Ziggy Stardust announces his retirement on July 3. Marc Bolan proclaims that glam is dead. Brian Eno departs Roxy Music. Lou Reed breaks with Bowie. Iggy creates the template for the self-immolating punk. Kiss dons makeup.
None of the glam rockers had much success in the US except for Alice Cooper, the Sweet (who had three Top 5 hits), and Bowie, whose touring began to pay off when “Space Oddity” reached No. 15 in April. But even in San Francisco, Bowie filled only 400 seats in the 5,400-seat Winterland Ballroom. In the UK, he packed 19,000-seat venues like Earl’s Court. Aside from New York and LA, he and Roxy Music only drew big crowds in, ironically, the industrial cities of Detroit and Cleveland.
The fans in those working-class towns shared lead singer Bryan Ferry’s desire to transcend gritty reality. Ferry was the son of a coal miner and grew up without indoor plumbing.1 Thus he camped it up as a smarmy film star in dinner jacket and bow tie and named his band after the Roxy movie theater. The scantily clad beauties on Roxy album covers harked back to lounge music LPs of yore, even as the songs critiqued the sensibility: in “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” Ferry orders a blow-up beauty doll to keep him company in his penthouse.
Ferry sounded like he was stuffed up as he sneered like Bob Dylan, but he was a handsome 6'1" with thick black hair, and the women flipped over him. It was an intriguing combination. Simon Reynolds wrote in his history of the glam movement, “In purely musical terms, Ferry’s greatest invention is his voice on the first two albums, the reptilian vibrato that paved the way for neurotic new wave mandroids like Gary Numan and Devo.”2 (Not to mention the Talking Heads’ David Byrne.)
Brian Eno started out as Roxy’s soundman, but he made such a show out of mixing their music with his equipment that they put him onstage alongside the sax player. Soon Eno began playing the VCS3 synth. But Ferry dug soul and the Beatles, while Eno wanted to experiment like the Velvet Underground. The contrast made for a groundbreaking two albums, but Ferry felt his vision was being hijacked both in the studio and onstage. After a tour to support the March release of For Your Pleasure, Eno left in May. Ferry managed to squeeze in a solo album of covers (including a song by Bob Dylan) before Roxy cranked out a third album, Stranded, in time for the holidays. Eno praised it as their best, even though he wasn’t on it.
He recorded his solo debut, Here Come the Warm Jets, with the help of musicians from Roxy, Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies, and King Crimson. “I wanted to see what happens when you combine different identities like that … with the knowledge that there might be accidents, accidents which will be more interesting than what I had intended.”3 Todd Haynes used “Needle in a Camel’s Eye” to open his 1998 glam epic Velvet Goldmine, featuring glitter fans running through the city just as Beatlemaniacs had in the beginning of A Hard Day’s Night.
While Ferry’s and Eno’s fortunes rose, the original glitter king was getting worried, though he would never admit it. Marc Bolan’s best single, “20th Century Boy,” went unnoticed by Yanks. (Even when the Replacements covered it for their album Let It Be ten years later, they changed their mind and shelved it in favor of a cover of Kiss’s “Black Diamond.”) “Glam rock is dead,” he proclaimed on the cover of Melody Maker.
“Essentially what they tried to do with Bowie was create another Marc Bolan, but the interest with the kids was not there,” he railed preposterously to Cameron Crowe in Creem that July. “I don’t think that David has anywhere near the charisma or balls that I have. Or Alice (Cooper) has. Or Donny Osmond has got. He’s not gonna make it, in any sort of way.… I mean, I don’t consider David to be even remotely near big enough to give me any competition.”4
Maybe he and Bowie laughed about the smack talk behind the scenes. The same month, he visited Bowie backstage during his “farewell” concert. But he seemed preoccupied with his rival, naming one album Zinc Alloy and The Hidden Riders of Tomorrow.
