It all started with Little Richard in the 1950’S, America’s first queen of rock music. That pop sensibility combined with the way that England ate up American trends in music, and you have the art obsessed, trendy suit, pop conscienced Mods, who followed Little Richard’s moves, by wearing mascara and lacquering their hair down.
By the time the Swinging Sixties were over, the Mods were gone, and in their place were Glam rockers. The movement, led by the Americans with Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, Lou Reed, and in England by Marc Bolan and T. Rex, David Bowie, and Brian Eno, was a revolt against the free love of the hippies, the social concern of the folkies and the political rockers; Glam was about surface and excess.
It’s hard to determine where exactly Glam started, as the movement happened nearly simultaneously on both sides of the ocean. In America, Alice Cooper took the direction of L.A. managers’ suggestions and started wearing glitter makeup and sequined shirts and platforms merely to create a scandal. On the other side of the coast the New York Dolls, when not so fucked up on drugs that they couldn’t play, could actually string together a few chords, they were mediocre at best and were more of a sensation not based on actual skill but because they were a straight drag band. The Dolls’ only hits were in controversy, at first as a “gay band” then, after Malcolm McLaren (later the brains behind the Sex Pistols and punk music) arrived as a producer, he tried changing the controversy from queer to communist, having the band appear in oublic in red leather clothes and draped in Russian and Chinese flags, hoping to rile patriotic Americans.
At this same time, also in New York, Lou Reed’s David Bowie-produced album Transformer showed up in April of 1972. The album, arguably one of the greatest releases, celebrates the seedy side of life in New York, prostitution, underground homosexuality, drug use, heroin, and sadism. Reed’s focus on these sleazy subjects ensured that his album would not receive much commercial attention, but in the music world, it blew up. Glam, in America, was everywhere and the “happening” thing.
Around this time in England, Brian Eno joined Roxy Music and manipulated sounds through a synthesizer switchboard. His take on this was to do it in a feather boa, platform shoes and glitter makeup. Internal struggles saw him kicked out/leaving the band and his next project, with similar sound manipulation duties was with King Crimson. After a few albums with Crimson, he left shortly, working merely as a producer, but during this period in the early seventies, his moonlighting career saw him producing David Bowie, who promptly took the bit of wearing makeup and implied bisexuality in his own side band the Spiders From Mars.
Yet during all of this, Marc Bolan’s T. Rex was wearing frocks, dancing with each other on stage, and singing weird, layered, heavily dense songs about space age love and boy toys. You see how this all happening at once, nearly simultaneously, makes the origins of Glam rock difficult to trace. It is easier to follow as many bands simply imploded or were destroyed by excess in sex or drugs, killed in simple accidents or went solo/in a different direction.
Eno later produced Lou Reed’s album Berlin as well as David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy at HANSA Studios in Berlin. Also produced here, by Eno, were the sessions for Achtung, Baby by U2 as well as the Bowie-produced Iggy Pop album The Idiot (unfortunately, HANSA Studios are now defunct, the last recording session ever commited to tape being Einstgurzende Neubaten.
After Glam, punk came, followed in the Eighties by New Wave, which was then followed by a queercore movement in the early Nineties (not the singer-songwriter stuff, the band oriented stuff) by bands such as Mindless Self Indulgence and Placebo, who were influenced more by Bowie’s Glam albums than by anything else.
At this time, the movie Velvet Goldmine (name taken from a Bowie song about the joys of making out with another man) chronicles a parallel timeline with fictionalized bands and people whose origins are obvious. Jack Fairy is Brian Eno. Curt Wild is at first an Iggy Pop reference (wild stage presence) but becomes a Lou Reed reference (underwent EST as a child because of sexual promiscuity and interest, as well as the connections to Brian Eno/Jack Fairy). Brian Slade is David Bowie. Slade’s band, The Venus in Furs, is a direct reference to a Lou Reed song when he was in the Velvet Underground. Placebo play a band like the Damned, interested in cabaret, but still punk with gothic tendencies.
I also would like to point out that Alice Cooper is copied by Marilyn Manson almost to a tee. Alice Cooper was originally the band name, then he took the name himself and went solo. Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids was the band that Brian Warner fronted then became Marilyn Manson and the Spooky kids took different names like Gidget Gein, etc. My Father, who was an Alice Cooper fan, saw the Marilyn Manson scare-craze in the mid-Nineties as ridiculous because things that Manson did that were played up in the media, like animal abuse, Satanic practices, etc., were all things that Alice Cooper got played up for in the Seventies.
Music seems cyclical. I think we’re headed for a New Wave phase. I’m just gonna be tuning up a lap steel, cos that’s the next logical step for “hip, indie bands” to take.
Stand Out Films: Velvet Goldmine, Hedwig and The Angry Inch, Rocky Horror Picture Show
