GLAM ROCK MADE FAR LESS IMPACT IN THE US HOT 100 THAN IT DID IN THE BRITISH CHART. DURING ANOTHER OF ROCK'S SLOW MOMENTS, THERE WAS IN NORTH AMERICA NO OVERT FOCUS OF ADORATION, NOTHING HYSTERICAL OR OUTRAGEOUS IN 1974.
While precedents were being forged by the likes of the New York Dolls in the city's twilight zone, adolescents and post-psychedelic casualties had to make their own amusements. Woodstock spirituality was forgotten like last year's tie-dyed grandad vest. Cheap spirits, downers, head-banging and streaking all caught on during this apocryphal year.
At roughly the same mental level as such desperate diversions were combos like Rush, the Climax Blues Band, Supertramp and Bachman-Turner Overdrive as well as the better-known "dinosaur bands" lampooned in the music press as either over-the-hill like the Grateful Dead or wholesomely Americanized like Fleetwood Mac. Still, at least they were an excuse for friends to get smashed out of their brains together with the drugs on offer in the toilets, and hurl urine-filled beer-cans stagewards if the band didn't boogie or play the good old good ones in the good old way.
If these squalid entertainments didn't appeal, consumers could turn to what was once the squarest, most right wing subdivision of rock. From the late Sixties, Nashville - the Hollywood of C&W - had been beckoning with greater urgency to purveyors of more generalized pop, albeit of a kind not uninfluenced by country's lyrical preoccupations and melodic appeal. Jerry Lee Lewis would rise anew as a country star, and Elvis would get wise too with 'Kentucky Rain', Tony Joe White's 'Polk Salad Annie' et al, either as hit singles or highlights of his Las Vegas pageants.
C&W had started tickling the fancy of a younger audience via albums like the Downliners Sect's The Country Sect, the Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline. Before his death in 1973, ex-Byrd Gram Parsons had discussed with Rolling Stone Keith Richards an even richer blend of C&W and rock for an audience still biased against one or the other.
Taking cues from Nashville's spellbinding gaudiness, its revamped music and the popularity of spaghetti westerns, bars and clubs throughout the globe transformed themselves during the Seventies into parodies of either Wild West saloons or truckers' road houses where conversations would be peppered with Deep South slang picked up from Merle Haggard albums, C.B.McCall's citizens' band 'Convoy' monologue and country rock standards like 'Okie From Muskogee' and Kris Kristofferson's 'Help Me Make It Through The Night'. Even if these hadn't made the Top 10, they were as well known as many that had.
Kristofferson and Tony Joe White were among a new breed of Southern songwriters considerably less pretentious and artistically self-centred than the Melanies and Neil Youngs up north. From Elvis downwards, their compositions attracted numerous cover versions. Broadly speaking, the milieu was of tougher stamp than the soporific country-rock wafting from the West Coast. Then in vogue were Loggins and Messina, sugary John Denver, Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles whose Greatest Hits compilation would be ensconced in the US album lists for most of 1976. Also popular that year - and those succeeding - was New Jersey's Bruce Springsteen, a singing composer with a Yogi Bear vibrato and energetic stage act that put him a cut above James Taylor.
From just over the border in Philadelphia emanated David Bowie's "plastic soul" album, 1975's Young Americans from which was taken 'Fame', the first US Number 1 for Bowie, whose glam threads had been ditched. Ringo Starr, Roy Orbison and other unlikely rockers also absorbed aspects of the City of Brotherly Love's trend-setting moderato style that had put the Three Degrees, the Stylistics and their sort on the musical map. Exhaling from late-night stereos were countless feathery "Philly soul" duplications: all synthesized string backwash, Shaft chukka-wukka guitars and a prominent backing chorale lowing an overstretched coda as the main vocalist's hopes of imminent sexual congress increase.
Beyond the mush, "Philly soul" was a key source of chart ballast as disco fever sashayed towards its John Travolta zenith. Moving in fast, the Bee Gees metamorphosed from Sixties teen icons to disco paladins when their sound-track to Saturday Night Fever filled dance floors throughout the world, selling millions in the process. They'd hired flesh-and-blood musicians for the sessions but their example did little to forestall the rising tide of a synthesizer-processed "bass guitar", soon to yield to the "twanging plank" noise that would plague Eighties rock.