It was actually Bowie who followed Bolan’s lead when T. Rex went soul on Tanx, with beguiling songs like “Electric Slim and the Factory Hen,” drenched in proto-disco strings by Tony Visconti. Bolan brought black backup singers onstage, including Gloria Jones, who sang the original “Tainted Love” in 1965. On NBC’s Midnight Special they smashed their tambourines and screamed like Tina Turner while he howled on his guitar like Hendrix and Prince, which even Bowie couldn’t do, though Bowie got his own black backup singer in 1974, Ava Cherry. Bolan left his wife for Jones, and Bowie moved Cherry into the house with Angie, sending his wife over the edge with rage.
By July, Bowie’s entourage had lived so extravagantly off the record label (limos, four-star hotels) that there was no money left for another leg of the tour. His manager suggested he announce his retirement to milk some publicity out of the last scheduled date.
“I think he stopped Ziggy when he did because the reality of fame was more than he could handle,” said music journalist Tony Parsons. “He had wanted it all his life, and had tried to get it for over a decade, but when it finally came it frightened the living daylights out of him. I remember the Earls Court gig [May 12, London] when he came out in the Japanese robe as the music from A Clockwork Orange came blasting out, there were all these Australians taking their clothes off and getting in fights and vomiting on girls in the front row.”5
His last show as Ziggy was at the Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, filmed by D. A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop). An hour-long special aired in 1974, later released theatrically as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The film captures an audience full of Ziggy mullets. Schoolgirls freak like bygone Beatlemaniacs and future Durannies. Angie arrives in a limo and struts through the fans, reveling in the attention. Ringo and Bolan hang backstage. The future Sid Vicious, John Ritchie, is glimpsed in a Bowie shirt. Off-camera, future Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones managed to steal some unattended equipment.
It seems surprising today to see the audience presented primarily as crying teenyboppers, especially juxtaposed against Bowie’s proto-goth cabaret songs like “My Death.” Frequently, though, the singer beamed. He got down on all fours and Ronson climbed on his back, then kneeled over him and played his guitar into Bowie’s ear. Former Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck joined them for a few numbers, including “The Jean Genie,” making the song’s connection to the Yardbirds’ “I’m a Man” explicit.
Then Bowie announced, “This show will stay the longest in our memories, not just because it is the end of the tour but because it is the last show we’ll ever do.”6 He launched into “Rock and Roll Suicide,” to his audience’s confused dismay.
Journalist Charles Shaar Murray said the Bowie camp had alerted him in advance, “enabling NME to have its ‘Bowie: That’s It, I Quit’ cover story rolling off the presses before Bowie had made the onstage announcement.”7 Murray wrote in the piece, “Glitter fans all over the world went into mourning.”
Bowie returned to touring nine months later, but it was the end of his live performing with Ronson and other Spiders from Mars. Their camaraderie helped ignite Bowie mania when Bowie threw his arm around Ronson while singing “Starman” on Top of the Pops. Ronson did occasionally pull some slight Spinal Tap poses when blasting the guitar, but his gorgeous string arrangements were one of Bowie’s secret weapons. Alas, intraband money tensions sank the group, as it did Neil Young’s touring band. When Bowie hired pianist Mike Garson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Mick Woodmansey got wind that Bowie was paying the new guy more than them and demanded a raise. Five days after the concert, the Spiders reunited to play on Bowie’s Pin Ups cover album, but when he recorded Diamond Dogs the following January none of the Spiders were involved.
For director Todd Haynes, the last Ziggy show took on significance as the moment Bowie left his gay identity behind, as if he had appropriated queerness for a gimmick, then discarded it, the way some white artists did with the blues. In Velvet Goldmine the ambitious Bowie figure transforms into a cold, whitewashed mainstream performer who doesn’t even appear to be played by the same actor.
