sweet

    In the beginning, rock and roll was about camp, theatre, sexual ambiguity and snotnosed premacho juvenile rebellion. Elvis Presley sneered past his pink suit and foppy long hair; Little Richard was a raver in every grand sense of the word. The Beatles, as Brian Epstein could attest, had that perfect blend of roughboy swagger and European existentialist ambivalence. So when Marc Bolan showed up on English television in the early '70s with a streak of glitter adorning his pale high cheekbone, he wasn't breaking new ground; he was just turning his back on Californian artsie-folkie highmindedness in favor of that early, best conception of rock as crotchgrabbing queerbaiting three-chord fun.

     The Sweet had been around, playing limp sub-Hollies bubblegum, for a few years before Glam hit. But when Bolan, Bowie and Slade draped themselves in dimestore mirror stars and started playing that bizarre English sax-laden boogaloo through bigass amplifiers, producers Nicky Chin and Mike Chapman injected the Sweet's fey bump-de-bump pop with a serious dose of testosterone. It was that magic combination of sugar, spice, everything nice and Chemical X that set the former Sweet Shoppe apart from their more ambitious, and less pure, Glam bretheren.

     But this isn't a history lesson. It's an appreciation of the band that I consider the most fully-realized manifestation of rock and roll that the '70s produced. And it's a recognition, nay, a celebration, of the underlying calculation and artifice of the whole Sweet operation. Because that perfection of concept could only be achieved by a band that spent years struggling to remove the puppetmasters' hands from up their scrawny English asses.

     Chin and Chapman invented Sweet. They're the ones who chose the cartoon-glam oufits, they're the ones who wrote "Little Willy" and "Ballroom Blitz" and "Teenage Rampage". It was their conception of the perfect rock guitar sound, the perfect balance of tribal drumming against baroque barbershop vocal sheen, that brought the Sweet to US radio when Slade couldn't get arrested. It was their intuitive grasp of the necessity to make the bubblegum bang, and not just stick, that kept the whole affair from degrading into a pathetic Bay City pedophile's holiday. But it was Brian, Mick, Andy and Steve's burning need to prove themselves a real band that provided the real soul where Chin and Chapman could only suggest it.

     For my one and only exhibit, take a look at the photo on the left. These poor kids just wanted to be taken seriously as rockers, and in the end they proved themselves up to the task. They strutted, thrust and slammed the door shut with their own songs like "Fever of Love" and "Action." But from the very start, it was clear that these were just four skinny boys who, despite their real talent, would never have had the brainpower or the will to make careers for themselves. They were just four goodhearted clueless goofs. That's why they were purer and better than the Ramones, who in the end were too clever by half. It was the Sweet's doofus inability to resist the humiliation of lipstick and cartoon clothes that allows me to take them to my metaphorical breast and love them.