Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  A quarter-century on, there has yet to be a rock ’n’ roll concert event that captured the global consciousness in the same way that Live Aid did, especially in England. For days, it was the common topic of discussion, uniting all classes and races. “There was a very strong sense of occasion about it, yeah. Like nothing I’ve experienced since,” Dolby says. “It’s a little bit hard in the States to understand this. Britain is a very small island and we generally have a maximum of six topics at a time. Not like us, where there’s multifarious info and culture. On the tip of everyone’s tongues here you can strike up a convo with any stranger in the grocery shop. Flopping was not an option.” The pressure to pull off a memorable performance was enormous even for veterans like Bowie, Elton John, Queen, the then estranged Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Who and Paul McCartney, especially when performing directly after energized younger acts like Simple Minds, Madonna and U2.

  Bowie and Dolby flew into the venue in a helicopter while Queen was performing their now-legendary set before the sold-out crowd. Dolby could see them on the Jumbotron as the helicopter descended. Bowie could only grit his teeth. “I’d seen things like the Cracked Actor documentary,” Dolby says. “That’s what I was expecting before I met him, and in fact all through rehearsal he was the ultimate English gentleman, gracious and demure, tan and healthy, polite to everybody, complimentary. He was anything but the cracked actor. But he was not too fond of flying, as you know, and the only way to get him to Wembley for the performance was in a helicopter, and I think it was his first-ever helicopter flight. Meeting up with him there, he was visibly quaking, wearing this big homburg hat pulled down over his eyes, and he was chain-smoking and very abrupt with the pilot. He became the cracked actor for the ten minutes that it took to get us into Wembley. Got out of the helicopter and into this motor cade weaving through the backstreets of Wembley and was absolutely loving it and I was terrified. Screeched to a halt inside Wembley Stadium, two hundred photographers inside, ‘Oh, I love this bit.’ A few minutes later we were onstage.” While some of his peers, including Zeppelin and Dylan (backed by Keith Richards and Ron Wood), failed to live up to their legends, it was widely noted that Bowie’s set, along with now-legendary performances from Queen in London and U2 in Philadelphia, were among the monumental festival’s high points.

  Bowie remained in London following Live Aid to complete work on his second major film role in a decade. Like The Man Who Fell to Earth, Labyrinth was of the science fiction/fantasy genre. The difference between the two could not have exemplified the difference between art Bowie and commerce Bowie any better. Whereas Nicholas Roeg’s film is sexual, cynical, paranoid and misanthropic, Labyrinth, written by Terry Jones of Monty Python, executive produced by George Lucas and directed by Jim Henson, is a sub-Spielberg, cloying and condescending Muppet-fuck. It costars cherubic future Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly as a young girl who wishes her annoying infant brother would be taken away by goblins. “Goblin king, goblin king, wherever you are, take this child away from me,” she pleads. When the boy actually is goblin abducted, Connelly must venture into the maze of hedges to rescue him from Jareth, the goblin king, played gamely by Bowie. The offended, militant queens who blanched at his “just kidding, folks” comments in Rolling Stone circa Let’s Dance were quite possibly appeased by the fact that Jareth could not look or sound gayer. “Sara, go back to your room. Play with your toys and your costumes,” he sasses as the crystal he holds turns into a snake. There’s also a vaguely creepy sexual tension between Bowie and Connelly during their dance sequence. “I think he’s got a lot of real chemistry with her,” a fellow rock critic once told me, and I tend to agree. Of all Bowie’s costars, from Candy Clark to Catherine Deneuve, Michelle Pfeiffer and later Rosanna Arquette (in the astoundingly bad The Linguini Incident), it may be the fourteen-year-old Connelly whom he generates the most intensity with. “I was just this side of getting it,” Connelly said of the shoot. “Getting who David Bowie was. He was really sweet. I liked him very much.”

