Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  McCradu felt special in sleepy, leafy Beckenham. She’d seen a more artistic and domestic Bowie, perhaps more David Jones than Ziggy Stardust. Only a few months later, in the Hollywood groupie jungle, she was aghast at the behavior she witnessed at the E. Club and the fervor with which Bowie, now in near-total Ziggy mode, dove in. The club itself was a mirror-lined speakeasy type of place. They served beer and wine and food, and had a doorman card people to keep out the underaged, but fake IDs were plentiful.

  “I’m with David at a table,” McCradu says, “talking, and we danced and suddenly this little girl comes in and she pushes me off the chair and says, ‘I’m gonna be with him now. You’ve already had your time with him.’ And I go, ‘Who the hey are you and what the hey are you doing? Little girl, you need to put your clothes on.’ That was my introduction to Queenie and Sable and Lori. Little girls twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. Quite frankly if I was a mother or father, I would have whipped their hide and made them stay home. [The next time I saw him] David was now fucked-up, into the frenzy of everybody wanting to have sex with him in the limo on the way to the recording studio. On the sidewalk in front of the hotel. In the bathroom. Everywhere he turned, everybody wanted to sex him. And he was enjoying that. That was exciting to him, I believe. I think after a while, these people, they just start sucking the life out of you …” As it was at Bromley Tech, David viewed sex as a means to capture and hold attention. He had become an Elvis or a Little Richard at last; his rock ’n’ roll made the girls and boys lose control.

  “It was a very sexual period,” Mick Rock observes. “A lot of sex going on but initially less drugs than you might think but certainly a hell of a lot of rutting! David generated a lot of sexual heat. He had a totally futuristic charisma and energy. He did have those amazing facial bones, a very skinny body, and photographed in a unique and sexy way. Everybody was buzzed about David, boys and girls and everything in between!”

  “Suddenly David was not to me a man you can talk to anymore,” McCradu says. “He was consumed by all the sexualness.”

  Bingenheimer shrewdly made sure that everyone knew that Bowie was associated with the club. “Oh, he signed a contract with the club to be on the board of directors,” Bingenheimer says. Rodney soon parlayed that association into moving and expanding the E. Club into the more iconic Rodney’s English Disco. By the time that opened a few blocks farther east up Sunset Boulevard L.A. had gone glam crazy and Bowie was its king.

  Bowie remained in Los Angeles to do some work on Iggy and the Stooges’ MainMan debut, Raw Power. “Originally Tony wanted David to produce us,” Pop said, “but I wanted to produce myself. He still wanted David to remix the tapes, adding some horns or whatever. I didn’t want that.” Pop relented, but in 1997 Raw Power was rereleased with an alternate, Iggy-approved mix. Fans remain polarized and which Raw Power is superior remains the subject of rock-geek round (bar) table debate. Bowie then returned to England in December for a short series of dates, including two benefit shows for his late father’s employer, Dr. Barnardo’s children’s charity, at London’s Rainbow Theater. Bowie spent the Christmas holidays of 1972 with Zowie and Angie in Haddon Hall. It would be their last in Beckenham, as a tight family unit.

