It Was Great When It All Began

I was a regular Rocky fan.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, that is. I’m not the first person to write about this, not by a long shot. I won’t be the last. But it’s Halloween and I have an annual ritual of playing the soundtrack in my car and loudly singing all the parts this time of year, something I did this past weekend. I also watched a BBC stage production of this on Saturday, so it’s on my mind.

My first exposure to RHPS was back around 1980 or so. I was in college and working as a volunteer teaching assistant for the secondary gifted program in Greene County. One of the students had a copy of the Official Rocky Horror Picture Show Movie Novel and the record of the soundtrack.

A janitor found the Movie Novel left in the classroom and lost his shit. He turned it in to the principal, believing it to be little more than pornography and what the Hell was being taught in that gifted class anyway. The teacher was forced to sit through a no doubt uncomfortable meeting about this, and to her credit, went to bat for the students, eventually convincing the administration of the value of discussing these kinds of topics. I don’t know how she managed it, but kudos. The book was returned to the student and we all got the stinkeye from that janitor from that point on.

Being out in a rural setting we had no access to actually seeing the film, so my experience with it was exclusively through these artifacts. It would be a couple of years before I actually saw the movie at a midnight showing at the GeeBee’s shopping plaza in Washington, PA. It was the full-fledged audience participation event I expected. All of the props, all of the chaos. I vaguely remember someone tearing a toilet out of the floor in the men’s room, so there was a level of vandalism not usually associated with this as well, probably explaining why it was never screened there again.

I loved it. How could I not? The film was, and forgive my obvious metaphor here, a Frankensteinian collage of my favorite things: science fiction, horror, rock and roll, comic books, and sex.

Which probably says way too much about my priorities.

What I didn’t recognize at the time is the extent of the Pop Culture nexus RHPS really is for these elements. There are lots of connections I want to explore, so bear with me while I work this out.

RHPS is pretty specifically a product of the time and place in which it was created. It was first staged in London in 1973, firmly at the height of the Glam Rock movement. Glitter, costumes, camp, and sexual ambiguity were the order of the day. T Rex, The Sweet, Roxy Music and David Bowie, among many others, were scandalizing the stodgy keepers of the status quo on record and on TV with overtly sexualized, gender-bending performances. Glam was a short-lived phenomenon in the music world (though I could make the case that it never went away, just reformatted). It’s lifestyle was too extreme. It served as a short transition from what rock music had been up to that point and what it was going to become.

In the midst of all of the Glam indicators in RHPS it is Columbia who most clearly represents it. Her costume is all glitter and sequins, with character references to Betty Boop and Sally Bowles from Cabaret (another influential film in the Glam Rock canon).

Little Nell

Liza Minelli

Betty Boop

Columbia is torn between the past and the future, as represented by her love for both Eddie and her obsession with Frank. It makes complete sense to me that Columbia was in love with Eddie. Glam was in love with the music of the 50s. A tremendous amount of the genre (the artistic achievements of Bowie and a couple of other artists excepted), was a return to the aesthetic of the past. The social consciousness of the 60s, the experimentation of the Beatles, the jazz-influenced jam band sound of the Grateful Dead, and many other signifiers of the hippy generation were eschewed in favor of the three-minute pop song single. Both Gary Glitter and Alvin Stardust had been 50s era crooners who reinvented themselves as Glam stars. A lot of the music itself sounds like it could have been written a decade earlier. Roy Wood of Wizzard tricked himself out in more makeup and gaudiness than most, but his songs were direct sonic throwbacks to old time rock n’ roll.

Glam wasn’t alone in its love of the past. A full blown 50s revival was in the air. Grease premiered on stage in 1971. AmericanGraffiti hit the big screen in 1973 and Happy Days was just around the corner on the small screen in 1974.

