Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  “This is it, isn’t it?” Bowie reportedly said to Angie as they looked down on Central Park from their window. After nearly a full decade of chasing fame and power, this was it.

  He and Angie never did get to meet Elvis on that trip. The King was in Vegas, but Bowie did meet several figures who had been, in his eyes, just as important as Elvis Presley. The first of these was Andy Warhol. With his associates from the cast of Pork as ambassadors, David was brought to the Factory for an awkward tête à tête with the pop art king on the afternoon of September 14. After surviving an assassination attempt in June of 1968, Warhol had tightened security at the Factory and Bowie had to prove that he was who he claimed to be before gaining admittance to the Factory.

  Wearing a floppy black hat and baggy trousers, his hair long in the blond, Veronica Lake glamour girl style (he had posed as such on the cover of Hunky Dory), he sniffed and shrugged. Bowie played Warhol the song he’d written for him. Warhol was polite but later took offense at the lyric “Andy Warhol looks a scream.” Bowie told Warhol he was a great admirer of his art. Warhol told David that he was a great admirer of his yellow leather shoes.

  “I met this man who was the living dead,” Bowie would later remark in a Rolling Stone interview. “Yellow in complexion, a wig on that was the wrong color, little glasses. I extended my hand and the guy retired, so I thought, ‘The guy doesn’t like flesh, obviously he’s reptilian.’ He produced a camera and took a picture of me. And I tried to make small talk with him, and it wasn’t getting anywhere. But then he saw my yellow shoes. He then started a whole rap about shoe design and that broke the ice.” Twenty-five years later, Bowie would re-create Warhol’s oddball appearance and all of his ticks quite expertly in Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat.

  More fruitful was Bowie’s meeting with Lou Reed. Reed was himself an RCA artist, albeit one whose bloom was not nearly as full as Bowie’s. Reed’s self-titled first post–Velvet Underground solo release, despite strong material like “Wild Child” (which rhymes “piece of sweet cheese” with “our lives and our dreams”), had been a flop. The failure of the self-titled effort and the then-marginalized legacy of the Velvets had put him in jeopardy.

  “Lou was going through an incredibly bad patch around the time that I first met him, and he was being left on the side in terms of what his influence had been,” Bowie has said. “And none of us knew what his influence was going to be—the direction of the Velvet Underground’s reputation.”

  Reed was polite but quiet and a bit sullen as they dined at the Chinese eatery the Ginger Man. The coolness was shrugged off as Lou being typically “New Yawk” as far as Bowie was concerned. Defries’s eyes lit up as he watched Reed sneer and roll his eyes. Reed clearly had the potential to be marketed to high heaven. Bowie was merely starstruck. They went on to Max’s Kansas City, the Warhol hub on Park Avenue. Reed begged off but Bowie was not finished meeting heroes. “I hope we see each other again; this has been such a thrill for me,” he told Reed.

  At Max’s, Lisa Robinson placed a call to Danny Fields, the downtown habitué who had first signed the Stooges to Elektra Records. At the time, the Stooges had been dropped by the label, and although Pop’s solo contract had been retained they were largely considered a spent force. Iggy was deeply addicted to heroin and essentially babysat by Fields. Fields was at the end of his rope. A student of pop culture, he knew exactly why Bowie would be attracted to Iggy. “Any touch of Iggy made you cool,” he says today. “There was a kind of indefinable poetic brilliance that he saw in Lou and Iggy that there’s no word for. And I think David thought that he was more practical and that they were loonier artists in the real sense of artists as madmen. I think he liked that about them. Because David was never a madman. I think he felt guilty about not being a madman, because how could you really be a good artist without being a madman? And now he had two of the maddest madmen in the world, one on each arm, Iggy and Lou, both of whom I had managed and so both of whom I was glad to be rid of. For me, it was just a load off my back, off my mind, off of everything. I felt so guilty about the Stooges. I signed them to Elektra and they didn’t sell any records. I thought their music was brilliant and I still do. But I couldn’t get them arrested and they were back in Ann Arbor getting in trouble and holding up gas stations to pay the rent. The house was getting torn down. Iggy was getting deeper and deeper into drugs.”

  Iggy Pop, in his opiate fog, had less of an understanding about just why he should be attracted to David Bowie sight unseen. He was in Fields’s apartment, only a few blocks away on West Twentieth Street in Chelsea, absorbed by a movie that was playing on television. He couldn’t be bothered to tear himself away, and in his state, the commitment of traveling a few blocks was already massive. Fields knew who Bowie was and insisted that this was worth it.

