The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  Cultural commentator Peter York wrote that Bowie’s distinctive contribution to style in the seventies was that he introduced “the idea of conscious stylisation—oneself as a Work of Art—to a wider audience than ever before.” To an extent, “oneself as a Work of Art” was also a definition of the Mod subculture of the sixties. What Bowie added was an understanding that “oneself” need not stop at surface appearance, but could become a conceptual art project encompassing every facet of existence.

  His influence on appearance was immense, however, provoking thousands of so-called Bowie kids to mimic him. (They needed to look sharp in every sense of the phrase, however, to avoid seeming tragically anachronistic. Woe betide the fan who arrived for a Bowie concert in 1976 wearing Ziggy makeup, only to discover that the once-alien rock star was now masquerading as the star of a Leni Riefenstahl documentary.) The cropped hair sported by him and his wife, Angie, was similar to the feather cuts of female suedeheads at the start of the seventies, but it was Ziggy who made it into a mainstream badge of pride. But whereas Bowie commissioned what he called his “cosmic Clockwork Orange jumpsuits” from Freddie Burretti and his “impossibly silly ‘bunny’ costume” (cut unflatteringly short: a hot pants jumpsuit) from Japan’s hottest designer, his fans had to concoct his image out of home-styled hair and accessories from Woolworth’s.

  Bowie himself was both a peacock and a magpie, borrowing looks and styles wherever he could find them. Two years before he visited Japan for the first time, he (like many others) was enraptured by the designs of a designer named Kansai Yamamoto,* who staged his first London show in 1971. Bowie credited him as the source for Ziggy’s dyed hair: “He had just unleashed all the Kabuki- and Noh-inspired clothes on London, and one of his models had the Kabuki lion’s mane on her head, this bright red thing.” Yamamoto subsequently created many extravagant costumes for Ziggy’s final months in the spotlight. “He has an unusual face,” he said of Bowie, adding: “He’s neither man nor woman.”

  If Yamamoto was the first designer to adopt Bowie as a deliciously angular model, the singer continued to prowl the most fashionable stores in London and New York for inspiration. They, in turn, created their fantasies out of nostalgia. Vintage clothing stores—The Last Picture Frock, Nostalgia, Paradise Garage—were (comparatively) cheap, ecologically efficient at a time of industrial disputes and material shortages, and conveyed glamour borrowed* from bygone ages. This applied especially to the thirties chic that passed rapidly from artists such as Lindsay Kemp (with his ostrich feather fans) into the mainstream, growing more popular as the West drifted further into recession—as if the only way of coping with a return to the economic emergencies of the pre–World War II era was to reinvent its style as well. By mid-decade, people were reading Stella Margetson’s The Long Party, a study of “high society in the 20s and 30s,” watching Robert Redford glide effortlessly through the depression-free gardens of The Great Gatsby, and, perhaps, reaching for the sleeves of either Pin Ups (with its back cover portrait of Bowie in a Tommy Roberts suit, like a twenties Chicago gangster) or Young Americans (with classic-era Hollywood cover portrait). Many of the symbols of mid-seventies fashion—platform shoes, flyaway lapels, high-waisted flares—originated from the thirties, though few of those who adopted them in 1973 wanted to hear that their grandparents might have worn the same styles.

  It was Tommy Roberts who, in 1970, opened Mr Freedom on London’s Kensington Church Street. Like Bowie, the store offered a choice of identities to borrow or reconfigure, from the art deco of the thirties through fifties rock’n’roll to sixties pop. As Vogue magazine declared, “there are no rules in the fashion game now. You’re playing it and you make up the game as you go.” Marc Bolan could have acquired an entire wardrobe at Mr Freedom, his skeletal figure acting as the perfect show pony for its hip-hugging, reflective trousers and tight-cut jackets. Among the store’s designers was the delightfully named Pamla Motown, whose cropped red hair and androgynous face marked her out as a hybrid clone of Bowie and his wife. A minute’s walk from Mr Freedom was the Biba store on Kensington High Street, which brought the revivals of deco, art nouveau, and the Belle Époque within reach of the girl on the street.