For all of its subversion, RHPS is drenched in nostalgia. The most obvious examples of this are the film references. The late night, science fiction picture show was part of 50s culture as much as doo wop. Frank was a mix of the horror movie icons of Dr. Frankenstein and Dracula, with Riff Raff as his Igor/Renfield. The reference to Fay Wray, followed by Rocky climbing a tower and getting shot down is less than subtle. Rocky himself is a parody of the Charles Atlas ads that ran in every comic book ever for decades (an exaggeration, but not by much). Body building, and the magazines dedicated to it in the first half of the 20^th century are one of the direct influences on comic books and the superhero genre.

But Columbia fell in love with the future as well. Eddie only had half a brain after all, and Brad and Janet are the cliched archetypes of the 1950s teen. Nostalgia is at its heart, conservative. The belief that things were better in the good old days prevents growth and progress into new ways of thinking. These images of a somehow more innocent past are subverted not only by the clothing and sexuality of the film, but by actual history itself. By this time we were wounded by Viet Nam, and assassinations, and the death of the love and peace ideal of the 60s. In the middle of this moment we had Kent State and Watergate (Nixon’s resignation speech can be heard on the radio in the RHPS movie). To go back to the metaphor, ‟Darkness conquered Brad and Janet.” No wonder we were clamoring for some innocent nostalgia. But, once we remove the lens of sentimentality and acknowledge the darkness it’s impossible not to see it. ‟Still the beast is feeding.”

But as scary as the past may be, the future is more so. It is the great unknown. David Bowie’s Major Tom was alone in his capsule, the ultimate in alienation, while Ziggy Stardust was ‟a Starman, waiting in the sky,” who would, ‟like to come and meet us, but he’s afraid he’d blow our mind.” Frank N Furter exhorts us, ‟Don’t get strung out, by the way I look.” He knows he’s blown our minds.

And in the end both Ziggy and Frank had to die at the hands of their admirers. It was too much, too soon. The lifestyle is too extreme to carry into day to day living, but the encounter with it changes people.

In 1973 50s rock n’ roll was nostalgia, Glam was dying of its own excess, but RHPS anticipated what was coming. The leather and ripped clothes and makeup and anti-authoritarian mindset anticipated Punk, and in its use of horror imagery, more specifically Goth (Riff Raff and Magenta appear in the early scenes in Denton posed as the American Gothic painting). Not that this was the first appearance or only influence in music. Screamin Jay Hawkins, Arthur Brown, and Alice Cooper were openly utilizing these motifs in ways that probably influenced RHPS as much as it influenced what came after. It’s certainly debatable, but I can see direct lines from Glam to Punk to Goth (which I might talk about in a different post). To quote myself from one of my novels, ‟Goth is just Glam with the lights turned down.” Count the number of Glam songs covered by Bauhaus if you doubt me.

All of these elements come to together, and to tease out specific connections and influences can be difficult. To explore one example, as an aside (because we need one of those in a post that’s already tl;dr), I want to talk, briefly I promise, about the Runaways. There is an anecdote where their Svengali Kim Fowley took the girls out to see RHPS. This was significant enough that it was mentioned in at least two books that I’ve read, and possibly three (I don’t have them in front of me). Cherie Currie and Joan Jett are both on record as being heavily influenced by Glam acts (Bowie and Suzi Quatro, respectively, among others). Because of the timing they were lumped in with the burgeoning punk movement. You can see this clearly in their fashion. Cherie famously scandalized the rock press by wearing a bustier and thigh highs on stage when she was sixteen. Was this directly inspired by RHPS? Hard to say, but the imagery speaks for itself. Years later Joan Jett was cast as Columbia in a Broadway revival of RHPS and in the floorshow section of the play can be seen wearing an outfit remarkably similar to Cherie’s. Full circle.

Columbia

Cherie Currie

Joan Jett as Columbia

RHPS was a failure when it was first released, but over the years developed a cult following in repeated midnight showings around the globe. It is perhaps the most viewed movie in history. Hundreds of thousands of people (millions? Is that possible?), have gathered in the dark to not just watch, but to participate in this cultural phenomenon.

