Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  On another business trip to New York City in early 1966, Pitt took a meeting with the pop artist Andy Warhol, with an eye toward representing his as yet unknown new group the Velvet Underground. He returned to London with an acetate of the unreleased The Velvet Underground and Nico album, the band’s debut. “Not being his particular cup of tea, he gave it to me to see what I made of them,” Bowie wrote in his self-edited issue of Mojo in 2002. That acetate, which Pitt casually handed to him as a sort of souvenir, proved to be a life changer.

  “Everything I both felt and didn’t know about rock music was opened to me on one unreleased disc. The first track [“Sunday Morning”] glided by innocuously enough without really registering. However from that point on, and with the opening throbbing sarcastic bass and guitar of ‘I’m Waiting for the Man,’ the linchpin, the keystone of my ambition was driven home. The music was savagely indifferent to my feelings. It didn’t care if I liked it or not. It could give a fuck. It was completely preoccupied with a world as yet unseen by my suburban eyes. In fact, though only nineteen, I had seen rather a lot but had accepted it all quite enthusiastically as ‘a bit of a laugh.’ Apparently, the laughing was now over. This was a degree of cool that I had no idea was humanly sustainable and it was ravishing.”

  The Velvet Underground and Nico demonstrated to the nineteen-year-old, as it has to countless bands over the last forty-plus years, where rock music could be taken. The album demonstrated how a rock lyric could be literary and vulnerable without compromising toughness (“Her oin”), how it could be sexy or romantic without using hackneyed bedroom come-ons (“I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Femme Fatale”) and how the avant-garde and the classical could mix to form something exhilarating and sinister without being oblique and alienating (“Venus in Furs”). Plus, the songs were easy to play. They were primal but felt complex. Bowie learned each of them on his twelve-string Gibson acoustic, the guitar he would use during what was amounting to his first serious run as a songwriter. He encouraged his backing band the Buzz and its short-lived new incarnation, the Riot Squad (essentially the Buzz with a flashing red light, onstage) to do the same.

  While the Velvet Underground would mark the start of Bowie’s love affair with New York City, also around this time, he caught a quintessentially English band at the Marquee that would prove equally shattering. These two bands would be as important to his musical development as Elvis and Little Richard had been a decade earlier.

  Pink Floyd (then often referred to as the Pink Floyd) was a quartet of blues fans from Cambridge Arts College, led by a dark-eyed, black-haired, handsome kid just a few months older than Bowie. His name was Roger Barrett, known professionally and to his friends as “Syd.” Syd played slide guitar with a Zippo lighter, giving his blues chords a fat, creepy quality. He didn’t try to sound typically American when he sang, unlike most blues-based bands. He didn’t drawl. He was, rather, distinctly British in his inflection, and his abstract lyrics and intense stage presence were unlike those of any other front man on the scene.

  “There are certain artists that are unprecedented in their time,” says photographer Mick Rock, who would shoot iconic portraits of both Barrett and Bowie. “I don’t think the Beatles and the Stones and Bob Dylan come under that description. It has nothing to do with the quality of the art, but you could hear their derivation. Whatever they mutated into, you could hear the roots. They all acknowledge it. With Syd the first time I thought ‘Where the hell did this come from?’ When I first saw the early Pink Floyd they had yet to make a record and were virtually unknown. It was as if they had just landed! They didn’t look or sound like anything I’d ever come across before, fronted by this beautiful being who was bobbing up and down and making the wildest sounds. The rest of the group were virtually invisible. It was all Syd. It was the same the first time I heard the Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges. You couldn’t track where it came from musically. Of course I didn’t see Iggy or Lou live until 1972 when I shot the Transformer and Raw Power album covers.” The Floyd’s effortless theatricality floored Bowie, and he became an acolyte of Barrett’s.

  “Barrett became a talisman for Bowie in how to be an English singer,” says early Pink Floyd producer Joe Boyd, who recorded their classic debut single “Arnold Layne” (Bowie and David Gilmour would cover the track, about a suburban cross-dresser, at a tribute concert in 2006, the year Barrett passed away; he would also do the mid-period, Barrett-free Floyd classic “Comfortably Numb,” with somewhat less passion).

