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JOE-BRIATH
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When I got this email from "Joe Elliott" I thought, I don't know, this is some random dude in Ireland. "Joe Elliott." There must be a MILLION of them. He was a fan of a certain obscure Glam singer, named "Jobriath" that I ran fansite for, so we talked about that, and that was it. I sent him a couple CDs of rarities and forgot about it.
At the time I was really wrapping up all interest in the subject. For nearly a year, Jobriath had made my life pure hell, which might've been exactly what I was looking for, but it had become too much . . . as in TOO MUCH. It was too much explaining to people that I, an enormously promising young writer, had chosen as the subject of my first book a weird wannabe rock singer who made one stab at fame & was dismissed as a David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust clone who'd never done anything else in his life, except die (of AIDS). I didn't want to tell anybody, ever again, that he was homosexual. (Typical reply: "Oh...") And I certainly didn't want ANYTHING to do with his fans. Joe was nice but a lot of them tended to be, how shall I put it? Not. They're mean, and sick. Most, apparently, were gay. I just wanted to round them up into Sodom & light it up again.
The queen bee, my nemesis & antagonist, the dog at my throat, was an organism named John Michael Cox, Jr., a piddling photographer /pornographer who'd had brief contact with Jobriath, then in recent years had angled himself as the priest of an online cult of "followers." He apparently resented any crowding on his turf, since at my entrance he reared up in fits of online ranting. People all over started emailing, "Why is he saying all those horrible things about you?" I felt like I'd been dumped out into a gladitorial ring, with a lunatic beating his chest and lunging for me, while the crowd roared. I'd check Cox's site & find long descriptions (?) of me, like this: "A Nobody who lives in a void, a vicious queen who has no life, a con artist, a compulsive liar, a thief, a criminal, a psycho . . ." Some of that I agree with, but not all. There was no responding. Nothing he said was factual. Other "Jobriath people," I discovered, lived in fear of him, noting their incomprehension at his behavior, but unwilling to say anything publicly lest they join me in the ring. Cox, I found out, was writing long, angry letters to anyone he knew who was remotely a biographical source, warning or threatening them against speaking to me.
And then - my favorite part - my brother (EX-brother) found Cox's site, printed it out & sent it to my parents, and anyone else he could think of, with commentary about how I needed to "Repent." What you have to know about Christian fundamentalists is they know how to attack. He combed through my site, pronouncing it "unacceptable." "There has been a growing poison in our family that needed to be purged, if for nothing else than for my children . . ." - as my parents received his accumulating charges and were pressed, reluctantly, into a defense of the story I was planning to tell. "Jon insists it must be told in all its reality." But in reality, I didn't. I saw suddenly that nobody wanted this particular life to be told: not gays in their craving of affirmations, not "normal" people who'd distance themselves from all that he was.
But then I got a surprise! Joe's accounting firm in California (??) had sent me a $50 check. "You seem like a real fan," he said, cheerfully. I used the money toward renewing my site for another year, intending to abandon it. I packed my files into storage and moved away, wanting never to write anything again. THEN a couple months later I was reading an issue of Classic Rock magazine and on the cover was the lead singer of Def Leppard. His name was strangely familiar. "Shoot," I thought, "I could've scored an autograph or something." I tried to find his email, but had lost it, so pulled up my Jobriath website for the first time in forever and whined about it, saying I thought "Joe Elliot" of Def Leppard was a big fan! Then he wrote back! "Busted!" he said, very cheerfully, and explained that his band was working on an album of cover songs and he wanted to do something by Jobriath, which was fun. A Jobriath cover had never been done (unless that rumor about a disco "Street-Corner Love" is true). The track wasn't intended for the album itself, Joe explained, but for a B-side or something.
