There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  That day in September when we met Bowie, he was with his artfully butch, naturally boisterous wife Angela and his manager Tony Defries, who was one of those questionable, Expresso Bongo–type English managers. I started to tell them all about how David should meet the Warhol crowd—well, what was left of the Warhol crowd, Andy himself having moved ever upward in the world of society toward those who had the money to have him paint their portraits. I raved about such Warhol “stars” as Penny Arcade and Wayne County and the “underground” actors and drag queens who had performed in London in Pork—the play based on the taped telephone conversations of Brigid Polk. Right on cue, the door opened. In came Tony Zanetta—who “starred” as Warhol in Pork. With him were photographer Leee Black Childers, director Tony Ingrassia and actress Cherry Vanilla. David grinned. It might have been the first time I saw him pleased that he was a step ahead, but clearly, it would not be the last. Having been a devotee of mime artist Lindsay Kemp and Marc Bolan and whatever passed for the underground in London in those days, David had already checked out the Pork crowd. And, as this was a group who knew a good score when they saw one, they all had quickly signed up to be part of Defries’ MainMan company’s so-called “staff.” It was an association that would, several years later, contribute to a drug-fueled, dysfunctional operation, and one that would deplete Bowie of millions of dollars.

  But in 1971, the future looked bright, the rock and roll possibilities limitless. David had already tried several personae: there were some early bands, and an embarrassing novelty song “The Laughing Gnome.” He recorded material that sounded suspiciously like Anthony Newley. Then came the always attention-getting, Englishman’s penchant for putting on a dress. He’d had an international hit with the corny “Space Oddity.” But his musical heroes were Lou Reed and Iggy Stooge, and I was conveniently in a position to introduce him to both. That night, I arranged a small dinner at the Ginger Man restaurant two blocks from Lincoln Center. Some say if the lie reads better than the truth, go with the lie. But such ridiculous nonsense has been written about that “fateful” evening in retrospective articles and some books by people who, again, weren’t there. It was even “fictionalized” in the Todd Haynes–directed movie Velvet Goldmine. David Bowie meeting Lou Reed and Iggy Stooge has been made to sound as if it was akin to the coming together of FDR, Stalin and Churchill at Yalta. Of course no one who was there remembers it the same way, but the truth is that it was a fairly sedate, uneventful dinner. There were white tablecloths, steaks, and wine. Lou, who was often socially difficult and none too gregarious in the best of circumstances, was with his then-wife, Bettye. Present too were Richard, Tony Defries, Angela Bowie, and an RCA executive to pick up the check. Towards the end of dinner, I called Danny Fields, who had Iggy Stooge living at his apartment. We went to Max’s Kansas City so that David could meet Iggy. David and Iggy instantly hit it off. So much so that the next day Iggy moved into the Warwick Hotel, where Bowie and the MainMan bunch were in residence, running up a sizeable room service bill. A few nights later, the Bowies, Reeds and Defries came to our apartment for one of those Chinese takeout dinners. What I remember most about that evening was, with Lou watching appreciatively, Bettye go-go danced alone in the living room, someone stole a rare copy of The East Village Other with an article about the Velvet Underground from our library, and Lou and David locked themselves into a small room at the back of our apartment while Angela Bowie banged on the door, screeching for them to let her in.

  • • •

  In November 1971, with much fanfare, the drag queen troupe the Cockettes came to New York for the opening of the musical revue Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma at the Anderson Theater. In the audience that night were society types like Mica and Ahmet Ertegun, Chessy and Billy Rayner, Gore Vidal with Angela Lansbury, Bobby Short, restaurateur Elaine Kaufman, Diana Vreeland and Bill Blass. Fran Lebowitz was an usher, and claims she was never paid the promised $90 for the job. From then on, if there was a rhinestone or a sequin in rock and roll, you could make a case for tracing it back to the Cockettes. Or to Charles Ludlam, or the Lower East Side and the Theater of the Ridiculous—where John Vaccaro directed Warhol “superstar” Jackie Curtis in the low-camp Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit—or Pork. Andy Warhol influenced a lot of us in the early 1970s. He snapped Polaroid pictures wherever he went, and his pal Brigid Polk taped all her phone conversations. David Bowie might have been the only one so carried away by Andy that he wrote a song about him. But I admit I kept a cassette recorder on my night table, affixed a suction cup on the receiver of my telephone and taped most of my phone conversations. I took Polaroid pictures. Richard was one of the first—along with the filmmaker Michel Auder (who was married to Warhol “superstar” Viva) and rock photographer Bob Gruen—to have a video camera that came with the Sony portapak, reel-to-reel tape recorder. We taped and photographed our parties. Evenings out involved shlepping all of this equipment with us. Eventually, we got fed up and abandoned the whole thing. But we still have boxes and boxes of all this stuff. We have reels of videotape, including, but not limited to: Lou Reed and Richard Meltzer on our sofa, singing an acoustic version of “Walk on the Wild Side” several years before Lou recorded it on Transformer; Lou and Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico rehearsing in our living room in 1971 for the first Velvet Underground reunion (to be held in the winter of 1972 in Paris); former Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale in London, conducting a rehearsal with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Ray Davies visiting us in our London hotel room; and a birthday party at David and Angela Bowie’s London house in the winter of 1972.