  David Bowie’s debut album, released in early 1967, shows none of this influence, as many of the songs were already recorded by the end of 1966 in Decca’s studio with house producer Mike Vernon (the album’s sleeve is still very rooted in the early to mid-sixties, with a full head-shot of a handsome, vaguely defiant-looking David in his mod shag cut and high-collared jacket). With the exception of the collected singles (“Love You Till Tuesday” and “Rubber Band”), stylistically, the album leans toward the kind of vaguely dark, arcane English story songs (“Please Mr. Gravedigger,” “Uncle Arthur,” “Maid of Bond Street”) that Kenneth Pitt imagined Bowie performing in lounges, each one almost inviting a lengthy introduction.

  “D is for December, D is for David, D is for Deram—December 2nd is D-day all round, for that’s when Deram launches its exciting new contract star David Bowie singing his own outstanding song ‘Rubber Band,’” read the press-release copy that heralded Bowie’s debut single. With lyrical references to feeling “chappy” while eating scones and drinking, it’s a cutesy and quaint trifle of a single. “Dear rubber band, you’re playing my tune out of tune,” Bowie quips. “A happening song,” the press release insists.

  As usual the non-LP B side is the far superior “The London Boys,” “David Bowie’s partly autobiographical cameo of the brave and defiant little mod racing up-hill along Wardour Street to an empty Paradise,” the press release issued shortly before its release claims. “The London Boys” is Bowie’s most sophisticated and autobiographical track up until that point. Musically, it’s a hangover ballad, hindered by his still-developing sense of melody and song structure. It draws its power from the lyrics, which describe David’s weariness with the now five-year-old mod scene. “You think you’ve had a lot of fun,” Bowie sings, most likely to someone quite like him, “but you ain’t got nothing, you’re on the run.” David would also pen a similarly themed but much more cheerful track called “London Bye Ta Ta” around this time. It was later released as the B side to the “Prettiest Star” single in 1970 (but could have easily been a hit for Blur or Supergrass circa the ’94 Britpop boom). A version appears on disc one of the 1989 box set Sound and Vision.

  Bowie’s second Deram single, “Love You Till Tuesday,” gave Aimee Mann’s first band its name and inspired the Replacements’ “Love You Till Friday” and the Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love.” It’s another Newley-indebted number but more confidently executed and genuinely witty, with a zippy arrangement that, like “I Dig Everything,” seemed destined for the charts. Released April 14, 1967, it flopped as well, as did the full-length album that followed. It seemed a good time to give music a bit of a rest and focus on threat two in that triple-threat equation. In an interview with Melody Maker to promote the singles, Bowie is asked about his ambition. “I want to act,” he answers. “I’d like to do character parts. I think it takes a lot to become somebody else. It takes some doing.”

  Bowie, with Pitt’s encouragement, began auditioning for film roles around this time. He tried out for the John Schlesinger film Sunday Bloody Sunday, starring Peter Finch (later of Network fame) and Glenda Jackson, and lost that part to singer and actor Murray Head (now famous for the excellent and strange New Wave single “One Night in Bangkok”), and he starred in an avant-garde short by director Michael Armstrong entitled The Image. Its plot is, well, vague. An artist, played by Michael Byrne, is painting a portrait on a rainy night. A winding staircase is shot from various angles in shadow. The painting is a portrait
of David Bowie, wearing a beige sweater (it would later grace the cover of Bowie: The Pitt Report). Suddenly the real-life David Bowie places his face against the window. A painting come to life? Fortunately there is no dialogue. Bowie on film is, of course, a serious presence, and this is the first time it’s really utilized. Even as a ghost, Bowie’s features swim together beautifully on celluloid. He is, on camera, a great British beauty, more masculine than he seems in still photos. I’m always reminded of a young Michael Caine (circa Get Carter), and vice versa, but I may be alone. As anything more than the first indicator of this photogenic superiority, The Image is pointless. Even Pitt, who had invested a lot of energy in encouraging his client to act, dismissed the film as “dreadful.” As he elaborated for journalist George Tremlett, “The film was shot on location in a derelict house. To make it more realistic David was told to stand outside hanging on the windowsill for dear life while buckets of water were poured over him to simulate rain. To make it even worse, he wasn’t even standing by a downstairs window but hanging from an upstairs sill, so that if he had lost his hold he would have fallen, and possibly hurt himself. David came back that evening looking like a drowned mouse and complaining bitterly.”