Bowie did concede that queerness “seemed to be the one taboo that everyone was too afraid to break. I thought—well, if there’s one thing that’s going to put me on the edge, this is it. Long hair didn’t mean much anymore.”8 Twenty years later he explained his fascination with gay culture to Rolling Stone, “There might have been free love, but it was heterosexual love. I like this twilight world. I like the idea of these clubs and these people and everything about it being something that nobody knew anything about.”9
In some ways his trajectory paralleled that of Bob Dylan, who wrote some of the greatest civil rights anthems in the space of two years, then moved on. Of his period as a gay lightning rod, Bowie commented, “I’m quite proud that I did that. On the other hand I didn’t want to carry a banner for any group of people, I didn’t like that aspect of it: this is going to start overshadowing my writing and everything else that I do.”10
Some fans felt betrayed and branded them poseurs, but Dylan was a Jew born while the Holocaust unfolded overseas, and Bowie was bisexual. “When I was 14, sex suddenly became all-important to me. It didn’t really matter who or what it was with, as long as it was a sexual experience. So it was some very pretty boy in class in some school or other that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed upstairs.”11 In the late ’60s he read City of Night by John Rechy, “and that led me a merry dance in the early Seventies, when gay clubs really became my lifestyle and all my friends were gay.”12
But “as the years went on it became a thing where, sexually, I was pretty much with women the majority of the time.… Although I no longer consider myself gay or even bisexual it shouldn’t be assumed that therefore I have decided that heterosexual is correct and gay is wrong.… It is just that psychologically it was a decision that was made for me, in my head somewhere. There was never the thought, oh well, I’ll be straight now.”13
After the success of Transformer, it seemed natural Reed should ask Bowie to return as producer. But Bowie was touring the US, Asia, and England when Reed wanted to record. Also, journalist Murray theorized, Reed did not want to look dependent on Bowie. Instead, he reached out to Alice Cooper’s producer Bob Ezrin. Reed felt that Ezrin produced the best version of his song “Rock and Roll,” in a cover version by Mitch Ryder and his band Detroit.
He was tired of the rock press attacking him for going glitter, saying his white phantom makeup made him look like “an effeminate Frankenstein monster” (Rolling Stone) “giving rim jobs to the Fugs” (Creem).
“I just think that everyone’s into this scene because it’s supposedly the thing to do right now,” Reed said. “You can’t fake being gay. If they claim they’re gay, they’re going to have to make love in a gay style, and most people aren’t capable of making that commitment.… That line everyone’s bisexual—that’s a very popular thing to say right now. I think it’s meaningless.”14 He told Lester Bangs, “I may come out with a hardhat album. Come out with an anti-gay song, saying ‘Get back in your closets, you fuckin’ queers!’ That’ll really do it!”15
Reed enlisted Steve Winwood and Cream’s Jack Bruce to play on Berlin, which was actually recorded in London, not Germany. The recently released Cabaret had revived a fascination with the city; perhaps that influenced the titling. Also, in “Caroline Says I” he sings to his “Germanic Queen.” The record focused on the disintegration of his marriage to Bettye Kronstad, his own Blood on the Tracks. They married in ’73 and divorced less than a year later.
“We dated for a couple of years before we moved in together,” Kronstad said. “Lewis was quiet, reflective—a writer—and a teddy bear. I admired his writing very much. A simplistic explanation for why I married him could be that he wrote ‘Sweet Jane.’”16
She met him in 1968 when she was a nineteen-year-old Columbia student. Drunk, he slapped her behind at the end of their first meeting. She ignored his requests for dates afterward until she read a newspaper article praising the Velvet Underground. He liked that she seemed square, innocent, and his parents loved her. In “Sweet Jane” the prince of decadence envisions a life of conventional domestic bliss.
But in “Caroline Says I,” the female tells the singer he’s not a man and she’ll “get it” somewhere else. In “Oh Jim,” he “beats her black and blue,” reviving the domestic violence theme from the early Velvet track “There She Goes Again.”
“One night, Lou had been drinking and snorting cocaine in a veritable marathon,” Kronstad recalled. “Suddenly, he turned around and hit me in the face—hard, [then] started laughing hysterically and fell down onto the bed.”17 In “Caroline Says II” (a remake of an unreleased Velvets classic, “Stephanie Says,” with new lyrics), the woman picks herself off the floor and tells him, “You can hit me all you want to, but I don’t love you anymore,” then takes speed and punches a windowpane.
“The Kids” recounts the true story of how Kronstad’s eighteen-year-old mother left her abusive father before social services took Kronstad away. Producer Ezrin asked his seven-year-old to act out the child being separated from the parent, crying for mommy. In the process, Ezrin’s two-year-old began screaming, which Ezrin used for the end of the track.
