Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  These were the ambiguous exemplars of confessional songwriting, laying themselves bare for an audience who knew – or thought they knew – the precise personal crises which had triggered each lyric. (This was another trademark of the early 1970s: you not only bought their music, but bought into their lives.) For a brief period in the early 1970s, a handful of records provided the emotional soundtrack for a generation: Carole King’s Tapestry, James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James and Mud Slide Slim, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon and Blue, Neil Young’s After the Goldrush and Harvest; from Britain, too, the work of Cat Stevens and Elton John. Of these, Taylor was the most ambiguous, his almost soporific ambience masking disquieting dreams, as he battled against his discomforting fame. He subsequently admitted that his fragmentary 1972 record, One Man Dog, was a deliberate attempt to undermine his stardom. Neil Young cleared a more courageous path towards the same destination, outstripping even Joni Mitchell in the eagerness with which he risked psychological and physical destruction on Tonight’s the Night and the culture-shredding On the Beach. Those records coincided with the re-emergence of Bob Dylan, who had been absent in all but reputation as a creative force between 1968 and 1974. He toured America for several weeks with the Band, sparking the most frenzied demand for tickets in rock history, and then proceeded to refashion the narrative song on Blood on the Tracks and Desire.

  Dylan maintained that creative intensity through late 1975 and the spring of 1976, re-entering the Greenwich Village bohemia which he had dominated more than a decade earlier. He assembled a ragbag band of gypsies, folk veterans, cynical rockers, wives and lovers (past and present), and set out on two tours which he nicknamed Rolling Thunder. Each night, he revitalised his back catalogue and breathed fire into new material, marauding through some of rock’s most cherished anthems with the savagery of a hungry lion. Before he set out on the road, he watched the poet turned garage-rock singer, Patti Smith, perform the songs from Horses, an inspired spew of beat imagery and symbolist madness, fuelled by the spirit of mid-1960s garage rock. He also encountered the latest performer to be christened with the doom-laden publicity tag ‘the new Bob Dylan’: Bruce Springsteen was promoting Born to Run, an epic (if wildly over-romanticised) expression of the gospel of rock ’n’ roll. Joni Mitchell, dragged aboard Dylan’s touring bus, had completed one record of forensic cultural analysis, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and was assembling the material for an equally unsparing study of her own flaws and foibles, Hejira. Meanwhile, reggae star Bob Marley was leading the Wailers through ecstatic celebrations of Ras Tafari and ganja, with an intensity and righteousness which was provoking comparisons with the sacred Dylan.

  For these few months, the spirit of 1960s rock – the best intentions of the counter-culture, the magic that could set you free – seemed to be alive and burning with radical fire. Perhaps, after all, the music could not only fill your soul, but provide a spiritual handbook to deal with age and experience. And then, almost overnight, that brief spasm of urgency and relevance was gone, its protagonists sidetracked by marital breakdown, legal entanglements and simple self-indulgence. Thereafter, the only reliable route to that idealism, and the emotions it inspired, was through nostalgia. But with each passing year of disillusion and cynicism that followed, the mythology of the 1960s – the decade which stretched from the Beatles to Rolling Thunder – grew more intoxicating and enveloping. As the past was endlessly recycled and retold, it took on the status of a golden age, which would tower over subsequent generations like the husk of a derelict skyscraper: magnificent and yet hollow.

  It is apparent that rock5 has dramatically lowered the age level at which consumers enter the record market, and that market, in turn, continues to reflect the taste of younger age groups. Early rock ’n’ roll was recognised as a teenage product. The audience for Monkees records is regarded as subteen. And now with these new groups, we may be dipping down to the nursery level.

  Rock historian Arnold Shaw on bubblegum pop, 1969

  My birthday is March 3rd6, and I will be 11. I hope I am not too old for you.

