Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  There were other cultural touchstones that were fully Bowie inspired that he had nothing to do with, such as the BBC’s Life on Mars television program and its spin-off Ashes to Ashes, both of which featured a protagonist trapped between two planes of existence (in 1973 and ’83, respectively) adapting to the sudden change as he strains to restore himself to right. A good Bowie metaphor, and with regard to both shows, an excellent soundtrack array: Elton John for Life, Ultravox and Visage treasures for Ashes. Visage’s Steve Strange even plays himself in a cameo in the eighties-set show. In July of 2007, New Zealand hipster comedy duo Flight of the Conchords paid tribute to Bowie with dead-on style parodies (that’s what Weird Al calls them, anyway) in an episode of their hit HBO show. The episode, entitled “Bowie,” features Jemaine (the one with the glasses and no beard) as Ziggy, “1980 David Bowie from the music video ‘Ashes to Ashes’” and Labryinth-era Bowie, appearing to a depressed Bret (the one with the beard and no glasses), who is having height-related body issues.

  “It’s not Jemaine, it’s 1972 David Bowie from the Ziggy Stardust tour … it’s all part of your freaky dream. Am I freaking you out, Bret? … People used to give me crap about being thin all the time but I just broke through their false barrier … The media monkeys and their junkie junkies will invite you to their plastic pantomime; throw their invites away.” Bowie encourages Bret to wear an eye patch for “a look,” and the Conchords return the favor with “Bowie,” as good an homage as Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom” and far less annoying than Liam Lynch’s smug “Fake David Bowie Song.” “Do they smoke grass out in space, Bowie, or do they smoke Astroturf?” goes one lyric.

  Once a cult figure and then America’s favorite strange object of fascination, a sexual spaceman who made Bing Crosby wonder about his holiday rituals, David Bowie, in his sixties, became even more mainstream then he had been in the eighties when the Target superstore announced in 2007 it would be carrying a line of clothing by rocker turned fashion designer Keanan Duffty entitled simply “Bowie.” According to the designer, it makes sense that Bowie’s outsider sensibility would ultimately find a home in middle-American outlets, among the vast parking lots and shopping carts. Art and commerce, rocking its eternal wave.

  “It’s safe to say that I’m a committed Bowie nut. So for me, the chance to design a Bowie-inspired fashion collection was too good to be true. The opportunity was the ultimate in synergy,” says Duffty. “We finally met in December 2006, when I proposed designing a collection inspired by David’s style for Target stores in America. Bowie has not been associated with a fashion collection under his own name before. So I proposed this idea to David and he was intrigued. After seeing some of my initial design ideas, he gave it his blessing. During our first meeting David suggested calling the collection KDDB, before rather amusingly pointing out that this sounded a little too close to the KGB. We decided on ‘Bowie by Keanan Duffty’—David wanted to be clear that his aesthetic was the inspiration for the line.”

  Duffty had no worries about whether or not Bowie’s more avant-garde sensibility would sit well under the industrial track lighting or whether the synergy might have any effect on Bowie’s cred. “More than any other rock star, Bowie is associated with bringing left-field ideas to pop culture and inspiring trends in fashion. I am absolutely sure that the collection is helping people, fans and nonfans alike, to get in touch with their inner Bowie. Although I didn’t reinterpret Bowie’s Labyrinth costumes or sequined jumpsuits though—I don’t think that would have worked in Texas!”

  Still, for all this visibility, there was still a void. The anticipation for a return to his first business order, that of singer-songwriter and performer, was so high that when word got around that Bowie would be singing backing vocals on the debut album from actress Scarlett Johansson (a Tom Waits tribute entitled Anywhere I Lay My Head, produced by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek and heavily indebted to 4AD Records artists like the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil), Bowie had to issue a statement downplaying his contribution as just “oohs and aahs.”

