A Night at the Opera

The following content contains adult subject matter, including sensitive material and is intended for adult consumption only. It may not be suitable for all audiences, therefore discretion is advised. It's March 11th, 1979, an excited crowd files into the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco Civic Center. It's not your typical buttoned up opera crowd. Instead, it's a wild cross-section of 1970 San Francisco. Any kind of person that you wanted to see was there that night, from people with their back sides out to women in ball gowns. Record executives sit beside drag queens. A man in a leather tuxedo leads a man in a dog collar to his seat. There's a feeling backstage and in the crowd that this night is going to make history. Music history, cultural history, and civil rights history. Because tonight, it's not opera at the opera house. Instead, the stage will be taken over by a six foot two black man. Well, six Ford heels, covered in sequins with a tassel headdress and his signature bangle bracelets. His name is Silvester. Tonight, he will unleash his singular falsetto and groundbreaking disco sound in front of a sold-out crowd. Singer Izzora Rhodes could feel the energy from backstage, and it was intense. That show was so packed and there was people even riding against the wall, zipping the house and everything. And baby, they were screaming at Holland and were rocking the place. Friend and manager Tim McKenna comes backstage to find his star having a moment. I went back to the dressing room and Silvester was bouncing off the walls. He had taken some acid and bouncing off the walls with a pair of scissors in his hand, cutting up all this drag. And he said, "Just be here. Don't bother me about cutting up this stuff you paid so much money for." The place is packed. The audience is primed and rowdy. And Silvester, he's peaking on acid. Stage manager Robert Pintosi delays his intro just to let everyone settle a bit. Reports with the rules and regulations of the opera house. They've been working toward this moment and it's finally here. For the crowd here tonight, Silvester is not just a star. He's their star. Through him, they're seen. They're real. They have made it to the opera house. San Francisco was a unique place in 1979. It was the kind of liberated zone. But out there in the world, things were different. Elton John was still in the closet. Freddie Mercury was flamboyant as anything, but he wasn't technically out. Even the village people from Disco's campus act were read as straight by many audiences, despite singing dead giveaway songs like YMCA and Macho Man. Silvester, on the other hand, was tall and flamboyant and black and fabulous and wearing a blue sequin gown. Somehow utterly free to be himself. I'm Jason King. One of my earliest musical memories comes from when I was five or six years old. My parents bought me a long-playing K-tail cassette compilation of Disco hits. On Side B, there was this track called "You Make Me Feel Mighty Real." At the time, I had no idea who the artist was. All it said was Silvester. Was it a man, a woman, a band? It didn't matter. The energy on that track made my pulse race. It became my anthem. Today, I'm a journalist, musician, professor, and chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. Every semester, I teach a class called Artisan Audiences in Historical Context to a room full of 19-year-old undergrads. My students know a surprising amount about artists from decades before they were born, like The Beatles, James Brown, Led Zeppelin. But when I ask if they've heard of Silvester, a musician who paved the way for so many pop culture figures that they love today, artists like Janelle Monet, Frank Ocean, Sam Smith, I just get blank stairs. So to get started, I play them this. And slowly, they start to get it. Those churchy vocals, robotic synthesizers, that funky groove. And then I show my students the music video for Mighty Real. Silvester's shifting in between masculine and feminine looks, playing with boundaries in a way that's still provocative, even today. This is Soundbarrier, a show about artists who break new ground in music and culture. And this season, we're diving deep into the world of Silvester. This is the story of how a black game musician in 1970s and 80s San Francisco went from counter-culture curiosity to global superstar. How he searched for a unique sound of his own and the right collaborators. How he fought with his record companies to get his fair share and present his authentic self. Rapper Mickey Blanco. In the hearts and minds of queer people and cis people alike, Silvester's canonized, Silvester really is one of our saints. Because they laid the groundwork for so many. I just can't even believe that he even existed. Actor and singer, Billy Porter. And he does not get the credit that he deserves in his due because he did something that literally no one has been able to do since. I connected with Silvester because of the sway and the fierceness that he had. Rapper. Big Frida. I mean, you put on a Sylvester song today and you're going to get the party started. DJ Nikki Siano. Just one of the greatest disco stars ever. But that's the wrong legacy for him because I think he's one of the greatest singers ever. Singer Paddy LaBelle. He was way out there not afraid to take chances. And that's what I love about it. Here I am, take care, leave me. The fabulous Silvester. I've never had any