Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  Ken Pitt says he initially figured Angie was Jewish because she was so forward. I asked him about this and he answered, “I knew a number of people named Barnett and without exception they were Jewish. I suppose that when Angela appeared on the scene I might have asked D if she was Jewish. And he would then have said to her, ‘Ken thinks you are Jewish.’ I didn’t think she was Jewish, I only wondered. To this day I don’t know and quite honestly I couldn’t care less. But then again perhaps I didn’t ask D that question at all and this is just A’s troublemaking.” As I indicated earlier, Pitt would later identify her as the second (to Lee’s first) of the predators who would help remove David from his care. At the time, he thought she was more or less amusing. He simply did not know who he was dealing with.

  There were several incidents around this period that also helped prime Bowie to pursue rock ’n’ roll as opposed to pop or cabaret. Marc Bolan was busy transforming Tyrannosaurus Rex, his bongos-and-acoustic-folk act, into a lean, sexy electric rock band called simply T. Rex. He was reinventing himself as a Les Paul–wielding rock god with tight satin trousers and muscle tees with his own visage emblazoned across the chest. Bolan invited Bowie to open for him during a short tour in the late winter of 1969. Bowie opted to do a mime performance designed to publicize the plight of the oppressed Tibetan people, as well as his standby “The Mask,” and was often heckled. Also that year, he spent time on the road with Peter Frampton’s new act Humble Pie, which was managed by the Stones’ ex-manger Andrew Loog Oldham and featured former Small Faces vocalist Steve Marriott, an early Bowie hero, on vocals. They were enjoying huge success in both England and America. This time he played material that would end up on the Space Oddity record and saw a veritable fork in the road professionally. The older, folkier songs left him jeered at and pelted. The more energetic songs were cheered and hooted over. He witnessed how Humble Pie were treated: like rock royalty with rock royalties. It was tempting.

  “He was our special guest,” Frampton says. “David just played a twelve-string acoustic. He had no road manager, no tech; when he broke a string, he literally changed the string onstage.”

  While Bowie was in Italy making his much contended appearance, his father took seriously ill. Angie had recently flown back to visit with her own parents in Cyprus. David returned to England proudly carrying a trophy he’d been awarded at the festival. John Jones had collapsed in the street with a fever days before and rather than take him to the hospital, Peggy kept him confined to bed in hopes that he would recover. Without professional care, his fever turned into pneumonia.

  “David arrived home carrying the statuette that he had won at the contest that he’d been to with Ken Pitt and dashed straight up to see his father, who hadn’t been well for a number of days,” Peggy recalled. “David handed the statuette to his father, telling him that he’d won the contest, and his father told him that he knew he would succeed in the end. He died not long afterward.”

  Bowie called Angie to tell her the news, and she quickly made arrangements to come to his aid once again, a pattern that would emerge in their relationship both before and after his superstardom. He was naturally overwhelmed emotionally. He did not know how to deal with his bereaved mother, the funeral and John Jones’s affairs on his own, and soon Angie was applying to this tragedy the same forceful sense of getting it done that she had to Mary Finnegan’s kitchen, the Three Tuns Arts Lab and David’s career. “It wasn’t easy,” Angie recalled. “There were only two bedrooms and I had to share a bedroom with David’s mother, a living arrangement that I just wasn’t used to. I felt David’s mother didn’t really like me, and having to share a bed with her really drove me nuts.”

  John Jones kept his papers neatly arranged. Aside from sad details such as how to dispose of his false teeth, the real challenge was dealing with the survivors. John had controlled the bill paying and general organization of things, leaving, like many of his generaton, the housework and homemaking to Peggy. Now both Peggy and Terry Burns would need care.

