Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  Mike Garson recalls:

  This was going to be a rock gig, and it was going to be easy for me to play, so to speak. But what I didn’t realise was that it was a gift, and it was going to bring out my originality and my real style, rather than being limited to just the jazz vocabulary.

  The afternoon that Garson received that life-changing call from Defries, he was teaching a piano lesson at home in Brooklyn, whilst Susan was at work. Defries introduced himself as David Bowie’s manager. Garson asked: ‘You manage who?’ Defries explained that Bowie was an English rock star who was going to break America, and he asked Garson whether he could be at RCA’s studios in Manhattan in twenty minutes. His baby daughter, Jennifer, was by the piano, swinging in a little hammock (which he had written a song about, called ‘Jenny’s Swing’).

  She’s floating back and forth; I’m giving the piano lesson; Susan’s working – we’ve always been working people, we didn’t come in like the kings and queens of the old money from England, you know what I mean? We were just struggling people, and I said to my piano student: ‘Can you babysit my daughter? I have an audition!’ I got in the car; I was there in twenty minutes. I left my student to babysit – my wife wanted to kill me, you know. Could have been some sort of paedophile sicko, you know! [laughs] And he wasn’t, but you know, the mother gets scared. So, I run to the studio, I walk in, I see this booth. In those days, it’s not like it is now – there was a booth with a window that separated the control room from the studio room.

  The first thing he noticed was Mick Ronson’s ‘wild blond hair’ and high socks and boots, Trevor Bolder’s ‘wild black hair’ with silver on the sideburns, Bowie’s red hair, shorter but full; whilst Garson stood there in a T-shirt and plain dungarees, ‘and I didn’t know where the fuck I was!’ The details of what happened next have been told many times in the music press and in biographies of Bowie, but Garson is clear that many of those accounts have been inaccurate, and now offers to give me exclusively his definitive account.

  David Bowie, Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder stayed behind the glass and Mick Ronson joined Garson at the piano, greeting him in his broad Hull accent, saying, ‘Alright? I’m the guitarist, I arrange some of the tracks, I play some piano. We’re coming into the States, we need a piano player.’ There was at this point no clue as to how they had found him or what plans they had, and the whole experience was bewildering for Garson. He says now that he was dazed by the whole whirl of it. He is clear that just the night before, after his five-dollar gig, he had specifically said he wanted to go on tour with a rock band; and here he was, hours later, being auditioned for exactly that.

  Mick Ronson asked Garson to play by reading from a handwritten chord chart headed ‘Changes’, saying, ‘This is a song we do, can you read it?’ Garson says he looked at the chart: there was ‘a C chord, a C-sharp diminished, maybe a D minor, a G, maybe E minor or whatever; there were some lyrics on there, but the intro didn’t have words, just chord changes. Ronson held it and was asking, “Alright? Can you play this?” ’ Garson went straight into it, embellishing from those chords. The recorded version had been out for a while, but Garson had definitely not yet heard it at that point. They stood and watched what Garson did with this bare chord structure. After just the first few bars, Ronson abruptly stopped Garson and said, ‘You’re in! You’ve got the gig.’ Garson recalls:

  I thought either he’s nuts or I’m on an LSD trip, or somebody doesn’t know something, or somebody really knows something, and gets it real quick! But, I didn’t know which one it was, because I hadn’t even got going. But… he’s a piano player, he knew I could play. And they’re all watching from behind the glass…

  His first reaction was to think ‘be careful what you ask for’, and wonder whether he really did want this gig. He had his baby at home, his wife at work (and coming home soon, possibly in time to find his student babysitting). This would mean being away a lot. A moment later he was shown an itinerary. The first gig of their tour across America was in Cleveland, Ohio… and only a week away. That was it; his whole life shifted. He was hired initially just for eight weeks, but would in fact stay on the tour until it ended in London the following July, having been right across the USA, Britain and Japan. He was handed a cassette tape with the whole set on it, and had just days to learn these songs and to familiarise himself with the chord progressions through which his life would now change direction dramatically.

  At his one full rehearsal, in Cleveland, before joining the tour, Garson had a dramatic introduction to this new world he was entering. At the jazz gigs he had been used to, the piano was usually an upright or possibly a broken-down baby grand; there would be no monitor speakers, the bass player would have gut strings and no amp. He sat down at a nice grand piano and pointed out to Mick Ronson that the PA speakers were facing the wrong way. Ronson replied, ‘No, that’s your monitor system, the main speakers are up there!’ and pointed up to the high ceiling which carried some huge speakers. Garson exclaimed, ‘Holy fuck, where am I?’

  Defries had created a vacuum around Bowie’s arrival in the States, whereby only the smallest clues were allowed through about what was coming. There was a genuine air of mystery cultivated around both Bowie and also his band, the Spiders From Mars, in the States. Soon after joining the tour, Garson found himself within the extended entourage and being installed in luxurious accommodation all over the States, in places like the Beverly Hills Hotel, where his wife and child joined him and stayed with him in one of the hotel’s bungalows.

