A few
years ago while visiting friends in California I made my first trip
to San Francisco. Mike and I spent the day seeing sights and eating
great food and having fun. Completely fortuitously Cherie Currie,
former singer for the 70s band The Runaways, had announced a concert
in San Francisco the same day that we had already planned on being
there. When I discovered this I called Mike and told him we were
going, then bought tickets online. I wrote about that concert in more
detail HERE, so that isn’t what this is about.
There
were two experiences I had while waiting in line outside of the Red
Devil Lounge waiting to go into the show. We were approached by a
homeless man. He was the epitome of the downtrodden. His hair and
beard were long, dirty and matted. He was thin and filthy, wearing
clothes so ragged I’m not sure how they stayed on him. He came
straight to me and I fully expected him to ask us for money and then
move on.
‟Hey,”
he said to me. ‟Nice shirt. They’re one of my favorite bands!”
I was
wearing a t-shirt with the logo of the Glam Band The Sweet (Ballroom
Blitz, Fox on the Run). Perhaps ungenerously I assumed this was just
his opening line and the ask for money would come next. Nope. He
enthused about The Sweet, telling me about seeing them in the 70s. He
was knowledgable about them and we had a completely enjoyable
conversation, just two guys who shared an interest in a specific
band, swapping stories about favorite songs. For the duration of the
conversation he lit up, happy to be just talking and connecting. At
the end he just smiled and started to go on his way. He never asked
me for a dime (though I did give him some money, which, though
grateful, he seemed hesitant to take).
Just
after he left two couple walked by. Older. Well-dressed. Out for an
evening. One of the women looked up and saw the marquee which
announced, ‟Tonight: Cherie Currie!”
‟Cherry
curry?” she said while scrunching up her nose. ‟I don’t think
that would taste good at all.”
Do
you ever get stupidly obsessed with something for no apparent reason?
It could be anything, and suddenly you just can't get enough of it?
Then you feel the need to share and talk about your obsession with
everyone you know (like I'm about to do in this blog post)? It
happens to me every once in awhile. Sometimes it's because I've
discovered something new and want to know everything I can about it.
As bizarre as it may sound to some people I love to research the
things I get obsessed with. Some of that is my lifelong love of
history, some of it is just wanting to know where things come from. I
did it with Arthurian fiction, mythology, and any one of a number of
other topics that have captured my interest over the years. I get
into a new band and start discovering their precedents and
influences. I go back farther and farther and discover a lot of great
music along the way. The same is true of the comics I'm into. Both of
these hobbies are life-long obsessions for me, but I'm still finding
connections I didn't know existed.
And
then sometimes it's a renewed obsession with something I've been into
for a long time. Something reignites my interest and I'm off for a
couple of weeks reading and/or listening to everything I can. It
happened last year with David Bowie when I read the Starman
biography. It happened recently with Love and Rockets (the
comic... I swear I'll write those blogs someday), and I have spent a
lot of time lately rereading them.
The
last two weeks it has been the 1970's Glam Rock band The Sweet.
MickTucker-Drums, Brian Connelly-Vocals, Steve Priest-Bass, Andy Scott-Guitar
You
probably know them from their songs Little Willy, Ballroom
Blitz, Fox on the Run, and Love is Like Oxygen.
Chances are those are the only songs by The Sweet you've heard unless
you're a fan. It started when I listened to a collection of live
tracks and studio outtakes on Spotify recently. Even though I've
listened to them off and on for years and have read about them and
watched some documentaries and YouTube videos (see... not really a
casual fan before all this), something about this collection set off
my obsessive tendencies. I've been tracking down obscure and
out-of-print music, rewatching the documentaries, searching the
internet... the whole bit. I discovered there was a biography of the
band called Blockbuster: The True Story of The Sweet and
luckily my local library had a copy in stock (Yay for the Carnegie
Library of Pittsburgh!). There is a long out-of-print autobiography
by bassist Steve Priest called Are You Ready, Steve? that I
would love to read. Anyone have $900 for the Buy-It-Now copy I saw on
Ebay?
The
Sweet had a strange and varied career. They went through several
changes in style and public perception, from Bubblegum to Pop Rock to
Hard Rock to Prog Rock (though the categories are debatable, I'm
sure). In the beginning they seemed to be little more than a
teenybopper Bubblegum Pop band, and they were very successful at it.
As much as we music fans tend to think of the early 70's as the time
of the birth of bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and many
others of this ilk, the truth is, in Great Britain at least, and to a
large extent here in the US, the top 40 was full of Bubblegum Pop.
Sugar Sugar by The Archies, an overtly made-up band based on
the comic book characters, was the top-selling #1 song of 1969. There
was a lot of money to be made with Bubblegum and a lot of people were
making it. Two of the most successful purveyors of Bubblegum were the
British songwriting team of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. For several
years they churned out one top 10 song after another for a variety of
bands, The Sweet among them.
On a lot of these early singles, though
the vocals and harmonies were by the four members of the band, most
of the music was performed by studio session musicians. This was a
fairly common practice then, and The Sweet weren't the only
successful band this happened to. Unlike many others, The Sweet were
actually fairly accomplished musicians and constantly pushed to be
allowed to record on their own records. They were allowed to do so on
most of their b-sides. One of the qualities that set Sweet apart from
many of their contemporaries was the strength of their incredible
vocal four-part harmonies. Queen is known for the same, and are
probably the undisputed champions. None of the members of Sweet could
match Freddie Mercury's sheer range and versatility. But, as a
distinct band sound, The Sweet were doing this for quite some time
before Queen's first album hit the shelves.
