Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  Terry was picking up his most explicit and exciting cues on how to really live from the new wave of literature by the Beats. He devoured William S. Burroughs, the poems of Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac and distilled their messages of freedom for David.

  “My writing is a teaching,” Kerouac once noted in his journal. Terry Burns and, by extension, David Jones were avid students.

  Through the Beats, David was also opened up to the concept of Buddhism and was soon reading up on meditation. He wrote a paper for his history class on Tibet and, around this time, saw a film on television about Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s invasion of the country in 1951 and the subsequent oppression of Buddhist monks in an attempt to erase their culture and ancient practices. “That made me interested in Tibet as a country and I started studying its history and its religion,” David has said, “and while I was still at school, I wrote a thesis on it.” He saw a line from James Dean to Kerouac to Elvis Presley to the Tibetan monks in resistance to the Chinese: they were all rebels. None of the other students at Bromley spent the weekend at London jazz clubs or researching Buddhist monasteries in Scotland. While others were preparing for their inevitable induction into the nation’s cramped and airless offices, David Jones was becoming another species entirely: a genuine rebel himself.

  This spirit soon found another mentor in the form of Peter Frampton’s father, Bromley Tech’s unorthodox but august art instructor. Owen Frampton had been a successful graphic designer before he was hired at Bromley and knew both sides of the culture, the liberating and the confining energies that went along with the technical arts. By the time he met David, he had long since made the choice as far as what energy he wanted to pursue and impart. Frampton took David and his group of would-be artists and musicians under his wing. Like Terry Burns, the senior Frampton was a “mad one,” as Kerouac wrote in On the Road. “Mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.” He would not be limited by any curriculum or dress code, and his overjoyed young pupils followed suit.

  “He became our mentor,” says Underwood. “Owen was the best thing about Bromley Tech for me. He encouraged me and we were more like friends than teacher and pupil. If a pet student of Owen Frampton’s got into trouble with one of Bromley Tech’s other faculty members, Frampton would run interference.”

  “He was the only teacher there who spoke to you as a human being,” says Kureishi. “It was pretty crude, the teaching. It was pretty rough. In those days they still used to hit you with sticks.”

  “He was always his own man,” Peter Frampton says. “He didn’t toe the line at all and it got him into trouble occasionally. Basically he had an idea of what he wanted to do and he did it. He made his own syllabus. If you were up for it, he’d take you all the way. You’d do a year and a half of what you were normally doing in college. He was a great artist himself but his joy was teaching. What he got back from what he was giving. I think his enthusiasm was something that people like David just latched on to. They saw a good thing. They couldn’t believe that this guy was actually for them.” Owen Frampton was vociferous where John Jones was taciturn, and there was none of the Terry-related domestic drama in the art room. It was a safe space in which to create and scheme and feel strong and valuable.

  “I believe he had an estranged father,” says Peter Frampton. “Remote. For David being not only talented on the musical side but also very arty, he loved my dad and saw this man would push him and was open. He became some sort of a father figure, yes.”

  Under Owen Frampton, David learned to be both disciplined and an insurgent at the same time. He was and remains unusually professional in his approach to his rule breaking. If his classmates were wearing pointy-toed shoes, David would wear round-toed creepers. If their ties were tight, his tie would be loose. Peggy would taper his trousers and jackets to his specific details. He had an image in his mind of how he wanted to look, derived, mainly, from films and the album sleeves that lined the bins at Furlong’s, and scrounged whatever he could from the local department store and, whenever possible, the shops in London.

  “Clothes were a really big deal,” Kureishi says, alluding to some communal Bromley-ite mind-set. “In the suburbs it was about originality and not being like other people. Being slightly different, sophisticated. You could get good clothes in Bromley but it helped if you wanted to be ahead of the other kids to get something amazing in London.”