  The script is full of Zen koans like “The way forward is the way back.” And yet for all its vulgarity, its easy to see why Labyrinth remains a cult hit on video and a favorite among the kids of Bowie’s boomer and Generation X fans. It’s just scary enough to amuse older children, and their mothers and fathers (or fathers and fathers and mothers and mothers) can revel in the high camp. “I’d be forced to suspend you headfirst in the bog of eternal stench,” Bowie says, threatening Connelly’s dwarfish Muppet pal Hoggle; the bog gives off a delicious stench indeed, and the execrable soundtrack was clearly recorded there. “Chilly Down,” in which Bowie semi-raps, is not exactly “The Rainbow Connection.” “Underground,” the film’s ostensible main theme song, returns Bowie to his soul-singer mode without any of the passion that he knew in ’75. The sensational pipes of Chaka Khan, who provides backup vocals, as she did on every single song released in 1986, are wasted. Upon its release in the summer of ’86 Labyrinth failed to connect, raking in just twelve million dollars theatrically. “It was a flop at the box office because it’s not a particularly good film,” says John Scalzi, film critic and author of The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies. “I think it’s pretty clear that Bowie wasn’t brought in to hide himself in the role of the goblin king, he was brought in so that the goblin king could be like David Bowie. They didn’t hire him to be an actor, they hired him to be a star.”

  A brief reunion with Iggy Pop on their third collaboration, Blah Blah Blah, resulted in some strong songs—and a minor hit with Iggy’s cover of the old Johnny O’Keefe rockabilly hit “Real Wild Child”—but Iggy’s real creative foil on that record was Steve Jones, the former Sex Pistols guitarist.

  David Bowie turned forty on January 8, 1987. In an interview with Charlie Rose in 1998, the year after he turned fifty, Bowie explains that the big four-inch was much more troubling. By fifty, he’d released two more very strong albums, 1995’s Outside and 1997’s Earthling; fallen in love with Web-based technology and new finance; and seemed to have regained his creative footing and interests. At forty, he’d lost nearly all of it. The artist who prided himself on being hands-on, controlling (he’d occasionally hum guitar solos to his revolving ax men) and perpetually inspired began showing up to photo shoots and allowing himself to be draped in whatever horrible, shoulder-padded and garishly patterned frocks the stylists deemed worthy. Photos of Bowie during this period certainly show him in a lot of animal print. In the video for “Day-In Day-Out,” the first single off Never Let Me Down, his 1987 follow-up to Tonight and the Labyrinth soundtrack, Bowie is skating. There’s a good little bit of metaphor. Like Tonight and Labyrinth, Never Let Me Down is not a terrible album, it’s just another slothful one, the third strike in a row. The hum and the groove of “Day-In Day-Out” starts out promising, but midway through, the canned quality of the backing vocals (which ruin “New York’s in Love” as well) grows wearying, and people like Hall and Oates and even Robbie (“C’est la Vie”) Nevil or Go West were doing the high-tech blue-eyed soul thing much better circa ’86 and ’87. Iggy and Steve Jones (with Bowie) do the Sunset Strip trash-guitar rock thing better on Blah Blah Blah than Bowie does here as well (“’87 and Cry”). “Time Will Crawl,” with its nightmare lyrics about nuclear meltdown (inspired by the Chernobyl power plant disaster in April of 1986), is one of the few genuine high points where Bowie sounds like he actually gives a toss for what’s coming out of his mouth and how. The only thing that keeps it from joining the Bowie best-of is the tinny production, something Bowie publicly regrets. He told the Daily Mail in June of ’08 (where the track was included in a CD of his all-time favorites), “There are a host of songs that I’ve recorded over the years that for one reason or another I’ve often wanted to re-record some time in the future. This track from Never Let Me Down is one of those.” Electronic percussion clangs and towers of cheap synth echo all over “Beat of Your Drum,” as if Bowie was watching Miami Vice with
Swiss subtitles as he composed the thing. “I like the smell of your flesh. I’d like to beat on your drum,” Bowie sings. This passes for lust from a man who once wrote, “This mellow thighed chick just put my spine out of place”?

  Physically Bowie looked remarkably unchanged. A journalist observed at the time, “Incipient crow’s feet is virtually the only sign of his age.” He wore forty well from the skin out. Inside, he seemed like his rapidly aging character from The Hunger, trying to convince those who encountered him, “I’m a young man! I’m a young man.” Midway through the record we are told all about the glass spider, the namesake for the monster tour that Bowie would launch in the summer of 1987. Over a dour string arrangement, Bowie—or is it Jareth the goblin king?—takes the spotlight for his “Stonehenge” moment. “Up until one century ago there lived in the Zi Duang province of eastern country a glass-like spider … Having devoured its prey it would drape the skeletons over its web … its web was also unique in that it had many layers like the floors of a building …” The tale goes on for nearly six minutes with unintentional hilarity (“The baby spiders would get scared and search frantically for their mother”) that makes a Bowie-ist long for the days of rats the size of cats and ten thousand people-oids.

