunk in New Orleans (if you believe record company hyperbole) and at one point Jimi Hendrix’s flatmate, Jack Hammer (Earl Solomon Burroughs) began his recording career in 1956. Although he scored a few novelty hits in Europe at the beginning of the 1960s, his fame came not as a performer but as a songwriter, writing ‘Fujiyama Mama’ when he was just 14 and, later, ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ (with Otis Blackwell). Biographers have claimed he wrote the Coasters’ 1958 hit ‘Yakety Yak’: he didn’t, although he did write a song called ‘Yakitty Yak’, a B-side for the Markeys that same year.

  A painter, poet, tap dancer and multi-linguist, his free jazz/soul album Brave New World (issued by Polydor in the UK in 1966) tackled such subjects as the Ku Klux Klan, religion and teenage crime and featured the Northern Soul stomper ‘Down in the Subway’, later a hit for Soft Cell. Described by Jack himself as ‘contemporary folk tunes, depicting life as it really is, pulling no punches,’ the album also included the song ‘When a Girl Loves a Girl’ – a ballad about lesbianism from the perspective of a confused but broad-minded man: ‘ignoring all the shame it brings … she lives and dreams; her love is not just what it seems. Her heart is dizzy, in a twirl, when a girl loves a girl’. Hammer was straight – he went on to father seven children – but his plea for tolerance and understanding in this Brave New World, released in the same year that a new organisation called the National Organization for Women (NOW, a precursor to the Women’s Liberation Movement) was formed was a prophetic assessment of things to come.

  Someone who would have benefited from a little tolerance and understanding was Arthur Conley, whose urgent ‘Sweet Soul Music’ lit up jukeboxes and shot up singles charts around the world in early 1967. A protégé of Otis Redding’s, any chance the sensitive and deeply closeted Conley had of building on the massive success of ‘Sweet Soul Music’ was dashed when Redding was killed, aged just 26, in a plane crash later that same year. After several attempts to reignite his career failed, Conley moved to London and then to Amsterdam, where he changed his name to Lee Roberts and met the textile designer Jos, who became his life partner. He continued to perform throughout the 1980s, and spent the rest of his life happily living as an out-gay man in a country with some of the most progressive thinking on LGBT rights in the world.

  Walter Carlos press advertisement, 1972

  CHAPTER 9

  Electronic Sounds

  ‘Walter Carlos’ “Switched-On Bach” has won critical raves and become the No. 1 best seller on the classical charts. It’s “the record of the year,” says Bach interpreter Glenn Gould, who then immediately adds, “No, let’s go all the way – the decade”’

  ‘Moog Music Breaks Sound Barrier’, Peter Benchley, Newsweek Feature Service, 28 February 1969

  In late 1968 and early 1969, while the Beatles’ monolithic, mesmerising White Album nestled at the top spot, a rather unusual recording – played entirely on the new Moog synthesiser – appeared on Billboard magazine’s Top 10 albums chart. At the same time, the disc topped the magazine’s classical album chart … and stayed there for over two years. The album won a gold award (for selling in excess of 500,000 copies) in August 1969, won three Grammys and in 1986 became the first classical album in the history of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) awards to go platinum. Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, whose 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations established him as one of the most brilliant classical performers of all time, called the record ‘one of the most startling achievements of the recording industry in this generation and certainly one of the great feats in the history of keyboard performance.’1

  That record was Switched-On Bach by Walter Carlos, and it was still on the classical chart when the follow-up, Switched-On Bach II, was released five years later.

