Glam Homecoming Prom

 

On the first of September, a Club 57 Reunion - "Glam Homecoming Prom" - at Zebulon in LA, rather than in New York, where it originally happened. This Sunday, 6pm to 9.30 pm - free admission. 

Guest of Honor Michael Des Barres participated an eon ago in the so-called "Death of Glitter" at the Palladium in Los Angeles, October 1974. A.k.a. Hollywood Street  Revival and Trash Dance. 

Homecoming Prom DJ Kristian Hoffmann, a Dolls diehard, did this saucy sketch that was used in the inner artwork of the Dolls debut.

On the Glam +  No Wave / Mutant Disco continuity - 

[from Rip It Up - US edition]

If the B-52’s had a spiritual second home in New York, it was at a place called Club 57, which was closer to a kooky arts lab than a nightclub. Indeed, the people behind Club 57--performance artists Ann Magnuson and John Sex, and painters Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring--have been described as a gang of B-52’s groupies. “We went to all [their] shows and gave the band presents,” Scharf recalled in an East Village Eye interview, adding that Keith Haring “gave them plastic fruit once and they loved it.” The sensibility that united the B-52’s and the Club 57 clique was an ironic affection for American pop culture at its most grotesquely phony or over-the-top: majorettes and cheerleading troupes, Miss America, Liberace, pajama parties,  beach movies, and the campy, misguided B-movie/Las Vegas phases of Elvis Presley’s career.

Club 57 began as a spin-off of an event called the New Wave Vaudeville, whose cast of freaks included Klaus Nomi, briefly famous for his opera-meets-Kabuki performances. Taking up residence in the basement of a Polish church at 57 St. Marks Place, the club initially showed horror B-movies such as The Blob. But soon the 57 crew started hosting elaborately designed theme parties that distilled a whole new sensibility from elements of Pop Art, drag, the trash aesthetic, and performance art. “I would create a set, a soundtrack, and a framework for people to come in and be their own characters, costume themselves,” says Ann Magnuson of theme nights such as Name That Noise: Punk Rock Game Show, Lady Wrestling: Battle to the Death, Salute to NASA (complete with simulated space flight), and Brix Deluxe Barbecue Patio Partying. “Once we started doing themes, I'd be going to thrift stores almost every day, getting costumes and props. There was also a lot of stuff on the street you could pick up, like refrigerator boxes. So we'd drag all this stuff back to the club and create, say, a Jamaican shantytown and make a putt-putt miniature golf course through it and play reggae.  It was a conceptual art piece that you could be involved in”. 

Scharf designed the Club 57 logo, a TV set with the word FUN underneath the channel control dial. ”I really saw Club 57 as an exorcism of Americana,” says Magnuson. “Because there were only three network channels of TV at that time, you watched all these old movies, and you'd pick up the sensibilities of vaudeville, the Marx Brothers, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, horror films. All that stuff informed the art.” Beneath the camp delight, though, was a semi-serious impulse to use mass culture’s tatty ephemera as a prism through which to view America’s political unconscious. As Kate Pierson from the B-52’s put it, “without being too pretentious, you can look at a K-mart Shopping Center as a modern cultural museum and learn something from what’s there and what that means.”  

Fueled by acid, mushrooms, and poppers, Club 57’s vibe was kitschadelic. It helped pave the way for the mainstreaming of camp and Mondo aesthetics that took place in the Nineties and included Deelite, Nick At Night, Mystery Science Theater 3000, the crossover success of John Waters films, and Tim Burton movies like Ed Wood and the lamentable Mars Attacks!  The Club 57 ethos was playful in both the childlike and theatrical senses of the word “play.” Artifice was celebrated and gender treated as performative rather than innate. 

[from the Aftershocks section of Shock and Awe]

A Berlin transplant to New York’s late Seventies clubland, Klaus Nomi’s own act merges Queen/Sparks-style popera, Kraftwerk’s Germanic formality, and  Zolar X’s extraterrestial image. Nomi first made a name for himself as the closing act at “New Wave Vaudeville”, a postmodern take on the variety revue staged in 1978.   Appearing onstage amid clouds of dry ice and the sounds of a landing space ship, he sang an aria from Saint-Saëns'  Samson et Dalila. Transfixed by his “transcendent, peculiar, inexplicable but undeniably otherworldly artistic vision,” a watching Kristan Hoffman of the Mumps introduces himself to Nomi. Soon Hoffman has become his music director, pulling together a backing group and developing  a set of original songs penned by himself ("Nomi Song," "Total Eclipse", “Simple Man”, “After The Fall”) and covers (Lou Christie’s “Lightning Strikes”, Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”,  Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling In Love Again”), plus baroque pieces by the likes of Purcell. 

The closest Nomi ever got to proper opera was working as an usher at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, but in the rough-edged context of New York postpunk, his pipes are astonishingly pure and celestial. “With that voice, and that eerie amorphous charisma, Klaus would be OUR Bowie,” Hoffman believes. Nomi’s adapts Bowie’s  stylized black-and-white tux + tie from the SNL performance and makes it his own signature look: a stage suit whose very wide, straight shoulders create a triangle as they taper sharply into the waist before flaring out with a  tutu-like effect.  In combination with his snow-white foundation, dark lipstick in silent-movie bow shape, and stylized black-dyed hair (huge brow, extreme widow’s peak, angular tufts sculpted like the fins on a 1950s car), the overall effect is startling: like Nomi’s been scooped out of a black-and-white 1920s science fiction movie and dropped into the garish present....  

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Here's Ann Magnuson from 2012 flying her glam freak flag high with an album in tribute to Jobriath. It's titled The Jobriath Medley: A Glam Rock Fairy Tale. Produced and arranged by Kristian Hoffman. Guest vocal from Russ Mael on "I'Maman".