Most great pop music is reductive. Its creator has listened to some old or new favourite or their own meanderings and realized that there’s one weird trick in there that’s underutilized, underheard. So they extract it, magnify it, simplify it. Some rocking blues fill, perhaps first heard almost inaudibly on Johnny Johnson or Little Richard’s piano, gets boiled down to the moronic crunch of “You Really Got Me”, and the world has changed. If our creator is an abject genius, they may combine several such power moves on the same tune, and we have a new genre and quite possibly a craze.
One of the best examples of this is the creation of the glam rock sound, which ran wild over the charts for two or three years, and it’s rarely credited to the right person, because the star he produced it for was the exact opposite of glam, and was dead sick of being a star.
The musical elements of glam rock are retro and reductive rock’n’roll, do wop or, a bit later, British blues boom chord changes, often reinforced with ‘50’s sax, lots of echo on the bass drum, handclaps, football terrace singalong choruses, and, a bit later, glissando strings. The lyrical elements are camp sexual innuendo, American popular culture, and futurism. And the inventor of the musical portion of this mélange was - Phil Spector.
By 1970 John Lennon was being harassed by everyone because of his fame, his choices, and the successful revolution he had led with his Beatle mates. The half-wit frauds and leeches of the far left, in a classic example of the narcissism of small differences, attacked him for not going far enough, by which they meant, installing Yoko as Britain’s Madame Mao and setting them to their proper work of killing each other. The half-wit fossils of the right attacked him for his ingratitude to Britain and his traitorous marriage to Yoko One, a conceptual artist who symbolized Japan, a people remembered by them for torturing and murdering tens of thousands of Empire prisoners and largely dodging accountability, as the Germans had not, in the post-war reckoning. The Beatle’s fans, one of whom would end up killing him a decade later, and whose number by now included Charlie Manson, were also becoming a nightmare. The fall-out from insulting Jesus and the Marcoses in the mid-60’s must have seemed like minor japery compared with the position Beatle John found himself in in the “heavy” years.
One of the central conceits of the post-acid period was returning to one’s roots, “getting it together in the country”, and so on. In the USA this trend produced the first shoots of what would become today’s somewhat boring Americana movement, in the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty and the self-titled Crosby, Stills and Nash. British musicians exchanged Carnaby street gear for denim, and the complex Eastern-influenced structures of psychedelia for the most authentic blues sound they could muster, which also simplified songwriting for the exhausted, as everything could be sung to a twelve-bar change.
Lennon’s most relevant example of this is “Yer Blues”, on 1968’s White Album, but he was a rock’n’roller at heart, as “The Ballad of John and Yoko” shows; “Revolution #1” straddles the two impulses. But “Yer Blues” and “Revolution #1” aren’t simple 12-bars – the final cadence, the lift to the 5th and its resolution, is altered to make each song’s structure unique. This is an evolution of the less intense way Chuck Berry played with 12-bar structure to differentiate his songs, and would become a feature of classic glam compositions like Bolan’s “Get It On” and “Jeepster”. Lennon probably first used it in “Day Tripper”, and Hendrix used it in “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”, which was also one of the first glitch tracks.
On leaving The Beatles, Paul McCartney released “Another Day” (one of his best songs, which in a perfect world would have been the Beatles single to follow Abbey Road) while John released, under the name Plastic Ono Band, “Cold Turkey”, with the Beatles’ old Hamburg mate Klaus Voorman on bass, Ringo on drums, Eric Clapton on lead, and Yoko on existential vibrations. John and Yoko’s production is heavy and dense, Ringo’s drums sound double tracked and Voorman’s bass earths the song, just as well as sparks are flying from John’s rhythm guitar the whole time. Lennon screams over the fade, because he’s exercising his pain through Janov’s Primal Scream therapy, a quintessentially fin-de-sixties form of help. Music is a concept by which we measure our pain, and for the rest of his life John Lennon will be making psychotherapeutic music, in which the screams will eventually turn to memes. But “Cold Turkey” is a relative flop, and Lennon has to return his M.B.E. to the Queen. Stung by this humiliation, he vows revenge and is joined by Phil Spector, who swore his revenge on U.S. society after “River Deep Mountain High” failed to go to #1 in 1966, if not before, and who Lennon would soon, rather unnecessarily, and rather cruelly from the long-suffering George Martin’s perspective, bring in to produce Let It Be for the Beatles.
