Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  The press event was akin to improv theater, with Angie swanning in as if on cue to deliver a bon mot into the ear of a journo, who took up a pen to quickly scribble. Then she’d exit and Cherry Vanilla would appear. The whole thing seemed both painstakingly staged and anarchic at the same time. “I’ve wondered about how staged it all was in retrospect,” Shaar Murray says. “I was twenty years old, not that sophisticated. Before I fell in with the Bowie crew, I only ever met one out gay man in my life. I was ragged, I was naïve, it was a heaven. I was a reasonably smart but provincial young man with, you know, comparatively little sophistication in terms of polymorphous perversity. Very likely to accept a lot of what was staged for my benefit and the benefit of those around me at face value. I won’t say I got taken for a ride, because I gleefully signed up for it. I loved it. It was fabulous. It was really exciting and I enjoyed every moment of it. Let’s say, you know, they took full advantage of me and I did my best to take full advantage of them.”

  The press was treated to a Ziggy show at the Friar’s Club in Aylesbury and returned to America raving. Ziggy was coming. “David had security. One of the first people who had security,” Suzi Ronson says. “They’d rehearse running David offstage into the car and driving off. Three vans outside, jumping in the car. Speed off. Before anyone even wanted to touch him, they’d do that. Within six months, they really needed to know how. It all got so successful so quickly.”

  15.

  IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE NOW, with satellite radio and the Internet seriously diminishing the power of AM and FM radio to break new artists, but in the early 1970s a handful of disc jockeys and station managers at free-form terrestrial radio stations like KMET in Los Angeles, WNEW in New York and perhaps the most famous free-form station of the era, WMMS in Cleveland had the ability to turn a cult artist into a worldwide star. Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Rush are just a few of the arena-filling career artists who benefited from early free-form radio support. The Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album’s American buzz was due largely to a handful of devoted jocks who responded to the tough and punchy rock songs full of emotional complexity and progressive ideas. Bowie, who listened to pirate stations throughout the fifties and sixties, knew the power of radio to bewitch a young listener. (In England, he’d already found a strong supporter in disc jockey John Peel, who recorded Bowie and the Spiders at the BBC. Sessions with Peel—who died in 2004—were collected and released in 2000 on the excellent Bowie at the Beeb.)

  On Bowie’s first trip to America in ’71, he’d met the disc jockeys and program directors at stations like KSAN in San Francisco. He and Defries knew that American radio was his way in, and blue-collar Cleveland was isolated as the somewhat improbable beachhead. “Changes” and “Life on Mars?” from the previous year’s Hunky Dory were WMMS staples already. “Suffragette City” and the title track of Ziggy Stardust were in heavy rotation. U.S. tour number one would launch from Ohio.

  “In Cleveland we were early,” says Denny Sanders, then a DJ at WMMS. “So as soon as Ziggy was released, man, that audience was ready and they were familiar with Bowie and they were accepting of his style. And it just exploded. It was only natural that it’d be done in Cleveland. They were barely playing it in Boston. Boston is a hip city but it was late when it came to David Bowie. You don’t want to play to a half a house in a market where he’s barely being played.”

  Bowie and Angie sailed to New York City on September 10, 1972, aboard the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth II. They arrived one week later and this time, like Oscar Wilde, the press was there to greet him, along with assorted RCA executives; MainMan staff, including road manager Leee Black Childers; and a handful of hipper New York music fans. Between his first American promotional tour and this one, Bowie had developed a fear of air travel. While morbid, it was yet another opportunity, according to Defries, to exploit his grandeur and uniqueness. The Bowies, it had been announced, would “sail” to the New World in style, creating an air of great anticipation.

  While in New York and checked into the Sherry-Netherland hotel off Central Park, Bowie and Ronson auditioned a keyboard player for the American dates. Given the elemental rock that the Spiders had been playing throughout England, it may have seemed superfluous, but according to the MainMan philosophy, superfluity was a virtue. Recommended by a mutual friend, Mike Garson, nearing thirty, had been playing bread gigs in jazz lounges in Greenwich Village.

