L.A. Times, Calender Issue
Sunday, July 27, 1997
Something Has Survived, Baby
It was a brief, lurid, glittery blast that couldn't last.
But in Velvet Goldmine,
writer-director Todd Haynes rockets back in time to the arty,
sexually
outlandish pop scene known as glam rock.
By DAVID GRITTEN
RAY STUDIOS, England--"Oh! You Pretty Things
Don't you know you're driving your
Mamas and Papas insane."
--David Bowie, 1971
* * *
This is a film set with a whole lot of
ch-ch-changes going on.
Actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers looks as if he stepped
from the
pages of a 25-year-old British music magazine, dressed
as he is in
platform heels and a figure-hugging sweater, with a
leopard-skin
scarf trailing from his neck. He wears a reddish-brown
wig of spiky,
layered hair, with an ultrashort fringe exposing his
entire forehead.
One finally becomes accustomed to Rhys Meyers
looking this
way, when he disappears for half an hour and reemerges,
this time
stripped to the waist, clad in tight, silky, flared
cream pants--and
this time his hair is a spiky mass of bright blue.
Ewan McGregor, the charismatic star of last year's
Trainspotting, is doing some ch-ch-changes of his
own. The
morning sees him in leather jacket and pants, but his
after-lunch
look includes a dirty-blond, shoulder-length wig,
skin-tight
snakeskin trousers and black nail varnish.
Of course, if you make a film about glam rock,
it's only to be
expected that a day's shooting involves more costume
changes than
a Diana Ross concert.
Glam rock? The phrase, more familiar to British
ears than
American ones, defines a short period in pop history
(roughly
1969-1973) when a number of artists--mostly
British--experimented with the whole notion of stage
identity and
persona. Some also pushed the boundaries of gender
stereotypes in
pop music and were cheerfully ambivalent about their
own sexuality.
Now the outlandish nature of this era is being
recaptured in
Velvet Goldmine, a film by renegade independent
American
writer-director Todd Haynes.
"What was so interesting about that brief time,"
says Haynes'
longtime producer, Christine Vachon, "is that not only
was it OK to
[experiment] with gender, you had to in order to be
musically
successful.
"When you see some old Top of the Pops [British
TV music
shows] from that time, even bands like the Rolling
Stones, who
weren't associated with glam rock, wore lipstick and
feather boas.
The whole movement was fascinating. In the end it went
as far as it
could. It was almost too dangerous."
The key, enduring British artists in the glam rock
movement
were David Bowie and the group Roxy Music, initially
led both by
its singer, art-school graduate Bryan Ferry and
keyboard player
Brian Eno. Marc Bolan's group, T. Rex (who drenched
themselves
in glitter), enjoyed commercial success with a string
of hit singles;
other artists, like the Sweet and Gary Glitter,
co-opted glam rock
fashions while staying firmly within the realms of
disposable bubble
gum pop.
Bowie and Roxy Music changed appearances like so
many
discarded masks for successive tours and albums. Bowie,
first seen
as a sharp-suited London Mod, grew his hair long and
effeminate
and donned a dress, then subsumed his character into
Ziggy
Stardust, a campy, glitter-caked rock star with spiky,
lurid red hair
and an extravagant, theatrical stage act. As his song
"The Bewlay
Brothers" puts it, he was: "chameleon, comedian,
Corinthian and
caricature."
The first two Roxy Music albums show them as a
space age
glitter-clad art-rock band; Eno, in thick makeup and
mascara, used
to wear creations with exquisite long feathers
sprouting from the
shoulders. Later, Ferry would appear as a World War
II-era GI, a
suave lounge lizard in a white tuxedo and an Argentine
gaucho.
Glam rock manifested itself differently in the
U.S. The Velvet
Underground (especially Lou Reed) and Iggy Pop (of the
Stooges)
were Bowie's main American musical reference points,
but the
nearest visual equivalent was the New York Dolls, who
emerged as
glam rock waned in Britain. "The movement got caught up
and
quickly reworked into heavy metal in the States," says
Vachon,
"and there it stayed."
Glam rock's defining moment came in 1972 on the
release of
Bowie's album "Hunky Dory," when he told a music
journalist: "I'm
gay and always have been." Back then, rock stars simply
did not
say such things; Bowie later recanted: "It was probably
the most
provocative thing one could say in 1972. Drug talk was
positively
establishment, and it sort of felt like the era of
self-invention [was]
coming up."
Still, his disclosure was a clarion call to gay
British teenagers
who until then had found little for them in popular
culture. One such
kid, 15 at the time, was Peter King, who has the
frantic task of
supervising the actors' hair on Velvet Goldmine.
"When Bowie
came out and said that," he recalls, "it was a big, big
number."
"Hunky Dory" is full of coded gay references; its
key song,
"Changes," is virtually a coming-out anthem:
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Don't tell them to grow up and out of it.
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