Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  Angie purchased a sewing machine and began making stage costumes for this as yet unnamed new group. With Alice Cooper–mania on his mind, Bowie was chatting over the Haddon Hall phone line to Kenneth Pitt one day when he happened to quip, “It’s all hype, isn’t it?” Something clicked and he realized that he’d stumbled on the perfect name for this new, attention-hungry crew. They wanted to generate some hype, so they would literally generate Hype.

  By the spring of 1970 it was official. The Hype, referred to sometimes simply as Hype, were born, outfitted in Angie’s costumes and with newly christened, sensationalist stage personas. Bowie was Rainbow Man, his costume a prism of rainbow colors; Visconti was Hype Man, a sort of crime-fighting, bass-playing superhero; Cambridge was Cowboy Man, with a hat and fringe; and Ronson, his blond hair newly dyed jet black, was the pinstripe-suited Gangster Man.

  In an interview with Melody Maker that month, Bowie explained the group’s creation: “I deliberately chose the name in favor of something that sounded perhaps heavy because now no one can say they’re being conned. Especially nowadays there’s a lot of narrow mindedness among groups or at least behind the organizers who claim to be presenting free music for free people but I don’t see how they can because they’re so hypocritical in everything else. I suppose you could say I chose Hype deliberately with tongue in cheek.”

  Live, the Hype’s set consisted of covers and material off Space Oddity and the upcoming The Man Who Sold the World. Critical reaction was mixed. They made their debut opening for the denim-clad and longhaired hippie clan Country Joe and the Fish at the Roundhouse in late February of 1970. “Musically it was a great gig,” Visconti writes in his autobiography. “Although we were heckled initially, and called a variety of homosexual epithets.”

  Disc and Music Echo magazine observed of a later gig, “David had much more confidence and stage presence with this backing group, and as his songs are suitable for grooving to as well as just listening to, the brightest hope could well change categories,” but dismissed the show as a “disaster” in terms of technical execution. Still, it was clear that Bowie was beginning to come into something with the Hype. It was a baby step in platform shoes.

  “It should have been a complete rethink,” Stevenson says. “They got the costumes right but they were still doing old songs. Those little ditties. They required new songs. The kind he later went on to write. ‘Fame’ would have been fantastic in those costumes. The audience were just milling around waiting for the main act.”

  “For me this will always be the very first night of Glam Rock,” Visconti recalled in his memoir. “Marc Bolan was visible resting his head on his arms on the edge of the stage, taking it all in. Bolan never admitted he even went to the gig.”

  In the spring of 1970, T. Rex released the magnificent, Tony Visconti-produced “Ride a White Swan” single. It was that rare track that manages to be both trivial and a model for how to conduct the rest of your life (“Ride it on out like you were a bird,” Bolan instructs). It was the first in a series of chart-topping hits that would make him the focal point of a Beatlemania-like pandemonium dubbed T. Rextasy. By the time Bowie set about rehearsing the music for his next album, The Man Who Sold the World, his old friend from the mod days seemed to have done just that. At one point, T. Rex sold one hundred thousand records in a single day. Bowie had not managed to come anywhere near that in nearly six years of trying.

  Always on the verge of egomania, Bolan took to wearing top hats and T-shirts emblazoned with his own corkscrew-haired visage. In concert his duck walks, comic shouts of “Yeah!” and double entendres (“I’m gonna suck ya …”) were outsized.

  “Boley struck it big and we were all green with envy,” Bowie recalled later. “It was terrible—we fell out for about six months. It was [sulky mutter] ‘He’s doing much better than I am.’ And he got all sniffy about us who were still down in the basement.”

  Eventually, as it had done in the sixties, the competitive spirit between Bolan and Bowie manifested itself as a positive energy force. They would continue to try to one-up each other, and as a result, they produced some of the greatest English pop music ever recorded. Bowie was far too busy with family and business concerns to wallow in envy as Bolan’s star went supernova. Angie was pregnant with their first child, and the pair were about to pursue a radical change in management.

