Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  IN MAY 1965, Bob Dylan rolled into London’s Savoy Hotel, currently touring England being followed by American documentary maker D. A. Pennebaker and simultaneously pursued by a strange blonde woman from Germany who sang like a bassoon with scurvy. He was also rolling high in the UK top ten that month ‘lookin’ for a friend’ while in the want ads and tin pan alleyways north of the Savoy, David Jones was looking for a band. And somewhere amidst the dankest tumbledown dives of nearby Soho, the man born Brian Holden was looking for what was left of his sanity as he scraped the bottom of the barrel he’d christened Vince Taylor.

  Vince had left his destitute backing group behind in Paris on a Monday morning, telling them he needed to hop across the channel to demand outstanding payment from their London booking agent. He was gone four days. Time enough to recover the £200 owed. Time enough to crash a party for Dylan and drop his first tab of acid.

  By the time he returned to Paris on Friday evening Vince had managed to spend most of the money on a bag of LSD, half of which he’d already gobbled. When he stumbled back into the band’s hotel they barely recognised, let alone understood, him. Unwashed and unshaven, he carried a roll of purple material under one arm and a bottle of Mateus rosé wine in the other. Met with their confused daggering stares, he tried to explain himself.

  ‘You think I’m Vince Taylor, don’t you?’

  Nervous silence.

  ‘Well, I’m not. My name is Mateus.’

  Not a squeak.

  ‘I’m the son of God.’

  After a deathly pause, his long-suffering drummer, Bobbie Woodman, tentatively broached the subject of the missing money. Vince, or maybe Brian, or maybe even Mateus, took out the few notes left in his pockets along with a cigarette lighter.

  ‘That’s all you guys are interested in. Money! The root of all evil.’

  He burned the lot.

  The next morning, Vince Taylor resurfaced from his room, freshly shaven, his familiar black quiff newly slicked, much to the relief and reassurance of his band. Until they arrived at La Locomotive club where they were due to play that Saturday night. Vince noticed a poster outside advertising their gig. He calmly walked over, took a felt pen from his pocket, crossed out the name of Vince Taylor and scribbled ‘MATEUS’.

  Woodman and the rest of the band still clung to the skinniest of hopes they could carry off the show without incident. As was now their standard intro, they walked on stage first and kicked into the opening riff of Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’Mon Everybody’, increasing the tension until their leader’s entrance. When Taylor finally emerged from the wings he was carrying a jug of water. He never made it to the microphone. Instead he wandered among the audience, baptising them with wet sprinkles from his jug.

  ‘God bless you. I am Mateus. The son of God.’

  Vince Taylor continued preaching out into the streets of Pigalle, spreading the gospel of Mateus through the city centre, across the river Seine to the bohemian byways of the Left Bank. It was another twenty-four hours before his band saw him again. When he returned to their hotel he told them they were all catching a plane to California.

  ‘God is the pilot, and he’s going to fly us to Hollywood.’

  The next day the human husk that once was Brian Holden left Paris in the care of his sister on his way to a psychiatric clinic in England. Back to where Ziggy Stardust needed him to perform one last feat of messianic influence.

  By the summer of 1965, the 2 I’s in Soho was no longer the favourite hang-out of London’s young and desperate musicians. The smartest mod heads and hemlines had shifted camp to an Italian café on Denmark Street, the small nucleus of pop publishers, agents and management offices known as ‘Tin Pan Alley’. La Gioconda was the ‘in’ place where a band could form at any moment at any table over the steam of a few espressos. Where a beat group from Margate called The Lower Third could come looking for a singer and find one called David Jones, formerly of The Manish Boys. And where, one day in that same ’65 summer of ‘Help!’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ the former Manish Boy, David Jones, could have a chance encounter with the former Brian Holden, Vince Taylor.

  The way David told and retold it, Taylor was still quaking in the aftershock of Mateus, dressed in a white robe and sandals like a biblical prophet. He said he was the son of God. David wasn’t frightened, only fascinated. The same fascination which would soon see him cherish a paperback by Frank Edwards called Strange People, a compendium of true tales of folk ‘who have baffled the world’, including Victorian deformities, lunatics and his nineteenth-century namesake, a David Jones of Indiana who functioned perfectly despite never going to sleep. Vince Taylor was as strange as anything in Edwards’ book, his every word a bell jangling completely out of tune. It seemed very appealing to David. ‘I’d love to end up like that,’ he thought. ‘Totally nuts.’

