Jobriath c. 1974
Critics were, naturally, divided: ‘This is a very good album – an excellent first effort’;29 ‘the record contains very little out of the realm of the ho-hum’.30 ‘Every track on the first Jobriath album is a classic,’ says Partridge.
They’re show tunes from Saturn! I remember being aware of a ruffle of negativity and scorn, in the music papers when his first album came out. Stuff about a sort of an American Bowie clone, but his first album became one of my favourite albums and I played it constantly. I could see why he got hackles rising in the macho denim 1970s. Songs like “Blow Away” with the lines “It’s very gay … to blow away” must have tipped a few over. Anyway, I really loved the first album and had to pick up the second one after my conversion, so I had them both. The inky music press in the UK seemed to have a down on him, probably more for encroaching on home hero Bowie’s territory than anything else – a protective jealousy maybe? Perhaps he wasn’t “rock” enough for them, a bit too “show tunes”? That was fine by me, as I love show tunes, and nothing about his cosmic camp bothered me. Hey, it’s show business; if my mum can love Liberace, why can’t I love Jobriath?
‘It’s gay time and I think the world is ready for a true fairy,’ Brandt told the press. ‘My fairy is a writer, a composer, and arranger, a singer, a dancer …’ the money that Elektra advanced Brandt was gone in three weeks.31 Both Morrissey and Marc Almond have named him as an influence, but his first album sold next to nothing; the follow-up Creatures of the Street, ostensibly compiled from leftovers from the sessions for Jobriath, sold even less. Sessions for a third album had to be aborted: Jobriath’s increasing drug intake made it impossible to get much sense out of him.
Steven Grossman, on the other hand, was the critics’ darling. Stephen Holden of Rolling Stone hailed Caravan Tonight as ‘one of the most auspicious singer-songwriter debuts of the ‘70s,’ and praised his ‘poignant but not self-pitying’ songs.32 The New York Times music critic John Rockwell noted, ‘Homosexuality in Grossman’s case has nothing to do with glitter or trendiness: these are real efforts to compose love songs and set down personal impressions from a homosexual perspective’.33 Reviewer Bill Adler called it ‘a record of huge historical import’ and said that it would ‘most likely serve as a lavender flag of hope to other gay artists,’34 but, like Jobriath, despite having the clout of a major company behind it, the album sold poorly. Mike Gormley, head of publicity at Mercury at the time, told Adam Block of The Advocate that the album sold ‘5,000 to 6,000. 50,000 would have been acceptable, 100,000 would have made us very happy; but 6,000 just wasn’t in the ballpark.’35 Mercury didn’t know how to market him: there was no major gay press at the time outside The Advocate, which published a lone advert for the album, and no radio stations would play Grossman’s songs, even though a promotional single featuring the title track coupled with ‘Christopher’s Blues’ was issued specifically for airplay. Despite his having cost them $30,000 to sign in the first place, Mercury quietly dropped the talented Grossman.
Actress and model Twiggy recorded a cover version of ‘Caravan Tonight’ for her first solo album, Twiggy, released internationally by (ironically) Mercury in 1976, but Grossman quickly disappeared into obscurity. After attempting to shop around some new songs to an indifferent industry, he moved to San Francisco and became an accountant, putting his songwriting days behind him. In 1979 he was the victim of a gay bashing and lost an eye. Having split from his long-term partner, Grossman – whose early life had been scarred by familial abuse – entered a downward spiral of depression, drugs and unprotected casual sex.
As Steven Grossman was hitting rock bottom, Jobriath was attempting to reinvent himself. Bottled off the stage at the Nassau Coliseum, Jobriath had been dropped by Elektra while he was still under contract to Brandt, who in turn derided him as ‘a fucking alcoholic asshole’.36 He auditioned for the role of the transgendered character Leon Shermer in the film Dog Day Afternoon, but shortly after he failed to win that he and Brandt finally called it a day; Brandt opened a nightclub, the Erotic Circus, which Jobriath was convinced he had funded using his money.
