Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  John Jones, with his music hall background, brief as it was, also understood the appeal of Little Richard and rock ’n’ roll. Given his own unexpressed lust for color and noise in his own adolescence, John was likely touched by David’s interest in music and was evidently more than happy to supply the boy with 45s.

  “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley, who shared David’s birthday-twelve years his senior—was next. David played the 45 one day for his cousin Kristina and couldn’t help but observe the effect Presley’s voice had on her. The little girl began to sweat as she shook her hips to the mutant hillbilly beat. Puberty had not fully set in but even at age ten, it was clear that this music had a kind of power that his mom and dad’s 78s did not. Rock ’n’ roll meant sex, something never spoken of in society but always present, hanging in the air like a primal mist. And now, uncontained, an entire generation of English kids seemed to go mad at once.

  With rock ’n’ roll and pop culture, America liberated Western Europe a second time. Only this time it focused only on the teenagers. David, in many ways, was no longer an English kid and would never be one again. His heart like most English teens, was on the other side of the Atlantic.

  “We started to get into various things I have to call ‘American,’” music publicist Greg Tesser recalls. “Until about 1954 or -five, it was all a bit bleak and very dark and very austere. My father was in the printing business and he printed posters for Davy Crockett, and that had a huge boom in England. England in the early fifties was just like it’d been in the thirties and the forties because of the war and subsequent deprivation.”

  For a short time, David had even forsaken British soccer for “Yank football,” which he found he could pick up on John’s shortwave radio. He would sit and listen to the simulcasts on American Armed Forces Radio out of Germany. Transfixed, he wrote a letter to the American embassy in London requesting information on scores and players and received a uniform, helmet and pad in return, not to mention his first bit of press ink: LIMEY KID LOVES YANK FOOTBALL, in the Bromley and Kentish Times. The photo shows an elated David kitted out in his new pads and a tightly pulled necktie. “It is a safe bet that the people of Bromley may soon be scratching their heads, too, when David introduces ‘sandlot football’ to the youngsters in one of the parks,” the article stated.

  Along with these new, American-style freedoms and indulgent desires came an unavoidable generation gap. Those who had fought for king and country in World War I and II were outraged by the apparently ungrateful nature of these kids, who only seemed to want to dance and fornicate. There’s a famous scene in A Hard Day’s Night where John Lennon takes the piss out of an older train commuter in a bowler hat. “I fought a war for your sort,” he sneers at Lennon with disgust. “I bet you’re sorry you won,” Lennon snipes back. There’s another in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in which Albert Finney takes a break from pulling factory machine levers, lights up a smoke and scans a row of hardworking industrialized drones, ten years his elder and still there. “They got ground down before the war and never got over it,” he sneers. “I’d like to see someone grind me down.” Postwork, Finney dons a sharp suit and heads to a nightclub to listen to American jazz.

  Even some British youth quietly puzzled at the Americanization of their country and embodied a of inferiority as though they were being shown how to live. This was best articulated by Jimmy Porter, the angry young chain-smoking hero of John Osborne’s classic stage play Look Back in Anger. Inert and impotent, with nothing he could point to and say, “That is me,” Jimmy rages from his chair. “I must be getting sentimental … But I must say it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age—unless you’re an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans. That’s a thought isn’t it?”

  Unfortunately the one organic British subculture of this period, the Teddy Boys, were tied up in sensationalized violence. Teddy Boys, or Teds, were dandies, “Ted” being a shortening of “Edwardian.” A precursor to the more famous mods in that one had to be sharply dressed, Ted culture was an odd hybrid of English tailoring and American small-town style. Teds wore thick-soled creepers or pointy “winklepicker” shoes, loose collars, tight dark trousers, bright Lurex socks and large waistcoats but coiffed and greased their hair like American rock ’n’ rollers. The Teddy Girls wore hoop skirts, drape jackets and ponytails. In an effort, it seems, to prove you can look sharp and still be a badass, the Teds roamed London in gangs, vandalizing and tormenting straights but mostly fighting each other like the American juvenile delinquent gangs who were rapidly becoming a cottage industry, both in terms of selling to them and selling cautionary tales about them. The best among these cautionary tales was the film Blackboard Jungle.

  Released in 1955, Blackboard Jungle purports to be a cautionary tale but is really the godfather of all exploitation “teachers vs. students” movies, from Rock ’n’ Roll High School to Heathers to Dangerous Minds. Glenn Ford plays an open-minded English teacher. Sidney Poitier is the smartest of the troubled teens. They form an unlikely bond that helps them both deal with the surly, hopeless, chain-smoking teens around them. The language is pulpy (“You ever try to fight thirty-five guys at once, teach?”). Librarians are sexually ravaged, jazz records are violently critiqued and the generation gap between World War II veterans and their increasingly existentially hopeless offspring has its first black and white document.