My friend Dr. Michael Chemers has written about this (source cited below). He talks at length about the RHPS Performance Cult. The movie has transformed into a participatory experience as opposed to something that is simply watched. It has become a mystery cult, where virgins, those who have not seen the movie, are initiated into the shared group experience. There is a call and response, where the congregation shouts out specific lines in response to what is happening on screen. Props are brought to the theater to simulate the experience.

In many theaters there were performance troupes who dressed in costumes and acted out the entire film. You can see this in the movie Perks of Being a Wallflower, filmed here in Pittsburgh at the Hollywood Theater, which had a long history of showing the film (in 2008, when Chemers article appeared, Pittsburgh had only one of three theaters in the country that still did this). While I have certainly danced the Time Warp I never officially participated in these performances, though I know several people who did.

This level of identification with something is the essence of religious experience, and if I may go out on a limb, of intense fandom of anything. We identify with something larger than ourselves and wish to emulate it. Fans go to concerts dressed as Ziggy Stardust, Alice Cooper, and KISS. We wear the sports jerseys of our favorite players. Comics conventions are filled with cosplayers with dozens of Deadpools, Harley Quinns and Doctor Whos. We pull on the sacred raiments of our obsession and engage in Participation Mystique.

But, as Dr. Chemers points out, watching RHPS on DVD in the comfort of your home changes your interaction with it. Fewer and fewer people are having the shared communal experience. The mystery cult has no place to congregate. It’s a shame because it is in the shared experience that the lessons of the sacrament become embodied in the real world, and I think there are many lessons to be learned from RHPS.

The first is the obvious mantra of ‟Don’t dream it. Be it.” It is a statement that speaks for itself. It is Joseph Campbell’s ‟Follow your bliss.” But, as important as this may be, I don’t think it is the main lesson we can learn. While there are many factors in any major social change I can’t help but wonder about just how much of a cultural impact RHPS has had on our perception and acceptance of sexuality. For thirty years thousands of people participated in a world that embraced transvestites, transexuals, transgendered, queer, bi, and straight characters.

In 1973 these were topics that very few people discussed openly. Bowie casually hugged his guitarist Mick Ronson on TV and Great Britain lost its mind at the perceived overt homosexuality of the act. We now live in a world where these issues are being dealt with in a much more open fashion. We still have light years to go for full acceptance, I understand that, and in no way do I want to diminish the very real struggles many people still endure. But, I know that for myself, this movie was an open door into a world I had not encountered, one that changed my perceptions. In these over-the-top caricatured characters I was able to recognize truths that went beyond the campiness of the film. Under the glitter and the makeup and the thigh highs there was the possibility of very real people trying to find their identity, trying to connect with other people.

There was the possibility, for everyone, of finding a light in the darkness of their lives.

Chemers, Dr. Michael. ‟Wild and Untamed Thing: The Exotic, Erotic, and Neurotic Rocky Horror Performance Cult.” in Reading Rocky Horror: The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Popular Culture. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed (Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2008)

KISS Dynasty

Writing my last post spurred some nostalgia for my teen fanaticism for the band KISS. I've written on this topic before. When the original band reunited and put the makeup back on in the late 90's I wrote a fairly lengthy article for In Pittsburgh about being a fan. I can't find an archive of that article anywhere online and while I'm pretty sure I have a copy it currently resides in some unopened box where I packed it in a move a couple of years ago. I don't want to rewrite all of that, but I do want to recount some things I discovered about the 1979 Dynasty tour.

The night I first met Chiharu (see my last post), June 15, 1979, was the opening night of the tour in Lakeland, Florida. I had seen KISS the year before in Pittsburgh on the Alive II tour (January 13, 1978). In the interim they had released their four solo albums, followed by Dynasty. It was an expensive year to be a KISS fan. Dynasty was met with mixed reviews and reactions from the fans. The single I Was Made For Loving You was widely decried as a sell-out disco song, but for all of the naysayers it ended up being one of their best-selling singles ever. I liked it. For the most part I liked the whole album. After the success of Ace's solo album his songs and voice were more of a presence on Dynasty than on any previous album, which I thought was a good thing.