  “I heard about him from the British press,” Fields says. “Iggy knew nothing about him. No one knew anything about him at the time. In Melody Maker I think there was a poll of artists who were trendy or important in the UK at the time and they asked David Bowie who his favorite new male vocalist was and he said Iggy Pop, and that blew my mind. I told Iggy this over the phone and he said, ‘Oh, that’s nice. How does he know who I am?’ And I said, ‘You know, they pay attention in England to what we’re doing here in America more than we do.’ I poked him and I prodded and I put a splash of water on him. Iggy’s laying there with a lot of clothes on, passed out. Max’s was only two or three blocks from where I lived. So I said, ‘That guy David Bowie who said that nice thing in Melody Maker, remember?’ Iggy says, ‘Yeah? What about him?’ ‘Well, he’s here now and he’s with Lisa and Richard Robinson and he’s at Max’s and he wants to meet you.’ And Iggy groans, ‘Oh, God. I’m so tired.’ And I said, ‘Come on, come on. We have to do this. It’s good for your career because he’s now more famous than you are.’ So we went over to Max’s and Lisa and Richard were sitting at the round table in the back room. I introduce them. They start talking about music or something I hate and I just backed off and let them talk about it. And that was it. They were musicians talking about music or records. Thank God they had something to talk about and I don’t have to participate. I did my job. Iggy thanked David for saying those nice things about him. And their relationship was made that night. They became friends. David at that time immediately took Iggy under his wing and said, ‘Let’s work together,’ and I was up to here with Iggy. I couldn’t take it anymore. Iggy wasn’t in a good place and they were costing me a fortune and I wasn’t making a penny from them.” “He was doing real well in the business,” Pop has recalled. “And I wasn’t exactly ripping up the entertainment world.”

  Todd Haynes’s 1998 quasi–Bowie biopic Velvet Goldmine re-creates this moment, and by most accounts, it’s accurate. Brian Slade, the David Bowie figure (played by Jonathan Rhys Myers) asks Curt Wild, the Iggy Pop figure (played by Ewan McGregor), “How can we help you, you must tell us. What do you need?” Wild replies, “Everything,” explaining, “See, heroin was my main man. But now I’m on the methadone and I’m getting my act together. You come here and you say you wanna help and I say, ‘Hey, far out.’ You could be my main man.” Slade stares at Wild and we see hearts in his eyes. Slade’s manager, Jerry Devine, the Tony Defries figure (played by Eddie Izzard), stares at Wild and we see dollar signs in his eyes. “I liked what I saw,” Pop said of the meeting with Bowie and Defries. “I started hanging about with him, and he approached me with the idea of a management contract. Steve Paul [manager of Edgar and Johnny Winter] also approached me and others who wanted to make me into David Cassidy. I think Tony had this idea at first. I had the idea I could talk him round to doing my music instead of something churned out by specified musicans.” Only Defries had his eye on more than just Pop. He wanted the entire back room at Max’s on his mission.

  “Bowie’s manager was fishing,” Fields says. “It was a large fishing expedition and he was collecting back-room people and he wanted to create a world of his own, a management
organization that was well connected, able to tap into the resources of brilliant people who really had nothing specific to do.”

  The Max’s Kansas City network was the early-seventies equivalent of viral marketing. Although marginalized in a way that hipsters of today are not, their reach as far as spreading the word about an exciting new performer like Bowie was vast. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who simply had to hear all about him … and tell all of their friends. Because he was even vaguely associated with Warhol, those with a vested interest in staying up on such things started dropping the name “Bowie” at the right parties. The fact that these were essentially kids and not professional record industry personnel didn’t matter to Bowie and Defries. They had street smarts and personality, and that was more than enough to qualify them for executive roles in this new management office (which would be named, perhaps in honor of Iggy’s comments, MainMan).

  “Tony Defries was very calculating,” Childers says, “but he had a very dry but very good sense of humor about it all. He kept things in perspective very nicely. But he would say—because we would say, ‘We don’t know anything about business, we don’t know what we’re doing.’ And he would say, ‘That’s exactly why you’re here. You’re doing exactly what you should be doing. You’re just acting crazy, breaking all the rules and causing a sensation, which makes David look like he’s breaking all the rules when he doesn’t have to because you’re doing it.’ Make no mistake, we were thrilled. What would have happened to us? We would have just gone down in flames possibly. We weren’t making any money. We were making negative money. Those of us who could read and write had jobs. Others just lived the best way they could. I worked for David Bowie for over two years before my mother ever told anyone in the family what I was doing. I told her that I was teaching school up north.”