  Peter Frampton, Bowie’s old friend from Bromley Tech, was surprised to receive a call one day while he was out on tour with Stevie Nicks. Bowie had heard Frampton’s latest album Premonition and was impressed. “There were long periods where we didn’t acknowledge each other, ’cause we’re in different spheres of the world, but every like five years we’d make contact,” Bowie said at the time. “The last time I saw him was when I doing The Elephant Man and he was living in New York. I always thought it’d be good to work with him ’cause I was so impressed with him as a guitarist at school.”

  Frampton, unlike Bowie, was no longer the superstar that he was in the seventies and saw the job as both an opportunity to play megastages again as well as a chance to reconnect with his old friend. He didn’t bargain for being eaten by the Glass Spider production, with its troupe of dancers (choreographed again by Toni Basil) illustrating each song, countless lighting cues and two full decades’ worth of Bowie songs to learn on short notice, each one with its own distinctive guitar sound (from the Fripp drone of “Heroes” to the Stevie Ray wail of “Let’s Dance”).

  “Obviously going from being the head honcho on my own tour to David’s tour, which was this huge production, was interesting,” he says today. “I loved it for the most part but sometimes the dancers would keep stepping on my pedal. Once I was in the middle of ‘Let’s Dance’ trying to do my best Stevie and one of the dancers turned me off … Another night during a very quiet number one of them turned my fuzz box on. It totally blew the vibe. The dancers were not my favorite things. I’ll never perform with dancers again. I’ll have them green screened.” Big eighties greed bled its way into the venue sizing as well and exposed Bowie’s reach as a bit short. “Toni had never directed a stadium show in her life,” says Mark Ravitz, who again designed the set. “I don’t recall a full rehearsal of the show top to bottom, so it never had a total cohesiveness about it, despite all the complexity of the dances. When Frampton wanted to do something as an individual Bowie came down on that. Bowie would get upset at me if I told him he could do it. There were a lot of egos. A lot of it just wasn’t as whole as some of the other tours had been.”

  “I want a performance to upset people to a certain extent, to keep people interested so that they say, ‘Hey, you can do that stuff—I’m not quite sure what it meant but it was really exciting,’” Bowie told the New York Times, with typical prescience, shortly before the tour played Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. He would perform twenty-seven songs from every phase of his career, over two full hours, under the eight steel legs of a sixty-foot-high, sixty-four-foot-wide crystal-bodied spider, lit from within like a Lite-Brite toy. The arachnid was built by Mark Ravitz, designer of the Diamond Dogs and Serious Moonlight tours. For the encore (Aladdin Sane’s “Time”) he would emerge from the spider’s head, high above the crowd.

  “I got up on it myself,” Ravitz says. “Anything I design, if I can do it, they can do it. So one day I got up in the head of the spider. Sixty feet in the air. There’s a three-foot square you’re standing on, steel pipe welded to it, strapped with weight lifter straps. Foot pedal to make the wings open up. You gotta shit a brick when you’re up there …”

  Bowie had gotten a pass with Tonight, which didn’t have to carry a megatour on its brittle back, but the naysayers were in the long grass for him this time around, likely because of the sheer scale of the production, which required two full sets, as it took four days to break each one down. It might have been the hair as well, or the cherry-red suit, borrowed from Huey Lewis’s wardrobe for the “I Want a New Drug” video. Unlike during the Diamond Dogs tour, however, he was no longer all-powerful and could not scrap the giant spider and reinvent himself midtrek. He didn’t even have anything to reinvent himself into. He had erected a ridiculous white elephant in the form of a transparent bug and was doomed to stick it out until the end. If anything happy can be derived from this period, it’s that the stinging reviews seemed to snap Bowie out of his torpor. According to legend, consumed with the contempt of a man cured of a gambling or cheating vice, he reportedly had the spider burned in a field somewhere in New Zealand post-tour. It took nearly twenty years for him to see it in a greater context. In ’87 it was incriminating evidence. “I have one of the prototypes of the spider body,” Ravitz says. “Bowie called me up years ago saying that the other one was in splinters. Now he wanted to save it for his archives.”