  They chatted in La Gioconda about God, the rebuilding of the lost sunken city of Atlantis and flying saucers before walking together up Charing Cross Road. It was now rush hour, Taylor’s appearance squeezing stern glances from the stream of commuters marching towards Tottenham Court Road underground. Just outside the station, Vince asked David to sit down with him on the pavement, pulling out a battered map of the world and spreading it out on the ground oblivious to the stamp of tired feet all about him. He then took out a magnifying glass and began to scrutinise it in detail, pointing out various locations.

  ‘There’s money buried here,’ Vince told David, prodding his fingers across the paper.

  ‘And the UFOs are going to land here …’

  A finger dabbed somewhere in the Arctic circle.

  ‘… here and here.’

  The curious 17-year-old drank in the ravings of a drug-damaged rock ’n’ roll star who believed himself to be the Messiah. Who believed that aliens were going to land any day soon. ‘I’m going to remember this,’ thought David. ‘This is just too good.’ So ended the gospel of Vince Taylor. And so twinged the first conscious labour contractions of Ziggy Stardust.

  WITH DAVID’S NEW band, The Lower Third, came a new manager, Ralph Horton, who convinced him to shed his persecuted long locks for a shorter crop from the court of King Mod. Sonic pop art master Shel Talmy, producer of hits by The Kinks and The Who, agreed to record his third single, backed by The Lower Third but, to their annoyance, credited only to ‘Davy Jones’. ‘You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving’ and its B-side ‘Baby Loves That Way’ were both Jones originals, already staples of the group’s live set, which stretched to feedback-heavy struts through ‘Chim Chim Cheree’ from Mary Poppins and a tune David had loved since the first time he heard it pressed up against the back of the settee at the age of six. The Quatermass overture ‘Mars, The Bringer of War’ by Gustav Holst.

  Horton maintained high hopes for ‘Davy Jones & The Lower Third’ but knew accelerating them into pop’s fast lane would take the added investment of a management co-partner. He first threw the invitation to Kenneth Pitt, a theatrical agent who’d handled the publicity for Bob Dylan’s recent UK visit. Pitt politely declined due to work commitments but was generous enough to offer Horton one piece of free advice. Perhaps they weren’t yet aware, but there was already a young singer from Manchester called Davy Jones, currently attracting rave reviews on Broadway for his performance as the Artful Dodger in the musical Oliver! It might, suggested Pitt, be in The Lower Third’s best interest if their singer reconsidered his name.

  Two days later, Pitt received a letter from Horton overflowing with gratitude. ‘May I say that I enjoyed our meeting the other day and it was indeed a pleasure to be introduced to you.’ The typed note continued. ‘I have taken the liberty of writing to you and advising you that I have now changed Davie’s name … ’

  Somewhere deep, deep in the velvet ink of outer space, a storm of dust, a blizzard of gas and a new star punctured the blackness.

  ‘… to David Bowie.’

  TWELVE

  VINYL

  DAVID BOWIE. SO the 19-year-old David Jones began
the year 1966 one shedded skin closer to Ziggy Stardust. The Starman’s evolutionary jigsaw was still an incomplete, disjointed confusion of gaping holes and missing pieces but now, slowly, the edges were taking shape. A picture roughly the shape of Vince Taylor begging order from a bric-a-brac mosaic of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, On The Road, Quatermass, Martians, Mingus, saxophones, sexual discovery, suburban frustration and the symphonic discord of Holst’s Planets and, another classical favourite, Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring.

  He released his first single as David Bowie that January, the moodily moddish ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’. A beautifully honest mission statement, it sang of teenage remorse and childhood longing, severing family ties and seeking new realities, burying the body of David Jones beneath that of David Bowie. In its recognition of his ‘long way to go’ and the blind hope he will ‘make it on my own’, ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ was also a scream for help into the cavernous womb of time, one whose Ziggy-shaped echo wouldn’t be heard for another six years.

  Thinking about himself, David was still unsure who that ‘Me’ was. When interviewed by Melody Maker to promote the single he referred to his new fascination with Tibetan Buddhism, the religion of Kerouac, which scrutinised and obliterated all conventional Western philosophy of the self. That there was no such thing as a ‘David Bowie’, or even a ‘David Jones’. Already growing weary of rock ’n’ roll, he also spoke of his plans to write musicals and his ultimate ambition to act. ‘I’d like to do character parts,’ he confessed. ‘I think it takes a lot to become somebody else. It takes some doing.’