Phil Spector, a gun-waving control freak with an outsized inferiority complex that set him against almost everyone his entire life, was an odd choice of producer for the peacenik Lennon and Ono. Maybe John just needed to put a wall of sound between his shattered psyche and the outside world. In any case, John wrote and Phil produced “Instant Karma” – from concept to mixing the track took 10 days - it was released on Feb 6 1970, and the rest is history. Here we have a hoary rock’n’roll chord change, massive slapback echo on the drums (Alan White’s heavy style, alongside Voorman’s earthy bass playing, is perfect for this), handclaps, and a football terrace singalong chorus. And, not too much meaning; lyrically “Instant Karma” is John leaning, a little impatiently in the name of peace, into George’s Krishna vibe, but it may as well be nonsense. The first glam record, and one of the very best, were it not for its dressed down and shorn singer.
Because, listening in to “Instant Karma” is a smart young man called Tony Visconti, who has recently begun producing records for Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex and for David Bowie. His soundscapes on Unicorn and The Man Who Sold the World (on which he also played bass) are already showing a different sort of imagination from that of the 60’s producer. In December 1970, Visconti produced “Ride A White Swan” for the band now called T Rex, and followed it up in February 1971 with “Hot Love”, which Bolan performed on TV wearing glitter, and the rest is history. We hear the reductive 50’s rock riffs and changes, the clumping drums, with congas on top to mimic their slapback, the singalong chorus, the handclaps; throw on a little glitter, camp it up, and the glam phenomenon was born. On the third glam T Rex single and their second number one “Get It On”, a rewrite of Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie”, with a quote from it (“meanwhile, I’m still thinking”) to make the homage obvious, Visconti adds a saxophone, which is there as a Bill Haley and the Comets signifier, not a jazz reference. Late in 1970, the LP John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band – intensely psychotherapeutic rock from a man whose inspiration is drying up and who’s coping by being as reductive and intense as he can – included “I Found Out” in which Lennon’s fuzzed out rhythm guitar sets up a very loose choogling feel over an echoing, simplistic Ringo and Klaus backing. If you listen to live concert recordings from T Rex early in the T Rextacy period, you’ll hear Marc Bolan, never much of a soloist, fall back on this exciting sound whenever he wants to vamp and preen. By 1972’s The Slider there are glissando strings in Visconti’s T Rex productions, which may owe something to Torrie Zito’s strings on Lennon’s Imagine (1971), or to George Martin’s scoring of “I Am The Walrus” and “Within You Without You”, a styling which reached its apogee with David Essex’s “Rock On” (1973).
And look who’s there – Ringo, from “Cold Turkey” and Plastic Ono Band. And this scene from Bolan’s movie Born To Boogie was filmed in John’s garden.
Slade were the most obviously Lennon-influenced of the glam acts, especially with regard to Noddy Holder’s vocal but also in the “I Found Out” reductive crudeness of their approach to rock. Next time you feel like playing the Sex Pistols or some other driving punk music, play Slayed instead, you won’t regret it.
Glam did not really travel to America, being a representative entertainment of the English working class, which has no direct American equivalent; its threat of camp hooliganism (which found perfect cinematic form in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 UK film A Clockwork Orange, making Kubrick a second American godfather of the zeitgeist) was alien to the American spirit, and it referenced American musical modes in very English ways, for example when the glamsploitation production team of Chinn and Chapman decided that quasi-righteous rock might be more bearable than their horrible bubble gum take on glam, they added the stock riffs of the British blues boom, in songs like the Sweet’s “Blockbuster” and Suzie Quatro’s “Can The Can”, to the glam songbook. Quatro aside, the closest an American would get to the classic working-class glam sound was Alice Cooper with “School’s Out”. Cooper had the camp element in his name and pantomime stage act, his band were unsophisticated and liked making a noise, and his hooliganism was obvious. In fact he overdid it, leading to calls for cancellation and the invention of shock rock, but he did very well in the UK during the glam years.
