Glam Rock by Barney Hoskyns 1

Glam Rock By Barney Hoskyns There's a new sensation A fabulous creation, A danceable solution To teenage revolution Roxy Music, 1973 1: All the Young Dudes: Dawn of the Teenage Rampage Glamour – a word first used in the 18th Century as a Scottish term connoting "magic" or "enchantment" – has always been a part of pop music. With his mascara and gold suits, Elvis Presley was pure glam. So was Little Richard, with his pencil moustache and towering pompadour hairstyle. The Rolling Stones of the mid-to- late Sixties, swathed in scarves and furs, were unquestionably glam; the group even dressed in drag to push their 1966 single "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" But it wasn't until 1971 that "glam" as a term became the buzzword for a new teenage subculture that was reacting to the messianic, we-can-change-the-world rhetoric of late Sixties rock. When T. Rex's Marc Bolan sprinkled glitter under his eyes for a TV taping of the group’s "Hot Love," it signaled a revolt into provocative style, an implicit rejection of the music to which stoned older siblings had swayed during the previous decade. "My brother’s back at home with his Beatles and his Stones," Mott the Hoople's Ian Hunter drawled on the anthemic David Bowie song "All the Young Dudes," "we never got it off on that revolution stuff..." As such, glam was a manifestation of pop's cyclical nature, its hedonism and surface show-business fizz offering a pointed contrast to the sometimes po-faced earnestness of the Woodstock era. Glam rock rejected the Sixties longhair-and-denim counterculture that – fetishizing Eric Clapton's technical prowess as a player – anointed the Cream guitarist as "God." While it advanced beyond the infantile melodies of bubblegum, glam nevertheless rejected denim-wearing country rockers, acoustic singer-songwriters, and heavy or progressive-rock bands that believed themselves too important to release mere singles. Like bubblegum, indeed, it was a reminder that pop was originally meant to be young and fun. "What caused glam rock?" says the infamous LA producer- manager Kim Fowley. "Simple: James Taylor sat on a stool and begat all kinds of men and women sitting on stools wearing overalls and flower-print dresses singing about Laurel Canyon. It was horrifying and it wasn't rock and roll, and that's why glam rock entered the picture." Broadly, Glam rock was a mode of catchy electric pop played by young men wearing makeup and attired in glittery effeminate costume, appealing to adolescents and children who waited excitedly each week to see their idols on Britain's Top of the Pops show – especially if their parents had invested in the new color TV sets that were becoming must-have accessories in all modern homes. Glam encompassed everything from the crassest Top 40 novelty-pop (Mud) at one extreme to the canniest art rock (Roxy Music) at the other. Its fancy-dress dandyism allowed a generation of adolescents not just to experiment with androgyny but to escape the socio-economic reality of the early-to-mid Seventies – a period characterized in Britain by inflation, unemployment, unrest in Northern Ireland, oil shortages and petrol panics, miners' strikes and unscheduled power cuts, and (most notoriously) the three-day working week. Writes Andy Beckett in When the Lights Went Out, his 2009 history of Seventies Britain, "the energy and color of British popular culture during the Sixties and early Seventies – the peacock rock stars, the outrageous boutiques – could not disguise the fact that much of everyday life took place on streets of worn-out brown and grey." Elected in 1970, Edward Heath's Conservative government had tried to grow the British economy by cutting interest rates, deregulating the banks, increasing public spending, and cutting taxes. For a period it worked, with gross national product rising by 3.5% in 1972 and then 5.4% in 1973. Yet in a foretaste of future recessions, the boom was too dependent on speculation to endure for long. Shortages of skilled labor and underinvestment in training and management meant that increased demand for goods and services could not be met. The result was higher inflation and a worsening of Britain's trade balance, with the pound falling drastically against other currencies. This was compounded by the oil crisis, brought about by the Yom Kippur war of late 1973, when Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal and invaded the Israeli- occupied Sinai Peninsula. By January 1974, oil cost over $11, five times what it had cost two years before. Offering a respite from such gloom and austerity, glam rock had a far-reaching sociological impact that's still felt in rock music to this day. "I think glam has been undervalued critically because it didn't appear to take itself too seriously," says