Jobriath Boone became the louche pianist Cole Berlin, writing a musical Sunday Brunch, residing at the famous Chelsea Hotel and playing at various venues in New York; he would also appear under the name Bryce Campbell and wrote the score to a musical adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope. He gave a rather disturbing interview to Omega One magazine in 1979 in which he exhibited all the symptoms of someone suffering from multiple personality disorder, and dismissed his time as Jobriath as ‘retarded. His music is confused, eclectic and debauched. It seems like a long time ago.’37
Around the same time, another young man was starting to make a name for himself on New York’s LGBT circuit: Tom Wilson Weinberg began singing his original, queer-themed songs in coffee houses and at Gay Pride events in the late 1970s, issuing his debut album Gay Name Game (as Tom Wilson) in 1979 and a second, All-American Boy in 1982. Gay Name Game, an album of sensitive, predominantly acoustic songs with out-and-proud lyrics (à la Steven Grossman), featured a song called ‘Lesbian Seagull’, later recorded by Engelbert Humperdinck for the soundtrack of the 1996 movie Beavis and Butt-head Do America.
In July 1983, the New York Police Department sent three officers to break in to the pyramid room on top of the Chelsea Hotel. According to press reports ‘the stench was so foul that they all vomited. The man inside – a man with several names – had been dead and forgotten for over a week.’38 Jobriath had died from an AIDS-related illness, one of the earliest of a long line of gay musicians lost to the disease. Jim Campbell, Jobriath’s father, destroyed most of his son’s personal effects, including his diaries and most of the material related to his musical career. He was buried as Bruce Wayne Campbell, Private, US Army. Nine years later, Morrissey, unaware of his hero’s death, attempted to track Jobriath down in the hope that he could persuade him to join him on tour.
By 1986, Grossman had cleaned up his act and was performing sporadically again: he had a new partner and things were really looking up; however, the new man in his life was soon diagnosed HIV-positive and, sadly, Steven tested positive too. Steven Grossman died in 1991, aged just 39. Two months earlier, his friend, the singer-songwriter Judith Casselberry, had persuaded him to record some of his recent songs. Twenty years after his death, a second album made up of recordings from those sessions, Something In The Moonlight, was issued by Significant Other Records. In 2002, gay singer Mark Weigle released a cover of Grossman’s song ‘Out’, featuring him duetting with Grossman on the track.
When Grossman passed through San Francisco, he would often share a stage with Blackberri, a gay black singer-songwriter who first appeared on the local scene around the time that Caravan Tonight came out. Born Charles Timothy Ashmore in Buffalo, New York, he grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and was discharged from the navy in 1966 for being gay: ‘I was placed under investigation because one of my shipmates turned me in. They put a tail on me, and when they thought they had enough evidence, they arrested me, went through my personal belongings and found incriminating letters and other things.’39
Moving to Arizona, Blackberri began singing with a local three-piece blues outfit. ‘I started doing out-music in Arizona. I was in a rock band in Tucson called Gunther Quint and I started writing songs for the band. The first song I wrote was called ‘Frenchie’, about some boy I’d had a one-night stand with and then he kicked me out. All the guys in the band were straight, but I was out and they supported me and some times they defended me. When people would say: “well, why are you playing with that gay man?” they’d tell them: “he’s a good musician, that’s why”!’ He adopted the name Blackberri when living as part of a feminist collective; the whole household decided to take names that were not gender-specific. (He has since legally changed his name to Blackberri.) After the band broke up:
I went solo and I started playing coffee houses, and I was writing queer songs then. I wa
s writing songs about boys I had fallen in love with. I moved to San Francisco in 1974. I was with this band called Breeze: we had people like the flute player Mindy Canter, bassist Kirk Leonard and Alan Miller on first guitar. Alan was my housemate but then he went back east and we got another blues guitar player called Reiner who just played his ass off. We became boyfriends: I was his first. We weren’t making as much music as we thought we would, so I started playing on the streets during the daytime – that’s how I got money because I wasn’t working. I was busking. People were giving me money and saying: “why are you playing on the streets? You’re so good you should be playing in clubs.” So that’s when I started doing auditions, and every time I did an audition I got the gig, and that got me in to the coffee house circuit and I started to get a following.
In 1975, he and Grossman shared a stage at San Francisco’s KQED radio station’s first gay music concert Two Song Makers, and over the years he has played with Carlos Santana, Bo Diddley, Holly Near and many others:
A lot of people have told me that if I hadn’t done the gay thing then I would have been really famous; but that was never my thing. I always wanted to be me, and if anything happened then it had to be on my terms, not somebody else’s. I didn’t write to please other people, I pretty much wrote to please myself. If people liked it then good – and that’s what happened: a lot of people liked it. Not all of my songs are about being out, but when I played those songs people were pleasantly surprised and I never got any really negative comments.
