The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  FASCISM: Turn to the Right

  In October 1973, at the height of the glam-rock boom, the ITV network broadcast a documentary titled The Messengers. It was advertised as follows: “Two superstars of their time. Marc Bolan, idol of today’s youth, and Adolf Hitler, hero of a revitalised nation a generation ago. Two people, totally different but both subject to mass adulation.” If Bowie watched the program—and how could he have resisted the coupling of a rival with the century’s most notorious dictator?—one hopes that he would have found the comparison crass, or amusing, or ridiculous. Or is it possible that it planted a seed that would sprout only two years later?

  By the summer of 1975, Bowie was in America, wrestling with demons literal and metaphorical, and conjuring with the perilous juxtaposition of mind-altering drugs and occult experimentation. He was reading avidly about magick and religion, while dipping into a traveling library of volumes about the Third Reich. He was fascinated by the way in which the Nazis had transformed an ancient religious symbol, the swastika, into something that the world would remember as a badge of evil, and by their quest* for the Holy Grail of Arthurian legend. To assuage his various obsessions, he bought multiple copies of Occult Reich, a thin and mildly sensationalist account of the Hitler regime’s dabbling with mythology and the supernatural, which he handed out to friends and strangers. The book offered a panorama of rumor and suggestion, each brief chapter providing enticing details of such themes as Hitler’s ability to predict the future; the power of hypnosis, otherwise known as “fascination” [121]; Kirlian photography and “bio-plasmic energy” (a Bowie passion; he was given a Kirlian camera by an American academic); the origins of the Nazi salute in the nineteenth-century rituals of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; Hitler’s insistence on working by night and sleeping by day (with which Bowie could have empathized); numerology (a subject of enduring interest to Bowie at this point); the links between Tibetan Buddhism and the Nazis; and Hitler’s observations on the Nietzschean concept of the superman. This was, in other words, an anthology of speculation about subjects in which Bowie had a peculiar interest, almost as if it had been designed with his fevered imagination in mind.

  In addition, Bowie was attempting to win any one of a number of film roles that all, coincidentally, required him to play a Nazi, and was speaking all too freely to journalists while under the influence of an exotic blend of chemicals. Not having set foot in Britain for more than a year, he had decided he was an expert about the country’s political, social, and economic ills—which were sufficiently alarming to have inspired a number of covert right-wing groups to plan a coup against a government that they believed (quite erroneously) was laden down with communist sympathizers. These small organizations included GB75, led by Colonel David Stirling; Civic Assistance, headed by General Sir Walter Walker; and the less militaristic National Association for Freedom. In vastly different ways, they sought to impose repressive control on a nation that, they complained, was heading for ruin. Britain’s “official” fascist political parties had been undermined for years by internal feuding and incompetent organization. But the apparent backing for their cause from senior military officers encouraged the National Front to regroup, and gain at least 10 percent of the vote in many areas during the 1976 local elections.

  This was the arena in which Bowie chose to plant his own rather bedraggled flag, based on a cocktail of ill-digested reading and cocaine. He uttered similar phrases in several interviews during late 1975 and early 1976: “I could have been Hitler in England. . . . England’s in such a sorry state. . . . You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up. . . . I believe very strongly in fascism. . . . Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.” It did not help that he had set out on his 1976 world tour with a visual identity—sculpted cheeks, dyed hair swept back across his head, stern black costume—that encapsulated Hitler’s vision of the perfect Aryan icon. Nor that he was rumored to have been photographed outside Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, giving a Nazi salute. Nor that when he returned to Britain on May 2, 1976, he stood up in the back of a limousine and was caught by a photographer apparently giving his followers that same salute. This he denied most vehemently, and quite justly: the picture was a split-second image of an arm in motion, not raised to greet the Nazi hordes. Fans responded in kind at the Wembley Arena shows that followed, as if Bowie really were the dictator he had fantasized about in his interviews.

