Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Him: 'TransElectric' Reviewed

Welcome to Open Up and Read, the newsletter from music journalist Jason Brow. If you like what you read, tell your friends and consider tossing a few dollars his way via Ko-Fi. Be kind to cats. Music is the best.

Note from the author: Keep an eye out for Open Up And Read: Weekend Edition coming tomorrow.

Call it a bit of Pride Month magic that during a visit to my local public library, I would catch sight of the vibrant blue cover of Cidney Bullens’ TransElectric: My Life as a Cosmic Rock Star. The 2023 memoir (Chicago Review Press) details a rock star who flirted with success, a broken soul overcoming drug addiction, alcohol abuse, and childhood trauma, a parent grieving the incomparable loss, and a man who spent six decades living in the wrong body.

Bullens, a transgender man who came out publicly in 2012, details his prior life as Cindy in TransElectric: an androgynous Mick Jagger lookalike from Boston who finds herself in Los Angeles through bold decisions and determination. Along the way, Bullens would share the stage backing legends like Patti Smith and Bob Dylan, befriend legends like T Bone Burnett and Bonnie Raitt, and become one of Sir Elton John’s backing vocalists after crashing his party.

TransElectric argues for Bullens’ place in rock history. He was one of the singers accompanying Sir Elton for his legendary two-night run at Dodger Stadium in 1975, where he wore his now-iconic Bob Mackie-designed sequined Dodgers uniform. 

The fact that a trans man, albeit closeted at the time, was there backing the biggest rock star of the day seems to be an undercelebrated fact.

Even Bullens doesn’t spend too much time on it in TransElectric (likely because he knows that those 100,000+ fans were there for Sir Elton and not him).

That leads to one of the biggest takeaways from Bullens’ memoir. Trans people are everywhere.

Throughout TransElectric, I would often think of a clip that came across my feed on one late-night doom scroll. It showed an elfin man in an ill-fitting suit and odd mutton chops framing a slight face. He spoke about synthesizers with expertise and joy. The snippet’s caption has faded over time, but the general gist remains: trans people have always been here, often in plain sight.

The clip, from PBS’s Nova in 1970, was not of a trans man. It was Wendy Carlos, the pioneering electronic artist, discussing the instruments going into her Grammy-winning album, Switched-On Bach. This disguise, with the fake mutton chops and awkward suit, was the “boy drag” she’d wear for public appearances. She was already living privately as a woman, having started hormone therapy years before.

There’s a moment in TransElectric that takes place a year after Carlos’s appearance. Bullens had been assigned female at birth, and from age 3-4, knew it was wrong. So, while as an acting student in NYC, he visited the New York Public Library to look up a book on gender, leading to a possible route to hormone therapy. But, he balked.

This moment echoes TransElectric’s opening scene. We watch as a pre-transition Bullens finesses his way into a late-night studio jam session with A-listers like Ringo Starr, Joe Cocker, and Dr. John. After leaving the mic aflame with some blues-rock vocals, producer Bob Ezrin approaches Bullens with news that someone from United Artists wanted to sign her, then and there, to a record deal.

But producer Bob Ezrin warned her: she’d have to work twice as hard as everyone else. Because she was a girl. Except Bullens wasn’t. And so, she turned it down.

TransElectric sets up Bullens’ brush with superstardom. The second act chronicles Bullens, still living publicly as a woman, losing a daughter to cancer. He’d channeled his grief into an album, Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth, a project he’d share to help other parents cope with similar tragedies. 

It’s in the third act that Bullens focuses on his gender identity. We finally meet Cid – and Cid figures out who exactly he is.

TransElectric benefits from Bullens’ well-versed hand as a songwriter. The memoir flows like an album without skips, never bogged down with minutia or meandering stories. It helps that Bullens adapted his story before, turning his life into a one-person show (“Somewhere Between: Not an Ordinary Life”, which he details in the latter chapters.) The work here is precise, like a perfect three-minute song. Intro. Verse. Chorus. Bridge. Repeat. 