In “The Bed,” the female protagonist cuts her wrists to ghostly horror-film music. Finally, “Sad Song” recasts “Satellite of Love” as a guitar-and-strings epic in which Reed resolves not to obsess over the lost relationship anymore, though he keeps circling back to the idea that “someone else would have broken both her arms.”
Today, after Chris Brown, Rhianna, and the #MeToo movement, few artists hoping for success would release songs with those lyrics. And even then, Berlin didn’t do well in the States upon its July release, stalling at No. 98, particularly dismal after Transformer had reached No. 29. In the UK, it made it to No. 9. The New York Times liked it; Rolling Stone didn’t at the time but includes it today among the 500 Greatest Albums.
The album became a self-fulfilling prophecy when the twenty-four-year-old Kronstad left him in Paris on September 17. Five days later, he collapsed onstage in Brussels. He asked the doctor who gave them amphetamine shots to implore her to return on his behalf, to no avail.
When Kronstad went to purchase the album, the record store clerk informed her that people were returning it because it was “the most depressing album in the world.”18 It was the lyrics that made it so. The orchestration on tracks like “Caroline Says I” sounds deceptively upbeat. “How Do You Think It Feels” and “Oh, Jim” boast juicy horn sections.
“[Reed] didn’t even want to listen to the album,” Ezrin said. “Every time he listens to the album it gets to him. I mean, I can see tears coming into his eyes and everything.”19
Glam forked into proto-punk and glam metal, though some bands like the New York Dolls straddled both camps. Really, “metal” and “punk” were names marketing executives selected to organize the record store bins. The Stooges rocked as hard as any metal band, but Iggy Pop created the punk archetype by simultaneously antagonizing and entertaining his audience, often while destroying himself onstage.
He designed his glam look to piss guys off as much as to attract the females. “I would take a little glass bottle of Johnson & Johnson baby oil, pour it all over my body and face, then cover myself in gold and silver glitter.”20 In eyeliner, dog collar, silver-lame evening gloves from Kmart, thigh-high boots, cheetah jacket, leopard print pants or skirt or tutu or black bikini underwear with pubes (and more) poking out, he’d pant, “I stick it deep inside,” then flip his head over and contort like a snake charmer on a bad acid trip.
According to the Jim Jarmusch documentary Gimme Danger, Pop (né Jim Osterberg) was getting back at society for insulting his family. His parents were loving, well-read schoolteachers who lived in a trailer. Some well-to-do boys from school came by, shook the trailer, and laughed at the Osterbergs. Jim Morrison became Pop’s favorite singer when Pop saw him in concert making fun of University of Michigan students, mocking them as “the Mighty Men of Michigan,” then grunting like a gorilla, which sparked the crowd into throwing beer at him.21
The songs the Stooges tested live in ’73 were as obnoxious as any by later Michigan trailer-trash idol Eminem: “Wet My Bed,” “Head on the Curb,” “Open Up and Bleed,” “Fresh Rag” (“I can smell you walkin’ down the street with your fresh rag on”). In a radio station on March 27, he took off his pants, danced around, and told the audience that he was naked and playing with his balls, all the while slapping his member against his stomach. The station almost lost its FCC license, and Bowie’s manager dropped the band. Helen Reddy’s husband took the reins briefly but dropped them after Pop said gay and Jewish slurs onstage.
Sometimes it seemed Pop might hurt the audience. In June he threw a piece of watermelon into the crowd and gave a woman a concussion. Journalist Nick Kent said, “Once, he grabbed a chick and stared blankly into her face, almost beating up some poor wretch who dared to laugh at him.”22 When Warhol superstar Geri Miller taunted him to throw up on her, he obliged.
Or he might hurt himself, like a rock and roll Evel Knievel. He was one of the originators of stage diving, but on at least one occasion nobody caught him and he chipped his tooth. The live album Metallic K.O., recorded in October 1973 and February 1974, “is the only rock album I know where you can actually hear hurled beer bottles breaking against guitar strings,” Lester Bangs maintained.23 The title came from the war that erupted between Pop and a pack of bikers at the Michigan Palace. When a biker ignored Pop’s warning to stop heckling him, Pop charged into the audience at him—and was promptly beaten up.