  *

  The Moog synthesiser made its mainstream debut on the Monkees’ November 1967 album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Limited, played by Monkee Micky Dolenz and Paul Beaver (the Moog had also been employed on Pierre Henry’s best-known work, Messe Pour le Temps Présent, issued that same year, but that really did not hit mainstream consciousness until Christopher Tyng liberally adapted the track ‘Psyche Rock’ for the theme to the animated TV show Futurama). Beaver had previously used the Moog to treat Jim Morrison’s vocals on the Doors album Strange Days, and he also played the instrument on the soundtrack to the Jack Nicholson/Roger Corman movie The Trip. That year, Beaver and m
usical partner Bernie Krause issued The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music. Beaver and Krause’s album is a sonic soundscape, a soundtrack to an unrealised sci-fi film. The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music is experimental; all buzzes and whistles and a close cousin to Louis & Bebe Barron’s all-electronic Forbidden Planet soundtrack, or to the sounds Delia Derbyshire had been conjuring up throughout the decade in the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. Hit pop album it ain’t.

  Electronic music wasn’t exactly ‘new’: the Theremin – used to great effect on the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ – had been around since the 1930s. That decade, the advancement of magnetic tape as a recording medium had made it possible to manipulate sound and to make multi-track recordings, and John Cage and (later) Karlheinz Stockhausen would begin their musical experiments. Soon came the Chamberlin and its cousin the Mellotron, two keyboard instruments that used tape loops to recreate the sounds of other instruments and, in 1957, the RCA Mark II, the first programmable electronic synthesiser, was installed at Columbia University. The Mark II was a breakthrough but, at the size of a Transit van, not exactly practical. Beaver and Krause’s work with the much smaller (although still enormous) Moog was interesting, important and Art with a capital A, but none of it (outside the few swoops and bleeps which graced the odd pop album) remotely accessible to a conventional audience. With Switched-On Bach the world got to see (and hear) exactly what a synthesiser could do. Switched-On Bach quite literally turned the world on. Walter’s pioneering keyboard works would inspire musicians across the globe to plug in: Kraftwerk may have claimed Stockhausen, with his otherworldly musique concrète compositions, as their maestro, but it wasn’t until Robert Moog and Walter Carlos began to work together that the world first got to hear the endless possibilities that electronic music promised.

  George Harrison bought a Moog and was taught how to use it by Bernie Krause. Harrison’s second solo outing, Electronic Sound is played entirely on a Moog series III: Krause composed and played one side of the album (‘No Time Or Space’), but his name (which is included on the inner sleeve) was removed from the album cover. He later sued Harrison for using the recording, which, he stated, was edited down from his demonstration of the keyboard’s capabilities and was never intended for release. The instrument would also appear on the Beatles’ swansong recording Abbey Road, and on any number of late 1960s and early 1970s rock albums. No Moog, no Dark Side of the Moon.

  Studying at Columbia University under electronic music pioneers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky (in the department that housed the colossal RCA Mark II), it was Carlos who urged Moog – who had started his electronic equipment business selling Theremins – to incorporate a conventional keyboard into his new instrument. Bob Moog (the surname rhymes with ‘vogue’, in case you were wondering) had never thought of his synthesiser as anything more than an aid for the musician: ‘There was never a notion that a synthesiser would be used by itself for anything,’ he once said.2 It was Carlos who saw the potential, inspired by an early love of pipe, fairground and Wurlitzer organs. Moog saw his invention as another piece of equipment in the traditional electronic music studio. Initially inspired by the work of Pierre Henry and other musique concrète composers, Carlos heard the future: a future where electronic music would have a lasting influence on the world of popular music, and where Walter would become Wendy.