  Biba also attracted the attention of the tiny urban guerrilla cell known as the Angry Brigade, who exploded a bomb inside the store on May Day 1971. In the terrorist fashion of the times, they issued a communiqué to explain their assault on the cult of selling: “Life is so boring there is nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt or shirt. Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires? The only thing you can do with modern slave-houses—called boutiques—IS WRECK THEM. You can’t reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it until it breaks.”

  Theirs was a lone voice. Novelist J. G. Ballard might have noted cynically, “The next religion might come from the world of fashion rather than from any conventional one,” but even those who advocated the overturning of conventional morals and the hollowness of social thinking were far from immune to the pull of fashion. And so it was that Malcolm McLaren, a fellow traveler of the iconoclastic Situationist movement, found himself in 1972 running a vintage clothes shop on the premises that had previously held the iconic sixties boutique Hung on You, and then two of the stellar influences on the new decade, Mr Freedom and Paradise Garden. McLaren leased the building at 430 King’s Road in Chelsea for the remainder of the decade, and the changing names of his business told their own story: from Let It Rock to Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die; then Sex; and finally Seditionaries, by which time McLaren was notorious as the manager of a rock band who compressed the world-weary contempt of the Angry Brigade into a single message: “Anarchy in the UK.” Anthony Burgess must have nodded sagely in recognition.

  [71] THE PRETTIEST STAR

  (Bowie) (see also [13])

  Recorded January 1973; Aladdin Sane LP

  * * *

  Amid the rock’n’roll swagger and almost sickly decadence of Aladdin Sane, the revival of Bowie’s little-known 1970 single “The Prettiest Star” seemed anachronistic—neither contemporary nor apocalyptic enough to fit the album’s themes. It certainly received a more sympathetic arrangement than before, being taken at an altogether faster pace. Mick Ronson replicated Marc Bolan’s original guitar solo, but this time it sat within the track, rather than outside it. While doo-wop vocals and country-tinged piano lent the song a late fifties feel, the middle section featured a quartet of male voices that conjured up the world of Edward VII, as if the entire performance were an exercise in demonstrating the supple nature of time.

  Bowie’s own status as “the prettiest star” in the glam-rock field—or at least Marc Bolan’s closest rival—was evidenced by the amount of memorabilia that was now on the market to tempt his fans. Besides the usual posters (more often than not carrying photographs from the “Space Oddity” [1] era, as his management—in an early example of multimedia control—controlled the image rights on Ziggy Stardust portraits), it was also possible to buy Bowie pillowcases, alongside those featuring Bolan, Donny Osmond, and David Cassidy.

  [72] LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER

  (Jagger/Richards)

  Recorded January 1973; Aladdin Sane LP

  * * *

  Variously described by critics down the years as camp, bisexual, or gay, this riotous assault on a Rolling Stones single from 1967 was more accurately a celebration of Bowie’s utter dominance over the world around him. Other covers of classic rock tunes during the Ziggy era (from “This Boy” to “I Feel Free”) were conventional or ill-conceived, but “Let’s Spend the Night Together” jettisoned the tight control of the Stones’ original and thereby set the entire tradition of sixties rock aflame.

  The Spiders set out their manifesto from the start: a crushing guitar chord, savage smears of synthesized* noise, and Mike Garson’s fearless romp through all the major chords from D to F#, casting key signatures to the winds. Thereafter they settled for inflamed Chuck Berry riffs, while Bowie sang a
s if he were setting fire to every line. In the most daring, ridiculous moment, he broke the song down into a fifties-styled monologue, a pastiche of Paul Anka’s mock sincerity on “Diana,” perhaps. “Let’s make love,” he purred, and was answered by two orgasmic spurts of Ronson’s guitar, the briefest and most brutal of couplings. Spend the night? On this evidence, Bowie could hardly bear to spend two minutes with his battered victim.*

  [73] CRACKED ACTOR

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January 1973; Aladdin Sane LP