  The Bowies must have certainly found it strange, after the whirlwind of sex, spending and speed-traveling through America, to be back in the suburbs. Angie could not retrieve the mail without hearing high-pitched screaming. In certain circles, she was just as iconic as he was, but when he became Ziggy Stardust the experience got bigger and more people were sharing in it. David did not, at that time, flaunt his dalliances, and neither did Angie. They were progressives. Their marriage was open. Angie felt flattered that so many people of both sexes wanted her husband. Increasingly it was not women or men but fame itself that was the third party in their relationship. History is littered with failed “open marriages,” including those of Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Open marriage may be a genuinely progressive notion, but it’s clearly easier in theory than practice. If such a union is to work, it requires close and consistent proximity between the two agreeing partners. The couple must grow or evolve together, but even if they do, throw in fame and long periods of estrangement often due to professional commitments, and it ceases to be a liberating union and becomes one that can foster suspicion and jealousy and spite even with the must liberated partners. In their study Open Marriage, Nena and George O’Neill, for example, write, “The central problem in contemporary marriage was relationship. The attempt to solve the problem by moving into group and communal situations did not seem to mitigate the problems we discovered in the interpersonal relationship.” David’s steadiest companion post-fame was Ava Cherry, an eighteen-year-old African American beauty from Chicago. Like Bowie, she had a unique and soulful voice (check out the Astro nettes’ rarity “I Am Divine”). She also matched his flair for attention-grabbing and would spend the remainder of the glitter era with a platinum blond crew cut. According to Zanetta and Edwards’s Stardust, the Bowies’ laissez-faire attitude toward sex was something she had to grow into. The morning after their first night together, Bowie casually introduced Cherry to his family, stating flatly, “This is my wife and kid.” While Angie would come to loathe Cherry, at the time she was up for anything, as was their rule. Two years into their relationship, Bowie and Cherry would practice the same openness for better or worse. “If David kept an affair secret, it meant he had some feeling for the woman,” Zanetta and Edwards write. “Otherwise he had a friendly discussion with Ava about the one-night stand and gave her an evaluation on his partner’s performance.” Eventually Bowie and Ava Cherry’s relationship would go the way of his first marriage, making the notion of a lasting open marriage or steady relationship that much more challenging if not utterly dubious. Sometimes progress can break your heart.

  Around this time, Angie attempted to re-create herself as an actress named Gyp Jones, an abbreviation of “gypsy”—clearly a nod to the headier, happier days when she was careening through London with her undies in a bag—and “Jones,” her husband’s given name. “The initial plan was to work on his career and make him famous and then he and I would work on my career and make me famous and successful too,” she says.

  While in L.A. Angie auditioned for the part that Linda Carter eventually got on the CBS series Wonder Woman. By the time the Bowies moved out of their suburban nest in Haddon Hall in early 1973 and found a proper rock star apartment on Oakley Street in the Chelsea section of London, their marriage was unraveling. Zowie was largely cared for, like many children of the very famous, by trusted friends and expensive professional nannies. David would later cite not being around for much of his son’s formative years as one of his biggest regrets and took pains to make amends later in the decade.

  Angie comforted herself with retail, decorating the place in opulent fashion with antique dressers, Chinese carpets, a grand piano and the best audio-visual equipment available.

  With glitter becoming all the rage (and running the gamut from bubblegum heroes sweet to blunt-edged carpetbaggers like Gary Glitter and Mud to the openly gay cabaret of Jobriath and the sublime art-school-educated geniuses in Roxy Music), the business of keeping Bowie and MainMan ahead of the curve was not cheap, and in the Regent Street offices in London and their Park Avenue offices in Manhattan, amid the leather armchairs and framed portraits of Bowie, charges and chits on George Underwood–designed MainMan letterhead flew around like ticker tape. Bills would come in and pile up: travel expenses, promotional expenses, charge accounts, clothing, food, rent, studio time and limousines.

  On the surface, MainMan looked like what Defries envisioned it as, a Disney-like, catchall entertainment company. “He wanted to be a star-maker,” says Cherry Vanilla. “He wanted to go much bigger than he ever went. He wanted to have a building on Park Avenue with his name on the top of it. He wanted to have an empire. A huge empire. He really wanted to have movie companies. Cecil B. DeMi
lle and Colonel Tom Parker all rolled into one.

  “MainMan was a great, great company in its day,” she continues. “It had a mystique. We all had secretaries. We all lived in New York. It was a glorious, glorious time, but I always knew it couldn’t last because at some point something had to kind of implode, and it kind of did.”

  “Ah, but what did justify it was the end result, which was people believed that MainMan was this huge, rich entity. It was like Hollywood in the thirties,” Tony Defries biographer Dave Thompson, who has also written several great books on Bowie, counters. “They weren’t just launching a musician, they were launching a star—the idea was, we’re not gonna have David build from the ground up like everybody else. He’s not gonna grind for thirty years like Slade or T. Rex. He is going to appear as a star. So the first thing you do is you hire him bodyguards. ‘Why does he need bodyguards?’ people start asking. Then the word goes out: ‘Well, David’s worldview is a little unusual and there’s a lot of crazies out there.’ The headline the next day: ‘David Bowie Under Attack.’ If somebody from MainMan can go out with their company credit card and order this huge meal for fifty people, it conveys wealth, it conveys importance, it conveys strength.”