He didn’t feel the pain because of the smack, which infested the band in late 1970. Guitarist Scott Asheton said he was hanging out backstage with Parliament-Funkadelic when one of them offered him “horse.”24 Asheton didn’t know what it was but liked it. When he told Pop, Pop wanted to try some, too.
By July 1973, Pop was ravenous for any fix. Lynn Edelson, who painted Robert Plant’s pants, recalls the night he showed up at Plant’s room in New York’s Drake Hotel. At the time, Zeppelin was playing onstage at Madison Square Garden. “There’s this banging and banging at the door and I looked through the peep hole and it’s Iggy Pop … so I figure what the hell. I let him in and he’s beet red. He’s as red as that paint that you have in kindergarten. I hadn’t met Iggy before. I could see him shaking all over and he was perspiring, and I feel his head and he must have a 103 fever. And I get really nervous. I said, ‘What did you do?’ He said, ‘Well I ran out of coke so I shot up niacin.’ So I’m like, ‘Oh shit, we’ve got to get your body temperature down. Take your clothes off.’ So he takes off his clothes and he lies down on Percy’s [Robert Plant’s] bed. Now this is getting really bad, here he is lying naked on the bed. I wrapped him up in towels and could feel his temperature going down, and he fell asleep. A couple hours later Percy comes back and he says, ‘Who the bloody hell is in my bed.’ And he’s freaking out. And I just laughed and I said, ‘Go and look.’ And there’s Iggy totally fucked up with towels all over him. They really thanked me.”25
She led the Zeppelin road crew to one of the midnight shows the Stooges played at Max’s Kansas City from July 30 to August 6. Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis told Pop she wanted “to see blood tonight.”26 Legend has it that Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, Todd Rundgren, and Bebe Buell were there. Pop said it was like “trying to do a rock and roll show in front of your first-grade class with the teacher present, except all the students had morphed into your critics.” He started walking on the tables and stepped on a chair that slipped, knocking him onto a table filled with glasses that smashed on the floor. He fell on them and his chest was cut up, but he kept performing, after inquiring, “Is there a professional photographer in the house?”27 There was, and the images inspired Sid Vicious to carve up his own chest onstage five years later. Alice Cooper took Pop to the emergency room. “Everybody thought the stitches were really sexy,” Buell said.28 (It wasn’t the first time he’d cut himself onstage. He did it with a drumstick in May 1969 at Ohio Wesleyan University.)
The following night, Pop saw Rundgren and Buell at a New York Dolls show, then popped up unannounced at Rundgren’s apartment just before Rundgren was leaving on tour. Rundgren warned Buell not to leave Pop in the apartment unattended or he’d steal everything to fund his habit. He didn’t steal, but he did give downers to the dog, who survived apparently unscathed.
Karmic justice, perhaps, was enacted a few weeks later when Buell’s friend gave Pop powder he assumed was coke but was something very different. The Stooges had traveled to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, to open for Mott the Hoople on August 19. The powder was angel dust/PCP, a dissociative anaesthetic that had been outlawed for humans (replaced by ketamine) and was now supposed to be used only as an animal tranquilizer. Halfway through a set featuring new songs like “I’ve Got a Cock in My Pocket” and “Buttfuckers Trying to Run My World,” he collapsed onstage, mumbling, “My doctor told me not to play tonight.”29 Keith Moon and Waylon Jennings were also waylaid onstage by the suddenly trendy drug.30 Sly Stone and James Brown became addicts.
Pop managed to stagger into the crowd, where he reached out to shake an audience member’s hand, then pulled away. A fan splattered him with Hostess cherry pies, and another doused him with wine, an Iggy tradition since he’d rubbed peanut butter on himself onstage three years ago. He rubbed these condiments in as well. “Dance to the beat of the living dead,” the lyrics to “Raw Power” went.
