Overlooked No More: Jobriath, Openly Gay Glam Rocker in the ’70s

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

On March 8, 1974, American TV viewers got their first glimpse of the American glam rocker Jobriath on the popular NBC music program “The Midnight Special.” Jobriath, who was introduced by the singer Gladys Knight as “the act of tomorrow,” made a striking debut, wearing a futuristic silver-gray, hoop-shaped costume and singing a baroque-sounding number titled “I’maman.”

For his second song, the electrifying “Rock of Ages,” he wore a tightfitting, one-piece purplish suit and a large, bubble helmet that, with the touch of his fingers, broke apart into petals that surrounded his head. His space alien persona and theatrical rock music drew comparisons to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character, and his swaggering sound was likened to that of Mick Jagger. Onstage he moved like a ballet dancer.

“We were so excited,” the actress Ann Magnuson, then a teenager, said in a phone interview. “‘Oh, did you see that helmet?’ You would talk about that in school the next day.”

But Billy Cross, who played the guitar alongside Jobriath, remembered the performance, and the audience, differently. “It was horrible,” he said in a phone interview. “They hated us, and that wasn’t fun.”

Such was the complicated existence of Jobriath, who is generally regarded as the first openly gay rock star. His image came with risks: He released just two albums, and both were poorly received by an audience that was largely unwilling to accept his effeminate persona. His short-lived career became a footnote to rock ’n’ roll history, and he ultimately died alone, his body discovered by the police some time later.

He was born Bruce Wayne Campbell on Dec. 14, 1946, in Pennsylvania (accounts differ on precisely where), the second of three children of James and Marion (Salisbury) Campbell. His father came from a military background, and his mother was a homemaker who later worked as an insurance secretary. (The full name he used, Jobriath Salisbury, was “an amalgam of his teenage obsession with religion and his mother’s maiden name,” Robert Cochrane wrote in the liner notes of a 2004 Jobriath compilation.)

Bruce Campbell was a musical prodigy who could sight-read any composition at the piano, said Peter Batchelder, who met him in 1964 when they were music students at Temple University.

“He could play pretty much the whole first movement of the Prokofiev second piano concerto,” he said by phone. “He could handle musical data like nobody I ever met before or since.”

Finding Temple’s music courses elementary, Bruce dropped out after one semester and joined the military. “He wanted to impress his father,” said his half brother, Willie Fogle. “Of course he hated it, so he ran away.”

Relocating to California under the name of Jobriath Salisbury, he agreed to play the piano accompaniment for a friend who was auditioning for the 1968 Los Angeles production of “Hair.” The musical’s director, seeing Jobriath as a good fit for a production celebrating the counterculture, gave him a role.

“We were all dumbfounded,” said Oatis Stephens, a friend who also acted in “Hair.” “It was like, ‘Why aren’t you playing concerts with the Philharmonic?’”

Jobriath later joined the New York City company of “Hair” but was fired, by his account, for upstaging the other actors. He then found himself lost and binging on alcohol. “I was floating down in the gutter,” he told Interview magazine in 1973.

He was rescued, however, by the music entrepreneur and club owner Jerry Brandt, who heard a demo tape that Jobriath had sent to CBS Records. Brandt asked to become his manager.

“He could write, he could sing, he could dance,” Brandt said in the 2012 documentary “Jobriath A.D.” “I bought it. I mean, he seduced me, period.” (Brandt died in January.)

At Brandt’s direction, Jobriath transformed himself from a 1960s hippie to a glittering rock star, and in interviews he took aim at musicians like Bowie and Marc Bolan, the frontman for the band T. Rex, whose personas only hinted at sexual ambiguity.

“I’m a true fairy,” he would say. He told NBC Los Angeles: “There’s a lot of people running around, putting makeup on and stuff, just because it’s chic. I just want to say that I’m no pretender.”