pop historian Jon Savage, author of Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (2007). "It had that horror of pomposity. But it wasn't like some little ghetto – it was full of vigor and full of life, and it bossed English pop music for two or three years." Glam also impacted on American pop. "The Seventies seem to have been celebrated more for their silliness and hedonism than for their complexity and progressiveness," says Todd Haynes, director of the 1998 glam-rock film Velvet Goldmine. "For Americans, glam was a very exciting period, putting out images to kids that blurred sexual orientation." Glam rock took the more flamboyant aspects of hippie culture (kaftans, bangles, floppy hats, crushed-velvet flares, Pre- Raphaelite hairstyles) and gave them a trashy, futuristic look. "Glam really segued out of the hippie thing," says English photographer Mick Rock, whose portraits of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and Queen stand as iconic images of the glam era. "It started with all those old glammy clothes people would wear." The grooviest threads of all were found at Mr. Freedom on Chelsea's King's Road, or at Biba, which in 1971 took over Kensington's old Derry & Tom's department store – complete with a roof garden and the 500-seater Rainbow Room. Marc Bolan's decision to abandon cheesecloth and loon pants for tight satin jackets and women' shoes – many acquired at John Lloyd's shop Alkasura on the King's Road – was made in tandem with the decision to retool his late Sixties cosmic-folk sound for a younger audience. "There was a kind of gap in the market," recalled Nina Myskow, who edited the teen female bible Jackie. "We hadn't got our own Osmonds or Jackson Five, and yet the whole Beatles era was obviously over. Everyone was just waiting for something like T. Rex to happen." Ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, who would direct Bolan in the 1972 film Born to Boogie, claimed he was "getting pretty bored with what was going on at the time," asserting that the T. Rex frontman was "the first one, whatever anybody says, to get the kids back out of their seats, jumping and screaming about." Just as crucial to glam was the influence on David Bowie of Andy Warhol's workspace the Factory, a hub of pop-art decadence in New York. Two years after the one-off novelty that was his 1969 hit "Space Oddity," Bowie flew across the Atlantic and met not only Warhol but two of his musical heroes, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. Importing the outrageous looks and stances of Warhol's polysexual underworld to the UK and combining them with his own training in theatre and mime, Bowie created a fascinating alter ego called Ziggy Stardust. He would later produce albums by both Reed (Transformer) and Iggy and the Stooges (Raw Power). By 1973 there were two main streams of glam rock. The first, represented by Bowie, Lou Reed, Roxy Music, and the nascent New York Dolls, was smart and arty, subverting orthodox ideas of entertainment and show business. The second, represented by Bolan, Slade, Sweet, Gary Glitter, and Suzi Quatro, was more shamelessly poppy, appealing directly to the young teenagers who lived for the BBC's weekly half-hour show Top of the Pops. Somewhere between the two was Alice Cooper, whose schlock- horror stage antics were widely dismissed by the glam cognoscenti but whose stage name – assumed in the late Sixties – was an interesting harbinger of glam's "gender-bending." Bowie and Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry visibly winced when they were lumped in with Sweet and Gary Glitter. "It actually became a sense of embarrassment," recalled Bowie. "I mean, in my feather boas and dresses, I certainly didn't want to be associated with the likes of Gary Glitter, who was obviously a charlatan." For Bowie and Ferry, glam rock was characterized by the kind of self- conscious intentionality that paved the way for such Eighties icons as Prince and Madonna. These glam artists played with concepts like stardom and consumerism in precisely the way Pop Artists had done in the Fifties and Sixties. By contrast, for the more opportunistic likes of Mike Leander (producer of Gary Glitter) and Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman (producers of Sweet and Suzi Quatro), glam was supremely free of intellectual pretension. "We were very conscious of giving pop back to the kids, and giving them something to smile about and bop to and generally get off on," says Chinn. "Maybe this was part of the age of not having to interpret, of just having fun. There was no hidden agenda: pop should be fun and this is what we want you to have." To teenagers of the time, Ziggy Stardust and Gary Glitter were all part of the same heady excitement.

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