  Pitt took much of the blame for the success of peers like T. Rex and the relative obscurity of David and his ventures, only never directly. “[David’s] habit was to whine a lot and resist passive aggressively, never really speaking up for himself or taking charge of a situation,” Angie writes in Backstage Passes. According to Angie, Pitt would use his parental-figure status in Bowie’s life to quell any potential uprising, assuring David that things would right themselves if he would only trust in Pitt, behave himself and carry on. “Ken’s profile of the ideal son/client/sex object, on the other hand, was a young man eager for direction, convinced that Daddy knows best. And so the relationship staggered along under all that baggage,” she writes.

  Angie decided that the time had come for her to act on this and again help her man out of a troubling and sinking arrangement. She decided to go to the Phillips offices for advice and turn to an acquaintance, A & R man Ralph Mace. She asked Mace if there was any way to break the management contract with Pitt, as all the inquiries she’d made were met with dismissal. In the British music business you did not break contracts. It wasn’t gentlemanly. It was anathema to the process.

  “We had to hire someone to get rid of Ken Pitt,” Angie says today. “I had to go and find someone. I asked Ralph, ‘Look, does anyone know where I can get my hands on an attorney? Because all these British attorneys are scared shitless to break this contract.’”

  Mace turned to his boss Olav Wyper, who remained sympathetic to Bowie despite the lack of record sales for the Space Oddity album. “I was a friendly shoulder to cry on,” says Olav Wyper. “David had come to me before that and said that he felt totally frustrated. He felt he was ‘drowning,’ which was one of the words that he often used. He said he was drowning in the relationship. And he didn’t feel that Ken really understood what he was doing creatively. The personal relationship, because Ken was clearly deeply in love with David, was completely skewing the commercial relationship. And he had this wonderful chance that he’d been given back the hit that he thought he should have had. And clearly I was at the center of that. He’d say, ‘You’ve gotta help me. You’ve gotta help me.’”

  Wyper recommended an associate named Tony Defries to the Bowies. Defries, then only twenty-seven, with his great nose, neat gray suits and lacquered head of curly hair, carried himself like a man ten years older. Defries was not technically a lawyer.

  Defries reportedly went out of his way to color his background so that it resembled more of a rags-to-riches story. The Defries family was of Dutch origin and had been living in Britain for three generations. His father, Edward, had been an engineer and had lost his fortune during the Great Depression, but by the time Tony came of age, he’d rebounded and had begun a thriving antiques dealership in the marketplace in Shepherd’s Bush. Defries tells of his father sending him through the markets of London to find the prices of competitors’ wares and report back so that his father could mark his own wares down. Whether this was a temporary chore or a way of life, however, remains part of his greater mystery.

  The youngest of three and a sickly child with life-threatening asthma, Defries spent much of his childhood cot-bound in the family’s Croydon home. He attended a respected school, Heath, but resisted formal education. Like Bowie, he educated himself by devouring books and essentially teaching himself the ins and outs of the legal profession without actually becoming a lawyer. By his early twenties he was working at various law offices in London as a clerk. By the time he met the Bowies, he had already revolutionized one industry single-handedly.

  “He had a very good legal mind but he was not a qualified solicitor,” says W
yper. “And he’d never claimed to be, which is why he always identified himself as a lawyer. One who practices the law. But he wasn’t actually qualified. And I knew this because he told me. He was a solicitor’s clerk who was looking for opportunity. He did eventually become very involved in intellectual property. One of the first things he did that got his name known in British showbiz circles happened when he was representing photographers. At the time, they basically didn’t control their own work. And he set up the first association of fashion photographers and models. That’s the organization that most major photographers in the world now belong to.”