problems with me being exactly and doing exactly what I've done. I'm not hiding anything from anyone. If anyone wants to know anything, all they have to do is ask. And that's on them and not on me. This is episode one, A Night at the Opera. It was spring 1970. Silvester James was 22 years old, hanging out at the Whiskey Ego-Go. One of the hottest music clubs on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. He had on pants with a dress. Since it opened in '64, the Whiskey had been the launch pad for artists like Alice Cooper, The Doors, and Buffalo Springfield. Silvester was already living life like he was a star, at least in his own hand. Now he just had to become one in real life. The freewheeling '60s were still in full swing in 1970. Counterculture was still in the air. But progressive as it was, it was still a pretty white scene. Now, just a note, throughout this series, you're going to hear clips from interviews with Silvester. Some of them have never been heard before. Being black in those days was still at that point kind of rare to have black hippies. And I had all this hair and I wore all this drag and all these bracelets and all this stuff. And I was hanging out on the boulevard, you know, and going to rock concert and stuff like that. And there weren't that many black kids. But on this particular night, Silvester sees another black guy in the crowd. And I had a blonde wig and this glitter jacket, but I wasn't in drag. I was a boy. The guy in the wig was named Reggie Dunnigan. And I lived across the room and there was a tall, very thin, very beautiful dark-skinned man. And he was wearing all black. He had a million necklaces and a million bracelets. And he had on a woman's dress if he had split down the front so that it was like an open coat. So he was like perfectly half-man half-woman all at once. We immediately saw each other and just zoom right here. And we had the dance floor and the queens went wild. We were just the two hottest people in the club. And he said, "Oh, you're fabulous." I said, "Oh, you're fabulous." Reggie was in town from San Francisco. He told Silvester about this commune/performance troupe he was part of. Call the Cuckets. They all lived together in the Heydashbury. The San Francisco neighborhood that was ground zero for hippie culture. They were into freaky makeup and drag and doing wild shows in front of wild crowds. It was nonstop glitter and drag and sex and acid and hash. One Cucket described them as a hippie glitter gender-fuck troupe. Drag was hardly a radical new idea for Silvester. As a teenager, he'd been part of a squad of self-styled party stars who called themselves the Disco Tays. Author Josh Gamson wrote a definitive biography called the Fabulous Silvester. Josh describes the Disco Tays as somewhere between a sorority and a street gang. They were young black teens who spent their days on hair, makeup, and outfits. And then they'd slip out of their parents' houses to join that night's raging party scene. The Disco Tays walked the streets of Watts and Compton in drag, like they were walking the red carpet. Andrea Horne was one of the Disco Tays. She talked about how Silvester and another member of the group used to battle it out in song. Larry Heinz had a high soprano voice. There's actually a little clearer and purer than Silvester's voice. So they often had sort of sing-offs to read the songs and who could hit the highest note. And I call it physical food. Being a Disco Tay was fun. But in homophobic South Central LA, it was also dangerous. Disco Tay Jackie Hoyle. We were out there on a mission and that was to party. You know, we knew it was happening if you got caught in your own place, you got your ass whoop. LA had an anti-mascarating ordinance that had been on the books since the late 1800s. Cross-dressing was still illegal, even in the mid-1960s. Is it dangerous? Yes. Are they holding their own? Also, yes. You know, they're all there on the stroll doing their thing. My friend Steven Winter is a filmmaker, writer, and professor at Brooklyn College. He's one of the smartest people on Silvester that I know. When he think about Silvester, he was so confident and so clear about himself. And I think part of that was he spent those beautiful teen years in community with his people. Other teenage black queens and trans girls who were giving it to each other and giving it to the scene. By 1970, when Silvester was hanging out of the whiskey, the Disco Tays had drifted apart. When you think of Silvester's childhood and early upbringing, it was a lot of people saying that there's really nothing you're going to be able to do in this world because you are a black queer and draconess and feminine. There's no space for you. Growing up in LA, two men being in love with each other were having relationship with them. Especially in the black community. So when Reggie described his gender-bending pansexual clan of performers called the cockets, Silvester was intrigued. I told my situation just wasted down here in LA. I said we must come to San Francisco. When I came here in 1970, a friend of a friend said come to San Francisco and call these people living in this fabulous decorated house on Hay Street. I walked in the door and they fell in love with me. The cockets were performing at a Chinese movie theater called The Palace. Reggie Dunnigan talks about the moment that he and the other cockets discovered Silvester's talent. By the way, most of Silvester's