Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  Over the next few days, as he travelled through the Midwest towards the South, his mind kept returning to The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. The madness of the music. The story of this weird little guy from Texas who everyone laughed at.

  And the name. ‘Stardust Cowboy’. Whatever anyone said about his records, nobody could deny it was an amazing name. It got David thinking all over again. The familiar echo.

  ‘I think it takes a lot to become somebody else. It takes some doing …’

  BEFORE HE BECAME somebody else he was plain old Jim. James Newell Osterberg, Jr, another of 1947’s boom babies, raised in a trailer park outside Ann Arbor, Michigan. A quiet and thoughtful kid prone to debilitating attacks of asthma, he first acknowledged a hidden ‘wild streak’ around the age of five; by the time he reached high school he was swaying in the corridors pretending to be a giant flower and calling himself ‘Hyacinth’. Rock ’n’ roll baptism came courtesy of drummer Sandy Nelson’s savage instrumental hits, inspiring Jim to buy his first kit and form his first band at the age of 15, The Megaton Two. He remained on drums in his next group, The Iguanas. Other kids thought the name was hilarious and started to call him ‘Iggy’ for short. Jim didn’t like it at first. He tried to think of his own pseudonym but his best shot was ‘Jimmy James’. For better or worse, Iggy would have to do.

  Iggy tried to commit to serious study, enrolling at the local University of Michigan, the academic body which once upon a time tried to coax an ill Gustav Holst to join its music faculty. Sat in course lectures on social anthropology and Asian studies, he learned about ancient religious ritual involving music, dance, mild drug taking and orgiastic behaviour. It sounded much too tempting a career move.

  Iggy dropped out of college, forming a new band with three likeminded delinquent desperados. They called themselves The Psychedelic Stooges.

  Iggy was now singing out front, playing lap-steel guitar and a Farfisa organ with the legs taken off, wearing a silvery wig and some ill-advised Asian clothing. Their set included a song about a man who lived with his pet mouse and climaxed with Iggy’s attempt to blow sounds through a vacuum cleaner. It was the wrong kind of weird.

  The lap-steel, Farfisa organ and vacuum cleaner were eventually dispensed with alongside Iggy’s shirt, his decision to go topless in homage to the Egyptian Pharaohs he’d studied in the university library. The band’s music underwent a similar symbolic stripping down: a fierce primitive rock ’n’ roll grunt made by, and for, bored, insolent street punks.

  In September 1968, Elektra Records’ publicist Danny Fields was sent to Detroit to sign another local Michigan noise, the heavily politicised MC5. They suggested Fields might also want to check out The Psychedelic Stooges – ‘our little brother band’ – playing the next day. Fields thought they were chaotic, their few songs half-formed and rambling. But he knew a star when he saw one. The half-naked, crowd-baiting maniac calling himself Iggy. Fields made every effort and got them signed too.

  With a record deal they decided to drop the ‘Psychedelic’ and become simply The Stooges. For the time being Jim was still ‘Iggy Stooge’, an alias soon to be subsumed by another coined by his bandmates after a local junkie named Jim Popp. ‘Iggy Pop’.

  Fields’ next mission was to pair them with the right producer, somebody who could capture their crudity without neutering their spirit in the process. The ideal candidate seemed to be John Cale, who’d just proven his worth as arranger and uncredited co-producer on Nico’s Elektra album The Marble Index. Cale, better than anyone, understood the fine balance between raw experimentation and technical orthodoxy, a line he’d been happily treading with The Velvet Underground until only very recently.

  On April Fool’s Day 1969, The Stooges and Cale began work on their debut album at the Hit Factory in New York. Cale’s main obstacle was the sheer noise. With no studio experience, Iggy and the band automatically plugged in and played at full volume, just as they would on stage. When Cale asked them to turn it down, they insisted they could only play at number ten – as a token compromise, they might very seldom lower it to nine. There was also an alarming dearth of material. Somehow they’d expected to make a record with only four songs prepared. They improvised a fifth in the studio but it still wasn’t enough. Unfazed by the time constraints, they returned to their lodgings at the Chelsea Hotel. There, between the same walls Arthur C. Clarke had drafted his script for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Iggy and his Stooges knocked out the rest of the album – three more no-nonsense rock ’n’ roll rampages about dolls smoking cigarettes and having a real cool time – in the space of an hour.

  The end result, The Stooges, was released in August 1969. America’s reaction was summed up by the backhanded compliment of Rolling Stone magazine: ‘They suck, and they know it, so they throw the fact back in your face and say, “So what? We’re just havin’ fun.”’

