The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  When Bowie joined up, it was still nine months before the Beatles would release their first single, eighteen until the Rolling Stones’ debut. For a rock group, the successful template was the Shadows, all guitars and matching dance steps; so Bowie’s only apparent route to fame involved seizing the spotlight as a vocalist. By October, when the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” was issued, Bowie was styling himself David Jay (the resemblance to Peter Jay was not coincidental) and singing approximately a quarter of the Kon-Rads’ live repertoire: lightweight American pop for the most part, with only Joe Brown’s ballad “A Picture of You” betraying even a hint of his London origins. This was teen entertainment that wouldn’t upset elder members of the family, with none of Coltrane’s startling cacophony or Little Richard’s audacious swagger. There was applause and even adulation, however, and like any fifteen-year-old, Bowie relished the sexual attention sparked by his performances.

  Bowie’s enthusiasm for school soon paled by comparison. He was still reading voraciously, and filling sketchbooks with designs for stage uniforms, but none of that coincided with his school curriculum. Nor was there a clear connection between the controlled exuberance of the Kon-Rads, neatly parceled into unthreatening three-minute vehicles for teenage romance, and the limitless horizons that tantalized him in the pages of his brother’s beat literature, or in the transcendent and frankly unsettling vastness of Coltrane’s or Dolphy’s saxophone solos.

  Several events in the summer of 1963 altered Bowie’s sense of himself, and his potential future. He left Bromley Technical High School with a single O-level qualification in art—evidence of his failure to engage with academic requirements. In a time of virtually full employment, and a booming economy desperate for teenage fodder, he found it easy (with Owen Frampton’s assistance) to secure a job as a trainee commercial artist in a Bond Street advertising agency. If he’d been asked to symbolize the spirit of the age, he could hardly have manufactured a more convincing image: by day, he helped to fashion the dreams of consumerism; by night, he lived out the wildest of those dreams as—within the London borough of Bromley, at least—a pop star.

  III

  This sunny snapshot of Swinging London was shadowed by an alarming development in his family life. By summer 1963, Terry Burns’s behavior was beginning to worry Bowie, and his parents. His mother, Peggy, quite capable of acting erratically herself, recognized the signs of the family curse, the schizophrenia that had afflicted her own mother and several of her siblings. When Terry’s grasp on reality began to waver, Bowie not only suffered the fear and distress of watching his much-loved brother slowly slip into another, terrifying psychological world, but he also began to realize that the Burns heritage of instability could extend to his own generation.

  Terry continued to live independently for several more years. But Bowie could no longer rely on his strength and vigor. During an uncharacteristically candid interview with the journalist Timothy White in late 1977, he shone a momentary flashbulb on how he experienced his brother at this time: “He cried an awful lot at an age when I had been led to believe that it was not a particularly adult thing to do . . . he would seem miserable.” Bowie recalled that in his final months at school, “I became very withdrawn,” and felt that he must have “repressed a lot of strange things I thought about or saw in my mind.” He believed that his brother, and other relations, had experienced similar visions and fantasies but been unable to repress them: “I know insanity happened frequently within my family. A lot of institutions kept cropping up to claim various members, most of it coming out of bad experiences, loneliness, in-built caution with other people. . . . I tried to sort it out for myself to prevent it.”

  In the same interview, he admitted that “the first time I felt uncomfortable” was when he was reading Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka’s tale of psychological and physical transformation, with its suggestion that our shared humanity might be ripped away in a night’s sleep, to reveal a bestial creature within. Turning the pages of Kafka, and watching his own brother’s transformation, he must have wondered whether his own fate would be equally traumatic.

