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BRETT SMILEY, "BREATHLESSLY BRETT"
The glam rock era was the first time that popular music openly acknowledged its own superficial tendencies. The first time that the extravagance, glitter and condescension attendant to the rock n' roll lifestyle became an aesthetic badge of honor. Glam, through its emphasis on the primacy of make-up, wardrobe and snarling supercilious attitude, was pop music's first postmodern movement, containing both the substance of rock n' roll, and the commentary on the same. As such, it created a fleeting moment in history where anyone with the right combination of style, poise and bearing could become an overnight sensation, and often just as quickly fade into obsolescence.RPM
For every David Bowie, Brian Ferry or Marc Bolan, there were scores of glam divas-in-waiting like Jobriath and Brett Smiley. At least Jobriath, the world's first openly-gay rock star, got a chance to release two monstrously campy and epic LPs before public backlash silenced him forever. The winsome and sinewy Brett Smiley did not fare as well, recording Breathlessly Brett during a flurry of interest by the international music press, only to have the album cruelly pushed aside by an uncaring record industry and shelved permanently. Smiley was the willowy, blonde personification of glam, discovered and promoted like a classic Hollywood ingénue by Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham's vision for Smiley was to elevate the young man to the rarefied status of untouchable superstar before his first single was out. On record, Oldham accentuates the breathy, effete qualities of Smiley's voice, framing it in a series of impossibly dense Phil Spector-style teenage rock symphonies. And I mean dense: in addition to three guitars, Oldham wields orchestral percussion, a full horn section, synthesizers and strings. It's so unbelievably, absurdly overwrought that it somehow achieves a kind of righteous transcendence that makes for an entertaining listen. The muddy, reverb-heavy mix works beautifully for Bowie-style space oddities such as "Space Ace," a diamond in a Velvet Tinmine if I've ever heard one. A cover of Neil Sedaka's saccharine "Solitaire" sounds like a lost cut off of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, replacing Harrison's sincere delivery with Smiley's affected sigh. Brett's only single, the raucous "Va Va Va Voom," stands up next to the best of glam's bubblegum hits. Oldham and Smiley threaten to burst into flames from sheer flamboyance with the ludicrous medley of "I Can't Help Myself/Somewhere Over the Rainbow," sounding very much like Judy Garland stuck in a K-hole. After hearing this magnificent atrocity, it doesn't surprise me at all that poor Brett turned up a few years later with a giant drug habit, starring in a series of pornographic movies. Released 30 years too late to be even slightly relevant, Breathlessly Brett still provided me with some rhinestone-studded revelations. 