Like Lou Reed, the members of Mott the Hoople were determined to prove they could make it without David Bowie (who had written and produced their biggest hit, “All the Young Dudes”). When Bowie offered them the quasi-retro “Drive-in Saturday” they turned it down. (Bowie said, “I was so annoyed that one night in Florida, I got very drunk and shaved my eyebrows off.”31) The joke was on Mott, because Bowie’s song rose to No. 3 in the UK. But Mott, self-produced and released in July, had its own classics like “Honaloochie Boogie” and “I Wish I Was Your Mother,” both with the band’s uniquely haunting, bittersweet edge. The latter featured the requisite gender bending but sported a Faces-like mandolin and lyrics in which Ian Hunter acknowledged that his mean behavior toward his lover was dooming their relationship. At the same time, he felt bad about it and yearned for a family—a theme that seemed more country than glitter rock.
On their next single, “Roll Away the Stone,” he implored his partner to keep their love alive, enticing her with a rockabilly party on Saturday night. Hunter sang in Bowie mode, accompanied by Thunderthighs, the “Walk on the Wild Side” backing vocalists. The song was so catchy the Hollies tried to rush out a cover before Mott released the original, but Mott made it to No. 8 UK. Then, Hunter said, “I made a fatal error. Tony Brainsby was our publicist at the time and I remember walking into his office and saying: ‘I’ve got the formula. I’ve cracked it.’ And that was the minute I stopped having the formula.”32 It was their last British Top 10.
In the end, the group to rise out of the glam rock scene with the biggest record sales after David Bowie (seventy-five million to Bowie’s hundred million) was about as far on the other end of the spectrum as possible.33
Gene Simmons’s arrogance initially annoyed Paul Stanley,34 but they both shared an unrelenting drive to conquer Manhattan, and they could both sing lead or harmony, like their beloved Beatles. They broke up their original band, Wicked Lester, because it sounded too much like Three Dog Night, then found drummer Peter Criss through the Rolling Stone classifieds. Criss had been in a band called Lips, so Stanley suggested the name Kiss for the new band. They painted their faces kabuki white at their first gig together in November 1972 because, according to New York Doll Sylvain Sylvain, “Kiss quickly found out that if you’re a guy wearing makeup you get a lot of chicks.”35
They found lead guitarist Ace Frehley after auditioning over fifty candidates, then played their first gig as a foursome on January 30 in front of six people at Coventry in Queens, the frequent haunt of the Dolls. Initially the accouterments were standard glam: eyeliner, eyebrow pencil, rouge, high heels, and shoulder pads. Their mothers embroidered their shirts and glued glitter onto the Kiss logo, designed by Frehley and Stanley. They bought skintight Lurex pants with metallic threads, black knee socks, leather belts, and, from the pet store, studded collars. Finally, they found an S&M shop in the Village that specialized in gay biker outfits and paid them to make black leather costumes with studs.
They vowed to be different from the Dolls by only using black and white makeup, then made an exception for silver. But Simmons noted, “We weren’t convincing as androgynous guys.”36 After seeing Alice Cooper at Madison Square Garden in June they asked themselves, what if we were four Alice Coopers? They decided they each needed a different facial gimmick. Frehley continued the Ziggy spaceman tradition. Criss considered himself moody like a cat, so he made himself a feline. Stanley painted stars on each eye but gradually got lazy and reduced it to one.
Simmons was the one who put them over with all the kids who, like him, grew up reading Famous Monsters of Filmland. Photographer Bob Gruen said, “Kiss decided that they couldn’t compete with the Dolls in the sense of being better looking. So they did something completely opposite, which was to be monsters instead of trying to be attractive.”37 Simmons mixed Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera leer with Batman studded leather wings under his arms. He pulled his hair into a ball to keep it out of his face and took to sticking out his unusually long tongue.
They recorded a demo at Electric Ladyland that included “Strutter” and “Black Diamond.” Onstage they brought in dry ice, plugged in red revolving lights, and threw buckets of water (actually mere confetti) at the audience. Future Ramones Jeffrey Hyman and Tommy Erdelyi attended early gigs. Erdelyi likened the band to Slade. Kiss asked the Dolls if they could do a gig with them, but their progenitors declined. “You’ll kill us.”