  After Eric Clapton stood onstage in Birmingham a few weeks later and delivered what was widely interpreted as a racist rant (for which he apologized in mealymouthed fashion), and a riot broke out at the Notting Hill Carnival between black partygoers and white police, a group of activists formed an ad hoc organization called Rock Against Racism. Its first newsletter included a potent photographic montage, in the tradition of Heartfield and Grosz’s satirical ridiculing of the Nazi leaders. Lined up as if they were sharing a stage were the unmistakable figures of Adolf Hitler, maverick Tory politician and racial controversialist Enoch Powell—and David Bowie. Soon the Musicians Union was debating Bowie’s “fascist” remarks and threatening to sanction or ban any members who uttered similar comments in the future. Meanwhile, the leaders of the National Front welcomed Bowie as a convert to their cause, a theme they were still pursuing well into the eighties. Bowie later claimed that he had deliberately fashioned his 1976 “identity,” the Thin White Duke, as a fascist: “the best way to fight an evil force is to caricature it.” Even more ludicrously, he tried to argue that his naïve intervention in British politics “did some good because, for the first time, it brought to the fore that the National Front are a fascist party. Until then the National Front were nice and polite.” At least he dismissed fascism as “an idiot’s dream,” though without acknowledging the true identity of the idiot in question.

  [132] SISTER MIDNIGHT

  (Bowie/Alomar/Pop)

  Performed live 1976; unreleased by Bowie

  * * *

  Like “Golden Years” [127], “Sister Midnight”—in all its incarnations—was built around a two-semitone slide: up and down for the introduction, down and back up for the verse. It emerged as the lead track of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, and then in disguise as the framework for “Red Money” [173] on Lodger. But first it was prepared for, and occasionally performed during, Bowie’s Station to Station tour in 1976. In rehearsal, it was arguably his purest engagement with funk, slapped through its repeated chord change by a fretless electric bass. Bowie treated it as a vocal gallery, showing off his clipped voice, his falsetto, his croon, even a quasi-sexual series of groans. The identity of “Sister Midnight” was irrelevant: she was merely a cipher, who could send him soaring to the moon or falling to earth (like the spaceman he had recently played on celluloid) without either journey seeming to register on his emotions.

  By the time it reached the stage, something of the track’s simplicity had been lost, and “Sister Midnight” quickly vanished from Bowie’s repertoire. It took a new set of lyrics, and a less cluttered attitude, both supplied by Iggy Pop, for the song to regain its relentless momentum.

  THE ACTOR AND THE IDIOT: Bowie and Iggy

  Iggy Pop and Lou Reed were the two touchstones of Bowie’s rock sensibility in the early seventies. If Reed represented the Warhol milieu, New York cool, and lyrical precision, Pop was raw Detroit muscle, Dionysus to Reed’s Apollo: untutored, stumbling, an accidental genius, an idiot savant.

  Most of the shambolic qualities that Bowie admired in his theoretical Iggy Pop were the product of drugs. During Bowie’s 1972 US tour, another Iggy was sometimes visible: smart, articulate, even erudite. But his unpredictability made it impossible for the two men to maintain a relationship longer than Bowie required to mix Iggy’s third album with the Stooges, Raw Power. Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, added the Stooges to his roster in 1972, but canceled their weekly retainer when it became obvious that it was supplying stimulants, not provisions.

 
; Just over two years later, Iggy was in a Los Angeles mental hospital, and Bowie visited him bearing the gift of cocaine. Within a few weeks they were sharing a recording studio, and Bowie had penned a screenplay in which Pop could star. Then their sessions collapsed, and Bowie lamented: “He’ll never make it to the recording studios in time. Iggy’s doomed.”

