The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  At times, he sounded like a jaundiced political commentator of the old school, complaining that in the TV age, appearance counted more than substance. The obvious target was “Tricky Dick” Nixon, who had just resigned from the US presidency because of his involvement in the Watergate scandal, and the frequent target of the question “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Yet Bowie’s attack on Nixon seemed tame alongside more pointed barbs from singers such as Stevie Wonder (whose attack on the former president, “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” charted the week that Bowie’s sessions began). What gave Bowie’s lyric its bite was his willingness to extend his cynicism beyond the political arena and into his own backyard, where a star such as Valentino—or David Bowie—had the power to sell his audience anything under the innocent guise of his own stardom, and where the star’s relationship with his manager might resemble that between Faust and Mephistopheles.

  By accident or design, the instrumental accompaniment for this exploration of cunning and deceit was colored by the facsimile of an orchestral string section, as conjured up on a synthesizer. Over this lush background, David Sanborn’s defiantly harsh saxophone sounded a wake-up call. Bowie, meanwhile, phrased with the confidence of a born charmer, or a natural salesman, eventually adopting an array of different vocal personae like a one-man Sly & the Family Stone, a different mood for every moment and every pair of ears. Seduction had rarely seemed so attractive, or so menacing.

  [119] RIGHT

  (Bowie)

  Recorded August and November 1974; Young Americans LP

  * * *

  This song was titled “Right” (rather than, for example, “Never No Turning Back,” the most constant refrain) more, one imagines, to continue Bowie’s vague theme of using a single evocative word* to define his R&B pieces—though it begged confusion with the “take it in right” chorus of “Can You Hear Me” [108]. Nothing he’d written to date had been draped around such a skeletal frame: a slight movement between Fmaj7 and E major for the choruses, after which band and vocalists alike vamped at length over that solitary E chord.

  Those choruses were, effectively, self-help mantras, the second of which had the distinctly personal context of assuaging Bowie’s fear of flying. They could also be interpreted more widely, as commentary on a relationship—which was then acted out in vivid colors by the extended interplay between lead and background vocalists, Bowie shifting like a well-oiled actor from pleading to insisting to shrieking for control. As the BBC documentary Cracked Actor revealed, this apparently spontaneous call-and-response routine between Bowie and his backing vocalists was meticulously planned.

  [120] WIN

  (Bowie)

  Recorded November–December 1974; Young Americans LP

  * * *

  Much of this song seemed to exist in that slightly delirious space between drunkenness and morning, where tones matter more than words, and nothing you say would make much sense in the piercing light of day. Nothing was quite in focus: instruments shimmered and echoed, David Sanborn’s saxophone flittered up the scale and out of earshot, Bowie’s voice swayed between a whisper and a sultry croon, then gradually slipped into desperation as the sexy woman who’d lit his fire refused to believe his reassurances. Whereas “Right” [119] had set up a dialogue between lead and backing vocalists, in “Win” the chorale was there simply to support Bowie’s point of view: I must be right, he seemed to be saying, since all these other people think so, too. Totalitarianism assumes many forms.

  Rarely was it enacted in such intimate terms, however. Bowie softened his chords throughout the verses by adding a major 6th, creating the sense of unfinished business—and making the climactic shift to an E major chord seem all the more conclusive. Amid the delicate emotional drama of the song, it was easy to miss some of the more subtle elements of the arrangement, such as the cello section introduced portentously, and the Beatlesesque (from the Abbey Road era, to be exact) guitar chords unwinding beneath the chorus.

  [121] FASCINATION

  (Vandross/Bowie)

  Recorded November–December 1974; Young Americans LP

  * * *

  During Bowie’s late 1974 US tour, twenty-three-year-old background vocalist Luther Vandross was allowed to open the show with his self-penned paean to the power of soul, “Funky Music (Is a Part of Me).”* Bowie begged to be allowed to tinker with the lyric for his own purposes, presumably feeling that he needed to prove his funkiness rather than boast about it. “Funky Music” duly became “Fascination,” with the barest of chorus rewrites, and verses that were revamped only where strictly necessary. The Vandross arrangement was also retained almost unchanged, as an utterly contemporary slice of funk, over which Bowie exhibited his range of vocal personae—from breathy confidant to sly lothario. By midpoint, he had become so dazzled by his own dexterity that he felt the need to ensure he was still feeling something. “I like fascination,” he sang, “still—tick!” checking the box marked “soul.”