  To say that David Bowie changed as a person when his father died is to state the obvious. The death of a parent in any context is cataclysmic, but when it hits unexpectedly during a rush of professional commitments, it’s especially jarring. It should be noted that his work changed as well. At John Jones’s funeral in the first week of August 1969, he didn’t cry but rather seemed to be internalizing everything. The cast of his music would suggest this as well. Space Oddity and its follow-up, 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World, are among his darkest albums. Both depict a man coming of age in a world that is increasingly depraved and barren. “He was in an absolutely foul mood,” Finnegan says, recalling one of the Arts Lab events that followed John’s demise. “Black as thunder, rude and nasty to everybody.” These new songs wonder, both abstractly and directly, who or what to turn to for spiritual and parental guidance. By 1971 Hunky Dory would reflect the romance with Angie and the birth of their child, but it would take some time to arrive at that warmer and happier place. David was a boy, cared for by managers and those who found him attractive and charming.

  This shift was observed by others who knew him then. “I remember when David’s father died he was very solemn, as anybody would be when their father dies, and he took the responsibility of looking after his mother very seriously,” Visconti has said. “David automatically assumed the role of his father in matters of domestic finance. He appeared to grow up instantly …” Within a year, he would be a husband. Within two, a father. And in three, the biggest rock star in England. Angie had been right on. Things were changing fast.

  10.

  THE GREATEST CONCENTRATION of “space fever” was, of course, in America, and Bowie’s new single seemed a perfect way to finally introduce him to the biggest pop music market in the world. Shortly after the final recording and mixing of “Space Oddity,” and in the midst of preparation for Bowie’s full-length debut, Mercury Records’ American publicist Ron Oberman, a former college music journalist, was brought to London to meet Bowie. While Mercury’s UK partner Phillips would release Man of Words/Man of Music in England, Bowie remained a Mercury artist, his career, at that time, handled by people an ocean away. Oberman, who worked out of the label’s spacious Chicago offices, was surprised to find how inconsequential Mercury’s London headquarters were.

  “It was almost like an apartment,” he says. “I came out and said hello to David. He was sitting there cross-legged, like Indian style, on this big overstuffed chair. And we hit it off right away. We had a great conversation. We spoke about publicity and getting some materials together, press materials, bio and photos. So I went back to Chicago; I was very excited about David Bowie and really tried to talk him up among all the executives there. I’ve always had great ears for singles, and to my mind there was no question that ‘Space Oddity’ should have been a number one single. I was Bowie’s biggest supporter at the company. And other people in the promotion department seemed to like the record. At that time back in the sixties, if you really wanted to get a record on the air there were certainly ways to do it. But Mercury never really pushed it that hard. It wasn’t a hit initially because Mercury really didn’t get behind it the way they should have gotten behind it.”

  The Phillips and Mercury marriage was a relatively new one and there was still infighting going on between people who were reluctant to cede any power to one side or another. Bowie’s fate seemed to rest on the possibility of a tenuous harmony being achieved. Rather than reaping the huge publicity benefits of the Apollo 11 landing, “Space Oddity” languished in the outer reaches of the British Top 40 for most of the summer and barely registered in America. If NASA couldn’t help get him a hit, what hope did he have? Bowie would see his first stroke of real professional luck with the arrival of Olav Wyper at Phillips.

  Wyper was a former journalist who had happened into a career as a copywriter in the ad department of the massive EMI Corporation, which distributed the Beatles and the Beach Boys’ records. He had manag
ed to move laterally into a different department (a feat still difficult today in the eternally compartmentalized record business) and by the late sixties he was the marketing manager at CBS Records. Wyper increased the marketing staff at CBS from three people to seventy-six people and transformed the entire department, gaining the attention of every other troubled label at the time.

  “I was headhunted to go and take over the Phillips company,” he remembers. “And before I left I was aware that Phillips had released this extraordinarily brilliant single, ‘Space Oddity’ by David Bowie. I heard it because it was played on the radio. It was reviewed in the papers but we didn’t have a hit. At the time, Phillips was a very run-down, depressed, dreary place.”

  Despite its early sixties success with its Fontana imprint, which had enjoyed major hits, including the Troggs’ immortal “Wild Thing,” by the end of the decade, Phillips was in the midst of a dry period. Wyper found Bowie in person to be charismatic and the song to have limitless potential for Phillips. He made selling David Bowie the label’s first and only priority. The sole order of business under his new rule: make “Space Oddity” go.