  Owen Frampton also encouraged Jones and Underwood to take their campus band as far as they could. He allowed them to keep their instruments in his classroom and even encouraged his young son to fraternize with them. Young Frampton was already an accomplished guitarist and was soon a friend of both boys. Twenty years later, he’d come alive, of course, but at the time, he was simply Professor Frampton’s child. His group the Little Ravens performed alongside George and the Dragons at campus fetes and once at a school-wide talent competition.

  Although Peter Frampton and David would remain friends and move in and out of each other’s lives as both became pop stars (Frampton, ironically, would beat David Bowie to stardom as a guitarist with the Herd and Humble Pie in the late sixties), Frampton would not stay long at Bromley Tech. Owen Frampton’s charisma and approach to education cast a long shadow for his son.

  “I was only there a year because I found it difficult being at the same school as my father,” Frampton has said. “A few kids, shall we say the one half percent who didn’t get on too well with my father, made my life rather like a living hell.” Frampton would soon transfer out of Bromley.

  The newly Beat David Jones was a magnet for the young girls from local Bromley High School and Bromley Grammar, and even some fellow students at the all-boys Bromley Tech. It was around this time, he claimed to have lost both his hetero and homosexual virginity.

  “When I was fourteen, sex suddenly became all-important to me,” he told Cameron Crowe in their Playboy interview in ’76. “It didn’t really matter who or what it was with, as long as it was a sexual experience. So it was some very pretty boy in class in some school or other that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed upstairs. And that was it.”

  Both boys and girls were attracted to him because of his newly enhanced charisma and experience, and he did not differentiate between those who wished to pay a little physical tribute to it. Given the outrageousness of the Crowe interview it remains unclear just how extensively David explored his sexuality at the time. Surely the Beats, who he admired and took cues from, were frank about such experimentations, but both his best friend George Underwood and future wife Angie maintain that David’s motivation was “pussy,” or “the p word,” as they described it respectively. If his claim to Crowe is true, fastidious Peggy could not have possibly approved of any same-sex screwing under her own roof; perhaps she would have taken solace in the fact that he did it “neatly.”

  David’s sexual fervor could, on occasion, get him into trouble. “We did have a falling-out over one girl,” Underwood recalls. “Carol Goldsmith.” This event, which took place in the spring of 1961, has become a legendary part of the Bowie creation myth, and its result has been attributed to a Brixton street fight and even named as evidence of his extraterrestrial origins, as surely nobody born on planet Earth has mismatched eyes like that. The reality is that he cock-blocked his best friend and schoolmate and got slugged for it.

  “When I was fourteen I fell in love with a girl,” David said in 1973. “I can’t even remember her name now—but at the time I was crazy about her. Only trouble was, my best mate had a bit of a soft spot for her, too. I was the winner. Quicker off the mark, I suppose! I moved in before he’d even made up his mind how to approach her. Anyway—next day I was at school boasting to my mate about what a Casanova I was and he became terribly annoyed. In fact he threw a punch at me!”

  In actuality, David didn’t seduce her as much as make it impossible for Underwood to have a chance. “David would probably say that he can’t remember the
actual story,” Underwood has said, “but he can remember things clearly if he chooses to. He knew damn well why I did it. We both wanted to go out with her and I was lucky enough to get a date. On the day [of the date] David rang me up and said that she had to cancel. So I didn’t go, but he’d made up the whole story. The girl stood around for over an hour, waiting for me, as I discovered later. It was a bastard thing to do and I was furious with him, so it developed into a fight between us. And during the punch-up, I caught his eye with a fingernail.”

  “It caught me in the eye, and I stumbled against a wall and onto my knees,” David recalled. “At first he thought I was kidding—it wasn’t a very hard punch. But it had obviously caught me at rather an odd angle.”

  Underwood accompanied David to the school secretary’s office, where the injured eye was treated with cold compresses. The nurse arrived and soon it became clear that the damage was a bit more serious. David was taken to nearby Farnsborough Hospital. There, doctors noticed that the sphincter muscles of his left eye were badly torn, preventing the pupil from dilating or contracting. David’s parents rushed to their son’s bedside to comfort him.

