In 1972, David Bowie made history when he declared “I’m gay”
to Michael Watts of Melody Maker.
During the earliest days of the gay pride movement, it was a big deal to have a
major pop star come out of the closet in a major music paper. Just six years
later, Bowie was once again chatting with Watts in the pages of MM, only this time he heavily implied
that his “homosexuality” was all part of building the Ziggy Stardust character.
The year after Bowie made the declaration that would
continue to be a topic of discussion even after he admitted he’d always been
heterosexual, an artist regularly diminished as “The American David Bowie” made
a similar announcement. The big difference was that Jobriath actually was gay,
and instead of being an offhand provocation in the press, his homosexuality was
an outright publicity campaign. There was barely a scrap of press written about
the singer-songwriter that didn’t dwell on his orientation. This was not
Jobriath’s idea. The mastermind behind selling the singer’s sexuality was his
manager, Jerry Brandt. Sadly, Brandt completely misjudged the tenor of a time
that was pretty staunchly homophobic despite those initial uprisings in the gay
movement. Jobriath’s pop career never got off the ground. Neither of his albums
charted. Brandt dumped him. Jobriath ended up on the cabaret circuit and barely
left a footnote in Rock & Roll history as “The American Bowie” whom Bowie,
himself, wrote off as a piffling fraud. Jobriath died of AIDS in 1983.
This is part of the story told in Kieran Turner’s new
documentary Jobriath A.D.: A Rock ‘n’
Roll Fairy Tale, but it is hardly the story in full. We are not introduced
to Jobriath as a failed pop star or a confused kid struggling with his
sexuality or any persona that might make way for clichés. Our first Jobriath is
a great success, starring in the L.A. production of the smash musical Hair alongside R&B legend Gloria
Jones. A few years later he is signed to Elektra Records and cutting his debut
album with famed producer Eddie Kramer (and Richard Gere on backing vocals!). His
face and body are plastered on billboards and bus ads. He is not a joke. He is
not a mere David Bowie clone. He is an original voice melding prog rock, glam, cabaret,
and Beethoven. We spend the first thirty minutes of Jobriath A.D. with a star.
Then we backtrack to his troubled home life, the
introspective man he really was, how an incident going AWOL from the military
resulted in young Bruce Campbell morphing into Jobriath. Turner’s structure is
brilliant, forcing us to rethink the scraps of information we thought we knew about the obscure pop
singer. The filmmaker fills out the tale with illuminating interviews (Brandt
emerges as a deeply flawed and fascinating character in his own right) and
imaginative animated sequences that illustrate some of the stranger episodes of
Jobriath’s story, such as his aborted Paris Opera House spectacular that would
have found him playing King Kong scaling a model Empire State Building that
would transform into a giant penis before the star transformed into Marlene
Dietrich.
Jobriath A.D. is
one of the most moving, most insightful, most revelatory Rock documentaries
I’ve ever seen. Factory 25 presents it on home video with a deservedly lavish
presentation. Extras include a director’s commentary and extended interviews
with the likes of Gloria Jones, Marc Almond (valuable since he receives very
little time in the proper film), actor Dennis Christopher, Jayne County, and
Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott among others. Giving fuller air to music is 16 minutes
of crackly footage of Jobriath recording his debut album and a video for
Almond’s cover of “Be Still”.
The DVD is packaged alongside a clear-vinyl LP featuring
Jobriath running through a scrapped musical concept alternately known as
“Popstar” and “The Beauty Saloon”. After composing a made-to-order score for
producer Joe Papp’s adaptation of Moliere’s The
Misanthrope, Jobriath went to work on an original piece marrying details
from his own pop star years with gangster movie tropes. Between songs he provides
narration and stage direction. Though the music is a product of Jobriath’s
cabaret years (when he went by several names, including the not-too-subtle
“Cole Berlin”), there’s some real Rock & Roll energy in the work,
particularly on the pumping “Time Sat on My Face”. The recording is crude, but
its intimacy is touching, another welcome revelation among many in the
wonderful Jobriath A.D. project. I
hope David Bowie is listening and rethinking.