Benny Hill and Monty Python could dress
up like old tarts and it was funny. The Sweet, and the rest of the
movement, were threatening to the middle class, in terms of image if
not the music they were producing at the time. Bassist Steve Priest
in particular went out of his way to stir things up, from wearing hot
pants on Top of the Pops (a good six months before Bowie did the same
thing to public outcry), to appearing on a Christmas special dressed
as a gay stormtrooper, replete with WWI spiked German helmet,
lipstick, rouge, and a little Hitler mustache.
I can't find a single still image of this on the internet.
Priest once described The
Sweet's approach to all of this as “more camp than a row of tents”.
Though
they wanted to be taken seriously as a Rock band, their reputation as
Bubblegum teenybopper fodder kept critics and a more mature audience
from taking them seriously. The other problem was that the singles
were making them ridiculously wealthy. It was difficult to turn your
back on another Chinn-Chapman composition that was going to go into
the top 10. They did eventually begin to move past this impasse,
primarily by being allowed to play on their records, and on the
strength of their live performances.
Living
in the States I didn't know any of this. The Glam movement never
really took hold here in the same way as it did elsewhere, and I'm
just young enough to have missed it anyway. I was catching the
tail-end of it with Elton John's costuming and a couple of Bowie
singles. I was into Alice Cooper and jumped on the KISS bus as soon
as I saw them, but they were both darker, less androgynous versions
of Glam. I'm pretty sure if I had seen pictures of the Sweet in full
regalia I would have been interested, but by the time I was reading
the actual Rock magazines the Sweet weren't being covered a whole
lot, and when they were their image had moved on. I bought the
singles of Ballroom Blitz (another Chinn-Chapman tune), and
Fox on the Run (the first single written and produced by the
band, and their biggest hit in the US), and really loved both songs.
I remember looking at their Desolation Boulevard album in
record stores based on the strength of the singles, but for some
reason I never picked it up. There was probably a new KISS album I
needed to buy on my limited budget.
Sometime
in 1976 or '77 I joined the Columbia House record club. You sent in a
penny and got 10 or 12 albums, then were obligated to buy several
more at full price over the next three years. I don't specifically
remember most of the records I purchased through this service, but I
did choose Give Us a Wink by The Sweet as part of my original
purchase. Having never heard the British term wank before I
didn't get any of the sexual innuendo (though the less-than-subtle
line “up to my balls inside her” in the song Yesterday's Rain
certainly, ahem, pricked up my ears).
On the original album the eye on the left was a die-cut hole in
the album sleeve. An inner sleeve had several different images
of an eye, from wide open to closed. When you slid the inner
sleeve out the cover appeared to wink at you. You don't get
that with CD's and mp3's.
Based on the singles I had
heard this was not the album I expected. I now know this was the
first album the band wrote and performed entirely on their own, and
they were going full-on hard rock. Whatever my expectations, I grew
to really love this album, and it remains in my personal echelon of
favorite records from my teen years.
But,
much to the band's dismay, the album really didn't replicate the
sales success of earlier efforts. They were a band that seemed
plagued by bad luck and bad timing. At every turn it seemed, just as
they were poised to take that next step, something set them back.
Some of their problems were of their own making, of course, but
others were just ridiculous. BBC Radio went on strike just when they
released a single, so it went nowhere. BBC thought the phrase “for
God's sake” in the single Turn It Down was blasphemous and
refused to play it (oh, how times have changed). They were invited to
open for The Who by Pete Townsend, who was a big fan of theirs
apparently. This would probably have been the biggest show at this
point of their career. But singer Brian Connelly was involved in an
assault and got kicked in the throat, making him unable to sing for
months (and by all accounts he never recovered full use of his
voice). They had to back out of the show.
There
was one last surge of popularity. The song Love is Like Oxygen
hit the charts in America in the late 70's. Like their entire career,
they were counted out, but then managed to squeeze out another
success. But that was pretty much the end. By this time the ravages
of alcohol abuse had taken their toll on Connelly and he left the
band. The other three continued on for three more albums that no one
bought (as a fan I didn't even know they existed until I read the
biography). There was an attempt at a reunion in the late 80's but
Connelly's health prevented it from going forward.
Connelly
died in 1997 from a series of heart attacks, drummer Mick Tucker in
2002 from leukemia. At present Steve Priest maintains a version of the band in America with all new members. Guitarist Andy Scott does
the same thing in England and Europe. Both bands tour and perform the
classic songs. Scott's band has released a couple of albums of new
material that sounds remarkably like the original band.
So
why this obsession on my part right now? I'm not sure. Maybe I'm just
feeling nostalgic, though in truth I really didn't experience much of
their career first hand. I didn't even hear the vast majority of
their songs until they were rereleased on CD in the 90's. But, thanks
to a couple of singles and one album they are a band that is linked
to my youth. I can't see the makeup and costumes and stage
spectaculars of a lot of modern artists without thinking of what came
before (and I'm old enough to realize that fans of Liberace probably
felt that way about The Sweet, at least in terms of fashion). Part of
it is simply that it's fun. It's over the top and slightly ridiculous
and just when it needs to it really rocks and most people don't know
anything about it.
I'll
leave you with a video of Ballroom Blitz. This song probably
sums up The Sweet better than any other single song. It's a Chinn and
Chapman top single. It has great Connelly vocals, driving Mick Tucker
drums, some great rock guitar from Andy, and the requisite amount of
Steve Priest camping it up. Enjoy. It's a lot of fun.
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