  *

  In December 1971, Lou Reed, Richard and I flew to London for the recording of Lou’s debut solo album. Lou had some great songs planned for the album—“Walk on the Wild Side,” “Lisa Says” and “Berlin.” They signed up session musicians, including a variety of guitarists. You could always count on Lou to get excited about a guitar sound. He could talk for hours about amplifiers and cables and microphones. The three of us stayed at the Four Seasons Inn on the Park for four weeks and ran up a huge bill sent directly to RCA Records. Lou’s room was down the hall from ours, and there were many—many—long nights when he just sat in our room, droning on for hours. As I recall, he was drinking a lot. Valium may also have been part of the equation. He was often paranoid. He talked extremely slowly. He could be nasty. Of course you couldn’t have one without the other; those great songs had to come from somewhere, and more often than not, it was anger. During the day, Richard and Lou would go off to Morgan Studios to record the album, and I had lots of free time to wander and play in London. I went shopping with John Cale’s wife Cynderella—formerly of the GTOs, the California girl art-rock group put together by Frank Zappa. I did interviews with Ray Davies and John Cale. I hung out with our friend Richard Williams, the editor of Melody Maker, host of the TV show Old Grey Whistle Test, and author of Out of His Head, a biography of the legendary “wall of sound” producer Phil Spector.

  *

  We’d only been in London about a week when David Bowie phoned to invite us all to his house for his birthday dinner. I asked him to please not have any Scotch on hand, as Lou was decidedly more fun without it. When we arrived, David greeted us at the door with a brand-new look: the black and gray jumpsuit, red patent leather boots and the short spikey orange hair. Ergo: Ziggy Stardust. I burst out laughing. So, I noted, you’ve gone from “ground control to Major Tom” and 2001 to A Clockwork Orange. He laughed a wicked cackle with a full display of his (then) rotting teeth. (Of course as soon as he had the first flush of success, he got new choppers—as did much of the gang from MainMan.) He dangled a bottle of Scotch provocatively at Lou. My heart sank. It was going to be a long night. I recall that he and Angela lived in a house that had a large, circular staircase that led to nowhere. Their house was full of people: his friends Daniela Palmer and Freddy Moretti—who designed David’s costumes—the musical composer Lionel (Oliver!) Bart (this explained the Antho
ny Newley influence), and Angela, who was in the kitchen, cooking. Later that night, the Bowies, their friends, Lou, Richard and I all went to the gay dance club El Sombrero. When Richard and I left several hours later, Lou and David were on the dance floor, slow-dancing.

  *

  My best friend, the music columnist and Rock Encyclopedia author Lillian Roxon, came to London. We went shopping on the King’s Road, and went to the just-opened Hard Rock Cafe to get a hamburger. At that time, London didn’t have anything like the restaurant scene that came years later. We were lucky to occasionally get a decent meal (on RCA) at San Lorenzo on Beauchamp Place or Mr. Chow’s in Knightsbridge. I bought blue suede sandals at Zapata—Manolo Blahnik’s first, tiny shop on Cheyne Walk—and maroon suede, knee-high platform boots at the Chelsea Cobbler. After finishing Lou’s album, Richard and I moved to the trendy, but inexpensive Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill, which was not yet a fashionable area. John Cale was staying there too. After the breakup of the Velvet Underground, Richard had tried to get John a job at RCA, but the idea went nowhere when, at his first interview with RCA executives, John suggested that he do the job from inside an oxygen tank. One night in the Portobello, we were awakened by the sounds of screaming as John, crawling naked down the hallway, bit the leg of some passerby. This was not unusual behavior for many of the musicians that we knew at that time. While we were still in London, Richard and I went to Better Books at 136 Charing Cross Road to videotape a reading with Warhol poet Gerard Malanga and his opening act, Patti Smith, who performed her poem about Jesse James. And Lou did not record “Walk on the Wild Side” on that solo, self-titled debut album.