  * * *

  Three layers of prostitution collided on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip in this song: offering money for sex; sex for drugs; worship for fame. “They were mostly older producer types, quite strange looking, quite charming, but thoroughly unreal,” Bowie recalled of the Strip’s clients. The fifty-year-old star (insert your own choice of name) of “Cracked Actor” was “stiff on his legend”: erect, famous, over the hill, effectively dead. He despised the whore, “a porcupine” of dope tracks, and the whore despised him. It was just another sales transaction in the city of dreams. The rhythm guitar cranked mechanically up and down its succession of barre chords with a whore’s indifference, while Ronson wavered between grunts of feedback and howls of equally contrived ecstasy. This was standard early seventies hard rock raunch, with a jaded air of glam, enlivened by a suitably flashy vocal, with Bowie building himself up to a climax that was stolen by Ronson’s insistent guitar solo.

  It was probably not a coincidence that the age differential between whore and trick in this song exactly mirrored the gap between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in the cinematic tale of erotic obsession Last Tango in Paris, which premiered in New York during Bowie’s autumn 1972 US tour. The film provoked shocked headlines around the world for its graphic sexual context, although only the woman was seen in a state of full frontal nudity—because, claimed director Bernardo Bertolucci, he identified himself completely with Brando’s character, and could not bare to expose “himself” on-screen. Bowie himself would not be so reticent on-screen before the decade was out.

  [74] LADY GRINNING SOUL

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January 1973; Aladdin Sane LP

  * * *

  Legend has it that “Lady Grinning Soul” was an ecstatic love song to the soul singer Claudia Lennear, best known as the supposed inspiration for the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” and perennial backup to white rock stars who required some authentic African-American passion in their work. The pair certainly met toward the end of his late 1972 US tour, and the song was written and recorded immediately after his return. But despite the regularity with which she has been named as the subject of both songs, a reliable source for this attribution is difficult to find.

  Whoever she was, no muse could have wished for a more vivid or affecting portrait, especially from a man who, during that same tour, described himself as “a very cold person . . . a bit of an iceman.” After the octave jump of the first two syllables, Bowie delivered much of the song beyond the high G that he used to regard as the top of his range, as if to demonstrate his vulnerability and commitment, his voice aching with loss and desire. His musicians were equally sensitive to the moment, Mike Garson wrapping Bowie’s delicious melody in a wrap of semiclassical, ultraromantic flourishes; Trevor Bolder offering some equally sensitive bass accompaniment; Mick Ronson summing up the moment with a flamenco-inspired solo as beautiful as Bowie’s obsession. They were drifting across a gossamer-light song, its verse a succession of tentative, tender steps up the scale, the chorus floating back and forth between Bb and B natural, melancholy and joy, memory and anticipation, with the equally uncertain closing movement (G#m-G-G#m) suggesting that he already knew that their love affair was over.

  ALADDIN SANE LP

  The figure on the album cover that was trumpeted on its launch as the most expensive design of all time was the archetype of artificiality—glittered, painted, dyed, decorated with a lightning flash, its flesh marble-cold and deformed with a silver teardrop, sculpted, epicene, emaciated, haughty, vulnerable, and ultimately alien. “David Bowie Aladdin Sane,” read the lettering, as if the two personae were interchangeable (and as if Bowie might indeed be a lad insane). Which is exactly what Bowie’s fans assumed, and hoped: that here was another character as striking and persuasive as Ziggy Stardust, ready to lead them on a second adventure into the outer limits of sexuality and identity.

  Initially, Bowie was at pains to play down these expectations. “I don’t think Aladdin is as clearly cut and defined a character as Ziggy was,” he insisted. “Aladdin is pretty ephemeral.” The album, he explained, was “my interpretation of what America means to me. It’s like a summation of my first American tour.” But so relentless was the demand for Aladdin Sane to exist inside Bowie’s skeleton that the singer eventually gave in and began to talk about the character as if he were more than simply a set of photographs, a pose, and a song. For example: “Aladdin Sane was a schizophrenic. That’s why there were so many costume changes, because he had so many personalities.” Among them, presumably, was Ziggy Stardust—or vice versa—because there was no break in Bowie’s schedule, or change of presentation, to differentiate the star of one album from the icon of the next. Fans chose not to ponder the philosophical dilemma—was Ziggy performing as Aladdin Sane, or was Aladdin playing Ziggy’s songs?—and simply wallowed in the decadence of it all.

