For a while, Josie Cotton stepped out of the spotlight, but this year she returned with her brand new album, ‘Day Of The Gun’.
Released earlier this spring, the LP showcases the enduring creativity of the Texas-born star, who released her debut LP, ‘Convertible Music’, back in 1982 and found notoriety with hit single, Johnny, Are You Queer?.
At the age of 17, the young singer moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams of becoming a musician and released the classic track on the Bomp! Label, before landing a deal with Elektra Records.
Before it was hers, the song had been a staple of The Go-Go’s live sets until its writers, Bobby and Larson Paine, suggested she record it after a falling out with the band. The song’s lyrics are written from the perspective of a young woman who is questioning her relationship with the titular Johnny and elicited a “crazy” reaction over the use of the word ‘queer’ in its title.
“I feel like I took a bullet for that word,” sighs Cotton in RETROPOP’s August issue. “I mean, honestly, it was all about the word. It started off really fun and then it got really weird; I was banned in Amsterdam and I didn’t know anything got banned in Amsterdam!
“Then the Evangelicals went after me – OK, the Catholic Church I could understand – in conjunction with the gay community on the East Coast. But then in California, it was an anthem for the gay community and they were so grateful to have that word belong to them and know it was OK to be gay.”
An underground hit, the track went Top 40 on the US Dance chart and Top 10 in Canada, and featured on the soundtrack of the 1983 film ‘Valley Girl’, in which she starred. As its popularity grew, so did the discontent surrounding it. “The crazy thing is, Johnny, Are You Queer? was used in conversion therapy,” she shares, revealing a gay friend who was writing a musical based around the tune witnessed the track in use first-hand.
“He was in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is very conservative, and they took him to a conversion camp to turn young gay boys straight and played Johnny, Are You Queer? through headphones, really loud, for hours and hours and hours. He said it was torture!
“But then the super Evangelicals thought I was actually a man trying to convert people to homosexuality. I would watch some of these Televangelists – in the eighties it was off the hook – and I remember this guy holding up the 12” single of Johnny, Are You Queer? and screaming into the camera, yelling, ‘There is no Josie Cotton!’. Then they played it on a turntable at half speed and tried to make out I was a man – because it sounded just like Brian Wilson!”
But the song’s appeal endured and just as it was ready to be serviced to commercial radio – with ‘queer’ beeped out – her label pulled the plug on the campaign. “It was like, ‘That’s why you signed me and now you’re killing the record’,” she admits. “They cancelled my videos for the first record; I had such an in to MTV because my manager was best friends with Les Garland, who ran the whole thing, but he said there was no future in video so they cancelled everything.
“My manager was Randy Phillips, who went on to ruin the career of Michael Jackson… And then when I wouldn’t do a spread for Penthouse magazine, the label dropped me.”
Over the decades that followed, she released music sporadically, but was ultimately lured back to music after a call from the producers of ‘Stranger Things’, who were looking for unreleased material from their 1980s. “They wanted songs from eighties artists that were never released and I just thought, ‘That’s a very odd request – who else but me would have a whole record they didn’t release?’,” she laughs.
“The songs weren’t dark enough for the show – they didn’t match that aesthetic – but it did make me go back and find that album, and everything worked out one way or another…”
‘Day Of The Gun’ is out now on Kitten Robot Records.
Read the full interview in the August 2023 edition of RETROPOP, out now. Order yours or subscribe via our Online Store, use our Store Finder to locate your nearest stockist, or get Digital Copies delivered direct to your devices.