  Carlos Alomar was another victim of the Glass Spider’s jaws. After a dozen years and a half dozen culture-changing albums together, the New Yorker was given the heave-ho. “I knew David wanted to do a different kind of music. But I always thought that if I gave it back to him it would end up going back to the Spiders from Mars,” Alomar has said. “That’s exactly what happened.” Lost and aging fast, he went about looking for something, anything really, in which he could bury himself again. Few besides Alomar were expecting a band, and even fewer figured it was a good idea.

  Bowie caused the first (of many) art school fights that I would find myself in. Most of them were over girls or who could pack the most power into a vulgar couplet, but this fight was over whether David Bowie used some kind of lamb’s blood or glands or chromosomes to stay eternally young. I insisted that he would never. A junior painting major, one of those rich kids who dressed like a homeless person with designer combat boots splattered with paint, an ironic afro and a cocky rather than needy patina, insisted that not only was this true but it was also keeping him from dying of AIDS. “He doesn’t matter anymore, he’s just another AIDS casualty.” Bowie didn’t have AIDS. Maybe the kid was being “punk rock” or thought he was by making outrageously offensive and iconoclastic statements, but his remark seemed too tasteless and baseless to let slide, so I simply had to drink a bottle of Strawberry Hill Boone’s Farm for courage, then find him, confront him and punch him in the eye George Underwood style. This is how I remember it anyway. That kid was a rich asshole, but I see it as a completely punk rock thing to say. Bowie was an idol, and it almost behooved the current generation, especially the insecure artists therein, to take potshots, especially when your idol stops being, well, any good. And in 1988, before Tin Machine and goatees and atonal guitars were able to apply their damage control to Bowie’s career, he’d finally become fair game. He’d played Pontius Pilate that year in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and after Never Let Me Down there were those who now saw him as a comparably sinister figure. His acting in that film, by the way, is solid. “So you’re the king of the Jews?” he asks Willem Dafoe’s Jesus, and manages to keep a straight face while doing so. The hair, however appropriate (a Roman emperor’s “caesar” cut), is terrible.

  This would not be the last time I would defend the David B
owie of the late eighties, by the way. As a rock writer in my late thirties, I participated in a “best and worst gigs of all time” feature package for a British music magazine that will remain unnamed. The topic of Glass Spider as one of the worst-ever concerts came up and I was approached about writing it up … and I refused. “Why?” my editor asked. “I thought he was really good.” “Marc, he was a cunt.” This in the British sense of the word, of course, meaning, I suppose, “rich feckless asshole.” When I was in that audience at Giants Stadium, and I looked up to see the spider, I was thrilled, and that memory sticks with me. But I also realize now (with a little editorial prompting) that I was easy to get, already someone who would buy the shitty album and the overblown concert tickets and the T-shirts with the horribly cluttered and uncommitted design. It didn’t occur to me then that Bowie was making assumptions about my loyalty, and it didn’t occur to him at the time that we, his audience, would ever let him down.

  25.

  BOWIE WAS BEHIND THE TIMES in 1988. In four years, the indie rock and hip-hop that had gotten under way while Bowie was rebranding himself had started producing masterpieces as culture altering as his own best seventies work, fully realized and fearlessly executed albums that felt like works of modern art—Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth, Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Straight Outta Compton by NWA, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy and Follow the Leader by Eric B. and Rakim among them. Even heavy metal, long dismissed as puerile or bubblegum, now sounded essential, with Slayer’s Reign in Blood and Metallica’s Master of Puppets (both released the same year as Bowie’s Labyrinth folly) addressing serious topics like the Holocaust and drug addiction, respectively. Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction had combined punk’s rush with a love for smart, theatrical seventies rock like Queen, Elton John and Bowie. Bowie briefly dated Slash’s mother when she was a costume designer on The Man Who Fell to Earth, but he could no longer hope to keep up with the now grown-up guitarist as he had with those Bowie-influenced bands of the late seventies. Punk, post-punk, New Wave and New Romantic never made Bowie feel like an old fogie, but as he celebrated his forty-first birthday in January of ’88, he had to be wondering whether or not his creative fitness was something he could ever recapture. Musically, Bowie knew that he did much of his best work when paired with a strong collaborator, whether it was Visconti or Ronson or Eno. Erdal Kizilcay, a Turkish musical prodigy who’d worked on the demos for Let’s Dance in 1982 and remained a sort of all-purpose asset in the intervening years (playing bass on Iggy Pop’s Blah Blah Blah as well as the Never Let Me Down record and tour) assumed this role in the late eighties.