  By 1970, when Bowie was a pop star and Terry was living in an asylum, there was an organized revolt against the savage division of mankind into “sane” and “insane.” Organizations such as People for a New Psychiatry and the Campaign Against Psychiatric Atrocities (CAPA), founded by patients and mental health practitioners, offered a new approach to “madness.” CAPA saw insanity as a convenient way of enforcing political control, and said that the inability to exist within a repressive capitalist society was nothing less than a badge of honor: “People who break down because they cannot find a way to live sanely in an insane society are shattered forces of change. Kept whole and mended, restored to themselves, they might threaten. So whilst they are broken and defenceless, the lackeys of the power system step in and make new men and women of them . . . new but no longer themselves.” The moral was simple: “The sane make war, slaughter each other by the million, lock people up for years, for life. The mad take trips, talk strangely, act oddly, but they rarely kill each other and they don’t imprison and oppress. So are they really mad? Are the others really sane?”*

  Bowie would have seen that manifesto in the pages of a paper he read avidly, the International Times, and it helped to shape his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World. In 1963, when there was no underground press in Britain to represent what would soon become known as a counterculture, and Bowie read nothing more radical than the Daily Mirror, the nature of insanity was being challenged only by psychotherapists such as R. D. Laing, whose analysis of the family culture of schizophrenia still casts an intriguing light on the extended Jones household.

  Laing balked at the idea of schizophrenia as a disease of the psyche. Behavior that was categorized as schizophrenic, he argued, was not “a biochemical, neurophysical, psychological fact”; instead, it was “a social event,” a product of relationships within the family. He insisted that “each person does not occupy a single definable position in relation to other members of his or her own family. . . . People have identities. But they may also change quite remarkably as they become different others-to-others. . . . Not only may the one person behave differently in his different alterations, but he may experience himself in different ways.”

  Imagine Terry Burns, then, already ostracized from his mother and stepfather; unwelcome in his family home; his room physically obliterated as soon as he joined the air force; being raised among a female line of relatives for whom madness was not so much a fear as an expectation; growing to feel, perhaps, that schizophrenia might represent a way of belonging to his family in a profound sense that was otherwise unavailable to him. Yet within that family unit, he has one person, his stepbrother David, who accepts him, respects him, trusts him, regards him as a source of knowledge and experience. Using Laing’s logic, it is easy to imagine how Terry might submit to the tradition of “insanity” presented by his mother, while in his relationship with David, the same chaotic emotional responses that his family classed as “madness” might become a means of exposing his young sibling to the artistic potential of life. The more exuberant Terry would become when talking about literature or music, the more likely it is that David would be enraptured by his example and, at the same moment, that his mother and stepfather would see not joie de vivre, but the unmistakable traits of insanity.

  That visceral sense of life was encapsulated for Bowie in a book that Terry gave him, and which he acknowledged as a major influence on his teenage self: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Set in the year of Bowie’s birth, 1947, On the Road is the exemplar of the beat generation—a manifesto to the wild impulse to go, get gone, change, keep pushing out and on and over the limits, in cars, in the free-form extravagance of bebop jazz, on pills and weed and beer, in lust and in the sheer necessity of moving to keep from standing still. Its ethos is speed—the Benzedrine pills that propel through the body through all-night stands, the cars that career across state li
nes at midnight, the conversation that pulses back and forth across smoke-filled rooms, everything that let its characters realize that “we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move. And we moved!”

  Speed and motion governed everything in On the Road, from sex (“the one and only holy and important thing in life”) to writing (“you’ve got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict”) and bop (“going like mad all over America”). In a key passage, Kerouac proclaims that “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Bowie would meet those spiders again later, but in Kerouac’s desperate yearning for the extreme he would have recognized his own relentless desire to change and burn, and his brother’s wild enthusiasms.