I now know that this time period was the beginning of the end of the original band. Ace and Peter were overindulging in the Rock and Roll lifestyle and having trouble keeping up. Some members of the band weren't speaking to others. At the end of the tour Peter left the band (or was fired, depending on the source you read).

On June 15^th we didn't know any of this. In public KISS maintained the illusion of being one big happy family. I will say that we all felt that this was the album where we were more aware of the members individually than as a band. The solo albums contributed to that perception. When Dynasty came out I thought of the tracks as “This is a Paul song... Oh, this is an Ace song,) rather than listening to the whole as KISS songs. I now see this as evidence of the fracturing of the band.

There was a lot of anticipation leading up to the show. There was going to be an all new stage set. More importantly, they were going to reveal all new costumes. I remember a lot of press and secrecy about this at the time. It was rumored they were adding color to their outfits for the first time, branching out from the straight black and silver we had seen up until then. They had introduced character specific color themes on their solo albums, so we expected this to be part of it. To build mystique and suspense they refused to release pictures of the new costumes before the first show. We were going to see the big reveal.

These were the days of Festival seating, which basically meant first come, first serve, no assigned seats. Mark, Scott, Chiharu and I arrived at the Lakeland Civic Center and found some seats. This was Chiharu's first concert and being a fairly small woman she had some understandable concerns about braving the crowd down by the stage. Mark and I were pretty pumped for getting closer than we had been in Pittsburgh. Scott and Chiharu stayed in their seats while Mark and I pushed our way through the mass of people on the floor to a space about ten feet from center stage (yeah, I was smitten by Chiharu, love at first sight and all that... this was a chance to see KISS's new costumes up close. I regret nothing).

The opening band was a group called Nantucket and if not for this show I would never have heard of them either.

The lights went down. The famous opening line from the show echoed from the speakers; “You wanted the best. You got the best. The hottest band in the world... KISS!!!” Fog rolled out over the crowd, spotlights hit the stage and the four members of the band rose up out of the stage in all of their glory.

I'm probably in the minority of KISS fans here, but I have to say these are my favorite of their many costumes. They are colorful, ridiculous and completely over the top and that's what I love about them. Gene's armor looked like the skin of some giant Godzilla-like monster. Ace was covered in mirrors so that when spotlights hit him it looked like lights were shooting out of his body. Paul's purple tunic called to mind some fantasy world, the garb of Rock and Roll royalty, the King of the Night Time World (the song they launched into after the lights dimmed again and they took their places on stage).

I've known since that night that I was one of the first people in the world to see those costumes, but I discovered a few other firsts from that night I didn't know until a couple of weeks ago. Ace's smoking guitar was already legendary, but this was the first time his guitar levitated into the rafters after his solo. He then shot it down with a rocket from another guitar. This was great, but there was an even more significant addition to the show, a special effect that continues to this day. Gene had been doing the blood-spitting and fire-breathing pretty much from the beginning of their career, but this was the first time he flew. We weren't expecting it at all. Gene did his blood-spitting bit and then the lights dimmed. As close as we were we didn't see the stage hands hooking up the cables to his flying rig. Suddenly a spotlight hit Gene and the crowd roared. Then he simply levitated before our eyes, shooting thirty feet straight up to a platform over our heads. Once there he launched into God of Thunder and we kind of lost our minds.

I found some pictures online from the Lakeland show. These were credited to Jerry Bennett. Based on his perspective we were about ten to fifteen feet to his right.

A little over a month later Scott, Mark and I saw them again in Pittsburgh. It would be the last time until the reunion tour in Pittsburgh in 1996.