  The film would be screened in gay porno theaters in the seventies after David Bowie had made it big, but in ’67 it was considered a failure, and there was even more rejection in store. The follow-up single to “Love You Till Tuesday” was a novelty track entitled “The Laughing Gnome,” which remains so notorious among Bowie fans that in 1990 when he was accepting requests via a call-in line for the hits that he would play on his best-of Sound and Vision arena tour, the NME encouraged fans to vote for “The Laughing Gnome,” which would have forced Bowie to play this most notorious novelty song amid culture-changing epics like “Ziggy Star dust” and “Heroes.” Adding to the Newley-ish delivery and the cornball lyrics, Bowie adds a Vari-speed gnome who essentially duets with him in a voice that Ross Bagdasarian, the producer who (under the stage name David Seville) foisted Alvin and the Chipmunks on the world, would dismiss as shrill. Still, it’s winning somehow. The chorus is a nod to Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” (“Ha ha ha hee hee hee / I’m the laughing gnome and you can’t catch me”), and if there’s ever a museum for gloriously foul puns (“Rolling Gnomes,” “Gnome man’s land”) the master tape should reside on a well-lit pedestal. “I am one of the gnomes on that record and am responsible for some of the terrible jokes on it as well,” the late Gus Dudgeon, who produced Bowie and, more famously, Elton John, admitted to a radio interviewer as if whispering to a priest in a darkened confessional.

  Bowie himself has developed a good-natured affection for the song over the years. “I really think I should have done more for gnomes,” he has said. “I always feel a bit guilty that I just put my feet in the water and never sort of dived into the deep end. I really could have produced a new sensibility for the garden gnome in Britain. Gnomes should have been explored more deeply.”

  In the nineties there was even talk of a jungle remake of the track with that tedious genre’s biggest star, the metal-toothed DJ Goldie, and acid house music icon A Guy Called Gerald producing. It did not happen. We remain grateful.

  “The Laughing Gnome,” despite its legend, was yet another failed single (although it was rereleased in the early seventies once Bowie mania had fully taken hold and enjoyed chart success). At worst, it made Bowie seem dated and out of touch. The would-be hit Bowie composition “Over the Wall We Go” was another novelty effort about a cheerful Cockney’s prison break. Bowie farmed this one out to Paul Nicholas, a second-tier pop singer and theater star, then recording under the moniker Oscar. Nicholas, using his given name, would play demented Cousin Kevin in the 1975 film adaptation of the Who’s Tommy and enjoy one monster disco hit of his own in 1977 with “Heaven on the 7th Floor,” a precursor of sorts to Aerosmith’s smarmy classic “Love in an Elevator.” There was an escalating war in Vietnam. The Beatles had gone to India to meditate. Acid had replaced liquor and pot as a means to get out of one’s head. The pop audience was changing, and novelty seemed like so much thumb twiddling. People were now looking to their rock heroes for leadership—not novelty or escapism.

  “Dylan and LSD were a big factor in the evolution from R & B to psychedelic,” says Joe Boyd. The Pretty Things, for instance, went from a Stones-like band to resembling Pink Floyd as a result of tripping. “The Laughing Gnome” was released on June 1, 1967 … the same day as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. In terms of vision and inspiration, the divide between the two pop products could not have been greater. There was a genuine darkness and intensity descending. You could hear it in post-Pepper Beatles tracks like “I Am the Walrus” and the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (which seemed to disavow all of England’s psychedelic foray as woefully naïve in just over three and a half minutes). In America, there were bands like the Doors, Love and the aforementioned Velvet Underground. David, a fan of all of these bands, seemed to understand this in theory but lacked the formula to put it to any use. The blithely Newley-esque Bowie compositions bore no trace of this wisdom, and the more gothic tracks were fanciful but empty.