friends and collaborators use he-him pronouns to refer to him, but Reggie called Silvester's sheep. That day, we were moving a piano and I took Silvester. I had no idea Silvester could sing. I just thought she was a big, fabulous person that I had found and I was just in love with her. Silvester sat down at the piano and started playing away and my mouth just dropped. And we all turned around and looked at her and then she started singing and I'm telling you we were all blown away. She was singing gospel music and immediately we decided to do a gospel show and have Silvester be the star of the show. They said oh, because the cockets show tonight. When I first saw them, I had no attention to being in it, but I was just so fascinated by the theater. They were men with beards and drag, writing shows like Journey to the Sin of Uranus. I mean, just insane theatrical things. Yes, it shows overall that high. Arriving in some foreign city, I'll pray to an unsure on the dark. The cockets shows were Ranchi. At last, I found the slipperyest dickenshink. Radically Ranchi. Half naked, free-for-alls. Peter Minton played piano for the group. The cockets did some big production number that closed with them all raising their arms and in their big paper cups they had with cream, aerosol cans. And so it looked like they were all these cocks ejaculating. It was a big mess. The drugs, naturally, helped a lot. Filmmaker John Waters, who went on to direct cult movies like Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, was living in San Francisco at the time. He was a regular at the shows. The audience was such a part of it. I mean, it was such an insane asylum. So it's impossible to imagine what that experience was like. When the audience and the actors and actors were all completely stumped out of their minds. It was bearded, trend-vested, hippie, communist, witches. I don't know, I've never seen a fence. Sylvester moved into their main commune, a Victorian flat they called a Hate Street Chateau. It was exactly as advertised, non-stop glitter and drag and sex and acid and hash. Peter Minton, the cockets piano player, first met Sylvester at a rehearsal. And Sylvester came over to the piano and he was wearing his stocking cap and a little woman's blouse at probably high heeled shoes. But I didn't know that it was not the guy. I thought it was just this big black woman next to me. Sylvester asked Peter if he knew Stormy Weather, a torched song that Ethel Waters first sang at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1933. As Peter started to play it, Sylvester sang, transforming himself into a 30s movie siren. Don't know why. There's no sun up in the skies. Stormy movie. Do you know that movie flying down Rio, Fred Astaire and Ginger Brothers? I said, oh yeah, so I play songs from that. And songs that Ethel Waters sang, being a horn. So he and I just clicked immediately. Peter started accompanying him for his solo number in the cockets shows. They became friends and close collaborators. Hello, Peter, this is Sylvester. Would you send me or can I come by your house and get one of the fabulous photographs of you and call me number five, six, three, five, two, four, three, five. Chichi. Peter Minton was playing piano for the cockets. Then he stopped playing for them and started playing for me. And we had a little jazz thing, where he would teach me period songs, sleepy time, down south, big city blues, all of these great old suns because she knew Peter's real name today. So, no matter what the title of the show was, there was always a black nightclub singing and there was always a black nightclub singing. I'm just a jaded maybe in your fooling love. There's a beautiful photo of Sylvester in the lobby of the palace theater, where the cockets did their shows. He's in a white vintage dress, long hair streaming down, eyes closed, head tilted toward the horn of a vitrola, straight out of the 1920s. Right away, fans like filmmaker John Waters could see that Sylvester was something special. I mean Sylvester was the cockets playing a horn, and would come out doing these great songs and numbers. And when he came out, everybody paid more attention. It got a little bit serious from him. Sylvester was obviously loved talented one. Talent wasn't the only way that Sylvester stood out. Sylvester was often given the stereotype, black character role. Peter Minton. And so, he would be the maid, and he'd have a feather duster and a big prosthetic butt on him, and come in and shuffle around, and he was playing a gal named Mabel, probably. They'd say Mabel set the table, and audiences loved it. Sylvester was playing with the racist stereotype of the Mammie figure, taking it over the top. Filmmaker John Waters. It would have been completely a character for him to do Mammie. You have to remember, at the time, Tina Turner did an album covering "White Faith," even one of them. Only three members of the cockets were black. Reggie Dunnigan was one of them. Everything was a part of drag. I mean, if we made fun of something, it was because that was our theater. So, it was okay. You are trying to create a utopian society, Steven Winter. But you can't do that without first wrestling with race in a very real way. A way that cockets were not necessarily prepared to do, but a way that Sylvester had to, in order to just survive from day to day, like being a black person in the society, much less a black person in a dress owning themselves as a