  Sadly, not enough people in 1969 were ready to share that fun. The album remained in the cult stratosphere beyond the mainstream, much like those of The Velvet Underground, less records than calling cards of cool between the initiated elite. Yet of the copies of The Stooges that were distributed, none were more precious than that which made it onto the record shelf of a radio station in San Jose. Where it remained, gathering a thin layer of dust, until the second week of February 1971.

  DAVID BOWIE WAS nearing the end of his trip, enjoying a three-night stopover in San Francisco, Kerouac’s fabled destination of the beats. His interview schedule included a daytrip out of the city. To a radio station in San Jose.

  Asked on-air if there was anything he’d like to hear, with New York and his fake Lou Reed encounter still fresh in his mind, he answered, ‘Anything by The Velvet Underground.’ A journalist called John, who’d been shadowing David that day, had also been flicking through the station’s records. He smiled to see they had a copy of The Stooges.

  John passed the album to David, nudging him to play something. David had never heard of them before. He looked down the list of song titles. ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ made him laugh. He asked the DJ if he could play it. Divine light poured forth.

  David heard a molten guitar riff steadily hacking its way towards the centre of the Earth. A monotone piano that stabbed his eardrums as a needle might a baby’s eye. The sleigh bell sound of Santa Claus dangling at the end of a rope. And that wired, wanting voice.

  ‘Now-I-wann-a, be yer dawg!’

  Who the hell was that voice?

  On the drive back to San Francisco, John told David everything he wanted to know about The Stooges. They’d made two records: that one and another called Fun House. Their singer was a lunatic called Iggy, who sang topless in ripped jeans and silver gloves. He was known for leaping into the crowd without fear of injury, dripping wax on his chest or smearing his torso with peanut butter. David liked the sound of this Iggy as he much as he loved the sound of his band. He sounded proper crazy. Vince Taylor crazy. Another madman to add to the pot.

  The pot stirred in his sleep during his last Friday night in San Francisco. It was still stirring the next morning when he caught the hour’s flight to his trip’s end in Los Angeles. Stirring through take-off, still stirring as the plane climbed until, slowly, the stirring stopped, his thoughts congealing tens of thousands of feet above the Californian coastline.

  ‘I think it takes a lot to become somebody else. It takes some doing …’

  Somebody else. Called something else like Iggy Pop or The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. A great name. Yes, it was all in the name.

  ‘The Legendary Iggy Cowboy. Iggy Legend. Pop Cowboy. Cowdust Iggy. Starboy Pop. Iggy Starboy. Stardust Iggy. Iggy Stardust …’

  Iggy Stardust?

  A ripple in the fabric of spacetime. A teeter on the precipice of ‘Eureka!’

  ‘Ciggy Stardust, Diggy Stardust …’

  Stirring, stirring.

  ‘Liggy Stardust, Miggy Stardust …’

  Stirring, stirring, getting closer.

  ‘Qiggy Stardust, Riggy Stardus
t …’

  Stirring, stirring, coming in to land.

  ‘Viggy Stardust, Wiggy Stardust …’

  THE DATE WAS Saturday 13 February 1971. In London, director Stanley Kubrick was filming four young men in bowler hats, braces and codpieces beat up a tramp in a pedestrian underpass in Wandsworth, while Marc Bolan admired the first press ads for his next single, ‘Hot Love’, as he readied himself for a gig in Barking.

  And in Los Angeles, David Bowie stepped off a plane from San Francisco to be greeted by Mercury’s West Coast publicist Rodney Bingenheimer, the first to learn of his latest idea to write songs about a new character he’d just invented during the flight. The first human to hear David Bowie say the two greatest words in the history of pop music. Two words which the cosmos had been waiting for a sentient creature to utter for nearly fourteen billion years, tumbling at last through jagged teeth and London lips to softly scythe the warm Los Angeles air.

  ‘Ziggy Stardust.’

  SIXTEEN

  BECOMING

  EIGHT MONTHS AFTER shaking hands with the wrong Lou Reed, David was back in New York shaking hands with the right Lou Reed. Eight months after he’d first heard Iggy Pop on record, David was meeting Iggy Pop in the flesh. Eight months after first saying the words ‘Ziggy Stardust’, David’s body and soul were accelerating on an irreversible slap-bang collision with those of the Starman.