  Blackboard Jungle, most important, blasts wide open with “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. The song, already a few years old, quickly became a Teddy Boy anthem and the first rock ’n’ roll single to sell one million copies on both sides of the Atlantic. Blackboard Jungle and its soundtrack caused a few incidents of violence in and around the actual cinemas where it screened, and soon the British newspapers got in on the act, realizing that outrage sold papers. (Haley, also appears in Don’t Knock the Rock but can’t stand up next to Little Richard.)

  David Jones was too young to be a Teddy Boy, but he began styling his hair in a rock ’n’ roll fashion and adding pointy winklepickers to his school uniform. And he continued to collect rock ’n’ roll 45s, which his parents happily provided, by the likes of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, and Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps.

  The cultural sea change is most famously lamented in the book Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes. David Bowie would star in the 1984 film adaptation, an ill-fated musical directed by Julien Temple. Absolute Beginners is about, if nothing else, the power of the teenage dollar. Once teens were seen as a target audience, largely because of rock ’n’ roll, they had both buying and spending power. With that power came a sense of entitlement, and eventually the social changes that took place, from the repealing of mandatory military service to kids attending art college as opposed to going right into the workforce, would lead to the culture revolution of the following decade.

  “Absolute Beginners was a posey literary book for adults and literati,” says pop manager and author Simon Napier-Bell. “Nobody gave a toss what anyone else read. Books were for adults or eggheads. People were far too busy fucking and dancing and fighting.” Oral contraception, approved in ’57, helped with all the “fucking.” Rock ’n’ roll (stereos could now be purchased on credit for the first time) assisted with the rest.

  England was lacking in stars and, with the exception of the Teds, lacking in style, but a new era was emerging. The 1950s were over and in the 1960s England’s role as trend follower and America’s role as trendsetter would be reversed almost completely.

  David Jones became an official teenager himself on January 8, 1960. In England children take a precursory version of America’s SATs at age eleven called the eleven-plus. These standardized exams were designed to determine what line of education a student will be best suited for upon graduation at sixteen: the idea was to keep an eye on career making and focus on the preservation of the strength of the workforce. David was, of course,
extremely focused. The only problem was that the objects of his focus—girls and rock ’n’ roll—were not part of the eleven-Plus. When he didn’t ace it, it became clear to his parents that action was needed. They knew he was an extremely bright and clever child. He simply needed the right environment. David interviewed at and was accepted as a student of Bromley Technical High School, or “Brom Tech.”

  A Bromley boy with a strong chin and a strong rugby player’s physique, George Underwood, soon to become David’s very best mate, knew the boy from their Cub Scouts troop. The most ardent rock ’n’ roll enthusiasts at Brom Tech, at one time George and David were so close that they would often try to test out their assumed ESP. One would think of a word and then inquire with the other. Occasionally they succeeded in reading each other’s minds.

  “I first met David Robert Jones at St. Mary’s church hall in 1956,” Underwood, a successful painter and illustrator, says today. “We were both about to enroll into the eighteenth Bromley Cub Scouts group. We started talking about music almost immediately, about skiffle and rock ’n’ roll, and that was it. I had found someone who was passionate about the same things I was. David was in and out of things so fast—one week it was Little Richard, then it was the Kingston Trio, the Everly Brothers, Lonnie Donegan. He was difficult to pin down. But I was the same—Charlie Gracie, Tommy Steele, Gene Vincent and Buddy Holly. In fact I went to see Buddy Holly and the Crickets when I was eleven. Twice! I remember David being quite jealous of the fact that I managed to get Buddy Holly’s signature. Fame was what fascinated him. All we were into besides music was pussy. We became best friends, walking up and down Bromley High Street, dressed identically, pulling birds—talking all sorts of shit to them, pretending to be American and sometimes scoring.”

  While art was studied in practice, it was not a bohemian-style art school where theory and philosophy were celebrated as well. Good jobs in design advertising and technology were the goal, not fame or creative expression.

  “The dream was to be employed and to own a house,” Hanif Kureishi, who also attended Bromley Tech in the late sixties, would later confirm to me. “My parents had lived through the war. The war was really recent. But we were different [from our parents] because of pop basically. For most kids, yeah, you want a good job. But then you got caught up in pop.”

  “The notion of making a living as a musician was far-fetched,” Peter Frampton, who grew up in Bromley and attended Bromley Tech (where his father, Owen Frampton, was the art professor), tells me. “What you’re talking about is the difference between the outlook in people in general coming from America with the American dream: ‘You can do anything, my son.’ To us in England it was ‘Don’t think you’re ever gonna make anything of yourself, because this is your lot.’ We were just after the war. Just off rationing. In England they were still in shock, I think, and the kids, the baby boomers, had not a clue of what their parents had just been through. My parents and my next-door neighbor’s parents were just so glad to be alive. We were the first generation that didn’t have to serve. Didn’t have to do anything. Seeing rock ’n’ roll on TV, what was powerful in addition to the music was the implicit ambition. That was the common ground between David, George and myself at school. I wanted to learn Buddy Holly numbers and they knew them.”