  When asked about the expense accounts, Leee Black Childers just chuckles. “The word that does not apply in that sentence is ‘accounts.’ There were a lot of expenses. No one seemed to be keeping track of the accounts, however. There was no cash flow really. There was no cash. And this is fairly well known, that we took limousines because we couldn’t afford taxis.”

  The lifestyle seems glamorous—it seemed so to me when I read about it—but imagine living like that all the time when you just want to relax and watch TV and eat a hamburger in peace and not have to be outrageous. “Everyone thought we were living this incredibly easy fabulous lifestyle, when in fact if you think about it, it’s really hard, because nothing is free,” Cherry Vanilla says. “If you’re eating at Max’s for free and drinking champagne at rich people’s houses for free, you have to be on, on, on! You can’t just be sitting there. You’ve got to be ‘Cherry Vanilla.’ You’ve got to be constantly telling stories. And every day was exhausting. So when you say the office, again, we were always in the office. The world perceived us as doing nothing; we were working our butts off all the time. We never missed a trip; we never missed a chance to forward David’s career, thereby forwarding our own fortunes. And hopefully keeping the ball rolling for a while. Tony Defries told us almost daily that we were not going to be successful otherwise, which may have been his way of getting us to work all the harder. He was like the big daddy to us all, you know, even though he was our age. I think he was younger than me. We all approached him in that way like Daddy. And he treated us that way purposely. Like instead of giving us a regular salary, we all got a hundred dollars a week and our rent paid. And an expense account at Max’s Kansas City and the use of limousines. So we were kept more like children. So was the band, so was Bowie. It was like a control freak thing.”

  What really guzzled up the cash was the need to duplicate the success of Bowie. For all of his success with his primary client, Defries could not duplicate it with anyone but Bowie. Lou Reed had Bowie-associated hit records, but he was not a MainMan artist and excluding Mott the Hoople’s revival with “All the Young Dudes,” Defries didn’t seem to know how to bottle lightning twice. Dana Gillespie had a failed record; the Stooges’ Raw Power had been released in early 1973 and sold nothing. There was no tour budget and Iggy was too zonked on heroin to promote it anyway. During one in-studio appearance at a local radio station, he got naked and began playing with himself on the air, providing the listeners with a running commentary.

  As with Bowie, all MainMan artists had their every need taken care of so that they could concentrate on creativity. They were assured that all MainMan artists were equal, but they were also obliged to sell, and with the exception of Bowie, who would not be selling anywhere near a Rolling Stones or an Elton John–like level until 1975 or so, nobody did.

  Meanwhile, Bowie, the company’s cash cow, returned to London and entered Trident Studios in the third week of January 1973, again with producer Ken Scott, Ronson, Woodmansey, Bolder and now Mike Garson to finish the material he’d written during U.S. tour one. He was under enormous pressure. Without the overhead, Bowie might have deviated further away from Ziggy even sooner than 1974, but he simply could not afford to. Aladdin Sane, the resulting album, is seen by some critics as subpar on the heels of something as momentous as the Ziggy album, but it has achieved classic status as well, and clearly the songs, which are top-notch, are all the evidence one needs that the artist was still way ahead of the game. The sleeve features an emaciated, lonely Ziggy with a lightning bolt painted across his face and a teardrop pooling in the left clavicle of his bare chest as if to say, “I am the only one striking.”