  “At first they thought I’d lose my eye,” he recalled. “I was scared stiff.” Doctors managed to save David’s eye and his sight was not seriously affected, but the cosmetic aspects of the condition would be permanent.

  “For quite a while I was very embarrassed about it,” David said in the early seventies. “Although I could see very well out of the eye, it made me self-conscious.” David grew to relish the attention. He had already started to use his distinctive qualities, his pale, thin androgynous physique to attract it. Now he had something that nobody else had: a screwed-up eye. Rock ’n’ roll has a long tradition of stars using their physical flaws in ways that make them unique and sexy. Pete Townshend did little to hide his outsized nose and in fact he held it high and regal. Prince’s stature, Meat-loafs girth, Joey Ramone’s gangly frame, Dolly Parton’s cup size—each of them probably found their unique feature to be a liability during their awkward teenage years but surely felt grateful for the distinction it provided once they were in their twenties.

  “We didn’t have the Web back then, had no way of knowing the details of why he had that bad eye,” Professor Camille Paglia, a Bowie fan since the early 1970s, told me. “Now we have much more info about what happened, but at the time, it gave him an abstract look. It made him look like a mannequin. Like Nefertiti. He really does. His face during the Aladdin Sane period has a strangled Nefertiti look. Mysterious. The idea of having one eye that sees and one eye that has been touched or blighted in some way, in myth and legend, it implies mystic powers. The bad eye sees within. Sees invisible things. It’s uncanny. It’s eerie that Bowie has the regular eye and this strange eye that’s always permanently dilated … always looking but not really seeing. He has a dual vision, really. To me that’s symbolic of major artists anyway. They see the physical world and they see the spiritual world. To me they are oracular. Often in legends the artists have a handicap. Homer was blind, so and so was lame. You are physically incapacitated in some way but it gives you this special gift. That blighted eye is the sign of Bowie’s special gift, the hallucinatory part of his imagination.”

  4.

  DAVID LEFT BROMLEY in the summer of 1963, when he was sixteen. Those who weren’t going on to college at that age were expected to get an entry-level job in an office, shop, food service establishment or factory. Despite his intelligence and creativity, David’s was a less than sterling academic record. He passed only two “O-levels,” or final exams. “I would have got three but they don’t award them for imagination,” he would later quip.

  Bromley Tech’s careers officer responded to David’s declaration that he wanted to find work as a professional musician by pointing him toward an open position in a nearby factory that produced harps, but David politely ignored this suggestion. John Jones found him temporary work as an electrician’s assistant but he only helped with minimal wiring before politely declining to show up for work ever again. Finally, Owen Frampton pulled some strings and found him work as a designer at the London branch of the famous ad agency J. Walter Thompson.

  J. Walter Thompson, or JWT as it’s commonly known today, was and is an industry giant, the first-ever global firm (founded in 1864), responsible for some of the best-known branding images in English and American pop history (from Prudential Life Insurance to Cadbury chocolates). Even a walk-in position at a prestigious corporation like this might have led to a long career in the field. The notion of a finely-tailored young David Bowie as modish Mad Man is certainly intriguing. However, David was only a bit more enthusiastic about this than he was about his part-time electrician gig and only because the position would enable him to spend his days in London.

  Sometimes he would stay in the city and walk around, browsing the cafés, record shops and boutiques that were springing up daily in light of the continuing economic boom that Britain was then enjoying. There was, however, always the specter of that last train back to Bromley at eleven thirty. If he’d meet a girl or a fellow rock ’n’ roller he found interesting, he knew he’d have to extricate himself from whatever experience in order to make it home.

  “The last train was a huge part of our lives,” says Hanif Kureishi. “The last train was a big deal for people from Bromley. If you got the last train you were lucky. Otherwise you had to sit at the station till morning. You know. You had to get the last train or you stayed up all night in London. You had to make this decision whether you’re going to pull this chick or whether you’re going to make the last train. It was a nightmare.”