  Called ‘perhaps the most important performer in the synthesizer’s evolution from a 60’s audio novelty to a common piece of the modern instrumental arsenal,’3 you cannot overstate the importance of Wendy Carlos’ work in the field of electronic music. As well as working with Robert Moog on her synthesiser the pair were instrumental (if you’ll excuse the pun) in developing the vocoder (and, consequently, kind of responsible for the all-pervasive menace that is autotune) as a musical instrument, with Carlos utilising it on her iconic soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The groundbreaking classical crossover albums she created with long-time collaborator Rachel Elkind are wholly responsible for establishing an entirely new genre in music, and Wendy’s 1972 instrumental album Sonic Seasonings set the stage for what, in the 1980s, would become known as Ambient and/or New Age music. Switched-On Bach was responsible for dozens, if not hundreds, of Moog this and Switched On that albums, with other (often lesser) performers using synthesisers to cover everything from Beethoven to the Beatles. The electronica acts of today owe an enormous debt to this pioneering keyboard work. Carlos’ influence permeates glam rock, disco, house, Hi-NRG and every electronic keyboard-based music form, and electronic music is seen as offering a sanctuary for LGBT artists, as Rod Thomas, aka Bright Light Bright Light, explains: ‘There’s kind of a safety in doing electronic pop music, because historically people like Erasure, Jimmy Somerville, Elton and the Pet Shop Boys and others who have worked in that world have made that a nice, safe space. Open-minded people are drawn to that kind of sound and ethos.’4 Sadly even today, in a field dominated by LGBT musicians, prejudice is still common. In 2015 Lithuanian producer Ten Walls (Marijus Adomaitis) who had recently scored a Top 10 hit in Britain with ‘Walking With Elephants’, wrote a homophobic rant on his Facebook page that compared homosexuals to paedophiles and referred to the LGBT community as ‘people of a different breed’ that need to be ‘fixed’.5

  The recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) for her ‘contribution to the art and craft of electro-acoustic music,’ Wendy was born on 14 November 1939 (name at birth Walter Carlos). Carlos studied piano and began to compose music at an early age. After high school, she attended Brown University, finishing with degrees in both music and physics, before moving to New York, where she studied music composition.

  In 1964, Carlos began a four-year association with Benjamin Folkman, a musician and musicologist who shared her interest in electronic music. Together they made various experimental recordings using the equipment at the Columbia University electronic music studio, including some arrangements of pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach. Carlos’ first compositions appeared the following year, on the album Electronic Music.

  As a child Carlos suffered from gender dysphoria, a medical condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because of the disparity between their biological sex and their gender identity. Put simply, someone with gender dysphoria may have the anatomy of a man but identifies as a woman – or vice versa. Carlos was ‘an unhappy, suicidal man’ who, from a young age, ‘felt female’.6 It was while working on Switched-On Bach that she sought counselling, turning to the pioneering Dr Harry Benjamin, author of The Transsexual Phenomenon. Benjamin’s treatment included oestrogen supplements and, in 1972, Walter underwent sex reassignment surgery. By coincidence, another musician given the same Christian name at birth also transitioned that year. Angela Morley (who had been christened Walter ‘Wally’ Stott) made a name for herself in post-war Britain as a gifted musician, arranger and conductor. In 1953, the Dutch electronics company Philips launched their own record label in England, and Stott – who had worked with several popular orchestras of the day – was appointed musical director; the following year she was both arranger and conductor for a group of sessions with Noël Coward which produced two singles and the album I’ll See You Again. She also worked with Marlene Dietrich when she came to London in 1955 to record for Philips. Whilst with Philips she kept up a second career, writing music for BBC television and radio (including for comedy pioneers The Goons and Tony Hancock, and for the TV series Doctor Who), as well as for several films. Later in the 1960s she went on to produce Dusty Springfield and former Walker Brothers singer Scott Walker, whose Jacques Brel-inspired albums were a major influence on David Bowie and Marc Almond.

  In 1972, the news broke that Stott had undergone sex reassignment surgery. Re-emerging as Angela Morley, she went straight back to work, orchestrating and arranging the music for the film version of the Lerner and Lowe musical The Little Prince and arranging and conducting the
music for the hit musical version of Cinderella, The Slipper and the Rose. Angela wrote the music to the hit animated feature Watership Down before moving to the United States, where, as well as winning several Emmys for her work on US TV shows including Dallas, Dynasty, Cagney & Lacey and Wonder Woman, she also worked with composer John Williams on soundtracks for blockbuster movies including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The Empire Strikes Back.