The Gimmick

Some artists can recognize soon enough that, although they are talented, there are many others out there like them. Nobody wants to be a Flash-and-the-pan. So, over the years, many of them have resorted to gimmicks to keep them alive in the dog-eat-dog world of Rock’n’roll.

Today, we’re going to look at a few of these. Namely, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Ozzy and Marilyn Manson. You don’t have to like these acts to read on, but it’s important to understand the reality behind the illusion they represent.

First, let us not confuse these with Mr. Gimmick, David Bowie. Bowie does not create a persona for the sake of marketing. He does this because it’s part of his strange genius. Ziggy Stardust was a real person. Bowie decide to make him bigger, to push him to new heights and preset a tale of what might have been had this guy been a little more sane-or a little more insane. Bowie simply presents life from a different perspective.

The others do not.

KISS me, please

Kiss were a major band in the seventies. I’m not a fan, but there is obviously talent in what they did. A dozen years ago, I was hanging out with a couple of my friends and we decided, to pass the time, to go see Ace Frehley at a local club. While it may not have been a memorable moment in the annals of Rock’n’roll, it was a nice evening. A very good show from a man who obviously enjoyed being on stage and giving the people what they wanted.

Without the masks, Kiss would never have been as popular as they were. Now, the fans of the music will tell you that it was the music itself that made the band. For them, this is probably true. But I was around when they were coming out with hits. And I remember what people talked about. Not the music, the masks.

A lot of people bought the albums because of the pictures of the masked faces. Probably most people who bought the albums did so because of that. Most people who went to see their shows went not for the music, but for the masks, the light show and the explosions.

There was also an ongoing debate about what these guys looked like without the masks.

After a while, some people left the band and pursued solo careers without the masks. Gene Simmons became an actor, unmasked. There was less and less interest in the gimmick so the masks came off. The sales plunged.

Recently, they decided to go on tour again… with the masks.

Vincent Furnier

Out of Detroit, Furnier put together a band that called themselves Alice Cooper. (Apologies to Canadian readers, the old story, still in circulation today, that he’s the son of a minister from smalltown Saskatchewan is false: No-one‘s from smalltown Saskatchewan…) Alice Cooper was a woman who was burned at the stake in Salem under the accusation of witchcraft. The official story is that while playing with a Ouija board, Furnier was told that he was the re-incarnation of Cooper. The truth is that this name just went well with the music and the stage show.

Although Furnier has had his problems with alcoholism, the man is no dimwit. Soon enough, as the band was getting more and more popular, Furnier started calling himself, rather than the band, Alice Cooper. Eventually, he broke up the band and continued, solo, using the name for himself. His first solo album is Welcome to My Nightmare. Hence, the change in style.

Zombie make-up, boa constrictors, electric chairs, Heavy Metal. A nice recipe for success. You may not like it, but the fans do. They like it so much, that they’ve turned him into a living legend. In high schools across North America, seniors pass down their fascination for the character to juniors. When they become seniors, it’s their turn to pass it on.

Basically, Cooper has a nice voice. Not a great voice, but still a very good one. The songs themselves, taken out of their context are not bad. Some of them are actually pretty good. But not enough to make him into the mega-star he is.

Always sensing what had to be done, Cooper was smart enough to come up with a ballad, Only Women Bleed, about abused women, in the mid-seventies. Before anyone was making a fuss about the whole thing.

As Furnier realized that his fan base was and would probably always be Highschool boys, he came out with a couple of rebellious anthems. No More Mr. Nice Guy being one of them. The other is the famed Highschool theme School’s Out. That last one brings back a lot of memories…

Of course, when a character is bigger than life, a lot of misinformation will pour out from many directions at once. When Alice Cooper went into detox, the story floating around placed him into an insane asylum. When you’re bigger than life, the stories are too.

The Ozzman Cometh

Ozzy was part of the début of Heavy Metal. When he left Black Sabbath, the fans followed him rather than the band. John has always been an outrageous character. Partly because of the popularity of Sabbath, based on the dark side of the human soul, but also because he is who he is. At least he’s true to himself.

John Michael Osbourne started off as a plumber’s assistant, before trying a very unsuccessful life of crime. Realizing this was no place to go, he became a singer.

Because, essentially of the name of the band, Ozzy and Sabbath have always been associated to Satanism. The truth is that in the early days of the band, they were asked to perform at a Satanic ritual at Stonehenge and they refused as it was against their principles and beliefs.

The leader of the British Satanic church, Alec Sanders, told them that because of their refusal, he’d placed a hex on the band members. Ozzy had his father make them large aluminum crucifixes, which he had blessed. The band wore these crosses 24 hours a day for protection against the Satanists.

These crosses became very famous. In conjecture with people’s imaginations, like moving wildly on stage, the cross swinging, it doesn’t take much too an excited person to imagine it having been upside-down. The story, deformed, became that Sabbath had performed for the Satanist church… And yes, there are some upside-down crosses, but that’s not a Satanist symbol, it’s the symbol of the apostle John who was crucified, according to the story, upside-down.