  “I worked a few nights with Elvin Jones, who was John Coltrane’s drummer, a year after John died [in 1967],” Garson recalls. “And the way I got that gig was the piano player fell off the bandstand drunk and they dragged him out onto the streets, and Elvin said, ‘Is there anyone who plays piano in the house?’ And I walked up and played.”

  At the time that he joined the Spiders, Garson was growing tired of playing tiny jazz clubs to three or four tourists and was starting to wonder about his career path. He auditioned for Bowie and Ronson with “Changes.” “I played eight bars; it took about twelve seconds, or eight seconds. And as soon as he heard what I played, he said, ‘You got the gig.’”

  Given how dominant Garson’s playing would be on the next record, 1973’s Aladdin Sane, it’s clear that Bowie was already taking the Spiders’ sound somewhere in his head. Aladdin would be written along the whistle-stop tour.

  “He was looking for another sound,” the pianist would tell me, “so these mixtures of jazz and classical and rock started coming together. Here I was superimposing that on his music, but it worked with his belief systems, his mind, his philosophy and his aesthetic. I just was playing how I felt. I really didn’t know his music.”

  With the lineup complete and the tour about to launch, Defries began writing audacious clauses into the venue contracts. The largest grand piano in each city would have to be provided by the promoter at every venue. If it wasn’t at least nine feet in diameter, the show would be canceled. While the Bowies traveled to Cleveland via a private Greyhound bus, the Cleveland Music Hall promoters scrambled to meet Defries’s demand.

  “They couldn’t find one that was a certain number of inches,” Childers tells me. “Tony told me, ‘Well, then cancel the show.’ I said, ‘They can’t get a bigger piano. It’s not like they won’t give it to us, they don’t have it.’ He said, ‘Cancel the show. That’s our rules. Cancel the show; they should have had that piano.’ And I refused to cancel the show because first of all I wanted there to be a show, but second of all I didn’t know what was coming but I knew this show was sold out and I talked to the DJs and people and I knew they were very enthusiastic. So the sound was great, the audience was up for it, it was packed.”

  David Bowie played his first proper American concert date at the 3, 500-capacity Cleveland Music Hall on September 22, 1972. With Lindsay Kemp and his dancers left behind in London, Bowie and his Spiders were a leaner, fiercer rock ’n’ roll combo. It was a loud, brash, bourbon-and-domestic-beer-chaser-style show, as rough and tumble as the Stones’ tour of the same year, with both Garson’s piano and Bowie’s lyrics and complex sexual allure adding a crucial emotional depth.

  On September 27, 1972, the MainMan entourage checked back into the Sherry-Netherland to prepare for what was, at the time, Bowie’s most important concert yet: a sold-out engagement at Carnegie Hall. The marquee at the venue, possibly the most famous concert hall in the world and host to performances by Tchaikovsky, Judy Garland, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Belafonte and the Beatles, read, simply, FALL IN LOVE WITH DAVID BOWIE. Before a crowd of celebrities (Andy Warhol, socialite Lee Radziwill, actor Tony Perkins, Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman), journalists and fans, David presented Ziggy in full, taking the stage to the Walter Carlos version of the “Ode to Joy” from A Clockwork Orange as strobe lights blinded the fabulous and powerful tastemakers in the crowd. From there Bowie played the equally prestigious Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and traveled on to Boston, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City and Salt Lake City. Throughout the tour, Childers acted as the �
�advance man,” getting to town early and making sure things were together.

  “In St. Louis, the Spiders were booked into an arena that held eleven thousand. I think six hundred people showed up,” Childers says. “We had really worked St. Louis too. So we were real apologetic, everyone who had been working on it. So we were really down in the dumps. Being Midwestern kids, they had taken the seats that were on the numbers of the tickets they had bought. So looking out over the arena of eleven thousand empty seats, there would be people here, and people there, and in the balcony and down in front, and all scattered here and about. So David just came out, stopped the show immediately, and walked to the edge of the stage and said, ‘Everybody come on down.’ And so they all got up, and they all came down and just took seats there in front of the stage, and there and then he drew out the set list and altered the whole show, and pretty much did a lot of it just sitting on the edge of the stage singing directly to the audience. Stood up for the dramatic bits. Used the lighting, used the facilities, but he made it an intimate show tailored to his audience. And that, I think, made as much difference to St. Louis on the next tour being a successful show, because those six hundred people went away feeling special.”