One of his songs, ‘It’s Okay’, had already been covered by San Francisco gay men’s musical collective Buena Vista, but the first time that an audience outside a coffee shop or Pride event got to hear Blackberri’s voice was on the 1979 Folkways album Walls to Roses: Songs of Changing Men, the first anthology of ‘men’s music’. ‘Somebody contacted me. I guess my name was thrown about when they were looking for people for the album. They also wanted colour, as everybody else on these was white! I was it: I was the colour!’
The 1981 release Blackberri and Friends: Finally was paid for by ‘a donation from a man who told me later on he didn’t really want the money back. Then we borrowed some money to distribute it.’ That album included his controversial song ‘Eat the Rich’ – a sentiment picked up years later by heavy rock acts Krokus, Motorhead and Aerosmith.40 Issued on his own Bea B. Queen label (someone had once said he was more B. B. Queen than B. B. King), he says that he is ‘incredibly proud of Finally: it’s still getting airplay. When I’ve gotten reviews they have always been about my musicianship and never about me being queer. There was mention of that, but the musicianship was what was most appreciated. I always thought that my music was the lubricant for the lyrics: my lyrics are kind of out there and hard, but if the music is good then people can accept what I’m saying.’
Blackberri quickly became a staple of Pride days and LGBT music festivals, becoming firm friends with other musicians such as Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country along the way. He was the only male artist invited to perform at Boston’s I Am Your Sister Conference in 1990, attended by over 1,000 women from all over the world, but the arrival of AIDS put paid to any plans for a follow-up to Finally, as his focus shifted from music to community support. Blackberri has been involved with a number of causes over the years in both in the LGBT and African American communities, working with anti-eviction charities, in HIV education and more recently with the Black Lives Matter movement. ‘I had lost so many friends. I used to go on the road every year in the spring and then in the fall and when I was going across the country I’d see these holes in my audience and in the community. We lost a lot of people; I lost people who booked me, I lost people in my audience, I lost people who I stayed with when I travelled, so my whole life kind of changed.’ His song ‘When Will The Ignorance End’ was chosen as the theme for the first National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference, and in 2002 he was honoured at the San Francisco Candlelight Vigil with a Lifetime Achievement AIDS Hero Award. His music can be heard in several films and documentaries, including the award-winning Channel 4 film Looking For Langston, about the gay black US poet Langston Hughes.
In the 1990s, Blackberri discovered Lucumì, a religion also known as Santeria, a Spanish word that means the worship of saints.
What brought me to the religion was a friend of mine in New York had an altar in his house and I asked him who this was for and he told me: “that’s Yemayá, the patron saint of gay men”. I’d found a religion that embraced gay men … I became a priest in Lucumì [he was initiated in Cuba in 2000]. The Orishas [spirits or saints] … believe whatever you do is your private thing, it doesn’t concern anybody else and as long as you’re right with them then it’s cool … my spirituality and my sexuality complement each other; it’s not a conflict at all.
Janis Ian press advert, 1967
CHAPTER 11
Living With Lesbians
‘We all of us need to be free, yet not add to the burden; and if you need my voice, it is there, and I will help you find yours’
Cris Williamson1
How can you have the one of the biggest-selling independent albums in the United States and still be virtually unknown? In these days of multimedia, social media and 24/7 entertainment news platforms it seems incredible that any act can be overlooked by the mainstream, yet that’s exactly what was happening to pioneering lesbian singer-songwriter Cris Williamson and countless other women in the music industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Today we’re used to female artists controlling their own careers – just look at the phenomenal success of Madonna, Rhianna, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé – but in a record industry presided over by men, women were unlikely to get anywhere unless they submitted to what their male overlords wanted (or were convinced that the public wanted). Unless you were in an all-girl vocal group or were a flaxen-haired folk singer, you simply were not going to get signed. Yes, there were exceptions, but by and large if you did not play the game you did not get the all-important exposure. No mainstream record company was going to take a punt on someone like Williamson.