  While it certainly provided no real solace to anyone, Bowie’s half brother, Terry Burns, who was fast spiraling into permanent mental illness, was spot on, zeitgeist-wise. Terry frequently stayed with his aunt Pat. During this period, he tended to wander; he’d disappear and return days later, and he would be cleaned up and reassimilated into a fragile domesticity. One day in 1967, however, he returned from wandering to find Pat’s home empty. He went to see his mother on Plaistow Grove in Bromley and was informed that Pat and her husband had moved to Australia, pursuing a business opportunity. Pat wanted to warn Terry but did not know his whereabouts, which underscores just how erratic he’d become at that point. The information, relayed by Peggy with typical frankness, seemed to snap something in Terry. He left the house on Plaistow Grove and walked alone across the train tracks to the neighboring town of Chislehurst, particularly to a series of caverns known as the Chislehurst Caves.

  The Chislehurst Caves have a long and strange history. Man-made caverns of cretaceous chalk, according to legend they were built during the time of the Druids. The chalk had been mined since the 1600s. During World War I they’d been a place to store secret ammunition, and in World War II, they were designated an air-raid shelter. The caves had become a popular tourist attraction for collectors of fossils and local arcane tales of ancient fauna and magic mushrooms. By 1967, rock acts like Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix had performed concerts inside the winding maze. David himself had performed there with the Kon-rads and the Manish Boys. In 1972, the caves were the set for a Dr. Who special. In the eighties teens would play Dungeons and Dragons there.

  “They were very dangerous,” Siouxsie Sioux, a onetime Chislehurst resident, says, her tone a bit more grave than I’d have suspected. “They used to cordon off bits you couldn’t go down. Kids would sometimes go down there and get caved in. It was very creepy.”

  By the time Terry reached the entrance to the caves, he’d begun to hear voices. “I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Terry, Terry,’” he reportedly said, “and I looked up and there was this great light and this beautiful figure of Christ looking down at me, and he said to me, ‘Terry, I’ve chosen you to go out in the world and do some work for me.’”

  For many with his mental affliction, hallucinations often take the form of a religious vision, a special message from either God or the Antichrist. Terry was convinced that Jesus Christ had selected him for a special mission. Christ was supposedly surrounded by a blinding light that forced the troubled man to the ground. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that he was surrounded by a ring of fire. Once the vision disappeared, Terry rose up and kept walking until he passed out. He was missing for eight full days and was finally taken into custody after wandering into a grocery store in a dazed and dirty state and asking for a piece of fruit. The police brought
Terry back to Peggy’s house but soon he was back in Cane Hill Asylum, where he’d been committed earlier.

  Cane Hill, which opened in 1883 and was, for the British, the mental hospital of the popular idiom, as Bellevue is to most Americans, always loomed as a specter in both his life and the life of his family. When he was out, it seemed as though it was only a matter of time before he’d have to return.

  Terry had been in and out of institutions and prescribed a variety of drugs, after various incidents of picking fights in bars or wandering off on his own for days, only to turn up disheveled and confused. Sometimes the drugs would work and Terry would enjoy periods of calm and functionality. Then he’d either go off them or they would cease to perform, and he would again be overtaken by demons whispering ideas he could neither communicate to others nor live with himself. During a good period, Terry even wed a fellow inpatient while both of them were confined to the premises. The Joneses hoped that he would one day be able to lead a normal life, but he could not hold a job or stay out of trouble for too long and always ended up back in professional care.

  Bowie was devastated to be informed of Terry’s latest misfortune and seemed to internalize his pain. “Terry came home this morning,” he told Ken Pitt casually one afternoon. Despite having met and conversed at length with both David’s mother and father, as well as his new client, Pitt reportedly had no idea that David’s brother was mentally ill. “In my subsequent visits I would sit talking with him in what had become his bedroom cum music workshop,” Pitt writes, “and it was the noise of his late-night practicing that eventually caused his father some discomfort and eventually resulted in his move to a spare room at Manchester Street.”