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     Those lines come from the opening song on this record, “(Do You Remember) The Planet Earth.” They were fantasy at the time they were written and sung: an apocalyptic fiction dressed in spangled guitars and operatic vocal shiver; a glamorous epitaph for a pop era then just reaching its perfumed height. But here I am, three decades later, listening to the first music of Another Pretty Face, a band “long since gone,” and marveling at how these songs – their electric sass and wickedly blurred sexuality – still sound like hot tomorrow. I also wonder how different yesterday would have been if this album had been released when it was made: during the Great Glam Uprising of 1973-74.
   Another Pretty Face were never just another anything. They were, in the prime unleashed here, proof that Americans could not only do the power-riff sizzle and erotic dazzle of glitter as well as the British – Bowie and Bolan, Mott and Roxy – but also bring something special to the gala. “21st Century Rock,” “Little Boys,” “Stuck on You,” “The Great American Candy Bar Debate”: These are not merely flattering imitations of Ziggy Stardust and Electric Warrior. Singer Terry Roth is a deliciously original weapon, dirty and fragrant in his lipstick-droog pow. The taut guitars in “Eighteen Scram” make me think of George Harrison decked out and fired up like Mike Ronson. And I can’t imagine any of those English darlings having the finesse or nerve to cover Phil Spector’s AM-radio operetta “Da Doo Ron Ron,” a 1963 hit for the Crystals, the way you get it here: with boy’s-choir doo-wop intro, “Smokin’ in the Boys Room”-style guitars and the original gender intact.
   There is no hairy-biker boogie here; this isn’t art class either. Born too late for psychedelia and too smart for heavy metal, Another Pretty Face embraced the fresh, tart ambition of English glam, then added the kick and moxy of their own long nights and warfare in New Jersey bars, Long Island beer palaces and Manhattan rock rooms like Club 82 and Great Gildersleeves. They say all politics is local, and the same is true of great music. Long before Bowie reinvented himself as a white-soul dandy on Young Americans, Another Pretty Face were peppering their sound with home-brew funk and marching R&B brass, like a New York Stones, in “Stuck on You.” I didn’t see Another Pretty Face live at the time of these recordings, but the sharp tart riffing and tempo shifts in “Wild Child” remind me of the way I had to slalom through the crush of space suits and super-high heels in the lobby of the Shubert Theater in Philadelphia when I went to see the New York Dolls in 1973.
This is a record of several firsts: It would have been Another Pretty Face’s first album, if one of the A&R men too busy looking for the next Beatles or Dylan had bothered to bend an ear. It was the first album produced by Ed Stasium. Three years later, he was cutting seminal Ramones and Talking Heads records; the punch and clarity of these tracks shows why. This is also the first time I’ve heard a cover of “Bang a Gong” that I dig as much as the T. Rex original. It’s a literal salute. But you hear what Another Pretty Face could do to a song in the clubs, when the room was packed and the beer fell like rain.
   This is also the first time I’ve heard these recordings. I caught Another Pretty Face live later in the decade, when I was deep into punk. I knew they were good, and I knew they were loved. Now I know why. And I’m as blown away now by the band’s faith in itself – the force of prophecy in the guitars and Roth’s voice – as I am by the music itself. Another Pretty Face were singing a “21st Century Rock” in the last one; they just had to wait for the century to come to them.
   Glitter was a phase. But Another Pretty Face were a phenomenon to those who knew them when, and the release of this album is their just reward, even thirty years late. “We brought our guitars in luxury cars/We live and we look and we act like stars,” Roth sings proudly at the end of “The Great American Candy Bar Debate.” “We drink our booze in the finest bars/And everyone knows who we are.”
   Finally.

David Fricke
New York City
April, 2004