The Fabulous Sylvester
The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A journey back through the music, madness, and unparalleled freedom of an era of change-the '70s-as told through the life of ultra-fabulous superstar Sylvester
Imagine a pied piper singing in a dazzling falsetto, wearing glittering sequins, and leading the young people of the nation to San Francisco and on to liberation where nothing was straight-laced or old-fashioned. And everyone, finally, was welcome-to come as themselves. This is not a fairy tale. This was real, mighty real, and disco sensation Sylvester was the piper. Joshua Gamson-a Yale-trained pop culture expert-uses him, a boy who would be fabulous, to lead us through the story of the '70s when a new era of change liberated us from conformity and boredom. Gamson captures the exuberant life, feeling, energy, and fun of a generation's wonderful, magical waking up-from the parties to the dancing and music.
The story begins with a little black boy who started with nothing but a really big voice. We follow him from the Gospel chorus to the glory days in the Castro where a generation shook off its shame as Sylvester sang and began his rise as part of a now-notorious theatrical troup called the Cockettes. Celebrity, sociology, and music history mingle and merge around this endlessly entertaining story of a singer who embodied the freedom, spirit, and flamboyance of a golden moment in American culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the world of that most disparaged of musical genres disco the subject of this biography commanded respect. By conventional standards, Sylvester James was an outsider he was an out, gay, African-American who dressed in drag and sang with a thundering falsetto but he found mainstream success in the late 1970s and early '80s with three Top 40 hits, Dance (Disco Heat), You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) and I Who Have Nothing, and an international #1 sensation (Do Ya Wanna Funk). At times, Gamson's (Freaks Talk Back) extensively researched volume is a vibrant and moving oral biography, with firsthand conversations with virtually everyone who knew or worked with Sylvester, from his youth in South Central L.A. through his successful music career, to his death from AIDS in 1988 at 41. The richness of this material (Sylvester's background singers Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes Armstead, who later became the Weather Girls, are particularly amusing and insightful raconteurs) reveals all the shadings of Sylvester's diva persona: he was fierce but generous, caustic but caring, temperamental but talented. Gamson's pulsating use of song lyrics, sounds and descriptions also creates a tangible history of San Francisco as it changed from a joyous oasis of liberation to the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic. Seventeen years after his death, this gay icon gets the celebratory biography he deserves. Photos.
Customer Reviews
In love with Sylvester
I just finished reading and I feel as though the world is now just slightly dimmer in Sylvester's absence. The story is woven amid the backdrop of gay San Francisco and so serves as both a biography and period history lesson. There are points in the book that I felt were wordy and somewhat excessive in detail. However, as a whole I feel enlightened, inspired, and respectfully in awe of Sylvester. The detail of the end of his life is written beautifully and I found myself in tears, as though I had just lost a very dear friend. The portrait painted by the author is so life like that I found myself embedded in a bygone era. And kudos to the writer for compiling an impressive tale based on a wealth of documented interviews and material. I highly recommend this read.