  What Bowie lacked in actual record and ticket sales he more than made up for in media appeal. The October 9, 1972, issue of Newsweek magazine featured a short profile of Bowie, putting his rooster-cut visage in millions of American homes. Entitled “The Stardust Kid,” the piece accurately, if a bit ornately, frames Bowie as the perfect star for the seventies: “This is a time of confusion, a middle ages, an appropriate breeding ground for the dark, satanic majesty of England’s David Bowie.” This being America, there was much made of his sexuality. “He sings songs about homosexuals,” the writer observes, “but there are just as many straight songs as bent ones.” Bowie has his way with the writer, who is either amused or confused. “My sexual nature is irrelevant,” he says. “I’m an actor, I play roles, fragments of myself.”

  Defries, who had started to affect the cigar-chomping, fur-coat-wearing style of a rock ’n’ roll manager, as opposed to that of a buttoned-down British solicitor, knew that overtaking the United States wasn’t about this tour anyway. U.S. tour number one was a theater tour. Bowie and Defries had their eye on a sold-out arena juggernaut and Bowie was instructed to act like a standing-room-only arena rock star until he became one. Promoters were furious at MainMan’s threats to cancel shows, but there would be no scaling back of the outrageous demands. This became the company’s general philosophy: one has to spend, and often lose, money to make it. Given the unsold seats and five-star accommodations, MainMan was in debt to RCA for well over a million dollars already (about five million when adjusted for inflation). Defries was confident that every full seat would, via word of mouth, turn into three or four dozen more in the very near future.

  As the tour rolled on, Garson, the only American, slowly became acclimated to the pandemonium and bonded with Mick Ronson especially, as the guitarist had begun as a pianist and could talk classical and jazz theory. Bolder and Woodmansey discussed spirituality with him. Garson was, at the time, a devout Scientologist. After the shows, when stuck in a less cosmopolitan city, Garson and Bowie, in full Ziggy makeup, would invade the cocktail lounge of whatever Ramada Inn they were lodging in and shock the other guests with impromptu concerts of Sinatra.

  “He would sing ‘My Funny Valentine’ and I would back him up on the piano just for fun in a bar,” Garson says. “And he sounded like his version of Sinatra. Mouths would drop. I wish I had a video; it would be on YouTube now.”

  Attendance picked up significantly as U.S. tour number one hit the West Coast. They had dates in Los Angeles at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and in San Francisco at Winterland, where future disco sensation Sylvester (who would record the indelible dance singles “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Do Ya Wanna Funk” before becoming one of pop’s early AIDS casualties in 1988) provided support. Defries clashed with notoriously tough promoter Bill Graham after insisting that a wall be constructed from the load-in area to the dressing room so that David and his entourage could enter the venue in private. The trek was also yielding major creative dividends, with a whole album nearly complete by the time they reached the Pacific. The notion of seeing America, the whole country and not just the major cities, comes up in those songs and brings Bowie back to his boyhood and the Beat literature that his half brother Terry encouraged him to read.

  The forty-six-person U.S. tour number one entourage hit Los Angeles in the third week of October. The city was ready for them. Rodney Bingenheimer had almost singlehandedly turned Hollywood into London West, running his Bowie-inspired E. Club then centered around the Chateau Marmont. The Spiders had no trouble selling out two nights at the 3, 500-seat Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. At one point the most famous bootleg in the Bowie unofficial discography, a recording of one of the shows was formally released by Virgin Records in the summer of 2008. Listening to it now, it’s hard to imagine just how different Bowie and his band must have seemed to the casual concertgoer, fresh off shelling out for Eagles or Santana tickets. After “Five Years,” for example, you can actually hear people screaming in psychic elation. It’s not just white-noise applause but rather shouts of “Yeah! Yeah! Yes!” Is it the sound of minds being blown? Surely this is what the city had been waiting for, someone to make their decay seem not only sexy but also … meaningful. “Five Years” meant something. The album stands as a document of just how on fire the Spiders were. Ronson is as solid as a walnut tree, adjusting the speed of his backing vocals (fast on “Changes,” slow and chantlike on “Five Years”) with killer instinct and throwing the shred in a way that would have seemed downright impolite on a record (“The Width of a Circle”). Garson’s piano makes the Hunky Dory tracks, like “Life on Mars?” soar. Bowie himself is breathy and so English he makes asking for a pair of pliers before “Space Oddity” seem grand. As he screamed, “You’re not alone,” at the end of “Rock and Roll Suicide,” the show closer, he could not escape the irony of staring out into the crowd to see so many of them dressed like him. “Santa Monica ’72 is the sound of a cult act pushing hard for breakout success,” Pitchfork observed in its review of the reissue.