  “I didn’t know a hell of a lot about David at that time but he was clearly an interesting young man who had a completely different take on things, and he had a unique sound and it was a unique record,” Wyper recalls. “And it may have been that the record would in the normal course of events not have been a hit and then not been taken out and dusted off and tried all over again. But it was because we as a company had nothing else in the immediate future and in the immediate past that was worth working on. It was already a hit in my view, it just hadn’t been a hit.”

  “Space Oddity” enjoyed a second ride up the charts, eventually reaching number 5 and landing Bowie his first Top of the Pops appearance in October. He spent the waning months of 1969 finishing up his Phillips/Mercury debut with Tony Visconti. The new songs were complicated, reflections of the twenty-two-year-old’s darkening vision. While not iconic, as his seventies albums would become, Space Oddity is first-rate as trippy rock records go. After some R & B singles and pop kitsch forays, this was David Bowie’s first “heavy” offering.

  The album opens, of course, with “Space Oddity” but shifts quickly into the extensive hard-rock jam “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed.” “I’m a phallus in pigtails / And there’s blood on my nose,” Bowie declares, and the deciphering begins. “This is a rather weird little song I wrote because one day when I was very scruffy I got a lot of funny stares from people in the street,” Bowie said at the time. “The lyrics are what you hear—about a boy whose girlfriend thinks he is socially inferior. I thought it was rather funny really.”

  “Don’t Sit Down” is more or less an interlude, something Bowie would continue to employ during this period. “Eight Line Poem” on Hunky Dory is another of this kind. The verse of “Don’t Sit down” is “Yeah yeah baby yeah.” It’s repeated several times. The chorus is the title. It is an excellent song.

  “Letter to Hermione,” based on a lovesick letter never sent, is next; it’s an acoustic lament with a literal title that is rare as far as Bowie songs go. At nine minutes and thirty seconds, “Cygnet Committee” returns us to the expansive realm of the post-psychedelic freak-out. “Well it is a bit long I suppose,” Bowie said. “It’s basically three separate points of view about the more militant section of the hippy movement. The movement was a great idea but something’s gone wrong with it now. I’m not really attacking it but pointing out that the militants have still got to be helped as people—human beings—even if they are going about things all the wrong way.”

  “Cygnet Committee” meanders in typical late-sixties fashion, but certain changes are interesting to a trainspotting Bowie-ist, as quotes from it will later show up in tracks like “Time,” on 1973’s Aladdin Sane, and “Rock and Roll with Me,” on ’74’s Diamond Dogs. The lyrical shout-out to the MC5 “Kick out the jams / Kick out your mother” is also, someone should formally point out, very cool.

  Occasionally the pressure would get to Bowie and Visconti. They knew, in light of the “Space Oddity” single’s success, that the album needed to soar as well. While recording the relatively simple acoustic track “God Knows I’m Good” (“Surely God won’t look the other way,” he sings), Bowie, in a rare show of vulnerability, lost control of his emotions.

  “He broke down during that,” recalls guitarist Keith Christmas, who plays on the record. “I mean I think if he hadn’t had ‘Space Oddity’ on that album it would have just died the same as the first one died. They all came out, got a few nice reviews, and then just disappeared back into the sort of wash of albums that were around then. But that one single sort of pulled it up by its bootstraps.”

  In their fervor to be big and attention grabbing, Bowie and Visconti made use of the facilities and recording budget by punching up some of the more cinematic songs, like “Space Oddity”’s B side, “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud,” with full orchestration. “Freecloud” recounts the last moments of a condemned man. As far as “about to be executed” songs, it’s no Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat” or Johnny Cash’s “Joe Bean,” or even Led Zeppelin’s “Gallows Pole,” but it is arresting, as Bowie, for the first time, manages to wed a sprawling rock number with his die-hard penchant for Anthony Newley/Richard Harris–style melodrama.