  Despite his decision to steep himself in jazz over several years in his late teens, he still felt that he had not found his own voice. Ironically, it was being thrust into the tighter structure of rock music which allowed him the musical space and opportunity to create his unique style, by fusing elements of classical, jazz, rock and pop. He attributes this to the tight eighth-note rhythm of most rock music, compared with the swing and syncopation of jazz, in which a series of triplets each have their middle note ‘missing’ from the rhythm. He characterises this as the swing of ‘ching, (chinga), ching’ giving way to the rock music idiom of straight ‘clap, clap, clap, clap’. He started to flourish by embellishing creatively from within this tighter framework and straight structure.

  It took a while for him to realise his achievement, as he found himself being harshly put down by both classical friends and jazz fiends for his participation in pop. He feels he mistakenly bought into that criticism, and started to believe that what he was doing was of little value compared with the discipline of classical music or the inscrutable complexities of jazz. But by the 1990s, and the second wave of his work with Bowie, the internet had changed perceptions and communications, with the emergence of email permitting an easy flow of international feedback, and he started to receive a flood of positive comments from fans, including a wave of emails from those who had been inspired in all kinds of ways by his extraordinary playing on Bowie’s work of the early 1970s (indeed, one of these emails was from me).

  He has received hundreds of messages specifically from people who were inspired to take up music or piano thanks to his inspiration, and especially owing to the wonder they felt as rock fans on hearing his 1973 avant-garde (and slightly Latin) piano solo on Bowie’s song, ‘Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)’. These people had not been able to communicate this so easily at the time, in the absence of email. That wave of retrospective approbation in the 1990s was also vindicated by the later Bowie albums on which Garson played, such as 1. Outside – The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper Cycle (1995), to give it its full title, or Reality (2003). On these his piano playing was now adorning songs which were often even more left-field and performance-art-oriented than the glam-rock tracks of the early 1970s.

  For children like me, growing up in the London suburbs of the 1970s, going to piano lessons was not seen as something ‘cool’. Then this credibly other-worldly music appeared in the form of the Aladdin Sane album, featuring layers of elaborate p
iano over many of the songs, which was the one record that summer which numerous young people were speaking of as the pinnacle of fashion and good taste. With this new perspective, and Garson’s sounds to aspire to, playing the piano started to seem rather more appealing as a craft worth cultivating.

  Garson says that he had no awareness at the time of any of this. He simply judged what he was being asked to do by the standards of his classical training, and felt in fact that it was not enough of a challenge. He says that he felt so little stretched at times that he was ‘dying’: that is, wilting not blooming. Now, however, he listens back and feels impressed that he could play that well in his twenties. He feels his self-esteem may have been helped at the time if he had been more aware of the enormous popularity of what he was involved with. But surely Bowie must have preferred it this way, that the jazz pianist he had cleverly added to his palette of musical colour was himself in his own world and immune to fashions or rock ambitions and vanities. Ironically, in the rock world, Garson was as other-worldly as Bowie was to mainstream society.

  He recalls one instance of his alienation from this world into which he had entered. It was an after-show party when the tour reached New York. Garson stepped into a huge hall full of the tour retinue to see the bizarre spectacle of dozens of people simultaneously and openly sniffing lines of cocaine from the tables. He felt awkward, out of place and dislocated, out of his comfort zone and out of his depth. He was still very new to this world and hardly knew anyone there apart from Bowie himself and the band. Now he was not focusing on his playing or the songs he had to perform as he had been an hour earlier; he was simply asking himself where he was, and feeling like he was on another planet.

  He felt like he wanted to hide, not physically, but rather from himself, to cover his eyes, to flee, as he felt so overwhelmingly that somehow he did not belong there. At the same time he felt no moral judgement at all against what they were doing, simply that it was not for him and he felt totally alien. He was walking around like a zombie, grateful that these massed revellers were too out of it even to notice him. This theme of alienation would recur many times and proves constant. Even the cosmic space-alien themes in many of the songs he would perform with Bowie were powerful expressions of the pain of being alienated from others and even more from oneself.

  During his first American tour with Bowie, there was a selection of songs on which the piano was not needed, and at that point Garson would slip front-of-house and watch the show from the audience. He soon realised that ‘something’s going on here. This guy is brilliant… He had a charisma, he had a great voice, he looked great and he had a great band… even if you didn’t like it, you’d have to be an idiot not to see he had something going on…’ Compared with the classical and jazz repertoire, the material he had to learn for the tour boasted simplicity, although the modulations of certain of the songs, such as ‘Life on Mars?’, ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’ and, added to the set in May 1973, ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’, had a good deal of subtlety too. And Garson was now helping to interpret and flesh out these gems of Bowie’s, while evolving his own style in a parallel application of self-discipline.

