1974 and Glam's Changing Faces

By Jack Alberson (jack@fac193.com)

The early-to-mid Seventies marked the meteoric rise and creative peak of what many musicologists like to refer to as ‘glam rock’—the word ‘glam’ a shortened reference to ‘glamour’ or being ‘glamorous’.  Many of its creators and superstars were, indeed, flamboyant, painted gentlemen:  think of the shocking flame-haired David Bowie, the boa-wearing Marc Bolan of T-Rex and even the glam Camelot’s own Merlin, Roxy Music’s Brian Eno.

By 1973, glam rock was diversifying and becoming a little more subversive (as if its leaner beginnings weren’t, at least to some degree, attuned for the ears of subverts and misfits).  The crooning voice of Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry did, surely, tear a page out of the Bowie playbook while their first two albums offer a glimpse of the potential of Bowie’s later partnership with Eno himself.  A recent three-disc retrospective on Roxy Music and Ferry called The Platinum Collection, does a decent job of compiling highlights from their early days, before the Eighties softened the artsy edges and Bryan Ferry retooled himself as strictly a solo artist.  There are few glam gems more fanciful than “Virginia Plain” or even the tense “Do the Strand”. Eno didn’t stick around long, though—we’ll get ‘round to him in a second.  As this collection shows, Roxy Music would retain a stitch of the glam through a lot of their Seventies output, like the instantly classic single “Love is the Drug”.  The band were inactive through a good part of the latter half of the decade, reuniting at the end of the Seventies as more of a romantic outfit.  Bryan Ferry’s solo work, for me at least, is really patchy although his “Let’s Stick Together” is very nearly as glam as it gets.  Roxy Music disbanded for good in the mid-Eighties.

Brian Eno left Roxy Music early in their career to further continue his pursuit of new sounds.  The first two of his solo recordings, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), are wild mutations that stretch the parameters of the pop song (and glam rock, however unconsciously) as far as they would reach.  “The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch” and “Cindy Tells Me” could feasibly share space on the same disc with “Virginia Plain”, though they bristle with far more ambition and stand as a harbinger of things to come—a three-album collaboration with David Bowie.

Bowie, to many, is the undisputed king of glam rock even though he would abandon this direction altogether by the time the mainstream truly caught up (this change running concurrently with the release of Eno’s initial solo offerings).  The nail in the coffin of the soon-to-be Thin White Duke’s glam years is Diamond Dogs, which was recently reissued yet again in a two-disc 30^th Anniversary Edition.  Dodgy packaging aside, the collection is fantastic.  The events surrounding Diamond Dogs put his impending change in perspective – the disbanding of The Spiders From Mars, a subsequent stab at a rock opera and an ambitious-but-cumbersome tour – yet even as a transition in his chameleonic career, songs from this album like the title track and “Rebel, Rebel” still stand out as highlights in his insanely huge back catalogue.

Glam, for these participants, mostly remains just another notch in the bedposts of their histories, though it could be said that Eno's subsequent work with Bowie on his Nineties Outside album may have been a subtle return to the character-driven concepts of glam rock.  Eno went on to become one of the first to create 'ambient' music (himself coining the phrase in the midst of recovering from an accident that left him bedridden for a while-see Discreet Music for more).  Bryan Ferry may have maintained a glamorous persona but has mostly turned away from those dazzling beginnings.  For Bowie, of course, it became yet another face in his long, chameleonic career-one that continues to this day.

(I want to thank Jennifer Ballantyne and Rebecca Barkin at EMI for sending the Bowie and Roxy Music discs)