  Where Vandross was celebrating his cultural heritage, Bowie was playing an altogether more cunning game. Out of his mouth, “Fascination” was a celebration of male lust and power. But two other connotations of the title, both of which he had recently encountered, may have influenced his choice of noun. In the book Occult Reich, which he had given to several friends, he had read that “Fascination” had once been an alternative name for hypnotism, originally regarded as “one of the occult arts . . . a spell cast by wizards.” In City of Night, John Rechy’s groundbreaking novel about homosexual relationships, however, “F*A*S*C*I*N*A*T*I*O*N” shone from the front of a gay nightclub, enticing every he/she in the vicinity to fall under its spell.

  [122] IT’S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THE CITY

  (Springsteen)

  Recorded November 1974 and September–November 1975; Sound + Vision CD

  * * *

  The second of Bowie’s Bruce Springsteen covers was billed as an outtake from the Station to Station sessions when it was released belatedly in 1989. But Bowie certainly attempted this song in Philadelphia during November 1974, on a night when Springsteen visited him in the studio; also, many fans believed that they recognized a Tony Visconti string arrangement in the mix, alongside an Earl Slick guitar track presumably overdubbed in 1975. Yet the song wasn’t one of those for which Visconti supervised orchestral accompaniment in December. The clinching argument seemed to be the unmistakable presence of Mike Garson’s keyboards over the closing bars, suggesting that at least part of this track did predate the creation of Station to Station.

  The finished piece emphasized the stark difference in approach between the two sets of sessions: other artists could have picked up a year-old track and continued happily in the same vein, but Bowie brought a markedly different sonic agenda to each project in the seventies. If the 1974 track had been intended as a faithful tribute to Springsteen’s urban romanticism, then the addition of Slick’s bombastic guitar and cacophonous drums undermined the pretensions of glamour, as if Travis Bickle from Martin Scorsese’s movie Taxi Driver had wandered onto the set of West Side Story. Bowie, meanwhile, drew on a wide palette of vocal identities, imitating Springsteen at one moment, squeezing his throat into an agonizing falsetto the next. The result hinted that his enthusiasm for the naïve imagery of Springsteen’s early work might have waned after spending more than eighteen months in America.

  [123] FOOT STOMPING/SHIMMY LIKE KATE

  (Collins/Rand; Smith/Goldsmith)

  Recorded for NBC-TV, November 1974; RarestOneBowie CD

  * * *

  This medley of early sixties R&B hits would have been forgotten had Bowie not performed it during his rather alarming appearance on the NBC-TV staple The Dick Cavett Show, and guitarist Carlos Alomar then twisted the riff at the heart of this arrangement into the skeleton of “Fame” [125].

  “Foot Stomping” was written and recorded in 1961 by the Flares, a Los Angeles–based vocal group who had earlier scored memorable hits as the Jacks (“Why Don’t You Wri
te Me”) and the Cadets (“Stranded in the Jungle”). “Shimmy Like Kate” was a 1960 adaptation—by the Olympics, of “Western Movies” fame—of a New Orleans jazz tune known as “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” The Olympics’ producers took the writing credit on their single; jazzman Armand Piron originally copyrighted the tune, to the disgust of other Crescent City players who had known it for decades.

  Bowie’s medley found him rasping as he had with the King Bees a decade earlier, though now it was “exhaustion” rather than inexperience to blame. On the same show, he delivered equally ragged but compelling renditions of “Young Americans” [113] (having perfected the Elvis moves he’d been parodying in his Love You Till Tuesday film in 1969) and “1984” [98].