  It wasn’t as simple for him as it had been for Billy Batson. He didn’t suddenly say the magic word – ‘Shazam!’ – and, in a flash, become Ziggy. But Ziggy now existed as a silvery voice whispering inside his head. A voice as old as space and time ordering him to empty himself of David Bowie and succumb to absolute extraterrestrial transfusion.

  New York in early September was a warmer city than that David first visited in January. He was glad to be back, glad for another gasp of air away from the suffocating fog of ‘T. Rexstasy’. The young Britons of 1971 had since surrendered willingly to the Marc Bolan blitzkrieg as he followed ‘Ride A White Swan’ with two number ones. The second, ‘Get It On’, was still in reverse thrust back down the charts as David touched down at Kennedy International. The first, ‘Hot Love’, had spent six weeks at the top that spring, incinerating the last dregs of sixties hippy bore-rock when Marc appeared on Top Of The Pops with glitter on his face. It was the magic touch of his publicist, Chelita Secunda, herself a flamboyant King’s Road fashion queen, whose idea it was to glue sparkling star shapes under each of his eyes. On the TV screen it looked as if Marc had been weeping diamond dust. A nation’s youth wilted in amazement and hailed undying loyalty to their new King of Glam. It was near impossible to think of anyone ever usurping him.

  David’s stars were aligning nicely nonetheless. In preparation for Ziggy, he’d found his mothership just north of Bromley, opposite Beckenham golf course: a converted flat in a redbrick turreted Victorian manor called Haddon Hall. Visitors approaching along Southend Road would catch their breath at its gothic asylum silhouette, their thoughts jumping to Norman Bates’ house in Psycho, the Addams family nest or the Gruesome Twosome’s ‘Creepy Coupe 2’ from the Wacky Races cartoon. From the outside, a house of horror, but a sacred cosmic pop hatchery within.

  There’d also been a radical changing of David’s guards: most of the moneymen who’d supported him through ‘Space Oddity’ had now been swept away, including the steadfast Kenneth Pitt. In his place stood the fierce new broom called Tony DeFries, a young Jewish business lawyer with a hypnotically soft voice and ambitions as scarily big as his favourite cigars. Among DeFries’ first coups as David’s manager was to wrestle him away from Mercury Records for a better deal. His new label was the home of the seven-inch single, RCA Victor. David was now on the same orange and white January 8 team as Elvis Presley.

  The deal with RCA was the catalyst for his return to New York, this time accompanied by his wife, Angie, and DeFries. The label welcomed him with a celebration steak dinner at The Ginger Man, an Upper West Side Irish bar and restaurant, surprising David with a special guest. Another new signing to the RCA roster: the right Lou Reed.

  He was nothing like the wrong Lou Reed. Doug Yule had been friendly and talkative. Lou was sharp, silent and a bit suspicious. David remained blind to Lou’s detachment, transfixed as if in the presence of a divine apparition. So this was him. Straight from the corner of Lexington, one-two-five, waiting for his man. David gushed.

  ‘This has been such a thrill for me.’

  Lou couldn’t yet bring himself to say the same. He’d see David again a few days later, hitting it off so well they locked themselves away in a bedroom while Angie hammered on the door screaming to let her in. But on this occasion he said little and, ever the enigma, retired early.

  The party continued without Lou down at Max’s Kansas City, the art bar and restaurant north of Union Square, its back room the blessed Camelot of Andy Warhol, who famously exchanged paintings for credit. As David was ushered into Max’s, his eyes peeled for Warhol, who wasn’t there that evening, four blocks away another of his heroes was engrossed in the fate of filibustering senator Jefferson Smith trying to save a plot of land called Willet Creek to build a boys’ camp. Iggy Pop was crashing at the apartment of his manager, former Elektra scout Danny Fields, enjoying that week’s CBS Thursday Night Movie, Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes To Washington starring James Stewart. Or he would be if Fields wasn’t bugging him about some phone call from a journalist inviting him to Max’s to meet some English guy called David Bowie. Fields tried to persuade him that this David had been saying nice things about him in the English press. ‘OK,’ Iggy eventually sighed. He’d go. After the Jimmy Stewart film had finished.

  An hour later, once Jefferson Smith filibustered to victory, Mr Iggy met Mr Ziggy in the back room of Max’s. David was spellbound. So this was him. The body of that voice. ‘So messed up … outta my mind … deep in the night lost in love.’