  Their paths inevitably crossed during Bowie’s 1976 US tour, at which point Pop became a solid member of his entourage. They journeyed together to Russia and were photographed in Moscow’s Red Square. When Bowie had fulfilled his European tour dates, the pair settled at the Château d’Hérouville near Paris with the rhythm section from his live band. There they recorded the backing tracks for around ten songs, before adding Iggy’s vocals in Munich—and then mixing the results in Berlin, where Bowie and Pop rented an apartment. Bowie had entered the studio hoping that they might emerge with a single of “Sister Midnight” [132]; instead they completed an album, The Idiot, which Pop described as “a cross between James Brown and Kraftwerk.”

  Iggy’s album propelled Bowie into the sessions for Low—an enervating project that would have required any other performer to rest after its completion. Instead Bowie agreed to accompany Pop on brief tours of Britain and America, as his virtually anonymous keyboardist, resisting all demands from the audience to perform his own material.* Bowie even broke a self-imposed five-year ban on flying to visit America with the band—perhaps because, as he admitted later, their collective drug intake was “unbelievable.” In one of the more surreal moments of either man’s career, they appeared as guests on Dinah!, an afternoon chat show hosted by forties big band singer Dinah Shore. Their union survived long enough to record a second album in Berlin, Lust for Life, during the making of which Bowie banished Pop from the studio because of his excessive (even by the standards of the time) cocaine abuse.

  What did Bowie gain from this collaboration, besides the garage-punk prestige of working with the ramshackle prince of the genre? He was undoubtedly able to sustain the creative freedom he enjoyed at the Iggy Pop sessions when he almost immediately began work on his own, more focused projects Low and “Heroes.” In retrospect, it is a shame that the pair did not manage a third collaboration* before the Lodger sessions. More important, their partnership did not rob Bowie of words (which were, after all, in short supply on the Low album). His contribution to both Iggy records was purely musical: that is, he would participate in the haphazard studio creation of riffs and chord changes, and perhaps suggest a tune, before letting Pop pen the lyrics. His role was similar to that of Mick Ronson during the creation of The Man Who Sold the World.

  The reception of both records was colored by reviewers’ attitudes toward Iggy Pop. Those who wanted their Iggy to be incoherent and self-destructive (as on the Stooges’ live album Metallic KO) accused Bowie of taming their hero. Others assumed that this limp-wristed glam rocker was merely stealing some of Pop’s punk rock credibility. Then there were those who took Pop’s reputation at first value and heard, on The Idiot, music that noted British rock critic Nick Kent* described as “totally riveted and fettered to a thoroughly unhealthy aroma of evil and twilight zone zombie-time release.” The Idiot was certainly riveting: it moved at a majestically slow pace, like some overladen tanker truck that was uncomfortable taking corners (probably because Bowie insisted on choosing rehearsals rather than final takes, and often the band would not have changed chord or tempo at the same time). With one exception, it was built around the simplest of chord structures, often underpinned (or sometimes undermined) by a simultaneous collection of riffs, each musician contributing his own. Some songs matched the Kraftwerk/James Brown hybrid that Iggy promised, whereas “Baby” and “China Girl” hinged around a more orthodox verse/chorus structure. The exception mentioned above was “Tiny Girls,” introduced by a “cool” jazz-style saxophone melody from Bowie, which elegantly shifted key on three occasions, before a more orthodox (for this album) form of minimalism resumed control. Repetitive and haphazard, The Idiot represented the music that might have been made by a garage rock’n’roll band in 1962 if their nutrition had been restricted to downers and beer.