As such, TransElectric is a breeze to read—for better or worse. Towards the later chapters, most rock memoirs collapse into self-indulgent misery mining, as if the author has to relive their most humiliating low moments as some court-ordered penance. TransElectric doesn’t take that route. 

Bullens doesn’t graphically detail the lowest moments of his drug addiction and alcohol abuse. We do see some moments of his addiction, but after he attends his first AA meeting, he’s in recovery…and we move on. 

Similarly, a five-year relationship Bullens had with a woman prior to his transition is given a single page in the memoir. This might come off as jarring, but these editorial decisions serve the overall story. Bullens only spends a paragraph on the following page on his two albums, Neverland and dream #29, so he can discuss their commercial failures and explain why he shifted careers, turning to a fitness instructor at the Y. Bridge. Chorus. Repeat.

After all, TransElectric is a story about persevering despite it all. Drugs, drama, dysmorphia, and dreams denied all play a part in tripping up Bullens’ journey, but he never blames others. He owns up to his mistakes and doesn’t come across as bitter. Frustrated, yes—at times, but the story usually depicts a man grateful for what he has and not envious of what he doesn’t.

It helps that Bullens is never in want of much; he always has work, and I imagine the royalties from providing lead vocals to three songs on the Grease soundtrack helped. Bullens does name-check his privilege in the memoir, and the epilogue addresses the issues that less fortunate trans people endure.

But remember: Bullens didn’t transition until he was in his 60s. It might be false for him to speak at length about the plights of the community he wasn’t fully involved with until he was near retirement age.

That’s the second lasting note of TransElectric. Bullens knew he was a man when he was 3 or 4. And for sixty years, he didn’t like who he saw when he looked in the mirror.  Six decades of feeling wrong and out of step with the world. 

It’s a feeling that almost eludes description as if new words need to be invented to convey this feeling to the cisgender reader. Bullens doesn’t center TransElectric around discomfort. While it is an everpresent element in the first two-thirds of the memoir, the theme is surviving the pain, not the pain itself. 

But fuck. No one should ever go that long feeling uncomfortable in their own skin. And I hope this memoir leaves readers feeling that way. 

Every trans person is entitled to a happy ending. However, many will not get it. So stories like Bullens’ need to be cherished. 

Wendy Carlos got her flowers. After Kim Petras won a Grammy for “Unholy” in 2023, many brought up Carlos’s name, pointing out that Petras was the second transgender woman to take home such an award.

That same year, Cidney released Little Pieces via Kill Rock Stars, a “musical companion distilling that same beauty into the taut musicianship, expressive poetry, and thoughtful melodies that he’s made a career out of.”

While Cidney Bullens knew he was trans from the start, Cassandra Peterson discovered she was queer later in life. The woman behind Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, revealed her then 19-year relationship with a woman, Teresa “T’ Weirson, in her 2021 memoir, Yours Cruelly, Elvira.

I spoke with Peterson a year later when the book came out in paperback. We discussed music, her date with Elvis, and that one photo of her, Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Reubens, and Toni Basil all dressed up as new wavers.

For further reading (and a preview of a future book review), check out my 2023 chat with Jon Ginoli of Pansy Division. We talked about the band celebrating the 30^th anniversary of their debut album, Undressed, and how Pansy Division’s mission was to show “the joyful side” of being gay.

I reviewed Earth Tongue’s Great Haunting for New Noise. The garage/stoner/heavy psych album proved that the hype around this New Zealand duo is real. If you like wild music, Satan, and driving an El Camino down a long highway in New Mexico while evading cultists and werewolf bikers, this is the album for you.

You’ll also receive the first Open Up and Read: Weekend Edition tomorrow. It’s a longer piece about the recent chart tomfoolery between Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Charli XCX, and how this might mean that it’s the end of an era.

If you dig long-form journalism and would like to see more of it from yours truly, give it a read. Plus, a lot of cool and brilliant people helped in making it.

Until next time,
Jason

Thank you for checking out Open Up and Read, the newsletter from music journalist Jason Brow. If you like what you read, tell your friends and consider tossing a few dollars my way via Ko-Fi. Be kind to cats. Music is the best.