  Iggy wasn’t anything like Lou. He spoke like a prince of the dregs of America, wild-eyed with doglike wonder, candidly telling David about his life growing up on a trailer park, his past heroin problems and his methadone programme. DeFries was just as taken with Iggy. The Stooges were in label-less limbo with only Fields vainly trying to hold the threads together as manager. This, DeFries said he could fix, inviting Iggy to join him and David for breakfast at their hotel the next day to discuss his future.

  They were staying in the Warwick, the midtown luxury tower built by William Randolph Hearst, tempting fate by booking into the same penthouse suite where The Beatles spent their first New York visit in 1964. The last time David was here he was alone at the Holiday Inn. Now, just eight months later, he was in the lap of luxury, splashing the same bath taps once turned by Lennon and McCartney, riding the same elevators as Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor.

  Eight months. Eight months?

  How much David’s universe had changed, and how fast, since he stepped off that plane in Los Angeles and uttered the words ‘Ziggy Stardust’ …

  THE CHANGES STARTED as soon as David returned to London that February, his luggage straining with records by the Velvets, Iggy and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, his head similarly buckling with the added weight of his stowaway Starman.

  He’d spent his last days in Los Angeles scribbling ideas and writing songs for his new alter ego, delighted to find himself a guest of the same home studio as Vince Taylor’s inspirational black leather Beelzebub, Gene Vincent. Once nicknamed ‘The Living End’, by 1971 Gene looked like a man truly at the end of his living, a worn-out 36-year-old drunkard half-crazy in pain from his crippled left leg. Little Richard may have been ‘God’ but Gene was still one of David’s rock ’n’ roll saints. Aged ten he’d trembled in the cinema watching him howl ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ in The Girl Can’t Help It and later saw him in person on the same Woolwich Granada bill where Richard had pulled his heart-attack stunt. David was especially taken with the way Gene had stood. His leg had first been damaged in a motorbike accident and made worse when h
e later survived the car crash that killed his friend Eddie Cochran. Encased in an orthopaedic brace, he could only lower himself to his microphone by kicking his bad leg straight behind him and bending his right knee. Meeting Gene reminded David of the same pose, like one of H. G. Wells’ half-collapsed Martian tripods. It went straight on his Ziggy ‘to do’ list.

  While in LA, David demoed some of his first Ziggy songs, his close proximity to rock ’n’ roll divinity evident on ‘Hang On To Yourself’ which sounded, if not like Gene, then certainly Eddie Cochran. He left a copy with Gene’s producer, hoping he’d record his own version. Which Gene probably would have had he not died from a burst stomach ulcer a few months later. Another rock ’n’ roll suicide, he’d spent his final years slowly killing himself with alcohol, his dying words spat through blood as he collapsed to his knees in his mother’s trailer home. ‘Mama, you can phone the ambulance now.’

  Back in London, the songs of the Starman kept bombarding David’s head like an all-shaking thunder urging him to surrender to its will. He took temporary shelter in a clandestine demo session funded by his music publisher, Bob Grace, with the help of a trio called Rungk – a name chosen by their Scandinavian bassist after the Swedish slang for ‘wank’. As well as another soft stab at ‘Hang On To Yourself’, David gently squeezed the trigger of a potentially lethal pop laser-gun called ‘Moonage Daydream’. To recoup some of Grace’s costs, David agreed to release the Rungk tracks as a single. For legal reasons, he couldn’t put it out as a ‘David Bowie’ record since he was technically still under contract to Mercury. But the fact that he now needed to create a pseudonym meant he had a golden opportunity to dabble in some identity-switching. A chance to shove his own Doug Yule into the spotlight. The ‘wrong’ David Bowie.

  His name was Fred Burrett and he came from the East End. Or as he called himself Freddie Burretti, just 19, a blue-eyed, razor-cheeked, chopstick-thin fashion designer. He’d caught David’s eye at a gay disco on Kensington High Street, Yours Or Mine, nicknamed ‘the Sombrero’ because of the giant hat above its basement entrance advertising the upstairs Spanish restaurant. Not the most conventional spot for a newly-married young couple to spend their spare evenings but then David and Angie – shenanigan-loving Mrs Goose and Mr Gander – weren’t exactly conventional. Both loved the Sombrero for its human zoo of mock-Hollywood drag queens, oriental rent boys and speeding glamour pusses, fashion freaks and freaks of fashion cavorting as one on the tiny illuminated Perspex dancefloor. Fred was the Sombrero’s supreme star-bragger, a blond hipless wonder in white spandex pants who reminded David of ‘the new Mick Jagger’. Or maybe the wrong David Bowie. Yes. He’d do.