He seems to be an interesting character. How's the music?
I don't know, Fredericks. I've never really had any desire to seek out his music, but what little I've heard sort of sounds like warmed over Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie. As I said earlier, I know I'm probably slaughtering a sacred cow when I say this, but glam rock has never done anything for me. Harder-edged glam rock (Slade, Alice Cooper, early Queen, the first few Mott the Hoople albums) isn't bad though.
New York Dolls? T-Rex? Iggy? Eno? Sparks? Off the top of my head.
With you re: Mott.
nec13, Fredericks:
As noted, his stuff is unsurprisingly extremely derivative of
Ziggy-period Bowie, but it's a
lot more theatrical. Like "musical theater"-theatrical, rather than the kind of theatricality you might expect in other glam stuff. Like you guys, I generally prefer the harder glam rock (including all the bands you guys named and even early Kiss), but Jobriath's stuff hits me just right on those occasions that I'm in the mood for it.
All I have is a mid-2000s best-of called
Lonely Planet Boy (presumably so named by label head and Dolls fan Morrissey) and it's probably all the Jobriath I'll ever need. I can't really recommend him based on what you guys are saying. It has much more in common with Broadway kind-of stuff than, say, Slade, Alice Cooper, or the Dolls. A lot of it makes the Alice Cooper Band's embarrassing forays into "When you're a Jet" territory sound like the work of Kevin Allin.