  “I’d seen him right before we left to take the drive down to New Orleans to record the album,” Johansson told me. “We were talking about Dave Sitek and how great he was. And on my way out I was like, ‘If you’re ever in town …,’ in the middle of nowhere Louisiana. And then Dave and I always talked about our mutual love for Bowie and how inspirational he’s been in every part of my life. Pubescence, adolescence. Later, I was working in Spain on this film at the time and Dave called me and said, ‘Guess who’s in the studio?’ I said, ‘Goddamn it.’ It was incredible. He came to the studio completely prepared with the lyric sheets. Had all his notes on it. Knew what he wanted to add. He uses his voice as an instrument, fills out the song as much as the horn section would or anything else. Without it it sounds completely unfinished. You didn’t realize how unfinished it was until he lays down the vocals. It’s more than him having a second career as a backup vocalist. His voice is such an instrument and it’s only gotten better. Fresher. It’s awesome.”

  At the time of this writing, Bowie has reportedly been spending his time with his family at his estate in upstate New York. He doesn’t even get to Manhattan as much as he used to by most accounts. When he appears, it’s usually to walk a red carpet for a charity event or a real occasion like the premiere of his son’s film Moon at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. That film stars indie mainstay Sam Rockwell and covers familiar Bowie-ist territory: an astronaut experiencing extreme loneliness during a space mission with nothing but the voice of his onboard computer, Gerty 3000 (Kevin Spacey), to comfort him. “It started in utero,” Duncan Jones told Rolling Stone, explaining his penchant for existential sci-fi. The film’s pacing is certainly a throwback to the auteur era of the late sixties and seventies (including Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth). Jones executes this with real confidence whereas other first-time filmmakers, especially in the Web-age, might be tempted to chuck out mood and tone for the sake of rapid-fire imagery designed to cheaply hold the attention of a Web surfer. The machinations of corporate greed and bursts of Hal Ashby–esque madcap humor (Rockwell vexing his clone by dancing to “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves) also ground it in the past (for the better). That Jones waited until he was already pushing forty when he decided to make his debut seems in hindsight a wise choice. The film will surely have a life beyond being the footnote in the larger Bowie biography. The screening that I attended at the Landmark Sunshine Cinemas on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was populated with sci-fi nerds, not rock ’n’ roll Bowie-ists.

  If I had to make an educated guess about his new material, I would say that it might sound a lot like the kind of romantic folk that Scott Walker, one of his musical heroes, is famous for (perhaps a bit like Iggy Pop’s underrated late-period Avenue B album). Bowie made yet another talking head appearance in the 2006 documentary on Walker entitled Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, which he also produced. This is a respectful way, I guess, of saying that his days of “Suffragette City”–style rocking are likely over now. And yet Bowie certainly looked like a rocker singing “Arnold Layne” with David Gilmour at a 2007 concert tribute to another hero, the late Syd Barrett, so I have already contradicted myself and joined the unusually long-running guessing game full-on. A David Bowie album remains “TBA” on Pauseandplay.com, metacritic.com and most other upcoming-release bulletin sites.

  And as I mentioned before, there were reports of him headlining the Coachella Music and Arts festival this year, and there will likely be next year. If he is in fact retired, then Reality is a fine album to close on, but he remains such a part of the rhythm of so many lives that imagining a world where David Bowie does not observe and process the same things we all see every day, whether it’s politics, sex, culture, or even bad TV and goof-ball YouTube clips, just feels, somehow, a lot more lonely. “How many David Bowie albums do you need?” I recall the writer Jon Savage asking me when d
iscussing the absence of new Bowie music. “Put it this way: if he was done, then I’d say good on him, and enjoy yourself.” All right then. Good on him. And enjoy yourself. But how about an EP?

  I am sitting at a small table under a hanging rack of fashion magazines inside Café Gitane, where Moby told me Bowie comes for his French roast. Or was it Italian roast? This is where the guy gets his morning coffee. He comes in around six in the morning, before any of the tourists or locals would arrive. He sits, I’m told, by the window and stares out at the church across Mott Street. I am not here to meet him. It’s long after six anyway. I’m here to be imbued by his spirit I guess. I’m here so that I might be reinspired as if first hearing Kraftwerk or the Velvets. I’m here for maintenance. This is church on Sunday shit.

  The warm environment, with its basket of tomatoes; bright yellow cash register, the color of a Tonka dump truck; and portrait of Jimi Hendrix behind the busy counter must have reminded him some of the Giaconda in that other Soho. I stare at the menu and wonder what he orders. Coffee, served with a little cube of dark chocolate, perhaps? Baked eggs with basil and cream? No, probably granola, now that he is heart healthy.