  Kerouac, and the savage pileup of imagery in Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl; the tortured extremities of William Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch, and the elemental clamor of John Clellon Holmes’s Go: that perverse and electrifying set of images jangled Bowie’s nerves and roused his adrenaline just as Little Richard and John Coltrane had done. Rock’n’roll and bop—and now beat literature—precluded the need for chemical stimulation, although that merely added to the heightened surge of energy. In 1963, Bowie was a cauldron of excitement, onstage and in his head, while being told that one vital source of that adrenaline, Terry’s quicksilver mind, was not to be trusted. Doctors and psychiatrists prescribed drugs for his elder brother, which subdued his brain and set a distance between the two young men that would rarely be bridged again. Only the imprint of Terry’s influence remained, a cocktail of art and experience that amounted to a vision of life’s possibilities and pitfalls.

  IV

  While his head reeled with the restlessness of Kerouac’s wanderers and the twitching pulse of rock’n’roll, there was little room in Bowie’s consciousness for the demands of school—or, after July 1963, his new career in advertising. His employment lasted no more than a year, and on the rare occasions when he discussed it in interviews, he tended to dismiss it as either a bore or a disappointment. (“It was diabolical. I never realised that to be an artist meant buckling under so much,” he declared in 1971.) Occasionally, seeking to prove a point about the Orwellian nature of modern society, he would hint that he had witnessed advertising as a dark, controlling force, lending another interpretation to “diabolical.” “I’ve been in the media, I used to be a visualiser for an advertising agency,” he said in 1975. “They are killers, man. . . . They’re dealing with lives, those ad agencies.”

  The TV series Mad Men has lent advertising in the early 1960s a luster that Bowie might not have recognized. There was a clear gap between New York, where young admen were (in Tom Wolfe’s memorable description of Wall Street’s princes) the “masters of the universe”; and London, where most agencies were run in a frosty atmosphere closer to a law office than an adventure playground. In his move from technical school to a desk as a trainee commercial artist, though, Bowie represented the changing nature of the industry. As elsewhere in Swinging London, it was becoming possible for a working-class boy to attain a senior position in an agency. What agencies desired from their “creatives,” according to a 1963 survey, was a list of qualities that Bowie exemplified: “creative imagination, visual awareness, marked powers of analysis and synthesis, judgement, curiosity, clarity of thought and expression, observation, versatility, flexibility and psychological insight.” Almost all of those assets were evident in his later musical career.

  Despite Bowie’s insistence that his advertising employment was little more than a charade, he demonstrated enough promise during his year in the West End to be promoted from trainee commercial artist to junior visualizer. His first role involved illustrating other people’s ideas, and as a trainee he would often have done nothing more creative than draw boxes around illustrations and insert lettering into existing designs. As a junior visualizer, however, he was being inducted into the world of what the American writer Vance Packard called, in a celebrated exposé, The Hidden Persuaders. Visualizers were creating the concepts and images that the commercial artists would illustrate; alongside the copywriters, whose territory was strictly words, they would bring alive the products and campaigns of their clients. “The basic purpose of visualization is to communicate,” noted an advertising handbook of the times. “Only elements that carry forward the advertising message should be included—all others should be discarded.”

  In keeping with Bowie’s “diabolical” verdict, Packard believed that advertising agencies “see us as bundles of daydreams, misty hidden yearnings, guilt complexes, irrational emotional blockages. We annoy them with our seemingly senseless quirks, but we please them with our growing docility in responding to their manipulation of symbols that stir us to action.” From there, reasoned Vance Packard and (in Brave New World Revisited) the novelist Aldous Huxley, both writing in the late 1950s, it was a comfortable step to using the tools of the advertising trade to control a populace in the service of political power, whether that was democratic or (the advertising ethos at its devilish zenith) dictatorial. “Find some common desire, some wide-spread unconscious fear or anxiety,” Huxley wrote; “think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal and pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true.” And so the public laps up a new soap powder, a magazine, a pop star, or, so Huxley reasoned, a Hitler. Small wonder that one mid-sixties advertising chief on Madison Avenue conceded: “The techniques of persuasion by which the Russians seek to subvert governments, win the allegiance of new countries, and turn every political situation to their own advantage, are fundamentally the same psychological devices that we apply daily in selling products to consumers, and selling ideas at home.”