He and I emailed on occasion, so I knew way before most earthlings that his cover of "Heartbeat" (off Jobriath's 2nd LP) was in the can. "It sounds pretty good," Joe said. He'd done the 'heartbeat' sound by beating on his chest. I kept up with public announcements about the album. It was called Yeah! - a good title, I thought, though I slightly preferred Oh No! Joe seemed interested, so I updated him on my biographical research, which had started up again. Jobriath's good reviews, I'd found out, had turned really (REALLY) bad only after David Bowie's management team had decided to (quote) "crush" him. They'd pulled strings with music journalists to get nasty reviews. Names were named. "I know this goes on all the time," Joe sympathized, though he said he'd personally prefer to crush not musicians but certain journalists. I totally agreed. I'd like to crush them all.
Joe was so generous & nice, offering to pay to have Jobriath's 3rd album mixed & also pay to have several 'new' songs I'd located in the Library of Congress dug up, which was AMAZING, except I couldn't even get replies from relevant parties - that thunderously silent 'No' which is never far from the world's first openly gay popstar. Embarassed, I didn't even reply to Joe. My research had slowed, as new queries weren't replied to, leads vanished & several people who were closest to him wouldn't talk to me, or would only in that fleeting, anxious tone I had come to recognize so well.
The war with Cox was still on, but now I was winning. A few "Jobriath people" openly admonished him. Suddenly, his site was gone. I missed him! I had realized that sources who are silent about Jobriath's life, like journalists who lie about him, like Cox in his loud torrents or even "religious" morons like my brother, are in place, like a neurosis, to protect a truth from being disclosed. I felt from Jobriath's life profound waves of violation. He had been something one should not be. I sat trying to begin my book, all my favorite scenes in hand - Jobriath slashing himself screaming he's possessed by the devil, Jobriath at clubs in total drag drugged out of his mind, Jobriath trying to throw himself out of a window when his career flopped, Jobriath drunk at bathhouses, Jobriath wasting away so that by the end, at age 36, he looked like an old man - and I couldn't even begin. Far from being an "enormously promising" anything, I was what everyone is: looking at life, anyone else's or certainly, your own, with nothing of any relevance to say.
ANYWAY, a couple days ago, there it was. "Heartbeat" had been released on a Yeah! "bonus CD" available only at Wal-Mart. So I stood in line, feeling the absurdity of standing in line to buy a song by one of the oddest talents Pop had ever produced, as the bored checker rang me up. Then it was mine. But when I got home & slipped the CD in the player I couldn't help feeling . . . disappointed? "You're a voice on the street / You're the faces that I meet" - words booming out of Jobriath's tortured throat were totally unfit for the glossy sound of one of the world's biggest bands. "Like children we have left/ And played the game you and me / But have you seen me cry?" Jobriath sang it really convincingly, each phrase weirdly disconnected from the last, like a hideously self-estranged creature looking back on his life & feeling utter loss. Joe, however, strung it all together as if the words actually made sense, then on the last line ("Have you seen me cry?") he changed the notes around so it sinks into a minor key or something, and sort of deflates. Jobriath really WANTED you to know he cried. His major obsession in life was to be a PUBLIC SPECTACLE OF AGONY, and he did a great job! I had several good scenes of him crying, like after fleeing a stadium in New York after a concert where the audience started screaming "faggot!" - he was hauled away, past a huge mirror that he smashed, then outside collapsed in tears. Jobriath knew how to cry, publicly, and Joe, clearly, did not. He seemed like a nice, decent man. But it takes courage to be a freak, and he just didn't have it.