  [124] ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

  (Lennon/McCartney)

  Recorded January 1975; Young Americans LP

  * * *

  While producer Tony Visconti was in London, supervising string overdubs and the final mixing sessions in the belief that the Young Americans album was complete, Bowie covertly arranged a collaboration with John Lennon in January 1975. Perhaps believing that the Beatle would attend only if he had a personal stake in the session, Bowie announced that he wished to record “Across the Universe,” a song that had caused Lennon immense difficulty in the late 1960s before being remixed by producer Phil Spector for the Beatles’ Let It Be LP.

  At a period of creative inertia, Lennon had toyed with a simple chorus around the Indian spiritual phrase “jai guru dev.” Later, as he seethed silently in bed after an argument with his wife, Cynthia, he began to channel his frustration into a song that celebrated the poetic muse, and the triumph of the unconsciousness over intellectual intention. He combined this with the Indian chorus, added a refrain to the effect (rather inaccurate, as it transpired) that nothing in his life was about to change, and emerged with a song that he proposed as a potential Beatles single. Instead he struggled to bring his creation to life, remaining dissatisfied with the two strikingly different mixes of the song issued by the group.

  Lennon can hardly have been more encouraged by Bowie’s deliberately bombastic interpretation, which seemed to have been inspired by Pussy Cats, the gloriously ramshackle album that Lennon had recently produced for Harry Nilsson. In particular, he channeled Nilsson’s ragged version of “Many Rivers to Cross,” a version itself intended as a tribute to Lennon’s own vocal sound. Bowie double-tracked his voice for much of the song, as Lennon always did, and by the climax he was roaring in an uncanny imitation of his collaborator’s more throat-searing moments. Earlier, his voice had sounded so mannered that he might have been parodying Bryan Ferry. Either way, it was a bizarre way of impressing Lennon, especially as Bowie chose to ignore the “jai guru dev” refrain that was at the heart of the song. But the ex-Beatle generously heard him out, adding some distinctive guitar touches to the spaces where his spiritual mantra had once been.

  A veteran of his own managerial disputes with former financial guardian Allen Klein, Lennon was able to advise Bowie during the disintegration of his relationship with Tony Defries. He subsequently wrote a song about Bowie. Its identity was never confirmed, but “She’s a Friend of Dorothy’s,” an unissued Lennon composition from circa 1976–77, was an intriguing portrait of a multi-personalitied denizen of Manhattan and Hollywood high life, with a penchant for bisexuality. “I never really knew what he was,” Lennon recalled affectionately in 1980, “and meeting him doesn’t give you much more of a clue, because you don’t know which one you’re talking to.”

  [125] FAME

  (Bowie/Alomar/Lennon)

  Recorded January 1975; Young Americans LP

  * * *

  I WOULDN’T INFLICT FAME ON MY WORST ENEMY.

  —David Bowie, 2002

  For all his attempts to master the sweet sound of Philadelphia soul, it was a track recorded almost by happenstance in New York that finally carried Bowie’s music onto R&B radio stations, and also produced his first major US hit single.* The track emerged during a jam session at which John Lennon was present, and to which the ex-Beatle made the briefest of lyrical contributions, which was enough to win him a co-writing credit. Mick Ronson must have wondered at the injustice of life.

  Numerous explanations have been offered for the creation of this track, from both participants and supposed bystanders, and they are so contradictory as to be (collectively) worthless. It is possible, of course, that while John Lennon believed they were reworking “some Stevie Wonder middle eight,” and the co-composer Carlos Alomar felt they were revisiting his arrangement of the R&B oldie “Footstompin’,” Bowie had a Machiavellian plan to create a magnificent hybrid of rock and funk. Or, more likely, a bunch of seasoned musicians in a professional studio fell into a riff (more accurately, an interlocking collection of riffs) and hardened it until it felt tight enough to crack. They emerged with something that was right in the pocket of black American music at the beginning of 1975: a cousin of Kool & the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging” (check the rapidly stroked rhythm guitar against Alomar’s), James Brown’s “The Payback,”* or the recent No. 1 hit “Do It (Til You’re Satisfied)” by the B. T. Express. Other potential sources of inspiration included the Rascals’ 1972 single “Jungle Walk,” the Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces,” and a highly uncharacteristic funk track, “Brighter Day,” by Bowie’s Beckenham friend Keith Christmas, issued shortly before “Fame” was recorded.

