I hope to be back on the blog soon.
Sorry for the length of time since my last post.
Much has already been written about the work that David Bowie did with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop in the early seventies, so I won’t add much more here.
Guitarists James Williamson and Ron Asheton have both stated that they prefer Bowie's original mix of the album to Pop's re-mastered version that appeared many years later. The version of I Need Somebody here is the Bowie mixed version.
The New York Dolls formed in 1971, and over the next three years they became the premiere American glam rock band. Musically they are based in the "dirty rock of the Rolling Stones, girl-group pop, the Stooges and Bowie glam".
Jobriath was the stage name of Bruce Wayne Campbell an American glam rock singer from 1973 to 1974. He is credited as being the first mass-marketed pop star, and the first to be openly gay. Even today with his music championed by people such as Morrissey, he is still a largely forgotten figure on the musical landscape.
A mere six months after the release of the debut came Creatures Of The Street, a rapid follow-up by any standards. "Some of the music is very haunting. If Jobriath had come out, excuse the pun, let's say during The Village People's success in the late '70s, he could have very well become a major star. "Timing is everything."
Alice Cooper’s (real name Vincent Damon Furnier) career spans more than four decades. With a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, boa constrictors and baby dolls, Cooper has drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a grandly theatrical and violent brand of heavy metal that was designed to shock, and fitted in perfectly with the emerging glam rock scene.
The original Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1971 hit "I'm Eighteen" from the album ‘Love it to Death’, which was followed by the even bigger single "School's Out" in 1972. The band reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album 'Billion Dollar Babies'.
Image taken from "Marvel Premiere" # 50 by Marvel Comics Group.
Glam rock as a youth movement and a musical sub-genre was essentially over by the end of 1975. It had, if I’m being honest, been in slow decline since early in 1974. The best of the glam anthems had been and gone and established glam artists had either moved on to other pastures or were simply treading water.
The Polecats were a rockabilly style band formed in the late seventies, originally calling themselves the Cult Heroes.A record deal lead to the release in early 1981 of the double A-side, “John I'm Only Dancing/Big Green Car" on Phonogram's Mercury label. This got to #35 in the UK charts.Their third single release was another glam cover this time the old T Rex track "Jeepster". This got to #53 in the UK charts.