I discovered that there is a bootleg floating around online of their entire rehearsal for the Lakeland show. This was recorded at the same venue a night or two before. Apparently it has outtakes of the band shouting instructions to the lighting guys and by the end you can hear some of the tension between band members come out. This isn't exactly the concert I attended, but a neat artifact anyway.

For the completists out there here's the 1979 tour setlist (from Wikipedia)

1. King of the Night Time World (Paul Stanley)
2. Radioactive (Gene Simmons)
3. Move On (Paul Stanley)
4. Calling Dr. Love (Gene Simmons)
5. Firehouse (Gene Simmons Firebreathing) (Paul Stanley)
6. New York Groove (Ace Frehley) (lighted guitar)
7. I Was Made for Lovin' You (Paul Stanley)
8. Love Gun (Paul Stanley)
9. 2,000 Man (Ace Frehley Guitar-Solo,smoking guitar,flying guitar,rocket shooting guitar)
10. Tossin' and Turnin' (Peter Criss)
11. God of Thunder (Gene Simmons Bass-Solo, Bloodspitting and Flying-Stunt, Peter Criss Drum-Solo) (Gene Simmons)
12. Shout It Out Loud (Gene Simmons/Paul Stanley)
13. Black Diamond (Peter Criss, intro by Paul Stanley)
14. Detroit Rock City (Paul Stanley)
15. Beth (Peter Criss)
16. Rock and Roll All Nite (Gene Simmons)

Radioactive and Tossin' and Turnin' were dropped from the list after a few shows. Let Me Go, Rock 'n' Roll and Christine Sixteen took their places.

While I was in Florida a chain of convenience stores called
Magik Market were selling frozen soft drinks in these plastic cups.
They were released two per week. I was there for three weeks
so I never got the last two.

This was probably the height of my KISS fandom. By 1979 I was already starting to move on, echoing the whole of KISS fandom, apparently. I was getting into other music, other bands, other sounds. I had turned onto Cheap Trick and Blondie by this time, and was starting to flirt with some new sounds by bands like The Ramones and The Runaways. I picked up the next couple of KISS albums (and didn't HATE Music From the Elder the way most people did), but I just didn't care as much. By the time the makeup came off on Lick It Up both Peter and Ace were gone and for the most part, so was I. I kept a vague awareness of the band through the 80's but I just wasn't very interested. I wrote my In Pittsburgh article for the reunion show but I honestly didn't plan on going to the show. When they added a second night at the Civic Arena I caved and bought a ticket. It was an amazing recreation of the Alive II era, the first show I ever saw, so I ended up having a lot of fun, fully aware that it was more nostalgia than anything else.

I've seen them again in the last couple of years with Eric Singer and Tommy Thayer playing the parts of the Catman and the SpaceAce. I have mixed feelings. They still put on a great show. The spectacle of the concert experience remains pretty true to the original. I've had a great time at both shows and saw some younger fans really enjoying a recreation of something they never had the chance to see. I know a lot of older fans just can't accept the new version. Maybe I've seen comic book superheroes recast with new people under the masks often enough that this doesn't really bother me that much. I miss Peter and Ace but then I miss being eighteen years old as well. Some things can just never be repeated.

Sweet Obsession

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.

They quickly jumped onto the fashion and make-up that was to become the signature of Glam Rock. It started with simple stage make-up and clothing and quickly escalated from there. Whereas T.Rex's Marc Bolan's experiments with glitter and feather boas was seen as just part of who he was, and David Bowie's stage personas were crafted with a more calculating eye, The Sweet were, to use the British vernacular, just taking the piss out of people. Through their sense of humor they took the image to extremes, usually pre-dating and influencing everyone else in the scene. But every time they took the look up a notch more people noticed and they became more famous. They tapped into the androgyny and repressed sexuality of the scene and played it to the hilt. Though straight they embraced a lot of cliché gay imagery and mannerisms.

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.

Are you ready, Steve?