Julie Felix had done it, but she had to move to London to find support. Britain was more open to the idea of women having a musical career on their own terms and it was easier to establish a fan base via TV, radio and the press there than it was in America. In America, you were unlikely to build up anything other than a local following unless you could attract big money via a management deal or by signing to a major label. Joan Baez had the look the bigger companies wanted, but she had a mind of her own and that marked her out as a troublemaker. She did land a contract, but with the independent Vanguard label, not one of the majors; when her boyfriend Bob Dylan signed to a label two years later, it was to the mighty Columbia, then in the middle of a massive expansion programme that would see it establish its own pressing plants and distribution arms in other countries and eventually become part of the biggest music conglomerate in the world. No matter, her albums charted and her mix of traditional folk and political awareness served as a blueprint for many in the Women’s Music movement; when Baez admitted that she had a physical relationship with a woman when she was 19, her position as the patron saint of Women’s Music was assured. ‘If you swing both ways you really swing. I just figure, you know, double your pleasure,’ she revealed. The affair ‘was lovely and lasted a year,’ she added, although she continued ‘I’ve been men-oriented since’.2
Janis Ian, who was just 15 years old when she scored her first chart hit, had done it too. ‘Society’s Child’, which she wrote and recorded when she was still only 14, reached Number 14 on the Billboard chart. Although she did not come out until 25 years later, Bill Cosby perceived that she was a lesbian and spread the word, resulting in her being ostracised from mainstream television.3 Undaunted, she kept recording and, in 1975, hit the big time again with her Top Three single ‘At Seventeen’ and the album Between the Lines. In 1989, six years after her divorce from filmmaker Tino Sargo, she met Patricia Snyder, an assistant ar
chivist at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. Ian, who publicly came out in 1993 with the release of her album Breaking Silence, married Snyder in Toronto on 17 August 2003.4
‘We always had freedom, but, in many cases, we did not really know it,’ says Cris Williamson. ‘Women often felt they needed “permission” to be free. Women – myself included – began to examine and re-examine many of the ways in which we had lived our lives, many of the beliefs we’d come to espouse. Some of these beliefs and ways of living were handed to us by our mothers and fathers; that’s the way it’s always done, one generation engendering another.’ Born in South Dakota, Williamson was influenced by ‘every musician I heard, every book I read, every play and movie I’d seen, every person I met, every stone unturned. I truly am made of everything I’ve encountered. Life itself inspires me every blessed day, from the smallest thing to the biggest feeling. It never goes away and never ceases to amaze me.’
Williamson ‘s album, The Changer And The Changed, remains one of the best-selling independent releases of all time, with sales in excess of a million copies, and the label that issued it – Olivia Records – spearheaded a country-wide movement that would help to change the way women were treated in the music industry. Olivia was set up by a group of 10 women from Washington DC in 1974 as a lesbian/feminist collective ‘in which musicians will control their music and other workers will control their working conditions. Because we intend to avoid the male-dominated record industry we are setting up a national distribution system that will get our records out to large numbers of women all over the country.’5 Olivia’s journey began with a fundraising 45 featuring Meg Christian’s cover of the Goffin-King song ‘Lady’ backed with Cris’ ‘If It Weren’t For The Music’; the disc made the collective around $12,000, enough to fund the recording of Meg Christian’s debut album I Know You Know and to invest in some of their own studio equipment. Yoko Ono, who had been recording music with a distinctly feminist bent for a number of years, approached the collective to suggest that they collaborate on a project, however the women at Olivia declined. ‘The image that we were projecting was that we had our own music and vision,’ co-founder Judy Dlugacz told Jennifer Baumgardner for her book F ‘em!: Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls. ‘I think we weren’t smart enough at the time to realise that Yoko could have been a good thing’.6 Cris had form when it came to independent releases: her first three albums (issued one a year between 1964 and 1966) had been put out – along with a 45 – on Avanti Records of Sheridan, Wyoming, a label created specifically for her. ‘I thought it a good idea for us to invent a women’s record company,’ says Williamson, ‘And so we did, along with a distribution system, all of which served the women well. We stopped struggling, trying to fit ourselves in a structure that didn’t want us in the first place and created a structure that did, and wanted so much what we had.’ Still going strong, to date Williamson has released around 30 albums, several as part of a duo with folk singer, songwriter and producer Tret Fure.
David Bowie Made Me Gay Page 17
