Aural Fixations
JOBRIATH
Lonely Planet Boy
(Attack)
For nearly three decades, Jobriath was more a myth than a man. His story is best told by those who've done the research (such as Robert Cochrane, who wrote the liner notes for this collection and has a full-length biography in the works), but here's the Cliffs Notes version. The man born Bruce Wayne Campbell was a piano prodigy as a youth and spent time in both the Army and in a "hippie rock ensemble" called Pidgeon. In the early 70s, when glam rock was at its peak, he reinvented himself with the help of Carly Simon manager Jerry Brandt as a androgynously cosmic and openly gay pixie called Jobriath and signed to Elektra for a then-record advance. Due to baffling mismanagement, an overabundance of hype and the artist's own idiosyncrasies, both his self-titled debut (produced by Eddie Kramer!) and its rapid follow-up Creatures of the Street failed miserably, and Jobriath disappeared. He turned up in the early 80s, working as a hustler and a lounge act, writing for a never-performed musical and dying of AIDS in 1983. He found little fame or fortune during his career and barely rates a footnote in rock encyclopedias.
None of which really tells you anything about the music. While considered, in the words of Elektra president Jac Holzman, "so over the top and crazy" at the time, in retrospect the songs compiled on Lonely Planet Boy aren't nearly as overbearing as the rumors have it. Indeed, Jobriath's almost glib mix of flamboyant glam rock and Broadway show tunesmithery seem remarkably prescient, if you take the success of songwriter Stephen Trask's similar blend in the great Hedwig & the Angry Inch as an example. (Not to mention the drastically underrated film Velvet Goldmine, which borrows both visual and musical stylings from Jobriath.) Dramatic, SF-tinged ballads like "Space Clown" and "Morning Star Ship" mix the bombast of the best glam with the theatricality of playing to the cheap seats in a way more explicit than David Bowie or Elton John (Jobriath's most obvious precedents) ever dared attempt. The overblown arrangement of "Blow Away" even predicts Jim Steinman's extremely similar work with Meat Loaf on Bat Out of Hell. The self-proclaimed "true fairy of rock and roll" could rock out convincingly as well, as the cool "Imaman," the oddly funky "Earthling" and the previously unreleased "I Love a Good Fight" demonstrate. His quirky singing, somewhere between a nasal sneer and an operatic croon, may be an acquired taste for some, though it possesses its own peculiar soul, and his classically-trained piano work gives the songs an eccentric punch.
Pop star Morrissey, who compiled Lonely Planet Boy and released it on his boutique label, clearly favors Jobriath's Tin Pan Alley pastiches over his rock tracks, and the disk is too ballad-heavy as a result. Jobriath's second album isn't nearly as strong as his first, and the nearly equal footing given each record doesn't help the second's material as much as it hurts the stuff from the first. A gimmicky trifle like "Dietrich/Fondyke (A Brief History of Movie Music)" could have been left off in favor of the debut's inexplicably omitted single "Take Me, I'm Yours." Considering that Morrissey fits 15 songs into only 45 minutes here, he probably could have fit both albums, plus the bonus cut, on one disk and better served Jobriath's memory. That said, there's a lot of excellent music here that deserves to be heard, especially by fans of the golden age of glam rock. Despite its flaws, if Lonely Planet Boy serves only to put Jobriath into the radar of rock & roll's cognoscenti once again, it will have all been worth it. Michael Toland [buy it]