  Bowie’s awareness of the malevolent power of the advertising industry would only crystallize as he experienced its effects at first hand, as a performer rather than a visualizer. More immediately, the agency ethos altered the way in which he viewed himself, and the Kon-Rads. “His main contribution [to the band] was ideas,” recalled David Hadfield. “He had thousands of them, a new one every day—that we should change the spelling of our name, or our image, or our clothes, or all the songs in our repertoire. He also came up with lots of black-and-white sketches of potential advertising campaigns for the band. Many of them were great ideas, but it was impossible to put them all into practice.” Hadfield’s testimony suggests that much of Bowie’s working day was devoted to selling and rebranding the Kon-Rads, rather than the agency’s clients. It also confirms how seriously Bowie took the power of the hidden persuaders. For the remainder of the 1960s, he would present himself to the public in a bewildering variety of guises, as if he were still at his desk in Bond Street, presenting potential campaigns to his superiors. His willingness to pursue a dozen contradictory ideas at the same time, effectively damning them all, reflects the fact that he never moved beyond junior roles during his brief advertising career. Only in the 1970s did he realize what his agency bosses could have told him: to sell a product (or a career), it was not helpful to suggest that it was endlessly versatile but with no particular purpose. What he needed was to fix on a single brand, an image that would grab the public’s attention and be burned indelibly into its collective memory.

  V

  In the mid-1960s, Bowie was too blinded by the idea of success to establish a single identity in a long-term campaign. Like Kerouac’s “mad ones,” he was “desirous of everything at the same time,” and heedless of the effect that his single-minded pursuit of stardom would have on those around him. In just three years, he would work his way through six bands, repeating an often callous pat
tern of behavior. Each time, he would pour energy and enthusiasm into the project, and then abandon his comrades at the first sign of resistance. “David wasn’t really prepared for failure,” reflected Hadfield. “He started to push for a breakthrough, and when it didn’t come, he decided to leave.”

  Bowie’s intuition that the Kon-Rads were not a viable vehicle for his career was entirely correct; their image and their repertoire looked backward, rather than anticipating the rampant changes ahead. After seeing the Rolling Stones perform on the same bill as Bo Diddley and Little Richard at the Lewisham Odeon in October 1963, he was desperate to perform R&B rather than teen pop. He was several years younger than the Stones and their British blues contemporaries (though a full sixteen months older than the precocious Stevie Winwood of the Spencer Davis Group, and three years the senior of Little Stevie Wonder). If there was something faintly ridiculous about twenty-year-old Mick Jagger wading into the territory of full-grown bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, then the barely seventeen-year-old David Jones was an even less convincing messenger from the Deep South. Like thousands of his peers, however, the man who had yet to christen himself David Bowie soaked himself in righteous rhythm and blues, soul and gospel.

  He began 1964 in a blues duo with his friend George Underwood, the Hooker Brothers, before the two teenagers formed a five-piece R&B band, the King Bees (named after a Slim Harpo tune that was already in the Rolling Stones’ repertoire). He knew that the Beatles’ success had been masterminded by the manager of a Liverpool music shop, Brian Epstein, and his agency contacts told him that no entrepreneur in London was sharper and more successful* than the Rolls-Razor tycoon, John Bloom. So Bowie sold himself as a good investment to Bloom, an approach so cheeky that, rather than discarding the boy’s letter, Bloom passed it to show business manager Leslie Conn. After a year in which the Beatles and their ilk had rewritten the rules of the London music industry, no self-respecting impresario could afford to ignore an aspiring set of mop tops. Conn realized the appeal of the singer he described (exaggerating by an inch or two) as “a handsome six-footer with a warm and engaging personality,” and Bowie’s persistence was repaid when the King Bees were offered a bottom-level recording contract with the ugly duckling of the Decca Group of companies, Vocalion Records. Though the group was ostensibly a collective, “Davie Jones” was picked out for special billing.