Brandt brought Jobriath to the attention of Elektra Records, which signed him for a reported $500,000, a huge sum at the time for an unknown musician, equal to almost $3 million today. (In Mick Houghton’s 2010 book “Becoming Elektra,” Jac Holzman, the label’s founder, said that the actual figure was closer to $50,000.)

Jobriath’s debut album, titled simply “Jobriath” and released in October 1973, was a mix of glam rock, cabaret and funk, all given sophisticated arrangements at the Electric Lady recording studios in Manhattan. His lyrics could be risqué (“I’d do anything for you or to you,” he sang in “Take Me I’m Yours”), tender (“I know the child that I am has hurt you/And I was a woman when I made you cry,” in “Be Still”) or witty (“With you on my arm Betty Grable lost her charm,” in “Movie Queen”).

“The material just impressed me by its complexity, sensitivity, breadth and quirkiness,” Eddie Kramer, who co-produced the record with Jobriath, said in a phone interview. “He was a genius.”

Before the album was released, Brandt mounted a heavy promotional campaign, including full-page advertisements in Rolling Stone and Vogue, posters on the sides of buses and a gigantic billboard in Times Square depicting Jobriath as a nude statue. Coinciding with the album’s release, Jobriath had planned to make his live performance debut with three shows at the Paris Opera House, where he would emerge in a King Kong costume climbing a mini replica of the Empire State Building. The production cost was estimated at an exorbitant $200,000.

The ad campaign is one reason Jobriath is considered to this day to have been among the music industry’s most overhyped acts.

With the gay liberation movement growing in the early 1970s, Brandt assumed that Jobriath would be readily embraced. “The kids will emulate Jobriath,” he told Rolling Stone in 1973, “because he cares about his body, his mind, his responsibility to the public as a leader, as a force, as a manipulator of beauty and art.”

The album earned some positive reviews, including one from Rolling Stone, which said it “exhibits honest, personal magnetism and talent to burn.” Other publications were more mixed. In his review for The New York Times, Henry Edwards made the inevitable comparison to Bowie. “Jobriath, too, writes about ‘space clowns,’ ‘earthlings’ and ‘morning starships,’” he wrote. “The results can only be described as dismal.”

Sales of the album were poor, and the Paris Opera House shows were scrapped.

“When it started out,” said Cross, Jobriath’s guitarist, “it was all about the music. After Jerry Brandt got involved, it was all about the career. Then after that started to take hold, it was all about Jobriath’s sexuality. America was not ready for that.”

Jobriath put out a second album, “Creatures of the Street,” in 1974 and embarked on a national tour, only to encounter homophobic slurs during a performance at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. By the next year, even after his appearance on “The Midnight Special,” Elektra had dropped Jobriath from its roster, and he and Brandt had parted ways.

“He didn’t sell any records,” Brandt said in “Jobriath A.D.,” the documentary film. “What gets a record company going is the smell of money. And there was no money. He didn’t generate 50 cents.”

From the late 1970s onward, Jobriath performed pop standards as a cabaret musician, calling himself Cole Berlin, and lived at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. In a 1979 interview, he spoke of his former alter ego in the past tense: “Jobriath committed suicide in a drug, alcohol and publicity overdose.”

He was found dead at the Chelsea Hotel in the summer of 1983. He was 36. AIDS, which had reached epidemic dimensions by then, was given as the cause.

In the decades since his death, Jobriath’s music has been reissued, and a number of musicians have expressed admiration for him, including Morrissey, Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott.

Jobriath’s impact on L.G.B.T.Q. music history also went through a reappraisal. “He was a sexual hero,” the British singer Marc Almond wrote in The Guardian in 2012. “For all the derision and marginalization he faced, Jobriath did touch lives.”

Today, those who knew Jobriath in his various guises — classical music wunderkind, glam rocker, interpreter of the Great American Songbook — remember his talent. “Whether he was composing epic symphonic music of searing intensity (and orchestrating it at 16) or brazenly appropriating the Rolling Stones’s idiom,” Batchelder, his former classmate, said in an email, “there was always beauty in his work.”