  Jones and Underwood would spend entire weekends in the aisles at Furlong’s, the local record shop, where David first took a part-time job. “He was always a bit of a dreamer in that I’d give him a job to do, come back in about an hour and he was still chatting, the job unfinished, so that he had to go,” the shop’s owner Vic Furlong said.

  Jones and Underwood soon formed a group, George and the Dragons, with a small, revolving gang of like-minded classmates, allowing David a chance to test his musical ability and begin to learn rudimentary guitar strumming on an inexpensive guitar that John had purchased for him along with a tape recorder. “David and I were pretty good at Everly Brothers–style harmonies and he definitely had a gift or a talent which at that time was difficult to put your finger on. We would sit for hours working out numbers and recording them on his little Grundig [tape recorder].” As with the sax lessons he would soon begin with horn player Ronnie Ross, these sessions inform his later approach to songwriting—natural, born of conversation and improvisation as opposed to any formal training; call it personal discipline.

  “We’d all bring our guitars to school and slip them in my dad’s office before assembly,” says Frampton, who formed his own group, the Little Ravens, at the time. “And then at lunchtime he’d leave the door unlocked so we could go get the guitars and sit on the art block concrete stairs, which for guitar sound and vocal echo was perfect. George, myself and David would sit there and play all afternoon. They were the rebels with thin ties and rocker haircuts. I was twelve … I had the bowl cut.”

  Turned away by John Jones and his mother, and rejoining the workforce himself at a printing company, Terry found solace in frequent trips into London and David would frequently accompany his brother on weekends. During this period, Terry seemed especially enthusiastic about ideas, whether they were found in books, in political treatises or on record. Ironically, like his stepfather, John, Terry was overjoyed that his little brother was becoming a rock ’n’ roller, telling all who might listen, “My brother’s got a guitar!”

  Alarmingly, Terry could not de-enthuse at the time. A harbinger of his incipient mental illness, Terry’s energy seemed boundless and he’d rave about records or French philosophical texts by Sartre and Camus, which his impressionable little brother would dutifully attempt to absorb.

  It was through Terry that David would discover London, which was slowly becoming an exciting city for the young again. Terry and David would take the forty-five-minute train ride into Victoria Station, disembark through that widemouth exit and emerge into the instant urban bustle.

  “While I was still at school, I would go up to town every Saturday evening to listen to jazz at different clubs, and this was all happening to him when I was at a very impressionable age,” David recalled. “He was growing his hair long and rebelling in his own way while I was still dressed up in school uniform every day. It all had a big impact on me.”

  David had an instinctive feel and appreciation for jazz. It was a language that he could share with his brother. They engaged in rapid-fire discussion on the styles of Jimmy Smith, Zoot Sims, Wes Montgomery, John Coltrane. It was likely the American baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan, who arranged for Miles Davis in the late forties and formed an iconic combo with trumpeter Chet Baker in the fifties, that led David to actually want to pick up a horn himself. Mulligan was a progenitor of “cool jazz.” He wore his hair close cropped, wore tight, expensive suits and generally cut a high-style figure.

  “David was influenced by what his half brother, Terry, was listening to,” Underwood confirms. “He introduced him to certain jazz records like Gerry Mulligan, who David modeled himself on for a couple of weeks. I am sure when the careers officer came to our school and asked us all what we wanted to do when we left that David was thinking of Gerry Mulligan when he said he wanted to be a saxophonist in a modern jazz quartet.”

  John Jones next purchased a white, plastic baritone sax for his son from Furlong’s after a typically small amount of persistence. Once equipped with an instrument, David decided, also typically, to fast-track his path toward jazz mastery. Poring over the classified ads in the local paper, he found an address for Ross, a renowned baritone player who performed with a combo known as the Jazzmakers. Ross, who passed away in 1991, had slicked-back hair and wore sharp suits just like Mulligan. He was the next best thing. Ross didn’t give many lessons but the teenage enthusiast convinced him to take him on as a pupil.

  “I didn’t mind teaching if the pupil was really interested,” Ross said. “I was teaching him about music in general—how scales were formed, about harmony, how to blow and breathe and a little about how to read music … I told him that playing the sax was like tryi
ng to get the sounds you hear in your head out through a horn and into a room. It wasn’t just reproducing notes you saw on paper. It was creating a new language. Communicating your visions without speaking them.”

  Ross found his young study to have an odd combination of shyness and hyperenthusiasm on a level that could never really last. Sure enough, after about four months, David decided that he’d learned enough and ended his sessions with Ross. Ross would resurface in the early seventies, when he was hired to perform the now iconic sax solo at the close of the Bowie and Mick Ronson–produced “Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou Reed’s biggest hit.