I was steeling myself for a pleasant little note or something, wondering whether, if I wrote about my dislike, would Joe then see me as one of the journalists he'd like to "crush"?? It was so ungrateful, ME I mean, but I just could not like the song. I played it again. It's like Joe is singing to a girl, like it's a man trying to expose his inner self to a female - a REALLY big mistake, in my view. A boy revealing his inner self to a girl is like reading a newspaper to a dog. There's just a lack of comprehension. Jobriath's genius is that he wasn't singing to anybody. He was profoundly estranged from the human race - an honest & brave stance! Inside ourselves, we are all alone. The song is certainly "about" something, in my view, as a I have a lot of irrelevant views. "Heartbeat" is about his mother, the major obsession of his life (totally bizarre for a gay dude, I know). A heartbeat is what a baby hears as it floats inside the womb. Once he'd been outed, though, as in "born," Jobriath's mom hadn't wanted much to do with him. She left the family when he was a kid. As a teenager he kept throwing himself at her & she'd shut the door in his face. But the song is saying that even when she tries to flee, they're linked by the same heart, and that link is unbreakable. The one hitch was that his mom hadn't, to my knowledge, ever nearly died, so how to explain the most haunting line in the song? "Once I believe I saw you dying yet you remain to me the same mystery" - which Joe just rushes through. But, I thought, maybe Jobriath is referring to himself? He had died. His original self, the child he was, had died. After becoming "Jobriath," he'd tell people, "Bruce is dead." Though I suddenly realized the line, too, might describe his view of Jesus Christ. As a teenager he'd been an intense Christian, then fallen away, but in concerts he'd stand onstage as if crucified, head bowed in exhaustion & pain, arms outstretched as if nailed to a cross.
If you ask me, that's the gay psyche in a nutshell: Mom & Jesus. The hair gel, designer jeans & lead role in the high school musical all come much later. What Def Leppard, of all groups, was doing in this particular psychic terrain was anybody's guess. Even the way the two tracks generated the sound of a heartbeat - Jobriath by sampling his heart, and Joe by thumping on his chest, Tarzan-like - was the difference between a great singer & a successful one: one rips his chest open, and the other one taps on it. Then I put on Jobriath's "Heartbeat." It was so good. I turned it way up & lay in bed listening to the strangled sounds, happy that my neighbors could hear it too. The world needed to hear something this wretched. It's the sound of an inner self, I thought, which he somehow had captured, and which, naturally, horrified everyone. His subject is an inspiring one: the solitary reaching-out we do to people who do not care. Every extension of ourselves that we make is beat back. And why not? Whoever you are, you're pathetic. You deserve it. The song played a bunch of times, and then for whatever reason I put Joe's version back on. I was now in a heightened state of listening, and this time . . . heard more? It was better somehow. A notable power gathered around Joe's phrasing of "your heartbeat" and "my heart." He was really reaching out to somebody, in a way that was simple, honest, and I thought, you know, it might actually work! His voice grows gravelly, straining to make the connection. I was growing somewhat alarmed, actually. I put Jobriath's version back on again, and heard, suddenly, something I hadn't before. Whenever he says "heart" he puts a twang on it, like Southern or Cockney or something in between, as if to encase "heart" in irony & role-playing, i.e. "the game." The song was strangely, newly false. SUDDENLY, a hideous thesis burst into my brain, like an aneurysm. Maybe all men must access their hearts through a woman. Gay guys do it through their moms, and straight guys do it through a girl. Why you'd do either, I don't know, but the results of each were there before me: Joe was extending himself honestly, with a directness of "heart," and Jobriath was not. I played his "Heartbeat" again & again, and now heard posing, and falseness. The only word he sings with any directness is "me." He was so gay. That means a psyche with nowhere to go, except inside itself.
His music was the echoes of old, disconnected sounds, pulled out of childhood memory & written into songs. But he cared about nobody, even himself. There's this stupid story about Jobriath, the man, dying alone, his body rotting for days. Journalists in major magazines simply invented the details (the body was rotting, the door was beat down by cops who gagged on the smell, etc.) - none of which was true. Jobriath did not die alone, forgotten, etc. But the final focus on his dead body was a public statement of his life, and so of homosexuality, containing all that a P.C.-scrubbed discourse will not allow to be said: There was no life. "He started off a corpse," as Souxsie Sioux once said.
I couldn't write his biography. There was no biography to write. He'd lived a death. It was night out. It seemed like I should get up & develop the thoughts more, but they'd mostly stopped & thinking them over, they weren't anything. It didn't matter. Whoever is on that course, will continue. My words are insufficient. I turned off the stereo & lay in bed, longing, strangely enough, to write Joe again, but not knowing what to say, or what he could possibly say in reply. It was much easier to fall asleep. x