Rebels of Glam, Rebels of Punk

1973 was the year in which Glam became a national craze throughout Britain and other Western countries.
Effectively there were two major strands of Glam in the hay day years of 1971-‘74, one being allied to the serious, nay consciously artistic, Rock tradition, the other, to the more commercial end of the music…pure Pop in other words. Among those British acts and artists affiliated to the former were David Bowie and Roxy Music, and at a later date, Cockney Rebel, Queen and Sparks, while those who were more Pop-oriented included T.Rex, the Sweet, Slade, Wizzard and Gary Glitter. Foremost among US Glam Rockers were Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Jobriath and the New York Dolls, while many other American musicians were touched by it, including Aerosmith and Kiss, and singer-songwriter, Todd Rundgren, who is a serious candidate for the most gifted Rock artist of them all.
In Britain, Glam had been carried into the Pop mainstream as early as 1970 by T.Rex’s Marc Bolan, born to a working class Jewish couple, Simeon and Phyllis Feld, in 1947 in Hackney Hospital, East London.
Bolan had been featured in 1962 in a magazine called “Town”, as one of the Faces, or leading Mods of Stamford Hill to the north east of the city, although by then he'd moved with his family to a council house in Summerstown near the pleasant and affluent suburb of Wimbledon.
He went on to achieve major success as one half of the acoustic duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex, the other being multi-instrumentalist Steve Peregrin Took who, like Bolan, was a leading figure of London’s Hippie underground centred on Ladbroke Grove. In 1970, though, Took was replaced by percussionist Mickey Finn, who shared Bolan’s love of old-time Rock and Roll.
Soon afterwards, Bolan shortened the name of the band to T.Rex, and they had their first top 5 hit in the shape of “Ride a White Swan”. By the time of their first number one the following year, T. Rex were a four-piece band, and Bolan, the biggest British teen sensation since the heyday of Beatlemania. The Bolan phenomenon was dubbed TRextasy by the British press, while Bolan’s startlingly pretty face adorned the walls of teenage bedrooms all throughout the land.
In truth, though, extreme androgyny had been a major feature of Rock music all throughout its history, notably through acts and artists as diverse as the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper and the Stooges, who were among the foremost pioneers of Glam Rock.
However, it could be said that its true founding father had been Rhythm and Blues shouter Richard Penniman, better known as Little Richard. After all when it comes to Rock and Roll, everything can be traced back to the early days and beyond that to the Blues themselves.
As a boy, Richard attended the New Hope Baptist Church in his native Macon, Georgia, and sang Gospel songs with his family as The Penniman Singers, his favourite singers being Gospel legends Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He joined Sister Rosetta onstage in Macon at the age of 13, in 1945 after she heard him singing before the concert. What's more, he had serious ambitions of becoming a preacher.
By 1951, however, the world had begun to beckon, and he won a talent contest in Atlanta that led to a recording contract with RCA Victor, but the four records he subsequently released all flopped. Around about the same time, he came under the sway of an outrageous Rhythm and Blues musician by the name of Esquerita, who shaped his unique piano style.
Esquerita is also believed to have influenced his increasingly flamboyant image, although self-styled King of the Blues Billy Wright, who piled his pomaded hair high on his head and wore eye liner and face powder, was also an influence in this respect. Real success came for Richard in 1955 with “Tutti Frutti”, which has been cited as the true starting point for the Rock and Roll revolution; but within two years, he'd quit the business and returned to his faith.
Few Rock stars have been as vocal in their condemnation of Rock and Roll as he has been. He has been quoted as saying that “Rock and Roll is driving people from Christ”, and that he himself “was directed and commanded by another power” at the height of his influence as a Rock and Roll star, and which he has identified as “a power of darkness”. But the darkness of Glam was as nothing in comparison to that which succeeded it.

By the end of '73, the first wave of Glam had all but dispersed, although it was to experience repeated periodic revivals, notably in the '80s through the New Romantic movement in the UK, and the Glam Metal scene in the US. It still exists to some degree...yet with its power to shock effectively reduced to nothing, such is the extent to which the West has become inured to outrage.