  Fan letter to Michael Jackson (aged 12), 1971

  The Jackson 5 was not the first black family from Gary, Indiana to strike out into the music business. In 1952, Frank ‘Al’ Jenkins formed the Jenkins Family with six of his eight children, aged from 16 to 5, and a repertoire of ‘everything from bebop7 to sophisticated swing’. What carried the Jacksons beyond other sibling groups was the audaciously precocious talent of their (then) youngest brother. Until he hit puberty, Michael Jackson was America’s most instinctive soul singer, after which he learned how to replicate what he had once done unconsciously. He was a sex symbol with an ambiguous relationship towards his own physicality: pledging as an adult never to inflict sexual imagery upon his fans, he would grab at his crotch every few seconds on stage. But the pre-teen Michael had also displayed a repertoire of sexual bumps and grinds for audiences whose average age was about 10. Perhaps understanding what that symbolised better than he did, they responded with uncontrollable screams.

  The Jackson 5 were moulded by Motown boss Berry Gordy, and the creative team he tellingly named ‘The Corporation’, into a show-business attraction without parallel. Michael alone was compared to James Brown, Sammy Davis Jr, Mick Jagger and Tina Turner, sometimes all at once. The brothers were launched with an almost peerless run of hits which fulfilled every pop requirement: explosive excitement, spontaneity, instant rapport between audience and artist, crescendos and climaxes stuffed full of melodic hooks and topped with Michael’s telltale squeals.

  Their nearest rivals, the Osmonds, were white, and very clean. The sleeve notes to their first teen pop album (as against the barbershop quartet records they’d made in the 1960s) promised that ‘Donny [the same age as Michael] never has a bad thought8 toward anyone … After meeting Alan, you must think twice before doing anything wrong … The Osmonds did not need gimmicks nor stimulants to take them to the top.’ Meanwhile, David Cassidy was a singer turned actor turned singer, who had aspirations to match the Beatles or the Beach Boys, but was marooned in TV’s The Partridge Family. Less troubled than Michael, more human than Donny (he even admitted sexual relationships and mild drug use), he completed a trio of American idols who would command young girls’ hearts and pubescent urges for the first half of the 1970s.

  There were many more in the same vein, mostly white (the Jacksons would probably not have been accepted from any other label but Motown, which had already proved its transracial appeal with the Supremes), mostly soloists, barely older than their putative fans. They filled the gap left by the Monkees, and before them the Beatles, although the new breed was modelled on the clean-cut, winsome young men who’d offered a safer alternative to Elvis Presley: Rick Nelson, Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka. Between the prime of the Monkees and the propulsive launch of the Jacksons, however, the record industry filled the interregnum with a new genre: bubblegum pop. As its name suggested, this music was sweet, gave up all its secrets in an instant explosion of the taste buds, and was instantly disposable. The masterminds of the genre – many of whom had been crafting pop hits for a decade – preferred to use anonymous artists as the ‘stars’ of their records. The most potent stable was run by the Kasenetz-Katz production company, and including such imaginary groups as the 1910 Fruitgum Company and the Ohio Express. In 1968, eight of these outfits (or session musicians masquerading under their names) filled Carnegie Hall for an evening extravaganza by the Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus. But the K-K crew were soon outflanked by the Archies, fictional stars of a US cartoon series, and No. 1 hitmakers with the addictively perfect bubblegum record: ‘Sugar Sugar’.

  Here was a blatant attempt to reach an audience which everyone knew existed – children barely old enough to attend school – but whose buying power was minimal. Very young kids reduced popular music to its essentials: a rhythm, and a chorus, regardless of whether they understood the implications of either.fn1 A market was opening
for pop nursery rhymes, pop advertising jingles for toddlers, children’s TV shows in which pop would be used to educate as well as entertain. But bubblegum’s audience didn’t end there. If there was no barrier between the ear and the commercial appeal of the song – no political agenda or cultural baggage – then these hits could provide a social function for teenagers at discos just as they captivated the pre-teen audience for teatime cartoon shows.

  British bubblegum wasn’t as calculated as its American counterpart or, for a while, as simplistic. In the hands of the Foundations and the Amen Corner, Love Affair and the Equals, all hitmakers in 1968, it mixed essence of Motown with spirit of Beatles, excised the desire for progression and experimentation, and staked everything on a chorus so nagging that it would enter the ear of everyone who heard it, never to be entirely removed. (Whoever invented the term ‘earworm’ for an unshakeable musical motif knew what they were talking about.) The results were almost refreshingly obvious and direct: ‘Baby Come Back’, ‘Bend Me Shape Me’, ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’, ‘Everlasting Love’. This was the purest of pop, yet still constructed with enough finesse to avoid embarrassing the composer or the purchaser.