  Zanetta was made MainMan’s “president.” Childers was vice president. Vanilla was press secretary.

  “We had a sense of show business,” Childers says. “You know, we knew how to mount a show very well. And we knew how to sucker a sucker. That’s the same thing, the record companies were the suckers and we were the pickpockets. We knew how to do that.”

  “You’re spreading goodwill for David Bowie,” the late Cyrinda Foxe (who would star in Bowie’s “The Jean Genie” video two years later) writes in her Danny Fields–coauthored autobiography Dream On. “‘Fine. I’ll have a magnum of Veuve Clicquot. I promise to think very highly and often of David.’ It was unbelievable. People who couldn’t pay the rent on their squalid flats a few months before were now spending thousands a week on frivolities.”

  “Everybody we knew, this guy is the next biggest thing. You’re gonna die, you’re gonna freak out, he’s so sexy, he’s so hot, he’s so talented,” Cherry Vanilla recalls. “And a few writers we did let get to him began to make a little buzz and then the press started calling us. And when they would call us, for most of them we would say he wasn’t going to do any interviews. But I would talk to them because I had had these things published. And I would even send out pitch letters to radio stations and things saying, ‘I’m Cherry Vanilla.’ And I’d send copies of my poetry that had been published in things and say, ‘If you want I’m available to do interviews on your radio station.’ So I was the one now doing the interviews for him. Because I naturally like to talk about him and like to talk in general. I hardly knew that much about him, to tell you the truth. I made up stuff. I didn’t push the bisexuality, I pushed the sexuality. He was creative. Theatrical. Innovative. Fashionable. He was breaking ground. He was new and different and all of that kind of stuff. I pushed mostly that he was really sexy. I mean, that’s what I was selling was sex appeal. Because that’s what I felt. I personally found him very sexy. I’ve always found sort of delicate boys sexy.”

  Rumors began to circulate among the gossipy Warhol set about the source of Defries’s cash. The manager must have been tickled pink about the whispered chitchat.

  “I don’t mean to say anything bad about him but there were rumors about him dealing Krugerrands and unpleasant international activities,” Fields says. “There are only rumors and I don’t know firsthand, and they could’ve been put out there by people who just didn’t like him. I had no idea.”

  Max’s Kansas City is now the Green Deli, adjacent to the W hotel on Union Square. There’s nothing about it that suggests the counterculture vanguard or the crucial old New York art elite. It’s a place for cold mashed potatoes, cheap sushi, coffee and the papers. It’s hard to imagine just how excited David Bowie must have felt being ushered inside by genuine Warholians, how it must have seemed like all of New York City was unfolding for him. It must have felt a little like that party at Tom Ayres’s house in the Hollywood Hills, only a million times more inspirational, as this was not L.A. This was New York in the fall, almost obliging him to unveil his next and most lasting creation. Ziggy was ready.

  13.

  THE OLD-STYLE PHONE BOX in which David Bowie stood on a cold, rainy night in Soho in January of 1972 is gone, but an exact replica has been placed in the secluded alleyway off Heddon Street. This is exactly where Hunky Dory sleeve photographer Brian Ward brought Bowie, ill with flu, to shoot the back sleeve for its follow-up. Today, the box smells very strongly of urine. Much of the plastic window space has been covered in graffiti: Ziggy-era song lyrics such as “Put your ray gun to my head” from “Moonage Daydream” and “Breaking up is hard but keeping dark is hateful” from “Time.” If Bowie were an American high school student, this would be his yearbook page. “Thanks, David, I hope you in Spain,” someone writes. “I hope you” what exactly seems to be left, possibly forever, to the imagination. This box, or booth, as we Americans call it, as well as the spot just around the corner where Bowie posed for the front sleeve, is hallowed ground, not just for Bowie fans but for rock ’n’ roll fans in general. Short of the site where the Beatles’ Abbey Road cover was shot, it may be the most famous locale in the city’s rock history.