  By contrast, Lust for Life (the title, borrowed from a novel and movie about Vincent van Gogh, said it all) was cleaner, more propulsive, and altogether more definite: polished masters instead of rehearsals, in other words. These were songs, not spontaneous collisions of ideas, though still often rooted in late fifties and early sixties rock’n’roll. The Idiot would never have produced an anthem if Bowie hadn’t revisited “China Girl,” in an altogether lighter frame of mind, six years later; Lust for Life was full of them, from the glorious title track and the emblematic “Some Weird Sin” to the hypnotic riff behind “The Passenger” (one of two songs for which Bowie didn’t receive a composing credit). Any extreme moments here came from Pop’s lyrics and were delivered with a wry grin (see the cover for confirmation: no expressionist angst here). There were none of the ambiguous chord changes heard on the previous record’s “Nightclubbing” or “Funtime,” where each band member sounded as if he had his own vision of where the song should go next and was stubbornly sticking to it. Iggy later explained that Bowie had concocted several of the Lust for Life songs by copying the basic structures of rock standards, but there were almost too many candidates to make a definite identification of the original sources. Two albums, then, from two distinct personalities; two methods for Bowie to access his own creativity without spilling any seed.

  [133] SPEED OF LIFE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  The sessions for Low were undertaken against a background of extreme turbulence in David Bowie’s personal life. “He was, in my opinion, unquestionably at his lowest ebb,” recalled Michael Lippman. “He was emotionally distraught.” Bowie’s distress had been triggered by a series of meetings designed to produce a compromise solution to his business difficulties with Lippman—during which he was reported to have accused everyone around him of only being interested in his money.

  Angie Bowie had hoped to introduce some stability into her husband’s life by renting a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. She imagined it as a home where they and their son could resume the domestic life that had been interrupted when Bowie had moved to America in 1974. But instead he had opted to remain in Paris and Berlin with Iggy Pop (not least because he had become temporarily infatuated with a Berlin cabaret owner, a transsexual named Romy Haag). When Angie arrived to remonstrate with him, he told her he wanted a divorce—though only after discussions so heated that Bowie collapsed with chest pains and was taken to hospital with suspected heart disease. Angie subsequently told journalists that he was merely suffering from stress and depression.

  Meanwhile, Bowie had invited Brian Eno and Tony Visconti to collaborate with him: Visconti as a trusted friend, Eno because Bowie admired his ambient Discreet Music album and the minimalist rock experimentation of his Another Green World LP. Together they assembled the album that began with that (previously) most unimaginable of artifacts: a David Bowie instrumental. Its title was close to his heart. “People simply can’t cope with the rate of change in this world,” Bowie noted in 1977. “It’s all far too fast. Since the industrial revolution there’s been this upward spiral with people desperately trying to hang on, and now everybody’s started to fall off. And it’ll get worse. There’s not really a cause for hope.” “David works very fast,” said Brian Eno in 1976 of their collaboration on Low. “He’s very impulsive, and he works like crazy for about two hours or sometimes three-quarters of an hour—and then he takes the rest of the day off. And in that time, he does an incredible amount, very well, very quickly and faultlessly. Whereas what I do is to—quite slowly—build things up over a period. . . . Very slow.”

  Bowie and Eno elected to work with Tony Visconti on Low after the American producer rang Bowie and boasted that he had a gadget that “fucks with the fabric of time.” “I heard that
it could change the pitch of a sound without changing the speed,” Visconti explained to Bowie biographer David Buckley. “My brain nearly exploded when I found what I could do with drums. By lowering the pitch of a live drum, then feeding it back, I got a sort of infinite dropping of pitch, ever renewing itself.”

  So the speed of life on Low was fast, the way that Bowie loved to work but feared to live; and slow, like Eno’s painstaking tapestries of sound; and not to be trusted, because their music “fucks with the fabric of time.” And time, as Albert Einstein could have told them, was infinitely flexible, transforming everything it touched as certainly as Tony Visconti’s Eventide Harmonizer. In the four traumatic years since Aladdin Sane, when “Time” [69] had been a glamorous, nearly unimaginable concept, Bowie had witnessed its cruelty and trickery at first hand—the way it extended pain into an eternity and compressed happiness into the twitching of an eye. On a record that boldly chose to confront Bowie’s own experience of eternity and compress the images of himself that he shared with the outside world, it made perfect sense for the opening instrumental to credit the “Speed of Life,” a subject too profound for words.