  Neither at the time was there any exploration of the lightning bolt across Aladdin’s visage—mirroring the flash that was to be found on the flag of the Hitler Youth, was doubled to produce the insignia of Heinrich Himmler’s SS cadre, and was also a tarot symbol for the card known as The Tower, denoting the need to reconstruct oneself. The bolt had been seen on a gown designed by Kansai Yamamoto for Bowie to wear onstage, though photographer Brian Duffy recalled that Bowie’s inspiration was actually a similar symbol used by Elvis Presley—and Bowie himself, fleshing out his portrait of the imaginary Mr. Sane, contended that “I thought [Aladdin*] would probably be cracked by lightning.”

  Ultimately, Bowie’s original explanation—that here was a slightly deranged report on the American scene, from the distorted vision of a rock star—was quite accurate. There was no narrative or theme to Aladdin Sane, beyond the sense that civilization could not continue as it was without toppling into apocalypse: a clear case of personal crisis infecting the world beyond. As such, it was arguably a more “real” album than Ziggy Stardust; and, also arguably, a more rewarding one at this distance, its Stones-inspired, vivid production enduring better than the somewhat flat sonic canvas of Ziggy. But Ziggy had an impact beyond the duration of its songs; Aladdin Sane was its songs, its sleeve, and nothing more. It did not solve the problem of where Bowie might take his Ziggy character or abandon him: it simply compounded the pressure and his fame.

  [75] ZION (AKA ALADDIN VEIN AKA TRAGIC MOMENTS)

  (Bowie)

  Recorded ca. July 1973; unreleased

  * * *

  “Zion” was allegedly recorded for Aladdin Sane; meanwhile, Bowie declared that Tragic Moments was a work in progress during the Pin Ups sessions later in the year, intended as “a musical in one act . . . probably running straight through both sides.” He then played journalist Martin Hayman a long instrumental, “a highly arranged, subtly shifting piece of music with just a touch of vaudeville.” That description fits the piece of music circulated among fans under the title of “Zion”: it opened with the piano motif that would later grace the “Sweet Thing” medley [100] on Diamond Dogs, moved through a weighty Ronson guitar riff reminiscent of the Who’s “I Can See for Miles,” and then into a wordless Bowie melody that sounded like a close cousin of the Beatles’ “I’ll Follow the Sun”—and still on, via a jazzy descent into a piano section that could have featured on Hunky Dory, and finally back through the first two movements, to close with a typical Mike Garson flourish. It could almost be the overture for a rock opera, or a skeleton for the 1984 musical, or an attempt to marry half a d
ozen different themes and moods into a coherent whole, which Bowie chose to abandon.

  THE UNMAKING OF A STAR #1: Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide

  As a piece of theatre, it could hardly have been bettered. David Bowie’s performance at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, had reached its final encore. Before his by now traditional rendition of the elegiac “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” [61], he stunned his audience—and at least two members of his band—by announcing that “this is the last show we’ll ever do.” Cue screams and cries from his audience; startled glances from his rhythm section, who would never work together with Bowie again; banner headlines in the pop press; and knowing nods from those who had anticipated just such an outcome all along.*

  Bowie could not be accused of having hidden his intentions. The previous winter, he had signaled his discontent with the pressure of enacting Ziggy Stardust, night after night across Britain, North America, and Japan: “I feel as though I’m on a tightrope more and more, a kind of precipice.” By January 1973 he was telling a British pop magazine that “I’m not too sure when I’ll be appearing on stage in this country again. . . . I may be concentrating on films in the future.” Within his organization, Mick Ronson recalled: “David’s retirement was first talked about a few months before, at the start of the British tour. It was never a definite thing, but everything seemed to lead up to that Hammersmith show like it was the last time.” The concert was recorded and filmed by a documentary crew, for an album tentatively titled Bowie-ing Out.