All this time, David Bowie has been standing off to one side, doing his own David Bowie thing, most of the time taking little but license from glam rock, while adding futurism, Americanism, and his more complex songwriting to the mix, and in passing writing the scene’s theme song and manifesto, “All The Young Dudes” for Mott The Hoople - cue handclaps, singalong chorus, wall of sound production.
And my brother's back at home with his Beatles and his Stones
We never got it off on that revolution stuff
What a drag
Too many snags*
Bowie, with producer Ken Scott, added some early glam elements into the songs on Ziggy Stardust - the sax on “Rock’n’roll Suicide”, the Eddie Cochran riffing on “Hang On To Yourself” - all the while refining an alternative glam sound with Mick Ronson - an attractive, highly finished sheen over hard rock dynamics, the approach they’d apply to Lou Reed’s music on Transformer. Bowie and Ronson also produced Wasn’t Born A Man, an album of bluesy cabaret-styled songs, for a past flame of Bowie’s, and on it there is this, the eighth wonder of glam, Dana Gillespie’s version of Bowie’s Hunky Dory song “Andy Warhol”, made magical here by her pointedly glamorous singing and a backing band, the Spiders From Mars, that she’d share with only one other artist, with Bowie on the 12-string acoustic and a blistering Ronson solo on the fade.
Prog rock came of age and into popularity alongside glam, adopting some of its concepts like a more grown-up, educated, and upper-middle-class version of the thing, so that many teenagers, myself included, briefly considered switching allegiance from Slade and Marc Bolan’s T Rex to Yes and Peter Gabriel’s Genesis as glam faded. But what was interesting about those acts faded with it, and on the horizon were the fresh ideas of Brian Eno’s Here Come The Warm Jets and Patti Smith’s Horses.
By 1975 glam was tired and meaningless**. Bolan, who had gotten lazy and fallen behind, and Bowie, who had gotten restless and moved on, had had counterculture cred. ABBA and the Bay City Rollers did not. But the concept, which is simply the concept of dressing up and wearing make-up to play rowdily reductive but somehow futuristic rock’n’roll music, spread far outward into the culture, and 100 different living genres can now be traced back to “Hot Love”.
See how many you can list.
But what of the men who invented the glam sound? Toxic little Phil Spector dragged his gun around for decades, threatening Leonard Cohen and countless women with it till it went off in Lana Clarkson’s mouth and he was left to die of Covid in prison. John continued to make psychotherapeutic albums of very occasionally great but often painfully uninspired music. There is far too much hatred of Yoko Ono in this world (let’s not forget her “Who Has Seen The Wind” was the B-side of “instant Karma”) but far too much unqualified love for her on John Lennon albums. The reasons for John’s dependence on Yoko are well known by now and largely to her credit, but there is often something indecent about the way he expresses his gratitude on record. For a man of his character to live with anyone cannot have been easy, yet any pain (or humour, which is the same thing) in his situation stays unexpressed.
But there are some better songs, including those written from his experience outside the charmed family circle, like the hard rock and Beatlesque “I’m Losing You” (also recorded with Cheap Trick), and “Nobody Told Me”, recorded in 1980 and released posthumously. Here Lennon eschews the too-easily dated instrumentation and production of most of his 1980 work to revisit, albeit more lightly, the sound of “Instant Karma”, in the shadow of the wall which Phil Spector had built for him ten years earlier.
footnote
* Bevan tried to change the nation
Sonny wants to turn the world, well, he can tell you that he tried
I could make a transformation as a rock and roll star
So inviting, so enticing to play the part
I could play the wild mutation as a rock and roll star
Get it on, yeah
David Bowie, “Star” from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
** Here in New Zealand, Alistair Riddell’s Space Waltz had electrified the nation with “Out On The Street” late in 1974. A perfect distillation of the Bowie-Ronson sound, which nimbly switched gear in the choruses from melodrama to rock’n’roll rave-up. In 1975, Kiwi expat Richard O’Brien would turn glam’s retrofuturist, camp and rock’n’roll revivalist tropes into The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Punk, glam’s post-apocalyptic mutant spawn, was not far away.
Algorithmic Tip: Baader Meinhof - There's Gonna Be An Accident