queer individual. As he settled into his place in the cockets show, Sylvester became increasingly clear about what he was doing on stage. He had a specific archetype in mind, the black female superstar of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. With a Gardini in his hair and a bias cut vintage dress, he even had a name for his Harlem cabaret alter ego, Miss Ruby Blue. [Music] The cockets were not his entire identity. Filmmaker John Waters, I think Sylvester was very ambitious and wanted to make a name for himself. And you could tell he was going to go someplace. You knew it, everybody knew it. The cockets knew it, everyone knew it. As Sylvester got more stage time and saw how audiences responded, you can imagine how he might start to feel a little exasperated by the chaos of the cockets. Their gleeful lack of professionalism, their allergy to rehearsal, the general absence of what you might call talent. I'm sure there were some jealousies of Sylvester because Sylvester was so incredibly talented. And some of the great cockets, some of the greatest things about some of them is that they weren't talented. That also made it very, very appealing and added to the lunacy. [Music] Piano Man Peter Minton thought Sylvester was the only thing anyone remembered once the drugs were off. Well Sylvester was getting such attention. So you such a standout from a group that the manager of the cockets said you should do your own show. So we rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed so we got this show together where I did a show called "Women of the Blues" where I would do Billy Holiday at the Waters, Lena Horn, and I'd wear fabulous gowns. [Music] Around this time Sylvester liked telling people that he was Billy Holiday's cousin once removed. His rendition of "God Bless the Child", her signature song, feels like it's straight out of the jazz age. But he doesn't sound like a Billy Holiday imitator, he finds a way to make it his own. He took his publicity photo dressed in this persona and signed it, Miss Ruby Blue 1925. [Music] In September 1971 columnist Rex Reed showed up at the palace theater with author Truman Capote and social like Gloria Vanderbilt to see the cockets do their show. Tinsel tarts in a hot coma. In his nationally syndicated column, Reed wrote that the cockets were "the current underground sensations of counter-culture show business, the darlings of the underground press. And if you've never heard of them, some circles would say you're just not alive." That's the kind of hype that gets you noticed. Janice Chaplin, Alice Cooper and Tina Turner started showing up at the palace to see what all the buzz was about. Then Rolling Stone magazine published a big splashy piece on the cockets. The writer singled out Sylvester, describing him as a beautiful black androgy, who has a gospel sound with a heat and shimmer of arithas. [Music] With this much heat, opportunity inevitably came knocking. Some New York producers booked the cockets for a two-week run at a decrepit theater in downtown Manhattan. Instead of doing a song in the cocket show, Sylvester would be the opening act, performing a full set of his own. ABC's affiliates send a camera crew to San Francisco Airport to send off these unlikely local celebrities. The cockets as a group were born out of the early haydash for years. And other people like them or not, they're very much a part of the San Francisco scene and no one can argue with their success. A New York hamburger king is underwriting all their costs and they're being greeted in New York tonight in a giant reception given by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Rex Reed and 42 volt models. You can hear the awkward tiptoeing of 70s TV news trying to get its head around the cockets' gleeful gainus. And yes, Martha, then do hug and kiss with more than just brotherly love and no, we're not in Kansas anymore. [Music] At New York's JFK airport, in the fading light of a late October afternoon, the cockets were greeted like rock stars, like bearded beetles in glitter and drag. Danny Fields, who would go on to discover the remones in a few years, was there with several hundred people to meet the plane. I was working at Atlantic Records and the publicity department. We were on our way to Las Vegas to see Bet Middle are open for Johnny Carson and we'd heard about the cockets. We went to see them and they were hysterical. I think the word was out that it was something extraordinary coming here. New York's downtown a-list snapped up tickets for opening night. John Lennon and Yoko Ono would be there. Along with author Gorg Vidal, beatboat Alan Ginsberg, fashion eminence Dyne of Reeland, and designer Bill Blass, author Nora Efren, the entire cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, and according to writer Maureen Orth, a dozen Vogue editors, two real princesses and the night clerk at the hotel Albert. Reggie Dunnigan. The two weeks before opening night, we were invited to every major party in New York. I mean, all we had to do was show up and look and be fabulous. It must have been pretty exciting for Reggie and the rest of the cockets. That opening night was a scene. They closed off the streets in front of the Anderson Theatre and for two to four blocks, all you saw was limos. It's very affordable. It was like, I've never seen so many limousines in my life. But there is such a thing as too much hype. It was scary. I remember walking into that theatre