  *

  After Lou’s debut solo album came—and went—Lou asked David Bowie to produce his next album. We learned this news literally the day before Richard was set to fly to London to work on the record that would eventually become Transformer and include Lou’s only mainstream hit (but by no means his best song), “Walk on the Wild Side.” While Lou’s solo debut had been difficult to make and didn’t turn out the way either Lou or Richard envisioned, I was fiercely loyal to Richard and royally pissed off at Lou. I stopped speaking to, and writing about, both Bowie and Lou for a while. Of course, teaming up with Bowie—whose star was on the rise—made perfect sense for Lou, whose solo career had not taken off. But horror stories filtered out from those Transformer recording sessions—that Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson was doing all the work and David had to console and placate Lou for hours on end—and it helped ease any of my longterm bitterness. Despite the hit song “Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou veered into dodgy territory. He embraced a tacky glamrock phase with messy makeup and tottering high heels. It was sad and inappropriate for one of rock and roll’s greatest songwriters. Meanwhile, Bowie’s Ziggy persona took off in England, where British fans were entranced at Bowie’s performance of “Starman” on TV on Top of the Pops—with a tight closeup of his face. The whole Ziggy shtick—the makeup, costumes, feather boas, jockstraps, mimicking going down on Mick Ronson onstage—was cringeworthy to some of us in New York, but drew a generation of glitter queens dressed just like Ziggy to David’s shows. It sent him on his way to fame, fortune, success, drugs, retirement, more success, more drugs, more fame, some absolutely great albums and retirement once again. Over the years I did many, many interviews with David. They ranged from lucid, funny, charming and insightful, to strange encounters and mumbled gibberish. He was rarely dull—except for the period when he rode around in a convertible, making sure he was photographed giving some sort of salute while extolling Hitler. Or when he was coked out of his mind in the Plaza Hotel with Jimmy Page, watching Kenneth Anger films. Or when he looked like a skeleton backstage with John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the Grammys in 1975 in New York City. Or once, when we were in San Diego or Phoenix, I can’t remember which, and our scheduled interview never got done because he literally was making no sense. Then, from an adjoining room, out came a surprise: Iggy, who was also speaking in tongues. This was around the time they both decided to clean up, detox, and together, they departed for Berlin—the heroin capital of the world. Still, Bowie made two of his best albums there: Heroes and Low. David used to tell me that he wasn’t really a rock star, he was an actor playing a rock star. I always thought he was a rock star playing an actor playing a rock star. He had a whole philosophy that he had clearly thought out and would trot out during interviews. “To create an art movement,” he said, “you have to set something up and then destroy it. Do what the Dadaists or the Surrealists did. Complete amateurs who were as pretentious as hell . . . create as much ill feeling as possible. Then you have a chance of creating a movement. You’ll only have a movement if you have a rebellious cause. And you can’t have a rebellious cause when you’re the most well-loved person in the country. What you’ve got there is . . . well, a chance of being the most well-loved person in the country.”

  *

  In the summer of 1972, David invited a bunch of American journalists to come see his “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” concert at the Friars Club in Aylesbury, outside of London. I couldn’t resist. Performing separately in London that same weekend were Lou Reed, the Stooges, and the high-energy, roots rock band the Flamin’ Groovies, who Richard had produced a few years earlier at Buddah Records. In addition to David, MainMan was now “handling” Lou and Iggy, and in the famous photo of the three of them taken that weekend by Mick Rock in the Dorchester Hotel, David looks like a gorgeous vampire. As for all the talk about his “bisexuality,” I always thought it was fun, no big deal, a clever marketing ploy, or all of the above. Years later he would tell me, “People ask me if I’m bisexual and I tell them it’s none of their business. It’s so trite, and I will not give in. I think I talked about my private life twice. Then statements were thrown at me. But I don’t regret any of it. It was a way for me to get my music over. On the other hand, I was an experimenter. Particularly during those years, I was experimenting with my emotional life. I threw myself a test of absorbing every possible experience that I could while I was young, with no realization of what happens later.”

  *

  By the mid-1970s, the symbiosis that marked Bowie’s relationship with Lou had fully embraced Iggy, who had dyed his hair platinum blonde, was supported by MainMan, and was rumored to be taking heroin with the rest of the Stooges in the Hollywood Hills. Leee Black Childers had been dispatched by MainMan to be the Stooges’ “minder,” and it couldn’t have been a pleasant task. On my recommendation, Leee had initially installed the Stooges in the Beverly Hills Hotel, but either unpaid bills, slovenly habits, bad behavior or all of the above forced the band to move into their own house, where they rehearsed for shows that never materialized. The entire MainMan staff was living the high life—lavish hotel suites, catering, plenty of drugs—and traveling hither and yon. Years later, Bowie would tell me, “I didn’t choreograph the MainMan situation. I’m not quite the mastermind people would have me be. Like a fool, I thought Defries would be a good manager. It wound up as ‘We are MainMan, and we also have David Bowie.’ I was supposed to be the star; my money ended up being the star. It wasn’t a pleasant time of my life.” And many years later, when Iggy was in better shape, he told me, “You know, when I met you and a lot of people from New York, well, you know where I come from [a trailer park outside of Detroit, Michigan], and I was thrown into a scene that was very . . . mondo. I think it turned me a little bit evil.” Still, the records he made with Bowie, specifically The Idiot and Lust for Life, are among his best. And as for his association with Bowie, he told me, “Bowie didn’t have an influence on me other than friendship. Friendship is an underrated influence in these modern times. Basically, David and I exchanged information. It’s great to meet somebody else who thinks they’re always right.”