  “Watch That Man” opens the record with a crunchy Ronson riff and a post-party inventory: “Shakey threw a party that lasted all night. Everybody drank a lot of something nice.” He is still the observer of or Kerouacian commentator on others’ debauchery, but for the first time on record, he sounds equally jaded or wasted. The track is propelled by the kind of fifties-style doo-wop backing vocals that had become a powerful trend thanks to the debut that year of The Rocky Horror Show in London. David, Angie and their entourage took in the show multiple times and, as they’d done with Pork two years earlier, were clearly taking notes in the margins of their programs. Like most of Aladdin Sane, “Watch That Man” is given a geographical marker (New York) that reflects the peripatetic year that Bowie had just experienced. The title track is marked quite elegantly with the name of a cruise ship, the HRMS Ellinis (which sailed from Britain to Japan, where Bowie would tour later in the year) as well as cryptic birth/death/rebirth dates (1913–1938–197?), said to be the years immediately preceding the two world wars and, according to fan speculation, the imminent World War III. The track itself is not shot through with dread as much as languor. Along with Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (also a title track to a 1973 release) it is one of the best “come-down” tracks ever, another perfect segue from party to post-party to hangover. Garson’s playing is broad, almost a bebop/Thelonious Monk parody, but it fits perfectly with the loss of equilibrium implicit in the lyrics. “Drive-In Saturday” is another doo-wop pastiche with campy lyrics (“His name was always Buddy”) that, like those of “Life on Mars?” bring to mind the cinemas of Beckenham and the spark of the London mod scene, now a decade gone (“It’s a crash course for the ravers”). London luminaries like it-model Twiggy (who would pose with Bowie on the cover of his next release Pin Ups) and Mick Jagger are name-checked (although the geographical mark is an incongruous “Seattle-Phoenix”). Bowie scats playfully over the fade-out. “Panic in Detroit” returns us to the apocalypse already in progress. A portrait of Iggy Pop (“He looked a lot like Che Guevara”) written while mixing Raw Power, it’s a Bo Diddley “bum de bum de bum bum bum”–style beat treated with wailing backing vocals that call to mind Merry Clayton’s on the Stones’ equally nightmarish “Gimme Shelter.” “The Prettiest Star” gets a second life, as does “Queen Bitch,” in the form of its left-coast counterpart “Cracked Actor.” Opening with Ronson’s feedback, it’s another fifties-style, basic rock track with lyrics that are seventies L.A. to their sleazy, catty core. In full Warhol-damaged mode, Bowie embodies an aging star admonishing a piece of junked-up rough trade (“Forget that I’m fifty cause you just got paid” and later, “Smack baby smack is that all that you feel?”). It’s geographically tagged, unsurprisingly, “Los Angeles.” “Time,” the album’s second single after “The Jean Genie,” is marked “New Orleans” and opens with a ghostly Dixie brothel piano before Bowie again invokes Belgian singer/songwriter Jacques Brel (whose “My Death” he covered on the Ziggy tour). It’s possibly his weirdest single since 1967’s “The Laughing Gnome,” but unlike that track, it’s uncut and highly effective troubled-teen catnip
, almost surgically assembled to appeal to kids in smoky bedrooms with Bowie posters on their walls (“You are not a victim / You just scream with boredom,” after all). There’s a dramatic pregnant pause, then Ronson’s guitars spiral in, screaming like horror movie damsels. Like “Rock and Roll Suicide,” “Time” ends with an audience-inclusive sing-along, a string of “La la la” before Bowie punctuates it in vaguely corny fashion with “Yes, time!” The passing of time is an age-old theme (check the Stones’ “Time Waits for No One,” the Pretenders’ “Time the Avenger” and every Smiths track ever written) but it’s never been tackled with an unabashed, almost giddy theatrical pretension (“Goddamn you’re looking old!” Bowie shouts). “Let’s Spend the Night Together” is covered very, very campily, with a revised breakdown toward the end (“They said we were too young / Our kind of love was no fun”), complete with Ronson’s “talking guitar” (five years before Van Halen’s debut) and a headphones-friendly shout of “Do it!” The album closes with its best track, “Lady Grinning Soul.” Like “Aladdin Sane,” it’s driven by Garson’s piano and Bowie’s saloon singing at the high, torchy end of his range. Like “Panic” it’s a portrait in lyrics of a dangerously soulful black chick who drives a VW Beetle, plays a mean hand of canasta and will, if you are not careful, “lay belief on you” and “be your living end.” With its Spanish acoustic guitar fade-out, it manages to be hypersexual and objectifying but never sleazy. It’s in fact as genuinely affectionate a song about getting regally shagged by a hot black groupie as you will ever find. The yin to “Brown Sugar”’s yang?