  David Bowie posed for these iconic photos with little way of really knowing whether his Ziggy Stardust concept was going to succeed. When Bowie first had the notion to fashion together the songs he’d written in the spring and summer of 1971 into a loose narrative about a doomed rock star messiah, a character he would actually embody onstage and before the media, one wonders if, like anyone might, there was a moment where he said to himself, “Oh, no, I’ll just go the safe route and release a proper album. Maybe I will get lucky and have another big chart hit,” or if he could have imagined just how far he would take this new persona—all too far, as it happened; he actually became Ziggy for about a year. Nobody had really done this kind of thing before. Mick Jagger sang “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in the first person. John Lennon did the same with “I Am the Walrus,” but both those alter egos ended when the recording sessions ended (and anyway, the Walrus was Paul). Alice Cooper had a bit more fidelity to his stage transformation but he didn’t really sing about being Alice Cooper very frequently. There was no context. And Peter Gabriel, then of Genesis, could put on a fox head, but when he took it off, most everyone resumed yawning.

  The sleeve itself might be a hint. Bowie is still David Bowie, not Ziggy, on the album’s cover. He is blond and, despite the flu, looks as dewy-fresh as he does on Hunky Dory’s cover. Ziggy, the saturnine mutant with the red rooster cut, would grace the covers of the next three albums (Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups and Diamond Dogs). On Ziggy Bowie wears no theatrical makeup, only a clinging blue jumpsuit, open almost to the navel. On the front sleeve, he carries his guitar and exposes his calf-high boots as he props a foot up on a stack of boxes. He is merely a fragment of Ziggy on this first sleeve. Other people were pieces of Ziggy as well, whether they knew it or not. Meeting Iggy Pop, and to a slightly lesser extent Lou Reed, put him in the mind of fallen rock stars: larger than life personalities gone down unlit detours. American singer Vince Taylor, who started as something of a quasi-Elvis figure with a huge following in France and ended up a demented,
Jesus-touched, raving lunatic, was someone who also came to mind. “The guy was not playing with a full deck at all,” Bowie, who encountered Taylor on the club scene when he was still a struggling musician, has said. “He used to carry maps of Europe around with him and I remember very distinctly him opening a map out on Charing Cross Road outside the tube station and putting it on the pavement, and kneeling down with a magnifying glass, and I got down there with him, and he was pointing out all the sites where UFOs were going to be landing over the next few months.”

  Ziggy’s first name is, of course, an alteration of Iggy. His surname is a tribute to the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, whose record he was given on his first U.S. trip in early 1970. From Lubbock, Texas, Buddy Holly’s hometown, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy is best known for his twanging sci-fi single “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Space Ship,” which was released in ’69 (Bowie covers it on 2002’s Heathen). The “Ledge” published his own autobiography to accompany the single, full of wiggy selfdescriptions like “My favorite type of girl is a blue-eyed blond. I like blonds because I have blond hair. A blue-eyed blond is the most beautiful thing in the whole universe besides the stars in the night sky. If I had the opportunity, I would kiss every blue eyed blond in the world.” “Stardust” may also be an homage to the Hoagy Carmichael pop standard, another provocative mix of the fringe and the mainstream.

  There was a bit of his memory of playing with crippled and odd-looking rock ’n’ roll pioneer Gene Vincent at Tom Ayres’s house in the Hollywood Hills in the Ziggy mix as well. All those whom Bowie drew from seemed to have one foot in the grave and another in the future. Bowie knew he could never be like them without permanently damaging his body, his psyche and, more crucially, his hard-won career, but what if he wrote himself a part and acted it out? Then he could be them when he needed to be—during performances—and remain himself, a fabulous rock ’n’ roll artiste, committed to his project but safe from any real harm. Like Dr. Frank enstein, he severely underestimated the power of his creation. Strictly as a symbol, Ziggy Stardust could not have enjoyed the same impact in the sixties. He was not a utopian figure, but rather the cracked and not entirely legit messiah that the debauched humankind of the seventies had come to deserve. He’s the “all right, this will do” savior and the perfect antihero for the seventies because he is the embodiment of the dead sixties dream. Ziggy is the space-race anticlimax, Manson and Altamont and Nixon’s reelection and the breakup of the Beatles made sexy. Rock ’n’ roll ecdysis is a crucial element of his appeal. Ziggy says to all those in pain, “You have failed as human beings, but it’s all right. We will succeed as slinky, jiving space insects. Let all the children boogie!”