  I am now the same age Bowie was when he planned the Glass Spider tour and have survived similar follies. The pretty waitresses with their vaguely French air and pale green aprons flit about among the flow of equally good-looking patrons. Perhaps he leaves here and walks up Prince Street to browse in the aisles of the McNally Jackson bookshop.

  One day, maybe he’ll find this book in their music section downstairs, flip through it and say out loud, “No, no no. You got it all wrong.” I think maybe we all have ultimately. There is no getting Bowie right, really. It’s like getting religion right. People have been trying for a long time to get God right, even longer to get right with God. Maybe the key is to just treat the idea of Bowie the man—sick, sometimes scared, a little slower on his feet, possibly never to tour or record again—with as much reverence as Bowie the god. To view all that he has achieved simply as a great human achievement.

  People who know that I’ve been working on this book still e-mail me when they see him: “Saw David Bowie and Iman on 7th Avenue!” “He stared at your uncle for ten minutes in a cafe in Woodstock!” As if I’m supposed to throw on my coat and head over there. Their excitement always annoys me a little bit. I’ve seen him too; but again, he was just a guy trying to hail a cab. Those who are invested just like me, who believe, who are Bowie-ists, want to not just see but also feel and believe in him, but this is hard sometimes as he withdraws from the public (hear this David Jones, I wrote a book for you).

  Later, at the end of another long night at the bar, I let myself into the apartment, sleepless. I stand on the balcony, smoke cigarettes and looked down into the empty yard with the overgrown weeds, cigarette butts (none of them mine) and pink flamingos in the dirt. Tired of the news, I flip around the channels looking for a movie and see that The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of the Steinbeck novel, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, is beginning in eight minutes. I head downstairs, fix myself a vodka tonic and walk back up to the bedroom to watch it. The movie sucks me in. Banks are failing out in California and people have started talking about a coming depression. Familiar. All the drawn faces and glassy eyes of those wiped out by the Great Depression in the 1930s, filmed in shadowy black and white, make me start to well up. All their loved ones, everything that comforted them, have been taken. Even priests like John Carradine’s Casy have abandoned the Lord. They are ghosts too, roaming the dust bowl, looking for meaning.

  “There ain’t nothing to look out for and there ain’t nobody coming back,” one of them says. “They’re gone. I’m just a graveyard ghost … that’s all in the world I am.”

  Henry Fonda in his simple tweed cap: his head is cool. He’s just looking for work. Work is meaning. He and the Joad family finally locate a migrant worker camp that seems to treat the hard-luck Joads and their fellow travelers with dignity. There are dances and fair prices and there’s no harassment. The family remains but Tom can’t rest as long as there’s injustice out there. Before leaving the camp to go fight for the common man, he utters his famous speech: “I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look, wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build, I’ll be there, too.”

  I suddenly get a feeling of calm and find myself turning off the TV and laying my head on the pillow. My lids feel heavier than they’ve ever been. I realize that it doesn’t matter if I spoke to Bowie on the corner that day, or if I was cueing up his new studio album or standing backstage as he prepared to perform out in Indio, California, or if I ever really understood him after all of the years that I spent working on this book you are now reading. I will have time, and if you feel like you haven’t gotten him either after reading all of these pages, first of all, I apologize, and second of all, take heart. You will have more time as well. As he buries himself in what may be his final incubatory state—this one not a movie role or a Turkish neighborhood in Berlin or the series of tubes that is the World Wide Web, but rather reculsivity itself—it’s all right to miss him. But realize, thanks to his accomplishments and bravery and often blind foolishness, and of course, his music, there is nothing really missing now and there never will be.

  Whenever someone quotes from a heady book they haven’t read in full, he’ll be there.

  Whenever a cokehead closes the blinds at sunup because the conversation with his wired friends is too interesting to conclude, he’ll be there.

  He’ll be in the way we swallow hard, grit our teeth and step out onto the street after a new haircut.

  When bands from England and Iceland and Chicago and Atlanta are taking from their heroes and offering up some new music, he will be there.

  When that band’s next album sounds nothing like this new music, he will be there.

  He is like Tom Joad, only prettier.

  Bibliography

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