All That Glitters Is Not Glam

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century
Simon Reynolds

Stealing All Transmissions: A Secret History of the Clash
Randal Doane

Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk
John Doe and Tom DeSavia

Maybe you've heard the argument that the recent rise of right wing governments in the United States and Europe will reinvigorate music. Maybe it'll even bring a new explosion of punk rock.

If this theory holds true, it would be a nice silver lining on our s--t sandwich. (Although I still say I'd gladly put up with boring music if it meant I didn't have to worry about creeping fascism.) Unfortunately, there are problems with the theory.

For one: Punk did not originate in opposition to right wing politics. Margaret Thatcher rose to prime minister in 1979, the year after the Sex Pistols broke up and the year the Clash left punk behind with "London Calling." Ronald Reagan wasn't elected president until 1980, after the first wave of American punk had crashed.

With all this in mind, I sometimes point out to friends that the musical movement that arose in response to Reagan and Thatcher wasn't punk; it was Goth. I felt pretty proud of myself for coming up with this argument until I read this line in Simon Reynolds' new "Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century":

"It can't be coincidental that glam principles become ascendant in pop culture during periods when politics moves to the right -- the early seventies of Nixon and Heath, the eighties of Reagan and Thatcher, and, most recently, during the first decade of the twenty-first century."

Of course. I had forgotten about the Nixon years. Maybe '80s Goth was, in some ways, just a variant on glam.

Does all of this mean that, in post-Brexit Britain and ...  the current American predicament, we are in for a resurgence of punk? Goth? Glam? Some other exciting musical movement? I don't know. Let's talk about these three rock books.

This Is Radio Clash

As noted above, the earliest punk rock was not a reaction to right wing politics. To the extent it had any political slant at all, it was simply nihilist.

The exception, of course, was the Clash. Beginning with their first single, "White Riot," the Only Band That Matters was explicitly political and, as Joe Strummer put it: "We're anti-fascist, we're anti-violence, we're anti-racist and we're pro-creative. We're against ignorance." If not explicitly left-wing, this stance was explicitly anti-right-wing, and it was great for their relationship with their fans. That relationship was, and still is, key to the Clash's appeal. They, and especially Strummer, seemed to really care about their fans and treat them like equals. However, this egalitarian approach made for some uncomfortable situations when the band made a play for commercial success in America.

Randal Doane's "Stealing All Transmissions: A Secret History of the Clash" has a quote where record company executive is talking to the band's associate and sometimes manager Kosmo Vinyl about the release of the album "London Calling" in the United States. At one point, the executive says, "Look, if we do this right, we can sell millions of records here. Are you guys OK with that?" Vinyl replies, "Yes. Yes we are."

The quote is telling not only because it shows that the Clash wanted mainstream success, but also because it shows people in the record industry were so devoted to the band that they actually floated the possibility that the Clash could walk away from millions of dollars if they wanted to.

"Stealing All Transmissions" is about the Clash's success in America, particularly in New York City.  As Doane tells it, this wouldn't have been possible without the support of radio stations like WPIX, a free-form New York radio station that treated the Clash as a major sensation.

Doane has a good point, and parts of this slim book were a joy to read. People who work in radio, especially, will enjoy it.

We're Desperate, Get Used To It

So far in this post I have treated punk rock like it happened only in New York and London, but of course that's not true. One of the earliest punk rock scenes outside of those areas was in Los Angeles. "Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk," tells the story of that scene. Co-written by John Doe, of the great L.A. punk band X, compiles reminiscences many notable figures, including musicians like Doe, El Vez and Jane Wiedlin.

As Doe and his friends tell it, the songs of the L.A. punk scene weren't explicitly political early on, but the scene itself was a kind of political statement. It was implicitly concerned with giving voice to arty kids, LGBT kids, Chicanos and other people who were largely shut out of mainstream society.

The rise of hardcore put an end to that. You can see this happening in Penelope Spheeris' classic documentary "The Decline of Western Civilization," as the artier bands like X and Catholic Discipline seem crowded out by Fear, Black Flag and the Germs, all of whom seem to have been inspired by the nihilism they saw coming from New York and London.