By the time John started his solo career in the early 80’s his reputation preceded him. The most common story around him is that he bit the head off a bat that just happened to fly over the stage one night. I had friends at the time who argued that this was absolutely true and that they had seen footage of this the night before on television. I had seen the same footage and the lead-in was written in such a way as to make the viewer see what the reporter wanted him to see. In the footage I saw, he did not bite the head off a bat. Actually, I’ve no idea how someone can even have imagined seeing this. At any rate, would you perform somewhere where bats just randomly flew overhead?

As Ozzy says himself: “If I did everything the fans claim I do, I’d be dead by now.”

Yet, the reputation is more important than the truth. Ozzy plays this, of course. That’s why all of his albums make it into the charts and why his shows sellout in minutes.

Brian Warner

How do you follow-up the Ozman and Alice? First you need a name that will stick. Furnier uses a woman’s name, Osbourne’s band had a name that could have implied something evil. So you start by using a woman’s name that everyone will recognize at once: Marilyn. You follow it with a family name that everyone will recognize, but will not like: Manson.

What you get is immediate controversy. Before the guy has even shown his face or uttered a word, people are already talking! That’s a brilliant marketing strategy. Ethics are something else, but one person’s sin is another person’s religion.

As for make-up, the guy had to go beyond Alice Cooper. Anything less would have rated him as a cheap imitator and he’d never have sold a single album. By the way, Ozzy has a Happy Face tattooed on his knee cap, Manson wears a Happy Face contact lens.

What’s so great about Manson’s look is that he could take off the make-up, get a haircut, dress differently and be the new Ricky Martin and no-one would be the wiser. This is obviously not by accident.

Having seen Alice and Ozzy going on so long, as soon as I heard about Manson, I decided to reserve judgment until I could see the guy defend himself. As I’ve mentioned earlier, what people say happens and what really happens are two different things altogether. Then there’s the guy behind the myth he creates.

Once I saw Manson, it became obvious that my instincts were right. This guy is nobody’s fool. It’s not as much what he says as the way he says it. His thought process clearly shows his superior intellect. He’s playing a game, but a game where he made up the rules.

During a grueling hour on Politically Incorrect, he was attacked by two people for what they believed were his religious beliefs. He never once attacked their own beliefs, but showed enormous respect for their opinions. They never listened to a word he said.

Although it was clear that he did not believe a word of his “religious opinion”. It’s all part of the persona. Suffice it to say that by the end of the hour, Florence Henderson (Mrs. Brady of The Brady Bunch) invited him out for coffee.

He was clearly a nice guy who showed a lot of class and distinction. He always does. Even on stage. When he takes a bottle of Spring Water and hoses the crowd with it, they believe he spat on them. They’re so convinced-and proud-of this, that they’ll go anywhere and tell anyone that Marilyn Manson spat on them. The story becomes so big that it’s hard to deny. Even the media often get caught in it.

Mass Hysteria

That’s how this is referred to. Examples of this are plentiful, especially where it concerns religious beliefs.

You’ve probably heard of the Virgin Mary’s appearance at Fatima. According to the widely-publicized story, she gave a girl a letter to give to the Pope. In the letter, three predictions were made. One concerned World War I. I forget what the second one was about, but the third, which was revealed a few weeks ago, apparently was to the effect of divine intervention in saving a Pope.

Now there were a few level-headed reporters at Fatima who gave a completely different version of the story. Indeed, everyone present had in effect seen something. But for three quarters of the people there, what they saw was an unusual light show easily attributed to a meteorological phenomenon. For the rest, it was a religious experience. However, those who had a religious experience did not share the same experience. The experience they had was based on their own religious beliefs…

As I said, there are thousands of similar events we could describe, but the result would always be the same: people see what they want to see. And seeing is believing.

And even when something is clearly shown, it doesn’t have to be the truth. Many years ago, I was watching an episode of “Deep Space Nine” with a lady I was seeing at the time. In this episode, Doctor Bashir and a lady friend were doing some acrobatics in a room that had no gravity.

She asked me how this was done. I explained that they used wires and harnesses, that it was filmed before a blue screen and that, once the wires were removed using a computer (a very simple, although time-consuming process), they fitted those images on scenes of the room.

She said that this couldn’t be done, despite the amount of people working on the set and the $2 million dollar per episode budget. Her conclusion? There were antigravity devices and they were used for making TV shows and films. But not for, say, transportation.

At this point, not even a conversation with Steven Hawking would have made her change her mind.

Sound strange? This is the way that the majority of people think. This is why Marilyn Manson is compared to the devil, why Pakistan and India would like to nuke each other to death, why your neighbor expects to win the lotto every Friday night. Why Elian wasn’t immediately returned to the care of his natural, loving father.

Vincent Furnier, John Osbourne and Brian Warner are well aware of this. All they do is create a surrounding, prepare the terrain and let the fans make up their own stories. In the end, they become living legends.

It’s a way of distinguishing themselves from the mass. Of getting in and staying in. Even writing the best songs is not a guarantee of success. It may not be a way that you or I would like to follow, but it’s a great marketing strategy.