Within three years, it had been supplanted by a movement which, if it were at all possible, was even more outrageous, and this was Punk.
Punk's origins lay in the US among the so-called Garage bands of the 1960s, who attempted to emulate the rougher acts of the British Invasion, such as the Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Troggs and the Pretty Things, who were themselves heavily indebted to American Rhythm and Blues. But it was the distinct New York variant that exerted the greatest influence on the British Punk uprising...easily the most momentous of them all...and largely through the influence of a brilliant young London entrepreneur by the name of Malcolm McLaren.
McLaren, whose Jewish mother had owned a shmatte factory in London's East End was a former art student turned boutique owner, who by early 1972 was selling '50s style clothing - among other items - designed by his then partner Vivienne Westwood through an outlet at 430 Kings Road, Chelsea, which he'd named Let it Rock. It exists to this day as part of Dame Vivienne's global fashion empire as World's End, which it was renamed in late 1980.
In the late 1960s, he'd been drawn to the subversive ideas of the Paris Situationists, believed to have played a part in fomenting the '68 riots, themselves offshoots of the post-war Lettrists, who were very much precursors of the British Punk variant. He brought them to bear as he set about developing the Punk look in mid '70s London.
In 1975 he became the manager of the disintegrating US Glam band the New York Dolls, designing red leather outfits for them in tandem with a new pseudo-Communist image, which proved a disastrous move, and they split up soon afterwards.
Yet, while in NYC, he came across a fledgling Punk outfit by the name of the Neon Boys, featuring two young former Sandford Preparatory students by the name of Tom Verlaine - named after the French Symbolist poet Paul - and Richard Hell... born Thomas Miller and Richard Meyers in Morristown, NJ. and Lexington, Ky. respectively.
He was especially impressed by Hell's unique image of spiky hair - allegedly inspired by the famous tousle-haired photograph of Rimbaud by Etienne Carjat - and torn tee-shirt held together with safety pins. He attempted to persuade Hell to return with him to London, but the poet and musician demurred, so McLaren returned alone in mid ‘75.
Some time afterwards, he renamed his Kings Road boutique Sex and set himself up as the manager of a group known as the Strand, after “Do the Strand” by Roxy Music. The Strand had originally been formed by three working class denizens of the Hammersmith - Shepherds Bush - Acton area of West London, allegedly at the urging of guitarist Warwick "Wally" Nightingale.
Mclaren agreed to be their manager only on the condition that founder member Wally - deemed "too nice" by the entrepreneur - be ejected from the band, and so he was. Then, when a charismatic young London Irishman by the name of Johnny Rotten - born John Lydon in Finsbury Park, N4 - came onboard as lead singer, and the band was renamed the Sex Pistols, they were set to spearhead the most infamous of Punk’s many strains…the British one.
From its London axis, Punk spread like a raging plague throughout ‘77, even infecting the most genteel English suburbs with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity, which, fused with a defiant DIY ethic and brutal back-to-basics Rock produced something utterly unique even by the standards of the time.
It was genuinely dangerous to dress like a Punk in that landmark year; and if you chose to do so, you lived in constant fear of attack or abuse. After all, Punk's culture of insolence and outrage was extreme even by the standards of previous British youth cults such as the Teds, the Rockers, the Mods, the Greasers, the Skins, the Suedeheads and the Smoothies.
The truth is that Britain in those days was a country still dominated to some degree by pre-war moral values, which were Victorian in essence, and a cultural war was being fought for the soul of the nation. This explains the incredible hostility Punks attracted from some members of the general public. It could be said, therefore, that Punks were the avant-garde of the new Britain in a way that would be inconceivable today.
Today in Britain as well as every other nation on earth, aspects of the Punk revolution can be seen and heard at any time by anyone of any age on the internet, where they exist as minor elements of the teeming Babel that is the entertainment industry, provoking no more resistance from an exhausted culture than old film footage of Sesame Street.