  “He was always somewhat of a visionary,” says Laurence Myers, who would become Tony Defries’s business partner in the early years of his relationship with David Bowie. Then an accountant for South African pop music impresario Mickey Most, and now a theatrical producer, Myers was the entrance into show business that Defries was looking for, and soon the men were sharing an office and had formed a management company named GEM. “He was a visionary. I remember him telling me many, many, many years ago that one day everyone at home will have a laptop computer in their home,” he says today. “At that time, he was sort of eccentric. He had a very strange suit, I seem to remember. A sort of Doctor Seuss checked frock coat and this huge mass of hair. One day he said to me, ‘You know, models really get treated very badly. They’re stars, they don’t get paid, agencies never pay them, they exploit them. I think they should be stars.’”

  The Bowies were often without money, cold and fretful, during the recording of the new album. “The Man Who Sold the World was conceived during a period when we were really having a rough time,” Angie writes. “We were really poor. We didn’t have any money. Our band were really frightened.”

  Defries met David and Angie and patiently listened as they told their tale of woe. Bowie played him the material for the upcoming The Man Who Sold the World album, and Defries decided that he was in the presence of a major talent. Breaking a contract in the British music business was considered ungentlemanly and vile, but Defries insisted to David that he felt it had to be done and that he would ensure that it would be handled swiftly and cleanly. In Defries’s eyes it was Pitt, not Bowie, who had broken the arrangement by failing to make him the star he so clearly deserved to be.

  Sure enough, within days, Kenneth Pitt, who had never heard of Defries before, was shocked to receive a legal notice in his morning mail. “All the plans for David’s imminent success had been made,” he writes, “but on April 27, they collapsed like a house of cards.”

  Defries and Bowie requested confirmation that Pitt would cease to be Bowie’s personal manager from that point on. Pitt was a wreck. “I felt only sadness and, sadly, I put the letter aside.” Days later, Pitt responded to the letter, suggesting that they meet and discuss a civil way to dissolve their professional relationship. He also suggested an alternative scenario in which he would continue to be involved with Bowie professionally but only as a handler of contracts and other paperwork. Defries shot this down quickly. He wanted a clean and fast break.

  “When this was all happening, Ken did come and see me. We did talk about it two or three times and I did advise him that he was riding a wave that he was in no position to control,” Olav Wyper says today. “And my advice to him was to do a deal with Defries and Myers if he could and get what he could out of it. He had no chance of riding that wave with David. And he should get off and get the best deal he could.”

  Pitt, Bowie and Defries had an awkward meeting on May 7, 1970. While Defries spoke, David stared off into space, silent and frail looking. Pitt instinctively detected that Defries was not just David’s legal representation but his next manager as well. Pitt informed Defries that there was compensation due for his losses as well as a percentage of David’s future earnings. Defries agreed and promised to come up with an appropriate figure (at the time Pitt was reportedly willing to settle for a mere two thousand pounds). When the meeting was over David shook Pitt’s hand and left him with a simple “Thank you, Ken.” And then it was over. From his window, Pitt watched Bowie and Defries walk up Manchester Street and disappear around the corner.

  Pitt retired from professional talent management in 1982, has lived in Australia and Washington DC over the years and now spends much of his time in the countryside. He and Bowie have kept in touch. “He sends me rare secondhand books that he knows will interest me and I am sure it is true to say that we continue to respect each other,” Pitt writes.

  Liberated from Pitt, Bowie tried to pour all of his energy into completing The Man Who Sold the World, but he still could not seem to focus. The musical landscape of the album, Bowie’s hardest and darkest yet, was largely down to Visconti and Ronson (the latter intent on creating a heavy blues record worthy of Cream). Bowie, as a rule very good about giving credit to collaborators when it was due, admitted as much, telling Mojo, “The sonic landscape was Visconti’s. The band contribution—how the drums and bass should work together with the guitar—was something Mick got really involved in.”

  Visconti and Ronson bonded in the studio. A sharp student of music since his preadolescence, Mick used this opportunity to learn as many production and arrangement techniques as possible. “He was with me all the time, even on the mixes,” Visconti told Mojo. “He would ask me tons of questions: ‘Why am I doing this?’ ‘Is it possible to do this?’ I was so glad to have a person that keen on the team because Bowie was really uninterested.”