I don't know much about Fear's politics, and I always get a kick out of the band's music and dark humor. Still in "Decline of Western Civilization," when you see Lee Ving onstage, making fun of gays, or telling someone in the audience, "It's 1980, can't you afford a haircut?" it's clear he's not railing against the Reagan era. He's a harbinger of it.

All The Young Dudes

OK. Let's talk about glam. Why did young people (but most unusually, young men) in the UK and the US (but mostly in the UK) in the early 1970s suddenly fall in love with (mostly male) musicians who wore outrageous makeup and clothes, and who played a simplistic and already somewhat old-fashioned form of rock 'n' roll? And why did they do so at that time, just as the social upheaval of the 1960s had ended?

You get some good answers, and a lot more questions, in Simon Reynolds' "Shock and Awe: Glam

Rock and its Legacy, From the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century." The massive 704-page volume covers glam in overwhelming detail.

Reynolds, the author of "Rip it up and Start Again," "Retromania" and other pop culture history books, describes glam as the equivalent of Beatlemania for the third generation of rock. These were kids who were too young to have seen the Beatles, but who were bored by prog rock, bluesy jams and the other styles favored by their older siblings.

However, Reynolds notes that the glam musicians themselves, including Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Gary Glitter, Slade, Suzi Quatro, the Sweet and others, were mostly artists who had been kicking around the music scene for years, dabbling in different styles before jumping on the bandwagon and suddenly having hit singles and sellout crowds after the success of Bolan's T. Rex song "Hot Love."

Bowie, who had tried his hand as a mod, a hippie, a mime, a folkie singer-songwriter, etc., before becoming a sensation in glittery clothes and shocking orange hair, was in many ways simply copying his frenemy Bolan. It worked so well for him that Bowie, ever the superfan, rounded up struggling artists he admired, like Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Mott the Hoople, and tried to get them to do the same. The results were mixed.

Where other '70s rock was obsessed with technical virtuosity and personal authenticity; the stars of glam were happy to be fake. Where '60s rock was concerned with liberation, glam was for audiences who could enjoy the fruits of that liberation (drugs, sex, gay rights) without having to struggle for it to the extent people had just a few years earlier. (Reynolds doesn't get into this much, but it's important to note that glam was very much a white-people thing. People of color weren't quite as content to take their liberation for granted.)

Bowie famously captured the media's attention by declaring himself gay at a time when it was remarkable, but not especially dangerous, for a pop star to say so. (It also wasn't true. He was, at most, bisexual.) He became an international sensation with the Ziggy Stardust persona, as though he were an actor playing a role and not a singer-songwriter performing his own material. Reynolds observes that the concept behind "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" isn't so much about Ziggy, or Bowie, or David Jones, as it is a story about being a rock fan.

This kind of self-conscious phoniness is the theme that ties together the artists in "Shock and Awe," many of whom (say, Roxy Music and Alice Cooper) don't have a lot in common otherwise.

What does this have to do with our current political climate? As with Peter Doggett's "The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s," "Shock and Awe" notes that Bowie's breakthrough works all seemed rooted in his disillusionment with the utopian visions of 1960s counterculture. For Reynolds, this disillusionment is another theme underlying all of glam rock. These artists had given up on changing the world. Instead, they wanted to change themselves, and sell out to a young audience who were eager to buy into the fantasy, even if they didn't totally believe in it either.

Does that sound like anyone you know? At one point in "Shock and Awe," Reynolds is writing about Bowie's manager Tony Defries, who was a master of hype, but not so solid on the follow-through:

"There are perhaps two kinds of entrepreneurs, executives, politicians. The first inspires confidence with managerial competence, through expertise and command of the facts. The second seduces using techniques that bypass the rational: charisma, word-magic, a sense of theater."

Explaining that Defries was mostly of this second type, Reynolds writes that he was "a seventies music-biz version of ..." and here he uses the name of the con artist who is currently the U.S. president. I won't type his name here. You know who he's talking about.

Glam may come along partly as a reaction to right-wing governments, but it isn't exactly a protest against them. It's a warped reflection of them.