The funny thing about the much-lamented tendency for rockers to “go disco” in the late ’70s is that one of disco’s biggest icons went that route, too — though everything else great about Sylvester seemed well in place by ’73 anyways. The real question is what Sylvester and the Hot Band’s version of “rock” actually was. Unrepentantly queer, Sylvester’s toying with gender roles and his roots in the drag community might’ve superficially aligned him with the glam movement (at least for lack of any other real peers), but there’s a specificity to the defiance of his performances — Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” inhabited with a stunning falsetto that finds the reverence in camp, the ironic-yet-heartfelt reclamation of “My Country Tis of Thee” as metapatriotic speed-freak funk, a door-kicking “Southern Man” seething with rageful sorrow — that seemed to come from a deeper place of witnessing than the rest of the early ’70s glitter boys. And the band’s sense of rock, even in the covers of Neil Young and Procol Harum (“A Whiter Shade of Pale”), is closer to early ’70s Bay Area soul-crossover than anything choogling chariots across the Atlantic — not quite War or Tower of Power, but at least in keeping with, say, that same year’s jazz-rocking debut LP by their Blue Thumb labelmates the Pointer Sisters. A critic-bewildering curio and a slow seller in its time, this LP isn’t just an oddity from an icon in pre-hitmaker mode — it’s a wild deflation of rock’n’roll as an expression of machismo, the barrier-breaking salvo before disco gave one of pop’s most startling voices a more comfortable home.