and I was just like frightened. Replace their loving, super stone hippie crowd with blase, seen it all New Yorkers and the cockets just bombed. The opening night was a disaster. People backstage were in tears and people in the audience were in a huff and leaving. And Angela Landsbury stood up and said, let's get the fuck out of here real loud and people just followed her and that was it. When Angela Landsbury is dropping F-bonds, you know you're in trouble. I don't think we really realized how uptight, overly sophisticated and spoiled the New York audience was. It was opposed to San Francisco audiences, which were just like so open, so enthusiastic. Exhausted and demoralized, the cockets still have a two week run to do. On the second night, Sylvester comes on stage and tells the crowd, I am so sorry for this fiasco I'm associated with. Sylvester throws the cockets right under the bus. Reggie Dunnegan saw that his beautiful, talented and drodginess friend was moving on. After Sylvester became a star and rightly so, we were close but never as close as we were before, because he had something very important to do. And he developed an ego. I mean, he snubbed a lot of people. Stephen Winter again. Sylvester's instinct to separate himself from the group might be seen as an act of self-preservation. You know, I want to make sure people know that I actually have some talent and some drive, but it was so bitter and dark of Sylvester to do that. Maybe there was a lot of built up frustration between him and the cockets, not just about the professionalism, but about the whole thing of living your life as if there are no consequences. As a black person, Sylvester knows that everything in life has consequences. Two things must have been clear on the flight back to San Francisco. It was the beginning of the end for the cockets. And Sylvester, he was just getting started. So back to where we started, March 1979, just about eight years later. Sylvester was on stage at the Opera House, in front of an adoring hometown crowd with massive hits of his own, and a group that fit him and his sound perfectly. Do that wishes don't come true, y'all. Long time ago, I said, I want to be at the Opera House. Love the whole. Here we are. Thank you. Thank you very much. Midway through the show, they performed a song that he had been covering since his days singing blues and jazz as Miss Ruby Blue. The arrangement was new, but the lyrics still held the place in his heart. This is the first time I heard this song. It was in the '60s. And it was done by the Beatles. So who? The Beatles. Oh. And the song we have to do with animals, y'all. Birds. Black birds. Patches, you got some black birds from it. It's a song about liberation, about meeting your moment, and it means something special for Sylvester, especially tonight. You're ready, girl. I guess so. Go like this. Black birds, you get in the middle of life. Ten years from this weekend, life, all your life. You always made it all this come to my life. Don't get back. Over the next eight episodes, we'll bring you the story of Sylvester, Flamboyant Disco star, and Drogeness gender pioneer, AIDS activist, and Black queer ancestor legend. If you've ever wanted to feel mighty real, to live your most liberated life, to find your tribe and share your voice, then you may see reflections of yourself in Sylvester's story too. Next time on Sound Barrier, Sylvester. There's a date, March 16, 1971, and you go, "Holy shit, these are demos." The discovery of some long-lost music takes us back to Sylvester's earliest days as a solo artist. They didn't just dress in drag, they dress in spectacular drag, but is Sylvester really ready for success? If you can imagine a small control room up to seven or eight people in it, all getting high and partying. Me being so wild and everything that made people listen. There's two things we don't like down here, boys, and you're both of them. That's next time on Sound Barrier. Oh Peter. Peter, this is Sylvester. I need to talk to you tomorrow real, real, real important about some photographs and designs from you, by you, for a show, real important. 78 records with mining faces coming out of the labels. It's got to be real, real, real curious. So I'll call you tomorrow during the day, and I hope you're at home when I call. Bye. Sound Barrier is a Spotify original podcast from Best Case Studios. It was hosted by me, Jason King, and written by me, Adam Pinkis, Brent Katz, and Stephen Winter. Brent Katz's senior producer, Anne Carkeet, is our producer. Associated producers are Ashley Warren and Allie Gamma. Josh Gamson is consulting producer. Co-producers are Lewis Bigler, Christian D. Bruin, and Tim Smith. This episode was edited by Vanessa Lowe, with assistance from James Hanson, and mixed and mastered by Dean White. Paul Dallas is our archival producer, with help from Katie Heyserman. Music is by Gautam Stritcheson, Sam Retser, and Roger Neill, with additional music from Brent Katz, Blue Dot Sessions, and Five Alarm. Music supervision by Joel C. High and Sammy Posner, with help from Ricky Holman. Executive producers are me, Jason King, Adam Pinkis, for Best Case Studios, and Stephen Ames Brown, for the Sylvester Estate. Corinne Gileart is executive producer for Spotify. Special thanks to Harry Winder, Shirley Ramos, Brian Smith, Linda Cohen, Galen Mullins, Kevin Fam, Baron Farmer, Gina Delvack, and a lot of Myers. Find and follow Sound Barrier, only on Spotify.