  “He only took the job for his father’s sake, because his father thought that all this business with groups and music could well be a passing fad and that at least if he spent a year or so at work, it would give him some stable grounding to fall back on,” Peggy said. “So David did go to work there, though not without protest. I can remember him coming home and moaning about his ‘blooming job’ and traveling up and down on the train.”

  David’s job title, “junior visualizer,” was appropriately vague. The firm represented various clients, pasting up ads for raincoats and even a dietary cookie with the unfortunate brand name “Ayds” (which has since been discontinued for obvious reasons).

  In all his meanderings outside the office, Dobell’s, one of the city’s best record shops at the time, located nearby on Charing Cross Road, was where he could be found on most days.

  “My immediate boss, Ian, a groovy modernist with a Gerry Mulligan-style short-crop haircut and Chelsea boots, was very encouraging about my passion for music, something he and I both shared,” Bowie recalled in 1993. “He used to send me on errands to Dobell’s, knowing I’d be there for most of the morning till well after lunch break. It was there, in the bins, that I found Bob Dylan’s first album. Ian had sent me there to get him a John Lee Hooker release and advised me to pick up a copy for myself, as it was so wonderful.”

  “Dobell’s was the record shop,” George Underwood says. “David played me some fuckin’ great music he picked up there. Mingus, Kirk, Dr. John, John Lee Hooker—loads of wicked blues records.”

  By 1960, the blues had replaced the first wave of rock ’n’ roll as the fave rave music for hip young Londoners. With Little Richard a born-again Christian, Elvis enlisted in the army in Germany. Chuck Berry in jail for violating the Mann Act, Buddy Holly dead in a plane crash and Jerry Lee Lewis plagued by a scandal after bringing his thirteen-year-old cousin and child bride overseas on a 1958 British tour, it seemed like the initial excitement and danger of rock had faded. In the place of the revolutionary first wave came a crop of pleasant pop crooners, like Matt Monro, or clueless teen idols who were in no hurry to change the culture. Many of these were discovered and managed by a figure named Larry Parnes, who would not have been out of place on our current American Idol panel. Parnes, clean-cut and handsome himself, was happy to prefabricate stars, package them with a Tin
Pan Alley–penned “hit” and foist them condescendingly on the hungry teenage market. With ethnically vague names like Johnny Gentle, Vince Eager, Marty Wilde, Tommy Steele and Dickie Pride, many of these pop singers borrowed their look from an American icon like Presley or Sinatra but held none of their raw charisma or even adult sexuality. Only the Shadows, featuring Cliff Richard, were an English chart act that wrote their own songs, played their own instruments and seemed relatively authentic. They too were derivative of American acts like the Ventures, but they were a point of pride nonetheless for young rockers like David, George Underwood and Peter Frampton.

  “The Shadows were our wildly loved band,” Frampton says. “They influenced everybody.” While barely known in America outside of a pocket of Anglophiles, the Shadows had a very strong effect on the early leather-clad Beatles who would soon adopt a similar look, if only because of their presentation (smart suits, long hair).

  “[Shadows front man] Cliff Richard was a poor copy of Elvis Presley,” says music publicist Greg Tesser. “In everything he did, even the curled lip. They were boring. The wild men were gone and in their place, you had this real sort of cosmetic, this very sort of sanitized stuff, and it was very boring indeed.”

  “Some of the guys who were part of the original rock scene were quite edgy initially but it all softened down,” Dick Taylor, of British R & B legends the Pretty Things, says today. “One year you had Gene Vincent and the next year you had people like Greg Douglas. For anybody who was really into music, rock ’n’ roll was losing its thing. We were pissed off with the fact that there wasn’t anything there anymore. It just sort of went into pop pap.”

  Working up a passionate interest in the blues seemed an antidote to such cynical and self-interested offerings. Blues artists like Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson found themselves in great demand for lucrative overseas gigs. Marginalized in their own country, they were greeted like heroes when they flew to London to play to packed crowds in dank, subterranean cafés in Soho. They also found a presence on BBC radio.