“The true fairy of rock”: The forgotten legacy of Jobriath
Jobriath was the ephemeral glam rock dream who flew too close to the sun. He had “talent to burn”, according to critics in 1973, yet has been all but banished from public memory since.
Set up by the music industry as the “American Bowie” to capitalise on the glam rock wave, Jobriath was too wild, flamboyant, and, let’s be honest here, too openly gay for 1970s America. With his wispy body, extravagant costumes and grand pronouncements, he could have been the perfect pop star, but search his name now and he is only eulogised as forgotten.
Reading about his life sometimes feels like a mystery case in the pantheon of glam rock stars. He had the musical prowess, the beauty and $500,000 from Elektra Records, allegedly the most lucrative recording contract of its time, with an advertising campaign that spanned Vogue, Rolling Stone, Times Square and over 250 New York buses. This was after, as a childhood musical prodigy, he went AWOL in the American Army, changing his name from Bruce Wayne Campbell to Jobriath Salisbury and becoming a sex worker in New York after a quick stint in a psychiatric hospital.
One reason for his forgotten legacy is undoubtedly that the chance taken on his talent can be reduced to a magnificent error of judgement. Indeed, Elektra Records head Jac Holzman confessed that this was one of two such errors during his days at the label, written out of his official label history accordingly.
The music itself was adept and engaging, especially the track ‘I’m a Man’ from his self-titled album, taking from Bowie the odd vowel sound and expanding on it greatly in terms of swooping theatricality. Or as Columbia Records President Clive Davis put it, “Mad and unstructured and destructive to melody”.
This misguided attempt to outglam glam rock, find someone flashier, shinier and gayer than Bowie in the States, only exposed that these were not the qualities that transfixed people. It was more mercurial than that, and whatever Jobriath had didn’t fill the niche as it couldn’t be carved, so while receiving acclaim for his album, Jobriath, it simply didn’t sell. The career-killing opening statement, “I am the true fairy of rock”, or a classical nude image of Jobriath couldn’t lead to pointing and looking down the camera like Bowie did to a depressed ’70s England, and instead garnered wax wings that would melt.
In 1975, he retired from the music industry and retreated to relative anonymity as a cabaret singer under a different name, supplementing his income with sex work. He said in 1979 that the Jobriath persona had “committed suicide in a drug, alcohol and publicity overdose” and at the point his ten-year contract was over, he was ill with Aids, passing away at the Chelsea Hotel in 1983.
Though he didn’t live to see his legacy, it pops up in surprising ways, such as the strange story of Morrissey thinking he had secured him as a support act before realising he had died a while before. Again, here is the puzzling, ghostly presence of a cult star who might have had another lease of life. Ziggy incarnate with a rise and fall that was sharp and precipitous, easy to obsess over due to their sheer intangibility.
