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Flash in the Band

In the Seventies, More Than Just The Sound Got Loud

"Ground control to Major Tom... " The lights dim. "Commencing countdown, engines on..." In the dark, an engine whirs. "Check ignition, and may God's love be with you..." A spotlight falls on a slim figure of a man sailing out toward the audience on a cherry picker. With chalk­white face, painted lips, orange hair, and an almost catatonic demeanor, Ziggy Stardust breaks into "A Space Oddity."

Below him, his fans shriek. They've come, not to a rock concert, but to a show—not to hear David Bowie, the man behind the makeup, but to idolize Ziggy Stardust, his rock­star persona.

In the seventies, the garage-band sound of rock's earliest days was gone. Rock 'n' roll had hit the big time, and every band—whether art groups like Pink Floyd, pumped-up, dressed-up soul acts like Parliament-Funkadelic, or the enduring king of high fashion kitsch, Elton John—went along with it. With big hair, big clothes, big sound, big light shows, and big concert venues, the bands of the seventies pushed every possible limit.

But none pushed so hard as the glam rockers. With makeup, flash pots, fireworks, and props, drawing on everything from Broadway to Sgt. Pepper, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Kiss, and their ilk took showmanship to the extreme. "Everybody got tired of all that peace and love," Cooper said. "Something had to happen that would be a backlash."

For several years, David Bowie was Ziggy Stardust—"the definitive rock 'n' roll star," Bowie explained. "It was somewhere between A Clockwork Orange and Kabuki theater. I had always loved the theater, and I loved the idea of combining it with rock." So it was the costumed and painted spaceman, Ziggy, who played guitar and gave interviews—until Bowie, his mental health threatened by the intensity of the part, gave Ziggy up.

Alice Cooper mixed horror films, chorus lines, and guitars. With dripping eyeliner, clad in skin-tight leather or white tie and tails, he pranced among electric chairs, guillotines, and a gallows. "We were the band that drove the stake through the heart of the love age," he laughed. When people said he bit the heads off chickens (he never did), Cooper encouraged the stories. It fit his persona.

Eventually, the shows got bigger than the songs. Kiss—with its clown makeup and explosions—moved beyond archetype into caricature. So ubiquitous, so harmless, that Kiss even had a line of action figures for its youngest fans.

But those young fans listened. One of them, Trent Reznor, grew up to become lead singer of Nine Inch Nails, a Gothic-industrial-punk band. Thrashing around the stage, smashing instruments in his Theater of Doom, Reznor freely acknowledges his rock 'n' roll fathers: the glam rockers David Bowie and Kiss.

REAL HISTORY—THE HISTORY OF ROCK 'N' ROLL airs Monday, August 5, through Friday, August 9, from 9 to 11 p.m., repeating at midnight.

The 70's—Have A Nice Day airs Thursday, August 8, at 10 p.m. and 1 a.m.