  The charts of spring 1966 would remain as untroubled by the name of David Bowie as they had been by Davie Jones; the top ten a stronghold of The Rolling Stones, The Walker Brothers, The Kinks and The Yardbirds with their H. G. Wells-inspired art pop ‘Shapes Of Things’. David hoped to retaliate with a new backing band, The Buzz, joining him in April for a regular residency at London’s Marquee club.

  ‘The Bowie Showboat’ was a Sunday afternoon slot directly inspired by the same venue’s Sunday evening ‘Spontaneous Underground’ showcase for The Pink Floyd, an experimental R&B band who used fancy liquid projections and other strange mechanised light machines. The Floyd’s frontman, Syd Barrett, cut a spookily detached figure, his make-up, nail-varnish and exotic shirts jarring with an unexpectedly soft home counties accent. Over the next year, David followed their progress from the Marquee to the psychedelic haven of the UFO club, gorging his imagination on the Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Astronomy Domine’, entranced by Syd cooing ‘Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten’ between a cacophony of Holstian power chords.

  In contrast ‘The Bowie Showboat’ offered audiences a different kind of pop experiment: part rock ’n’ roll gig, part cabaret, jumbling originals with chart covers and a handful of West End showstoppers including Anthony Newley’s ‘What Kind Of Fool Am I?’ The second week, David’s manager Ralph Horton brought along Kenneth Pitt, the agent who’d already nudged the name change from Jones to Bowie. As Horton had hoped, Pitt was thunderstruck, as much by David’s sense of theatre as his singing voice, enough to reconsider the offer of becoming a business partner. He accepted, not only managing Bowie but, in time, becoming a close confidante and trusted mentor.

  Pitt’s Marylebone flat immediately offered David another new haven of inspiration, an oasis of Victorian collectibles and antiquarian books. Among the first volumes he plucked from Pitt’s shelf was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s children’s classic The Little Prince, the story of an airman who crashes in the Sahara desert where he meets a wise and charming boy from a distant asteroid. The tale ends with the sad little prince only able to return to his starry home by allowing his body to perish in an act akin to extraterrestrial suicide.

  David nevertheless still remained blind to his blindingly obvious destiny, for the time being distracted by other characters stalking his mind demanding immortality in song. The overgrown, comic-reading mummy’s boy ‘Uncle Arthur’. The bitter old soldier who loses his love to the leader of the ‘Rubber Band’. The innocent children of ‘There Is A Happy Land’ borrowed from the Keith Waterhouse novel of the same name. The rain-sodden child killer of ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’. And, tantalisingly, his first self-proclaimed ‘Messiah’, the population-crunching prophet of a future world-state turning ‘a blind eye to infanticide’ in ‘We Are Hungry Men’.

  Such musical playacting offered creative sanctuary away from the R&B pop world he’d already tried and so far failed in. A semi-autobiographical exception was ‘The London Boys’, not only David’s best song of the period but one of the best he’d ever write: a slow-building ballad belittling the empty promise of the city’s club scene through the eyes of a lonely young mod who falls prey to Soho’s vicious circle of drugs and false friends. The Rise And Fall Of David Jones, as narrated by his older, wiser reincarnation. Already popular in concert, David thought ‘The London Boys’ had single potential. Sadly his new label, the Decca subsidiary Deram, didn’t want to risk controversy over its lyrics mentioning amphetamine ‘pills’ but, as consolation, agreed to release it as the B-side of the safer, trumpet-tooting ‘Rubber Band’.

  In early November, Pitt left London on a business trip to New York, among his aims: to drum up American interest in David, both as a recording star in his own right and a potential songwriter for hire. David enviously wished him luck, wondering when the day would come when he’d finally get the chance to visit the promised land of Sal Paradise, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. To a seldom-travelled boy from Bromley, America, and New York in particular, remained an elusive fantasy. He admitted as much in another new song, ‘Did You Ever Have A Dream’, pondering on the ease with which somebody could imagine walking around Manhattan as they slept in Bromley’s neighbouring suburb. Dearest, glamorous Penge.