  “I remember inside they had this great big studio which would have been used for thirty-piece string orchestras,” Keith Christmas says. “This was obviously one of the things it was used for was orchestral recordings. You had to go up some stairs to the control room, which had a sort of window looking down on this space. And then you had to go up some more to where the tapes were running. They were on a different floor. And it wasn’t that long before I was reading that the engineers used to wear white coats. They were considered like engineers, lab technicians almost. And as I recall they had an intercom and they had to call up to get a rewind on the tape. Laughable when you think of making thirty-two, sixty-four tracks on a computer now.”

  Angie functioned as the cheerleader and de facto caterer, running errands, making lunch and generally coordinating the vibes. The excitement surrounding the record, which was indeed David’s finest music to date, carried over into the planned promotional events, but the bad luck that had dogged him through the 1960s initially seemed difficult to shake off.

  A record release party dubbed “An Evening with David Bowie” was scheduled for November 30, 1969, at London’s Purcell Room, a small venue in the basement of the larger Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the south bank of the Thames river. David would be backed by a local band named Copus as he debuted the strong new tracks from the album as well as the hit single “Space Oddity.”

  According to Kenneth Pitt, Calvin Mark Lee was put in charge of coordinating the press for “An Evening with David Bowie.” On the night of the show, however, attendance was good but the industry and media presence was almost nonexistent. Bowie and Copus, unaware, turned in a high-energy, sweaty set. Afterward, Bowie excitedly ran backstage to inquire about the VIPs in attendance, who, he assumed, had just witnessed one of the best shows he’d ever done. Lee sheepishly told him that there was nobody there. Bowie was furious and, in an act that would also emerge as a pattern, banished Lee, placing him well outside the inner circle. Their friendship did not survive the Purcell Room debacle. “His name was never again mentioned,” according to a secretly relieved Pitt.

  Speaking of the incident today, Lee plays down the outrage and insists that he did, in fact, coordinate an important review. “The Observer gave it a good review,” he tells me. “That’s a Sunday paper. Sundays are high-class papers. That irritated me. But what could I say?”

  Angie, meanwhile, was now “vagabonding” between London and Mary Finnegan’s house in Beckenham or David’s mother’s home in Bromley, with her clean and dirty clothes in the same bag. She was in the process of locating, securing and establishing a home in which Bowie would feel not only like a rock
star but also, crucially, like someone with a family and an infrastructure to cushion some of these ego blows in the future as he made yet another attempt to break out. “Angie was determined to find someplace where they could live together, and she was quite right,” says Mary Finnegan. “They couldn’t stay holed up in the single bed in the small room in my flat. I didn’t want it to go on either. I wanted my life back basically.”

  They found the perfect location in Haddon Hall. Haddon Hall is important to the Bowie myth. In essence, this suburban mansion was the hive or nest where so many of his indelible early songs were first written and demoed. It was a salon where key allies and collaborators would exchange ideas, create costumes and fine tune concepts that would define the new decade. David and Angela spent Christmas 1969 together and early in the new year moved their belongings into the once grand, now dilapidated three-story, red brick Victorian building, a former candle manufacturing factory, nestled at 42 Southend Road, Beckenham, amid a vast English garden and a clutch of looming, barren trees. Behind it lay an eighteen-hole golf course.

  The downstairs neighbors, a couple named Sue and Tony Frost, were young and accustomed to taking advantage of the abandoned space by blasting reggae at top volume. They did not object to a young would-be rocker moving in.

  Bowie was impressed by the sheer size of Haddon Hall. The long, circular driveway that led up to the residence seemed palatial, especially when their new purchase, a used Jaguar, was parked out in the shade. The living room was massive, as was the hallway, which led to the staircase and a stained glass window that was some forty feet wide. With its many rooms, great winding staircase that led to nowhere (the top floor was boarded off and rented out to another tenant) and ornate stained glass window, Haddon Hall possessed a regal feel.