  While producer Visconti and Ronson were forming the album’s musical vision, Bowie spent much of his time shopping with Angela. Terry Burns, during one of his intermittent periods outside of the Cane Hill asylum, had come to live with them in Haddon Hall. On many of the lyrics, which were written often moments before the vocals were due to be recorded, David drew some inspiration from this proximity: it was the closest he and his half brother had been been since the 1950s.

  “I just tended him and treated him like a special guest and spent time with him and just chatted away,” Angie has said of this period. “He was a very well-read man and a very interesting man, but with the drugs that were prescribed, he would tend to really not talk too much. I think David attempted to be up-front about the fact that his brother was unwell and it was an excuse for himself later during drug-induced paranoia.”

  Much of the lyrical content on The Man Who Sold the World seems to be abstracted observations of Terry’s life, both inner and outer. The most explicit of these are the title track, the prog rock “Width of a Circle” (which has no less than three guitar solos!) and “All the Madmen.” The former marks his first real foray into homoerotic lyricism (“He showed me his leather belt round his hips”). The latter is a terrifying track, beginning slowly, with a humdrum narrative device “Day after day” and thundering into a terrifying chorus with Ronson slashing out his protometal chords and Bowie promising, “I can fly, I will scream, I will break my arm, / I will do me harm.” There’s black wit (“Give me some good old lobotomy”) and a folky outro chant of “Zane, zane, zane / Ouvre le chien,” which would go on to become a hallmark of sorts, appearing on both 1994’s Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack and as a slogan printed on the back drop of his 1995 tour in support of Outside.

  Its literal translation is “open the dog.”

  “Black Country Rock” is a funky T. Rex homage that some interpreted as a piss take on Bowie’s ascending rival (à la Simon & Garfunkel’s 1966 Dylan parody “A Simple Desultory Philippic,” Paul McCartney’s broadly Lennonesque “Let Me Roll It” or Weird Al Yankovic’s Devo homage “Dare to Be Stupid”). If nothing else, it’s a testament to Bowie’s expert style mimicry. Employing his gift for mimicry, he out-Bolans Bolan. His old friend was reportedly upset upon first hearing it but came to see it, as he came to see most everything, as a tribute.

  “After All,” with its “Oh, by jingo” refrain, is another throwback to his late sixties penchant for English macabre. Bowie sounds like Boris Karloff settling down for a pot of cozy-war
med Darjeeling in the hollow of a cold marble crypt. “Running Gun Blues” takes on arms dealing with irony. “I’ll plug a few civilians,” Bowie threatens. “She Shook Me Cold” is Zeppelin-style blues. Best of all is “The Supermen,” a sort of Freidrich-Nietzsche-gets-taken-in-from-the-rain-by-a-family-of-cloaked-Druids psycho-folk work out with an odd Latin tempo. It’s Bowie at his most committal as far as facing and voicing the strange is concerned.

  With the album completed and due for an April 1971 release, David began considering the artwork. On one of their frequent shopping trips, he and Angela spied a medieval-style tunic draped over a mannequin in the Mr. Fish boutique in Savile Row (the boutique’s storefront can be seen in a snapshot during the Love You Till Tuesday film). The Bowies agreed that this would be an ideal garment to wear on the album’s cover, and although it was prohibitively expensive at nearly a thousand pounds in total, they also snapped up three long, slim, Chinese silk velour dresses in pale green, pink and blue. Bowie, his perm now grown out long and straight, posed while reclining on a divan in the great living room in Haddon Hall.

  Upon submitting the cover art to Mercury, the Bowies claimed to be shocked when the executives balked at releasing it as it was. Before the cover was restored on subsequent reissues, the American version depicted a George Underwood cartoon of a demented man with a rifle under his arm and a torn-up cowboy hat atop his head. The Cane Hill asylum, where Underwood was once committed himself after a breakdown, looms in the distance, providing a more or less direct reference to Terry and his illness. The “S” in “sold” is a dollar sign. Why they deemed this more appropriate than a lithe, befrocked Bowie, who can say?