  The same could not always be said for the contrivances which filled the annual Eurovision Song Contest. The late 1960s marked the finessing of Euro-pop, which crossed the directness of bubblegum with the oom-pah rhythm of the polka and the shameless banality of German Schlager. To bypass barriers of language, words were reduced to nonsensical syllables, as onomatopoeic as possible. Massiel’s ‘La, La, La’ won the contest in 1968; Lulu’s ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’ was joint victor in 1969; and subsequent competitions featured variants on the same inexhaustible theme.

  By 1971, British pop had prepared its own stew of all these elements, and an audience who felt alienated by the increasingly adult preoccupations of rock could luxuriate in the joyous simplicity (or stupidity) of ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’, ‘The Pushbike Song’ and ‘Funny Funny’. The last of these singles was recorded by Sweet and written/produced by Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, who concocted an entire series of equally immediate confections: ‘Co-Co’, ‘Alexander Graham Bell’ and (most amusingly for British kids) ‘Little Willy’. But something strange was happening: Sweet’s ‘Little Willy’ was set to a guitar riff that signalled strutting sexuality, not innocent childhood fun. ‘Wig-Wam Bam’ completed the transfer of power: the group cavorted on TV’s Top of the Pops in Native American costumes, with glitter arranged artfully on their cheeks, while miming to a fusion of metallic guitars and tribal drumbeats. This was cartoonish, but not like the Archies: what was being parodied here was sex, machismo, the pretensions of rock, ultimately adulthood – all in the spirit of pop. Here was irony, commerciality, artifice, compressed into an irresistible package: one that owed nothing to the rock tradition which had led an earlier generation from Elvis to Dylan to Altamont and disillusionment.

  What I’ve been trying to do9 is recapture the feeling, the energy, behind old rock music without actually doing it the same technically.

  Marc Bolan, T. Rex, 1971

  As annoying as watching10 a narcissist endlessly preening himself before a mirror … bogus … a crass package of synthetic rock and roll music.

  Nick Kent, Cream magazine, on T. Rex’s The Slider, 1972

  ‘They look like builder’s labourers11 with make-up’, complained Ozzy Osbourne of Sweet in 1973, by which time the former bubblegum band had adopted an image so camp that it would have shamed a pantomime dame. They were not alone. Camp was the sexuality of the age, completing a sequence that involved the Beatles’ collar-length, ‘feminine’ hair, the mock-homosexual stage antics of the Kinks, the Rolling Stones’ publicity shots in elderly drag and the ‘man’s dress’ which adorned the body of David Bowie on The Man Who Sold the World. ‘Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl’, asked a 1965 single by the US garage-rock band the Barbarians, quoting a standard adult response to men with long hair. Now the question was irrelevant, the only possible answer being: ‘Does it matter?’

  Alice Cooper was an American hard-rock band from Phoenix. Alice Cooper was also the pseudonym adopted by singer Vincent Furnier, who sported an explicitly tight catsuit and horror-movie make-up, snarled like a sardonic bulldog, and yet still managed to convince 25% of his live audience (in an American survey) that he was actually a woman. David Bowie was a married man who claimed to be gay, pretended to fellate his guitarist’s instrument, and dabbled in imagery that was not so much ambiguous as polymorphous.

  Leader of the pack, by being the first of his generation to wear glitter on prime-time television, was Marc Bolan, eternal peacock and musical chancer (like Bowie, he’d thrown himself at every wave from beat to R&B to psychedelia to folk), with a penchant for pseudo-mystical verse and an utterly distinctive vocal bleat – an opportunist, but also a natural star. He’d won over the British underground with his hippie mythologising as part of an acoustic duo named Tyrannosaurus Rex. For the new decade, he streamlined their name to T. Rex, and reinvented himself as a rock ’n’ roller: part Sun Studios, c.1957; part bubblegum, c.1969; with a mastery of media manipulation, which made him an artful self-publicist. Bolan’s lyrics couldn’t deliver the cosmic insight that he claimed, but he knew how to concoct a hit single, whether it was as hypnotic as ‘Ride a White Swan’ or as anthemic as ‘Hot Love’. He would run out of tricks to turn by 1974, but had already conquered a generation for whom he represented a first encounter with the art of magic and the magic of artifice. Sadly, he lacked the innate sensitivity to the changing times which enabled David Bowie to move effortlessly through the 1970s, remodelling himself and his work with stunning efficiency and imagination.