  So complex was the relationship between the motifs offered by the electric piano, the guitar, the bass, and the drums that one could waste pages of prose or musical transcription describing how they work. But what made them function was accident and instinct, not planning—which is why it didn’t matter when the drummer turned the beat around, and encouraged the bassist to mess with an entirely different pattern for a few bars; or when the acoustic guitar dropped in and out of the track at apparently random intervals. Even the vocal interjections weren’t consistent. But one of them, at some point during the session, hit upon the word fame.

  To Bowie in January 1975, “fame” meant not only his own stardom, and the impending lawsuits sparked by the sudden ending of his relationship with manager Tony Defries; it also meant Fame, a painfully expensive musical theatre project masterminded by Defries, using money from MainMan, the company built around Bowie’s fame. The show was an examination of another icon, Marilyn Monroe, and it closed after exactly one night on Broadway (having already flopped off-Broadway). For MainMan, this failure was near ruinous; for Bowie’s faith in his manager, it was traumatic. Every time in “Fame” that Bowie snapped back with a cynical retort about its pitfalls, he had his manager and his manager’s epic folly in mind: “bully for you, chilly for me,” as the most often quoted line had it.

  In overall effect, “Fame” resembled Sly Stone’s 1970 masterpiece “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again,” another combination of danceable funk skeleton and viciously pointed lyrics. Like Sly’s Family Stone, Bowie’s record employed an array of vocal sounds—all his own, except for the occasional piped voice of Lennon. Most striking of all was the electronically mutated “fame” that ran down three octaves, from Yoko Ono soprano to Johnny Cash basso profundo. Fame, it seemed to suggest, was an all-enveloping, artificial construction, in which it was impossible to locate the authentic human being. Which is why Bowie must have relished the idea of achieving his pinnacle of fame with a record designed to expose the emptiness at its heart. As he said of stardom in a contemporary interview, “There’s no gratification in it.”

  By the time “Fame” was recorded, Bowie had already broken off relations with Tony Defries. While papers and writs went back and forth, Bowie was hiding out in a cheap apartment in New York, where (according to his girlfriend of the time, Ava Cherry) he claimed that he was being haunted by “psychic vampires.” She, in turn, described him as appearing “very upset and emotional and hysterical.” He automatically soothed himself with work, rekindling his teenage interest in art by painti
ng dozens of canvases and penning three film scripts in less than two months.

  It soon became apparent that, regardless of what he believed and how he felt, Bowie was legally signed to MainMan’s management, and Defries had kept carefully to the terms of their original agreement. Bowie’s only means of escape was to make a settlement, which effectively entailed doing what Defries wanted. Bowie cried when he read the final agreement but signed it anyway. It entitled MainMan to joint ownership with Bowie of all his work to date, allowing either party to exploit them as long as the proceeds were shared. In addition, MainMan would receive 16 percent of Bowie’s gross income from records issued and songs written between the signing of the agreement and the end of September 1982, and 5 percent of his receipts from live appearances. The company would be entitled to those percentages in perpetuity, beyond Bowie’s death.*

  So Bowie moved ahead without the manager who, he was forced to concede in later years, had contributed enormously to the impact of his work on a public who had shown a strong resistance to his activities (“Space Oddity” excepted) before Defries’s reign began. Bowie considered himself scarred by the experience, but free. But every time over the next five years that he wrote a song, or made a record, he knew that one-sixth of what he had created was owned by a man and a company he had grown to despise. It was a dilemma that was bound to spark conflict in his heart: could he still be inspired when he knew that Defries was a beneficiary of his inspiration, or would the knowledge sour every song he composed?

  YOUNG AMERICANS LP