  Bowie was feted by the famous disc jockey Wolfman Jack at the after-show party, which drew every freak in the Golden State. RCA paid for the cocktails. The Wolfman had a fully functional disco in his home (much like Steve Martin’s during the decadent third act of The Jerk), complete with a pro sound system, spinning mirror ball and flashing lights. Bowie stood in the center of it. Nobody approached him. Bingenheimer and Fowley arrived. As the party went on, joints were lit up, cocktails passed around and the dance floor filled up. Bowie spotted a girl he fancied dancing with Fowley. “We were dancing away and Bowie comes up to me on the dance floor the way Gene Kelly would slide up to Fred Astaire in one of those old Hollywood musicals,” says Kim Fowley. “Anyone seeing it would say, ‘Oh, gay man sliding up to other feminine man to have a giggle.’ He slides up and says, ‘Are you in love with this woman or may I take her into the bathroom? Why don’t you and her follow me if she’s not your girlfriend or wife?’ I looked at the girl and said ‘David would like to have a word with you.’ Then he said to her, ‘How do you do, I’m David Bowie. I’d like to discuss life or the universal whatever, my dear.’ He gave me a wink, a bit of a thank-you wave. A David Niven–style wave. Went to the bathroom, obviously, to have an intimate discussion. I always thought he was so clever pushing that androgynous thing. They went into the bathroom and soon heard, ‘Oh no.’ Two drag queens were there, hoping that David Bowie was gay. When they saw their hero going in a bathroom with a woman, they went ballistic. I heard him lock the door and the drag queens took their high heels off, smashing the door, screaming, ‘Whatever she’s doing, we can do better. Let us in, throw the bitch out. We can do a better job on you than she can no matter what’s going on in there.’”

  Bowie was more
or less a teetotaler on the tour. There was far too much to do, and the rigors of being onstage and turning in a stellar performance every night required him to be a dead sober workaholic. Sex, of course, was another story: it was good exercise and, in Los Angeles in 1972, the equivalent of a politician glad-handing a potential voter. “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am,” indeed. While he would later dismiss it as the most vile locale on the planet, the love between Bowie and Los Angeles was in full flush.

  “L.A. was tailor-made for Ziggy Stardust,” Leee Black Childers agrees. “L.A. is like David. The city changes its personality to suit whoever is in town. So they had all become spacemen for that weekend that we were there. Whereas if it had been a reggae band they would have all been, you know, Rastas. And they all have all the necessary outfits and equipment in their obviously well-appointed homes. Nobody’s poor in L.A. And so all the groupies were dressed in glitter and platforms galore. And all the kids were dressed with makeup on and everything. So it looked like the town was totally behind David.”

  The Spiders’ entourage had checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, the massive, shell-pink structure off Sunset Boulevard, on the advice of Lisa Robinson. They lived off the fat of RCA, with roadies bringing back tourists from up the street and signing away for surf-and-turf dinners and champagne. There were groupies floating in the swimming pool.

  Cynthia McCradu was a young friend of Rodney Bingenheimer’s who had met Bowie earlier in the year while on a trip to London and spent a day with him in Haddon Hall, until Angie shooed her away. “David was the most funny, giving, intelligent person,” she says today. “[During that visit] he showed me his garden. I said, ‘What are you growing?’ And he said, ‘Mostly weeds right now.’ He was so gentle and funny and intelligent. I’m really happy that I met him before it was all ruined.”