Glamrock for a Gloomy Friday Afternoon

[dxmachina]

Raining a lot outside.

Apart from some individual songs, I wasn't much into glam back in the day. Or even much today, but I do like this one, "Ballroom Blitz" by the Sweet. There's some nifty drumming, and it's got the over the top vocal bridge by the bass player. I mostly remember the Sweet for one of the worst songs ever inflicted on me back in my college days, "Little Willie."

Comments

[hackerguitar.livejournal.com]

Whatever else can be said of glam, it was ridiculously fun & easy to play. Glam's theatrics can directly be called the precursor to new wave....

The one thing that glam never got right was having actual, you know, music behind the show. If they had, then glam would be more than a footnote in a Greil Marcus essay these days.

[hecubot.livejournal.com]

Dude! As you schooled me on the blues, let me call you to account on La Glam.

Mick Ronson was most certainly a very musical guitarist. Phil Manzanera - while not as wanky as some of his prog-era peers - had tone and taste for miles. And even freakin' Bill Nelson started as a glam rocker.

Glam also featured a number of extremely influential producers to get that sound. Mike Leander's sound behind Gary Glitter's pop hits was revolutionary and massive. Eno, of course, was a) glam and b) a sonic genius.

[hackerguitar.livejournal.com]

I agree with some of that, because you brought some folks to mind who I hadn't considered in the genre.

That's interesting; I didn't think of Mick Ronson as glam - I thought of him as proto-punk. Phil Manzanera I thought of as sort of a Brian-Eno-mold heavy-subculture textural sort of art-house player rather than glam. But you're right; they're both pretty amazing and they do fall into the subculture.

Mike Leander....well, we shall agree to disagree on that; I find his production to be a harbinger of Johnny Marr's fill-every-available-space production technique, with waaaaay too much compression. It gives me ear fatigue.....

It's what happened after Glyn Johns did Who's Next by using SM58s on a Twin and used the trim on the board as a de facto crude compressor; suddenly, every producer in the free world was cranking up ever more tube compression to fill space with white noise, which culminated (for my ears, at any rate) in the ludicrously lacking dynamics and brittle sound of Clapton's Journeyman album. Opinions vary, however...

Eno, though == sonic genius without a doubt. Not a question there. I know he was glam but I still can't get my head around the transformation from that to "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts."....

[dxmachina.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Glam fight!

About Ronson, my snarky answer to the original comment was going to be "David Bowie waves hello." It does seem like it would've been pretty easy to switch from glam to punk.

Of course for real excess, there were the prog rock bands that also dipped into glam for the outfits. My ex was a huge fan of a lot of them, some of which spilled over to me.

<Hangs head in shame...>