  NOBODY IN NEW York dreamed of Penge. Nobody in New York knew or cared where Penge was. Certainly not Andy Warhol, who knew where Pittsburgh was because he was born there, but was still happier in Manhattan dreaming of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie O, Campbell’s soup cans, Brillo boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, Bloomingdale’s, Elaine’s restaurant, electric chairs, wanted men, beautiful boys, high heel shoes, paint and glue. Andy Warhol, pop-art god, created from thin air around the Slovak-American vapour that once was Andrew Warchola. Whose greatest work of art was himself: silver-haired, sunglass-eyed, cruising through life in catatonic gear, never fully in the room he appeared to be in, forever clinging to the surface of reality. The artist who didn’t have a studio but a ‘Factory’ on the fourth floor of a midtown warehouse which used to trade in upholstery. The socialite who collected friends like ornaments and called them ‘superstars’. Youthquaking heiress Edie Sedgwick. Shaggy-maned Vogue model ‘Baby Jane’ Holzer. And the spooky blonde sex phantom known simply as Nico.

  Nico came from Germany and spoke, as some described, like a computer trying to impersonate Greta Garbo, a foggy moan of flat, elongated vowels creaking at the speed of an hour hand. She sang that way too: the bassoon with scurvy. Nico arrived in New York from London where she spent the same acid summer of 1965 which destroyed Vince Taylor sinking her fangs into Bob Dylan. By the age of 27 she’d already appeared in European films including Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, rolled with the Stones’ Brian Jones and cut an unsuccessful folky single for their manager Andrew Loog Oldham’s new label, Immediate. As Nico told Warhol, her next priority was to record the song groaning Bob had given her in London called ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’.

  Warhol saw the art in pop but had never thought about dirtying his hands in the record industry. He loved girl groups, especially The Crystals’ ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’ and his all-time favourite, ‘Sally Go Round The Roses’ by The Jaynetts. He’d also used pop music in his 16mm underground films, most recently March 1965’s Vinyl. A very loose interpretation of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess’ novel of teenage violence first published three years earlier, Vinyl’s soundtrack inclu
ded the Stones, The Kinks and Martha & The Vandellas. As the first to mix rock ’n’ roll with droogy delinquency, Warhol and his director Paul Morrissey were already seven years ahead.

  Out of everyone in and around the Factory, Paul Morrissey was Nico’s biggest fan. She was his ‘most beautiful creature that ever lived’ and, he thought, a born superstar if she could front her own rock ’n’ roll band. Warhol agreed that, if only physically, she was gobsmacking: glacial Dietrich cheekbones; irresistibly sensuous pillowy Bardot lips; an ideal subject for one of Andy’s ‘stillies’, his short 16mm moving portraits or ‘screen tests’ of regular Factory hangers-on and his many celebrity visitors, from Salvador Dali to Allen Ginsberg. His discovery of Nico also coincided with an offer from Broadway producer Michael Myerberg, who wanted Factory endorsement of a new discotheque in a disused aircraft hangar over in Queens. Morrissey intervened to advise Myerberg that, location-wise, it was too far off Manhattan and, Warhol-wise, would only be worthwhile for them if Andy could use the club to present his own rock ’n’ roll group. Myerberg agreed – unaware that Warhol didn’t yet have one.

  Since Morrissey was already excited about hiring a band for Nico, it now became his mission to find one worthy of the Andy Warhol trademark. He didn’t have to search long.

  A week or so after Myerberg’s proposal, Morrissey’s friend and fellow underground filmmaker Barbara Rubin asked if he’d help her shoot footage of her friends’ band currently in residence at a Greenwich Village beatnik club. Marooned on a dead go-go strip of West 3rd Street, the best days of the Café Bizarre were long behind it by December 1965; a cartoon goth tourist trap of Morticia Addams-a-like bar staff and fishnet lamps where every day was Halloween. Its last booking of any great interest was a couple of years earlier when it was home to 50-year-old Herman Blount, a ‘cosmic jazz’ pianist and philosopher who in his own inimitable hum-defying way bravely tested the waters for Ziggy by calling himself ‘Sun Ra’, telling everyone he came from Saturn and wearing far-out spacey Egyptian pharaoh costumes. If only Blount had been thirty years younger and learned to play three-minute rock ’n’ roll instead of ten minute abstract mood-jams, the Starman’s glory might even have been his.