  If Bowie and Bolan were the philosopher and cheerleader of what was soon being called glam rock, there were foot soldiers a-plenty, from the Beatles-inspired craftsmanship of Slade to the Neanderthal cacophony of Gary Glitter. As Julian Cope recalled, glam ‘would ultimately provide a safe haven12 for all the flotsam and jetsam of the music biz’ who ‘rushed to the pan stick and eyeliner in order to try and resuscitate their dormant, nay dead, careers’. Glitter was formerly Paul Raven, 32 years old when he scored his first hit; Alvin Stardust had been Shane Fenton (and before that Bernard Jewry), and was 31; Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter, once Ian Patterson, was 33 when he reached out to ‘All the Young Dudes’. Many of glam’s icons, then, were as old as the generation they were replacing; and, as Cope reflected, ‘glam rock may have had no more13 message than a single “Wake up!” But it was unashamedly attempting to be top entertainment at a time when most so-called serious rock was so far up its own ass that even putting on stage clothes was considered gauche by the delicate flowers of the singer-songwriter boom.’

  Eventually, everyone who still believed in the power of pop jumped aboard the glam bandwagon, from delicate flower Elton John (R&B singer turned confessional songwriter, now turned trussed-up fashion victim) to stalwarts such as Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. David Bowie even persuaded Lou Reed, veteran of the New York art-rock band the Velvet Underground, to don panda make-up and act effete, rather than his usual boorish self. Bowie and Reed would swiftly abandon glam once its shock value had eroded. Others who were less intelligent and sure-footed found the transition from camp theatricality to rock authenticity more difficult to achieve: both Slade and Sweet struggled for years to re-establish themselves as macho rock bands when TV clips of their beglittered heyday were so fresh in the memory. Bolan was the saddest case of all, living amidst the trappings of his dissipated stardom just long enough to proclaim himself the godfather of punk, before dying in a car crash. His boast seemed far-fetched in 1977, but the young pioneers of London punk were the children of glam, and there was only the shortest of musical paths between the two genres. Meanwhile, glam’s clown-like fashion sense was adopted by bands who took their music far more seriously, recasting the cartoons of the early 1970s as backdrops for horror movies worthy of the Hammer studio.

  There’s an incredible desire14
on the part of the public for the heavy and very unsubtle forms of music … Black Sabbath I would say are unsubtle. I don’t use that in a derogatory sense, but they have a very blunt and personal instrument of death and torture at their hands when they play, and that is what is appealing to a lot of people.

  Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull, 1971

  Heavy Metal Rock is amazingly15 popular. If all us smart-ass rock critics put it down so much, then who’s the fool? Either the audiences are out of their minds or else we are.

  Charles Shaar Murray, NME, 1973

  It was the most cynical of marketing ploys: using the name of a defunct rock group to sell tickets for a band that no one had ever heard. The manipulators were guitarist Jimmy Page, survivor of the British blues-psych band the Yardbirds, and his manager, Peter Grant. The solution? The (New) Yardbirds, boasting Page, a session bassist, and an unknown vocalist and drummer, fulfilling the commitments of a band whose two most famous assets, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, had long since departed. Only when the New Yardbirds reached North America in December 1968 did they dare to assume a fresh identity: as Led Zeppelin. Their bassist John Paul Jones recalled that their impact was immediate. ‘There were kids actually bashing16 their heads against the stage’, he said – not in anger or a sense of betrayal, but in the sheer elation of experiencing music so loud and relentless that its effect was transcendent.

  ‘They are a sort of release valve17 for our frustration and energy’, said a fan of another British hard rock band, Black Sabbath. ‘I think the volume they play at has a lot to do with their appeal for me – they work you up to a sort of pitch, which is almost an hysteria. I’d be disappointed if I come away from one of their concerts without feeling physically and mentally exhausted.’ The volume emitted by Deep Purple – proud of their reputation as the world’s loudest band – was so extreme that one exhilarated teenage fan was unable to hear anything for two weeks after a 1971 performance in a British town hall. ‘It was worth it’, he said afterwards.