  Later, in the recording studio, Bowie would generally strum the chords on a guitar when introducing a new song like ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ to the band. For that beautifully baroque ballad, which closes the Aladdin Sane album, Garson then played the startlingly exquisite piano part in conjunction with, and partly steered by, Mick Ronson’s sensitive and typically ecstatic guitar work on it, together creating the delicate dialogue between piano and guitar which closes the album.

  Some years later it finally became apparent to Garson just how he had come to receive the phone call that day from Tony Defries as Bowie’s manager. Just a few weeks earlier he had played on an album, I’m the One, by avant-garde New York singer, songwriter, musician and performance artist, Annette Peacock. The band Garson was in at the time, Brethren, who played rock with blues and folk influences, had been brought in as backing band for the album. When Bowie arrived in the States and was looking for a pianist, it was Peacock who recommended Garson to Bowie.

  Bowie and Peacock were recording on the same label. From this connection Defries had started to manage her as well as Bowie, and this was the link which ultimately led to Garson being approached. It seems Bowie may initially have asked Peacock to do the tour with him, either as his pianist or as a separate support act. She certainly did play piano, though not to Garson’s standard. Bowie respected Peacock and asked her if she knew a piano player. She told him that the pianist who had just played on her album would be perfect for him. Mick Ronson also knew Peacock. Certainly Bowie admired her material and would have taken her recommendation seriously.3

  She remained a definite influence on Bowie over the years, and Ronson covered two of her songs in his later solo work: ‘I’m the One’, with Garson on piano, on his 1974 album, Slaughter on 10th Avenue, and ‘Seven Days’ as the B-side to his 1975 single ‘Billy Porter’. The latter had piano played by Ronson himself, but an alternative version, which emerged on the 1997 CD reissue, has an unmistakable Garson performance of blistering blues piano together with a Hammond B3 organ solo by him too.

  Funnily enough, Garson only found out many years later that Peacock had personally recommended him and given Defries his number. For about twenty years, Garson always assumed for some reason that the recording engineer and producer who had worked on the Peacock sessions a few weeks earlier, Bob Ringe, had been the one to recommend him. Bob Ringe went on to become an agent for the William Morris theatrical agency. Every time Garson saw this engineer over the next twenty years he thanked him profusely for having given him such a huge break, and every time the engineer declined to correct him.

  Peacock was a fiercely independent spirit and one of the world’s first musicians to make use of a Moog synthesiser. Not only was she instrumental in introducing Garson to Bowie and thus to a much wider audience, she has also been a key creative force in her own right, helping to overturn expectations with an experimental and truly creative approach to music and performance over many years. I am pleased to say that, unlike many previous accounts of this moment in rock history, this description of what happened has been referred to Annette Peacock herself, who confirms that this account matches her own recollection and that ‘the arc of the story is fine and it reads well’.

  Once Garson had been brought on board and recruited to the band, things moved very quickly. He had to rearrange his whole life within a week or two, with some intense rehearsal and then the first gig in Cleveland, Ohio just a few days later. Susan joined him at various points on tour, staying with him in Los Angeles, and also later in Florida. They were young, and this was an opportunity to travel. She was also at the show at the legendary Carnegie Hall in New York. There is an old joke about a young visitor arriving in New York for a concert and asking a passer-by, ‘How do I get to Carnegie Hall?’ only to be met with the response, ‘… practice, practice, practice!’ In Garson’s case his eight hours daily of almost meditative piano practice had already more than prepared him to perform in such an auspicious venue.

  Initially, for Garson this was a good opportunity to do some much larger gigs and earn some money. He was away from the musical settings to which he was most accustomed, but was both willing and able very quickly to adapt. Soon, however, it became apparent that he had become part of something which was going to be huge. In those days a real piano would be used on stage (though not at all since the 1990s, Garson points out). He had his music on the piano for the first date of the tour in Cleveland. They finished their last encore and the rest of the band took off down a tunnel backstage and out into the waiting limousine, whilst the stage was being mobbed with crowds of fans in hot pursuit. Garson had been unaware of the need for this routine, learned by the others during their British tour earlier that year, and was left alone on stage collecting his sheets from the piano, when, as if in slow motion, ‘I saw all these people rushing to
ward the stage and I thought, “I’m going to get mowed over!” So I took off, ran my head off, and managed to get into the limo just as they were closing the door and pulling away!’

  For the young jazz musician, this was all a huge cultural shock. In the smoky little jazz bars of New York, rather than being mobbed, the only risk of misadventure on the stage was falling off it like the drunk pianist with Elvin Jones whom Garson had replaced several years earlier. The polite acknowledgement of certain solos and other nuances, which is the customary protocol for a jazz audience is, by comparison with rock shows, more like the applause at an old English village cricket match.

  Garson sees these large-scale rock concerts as ‘events’ rather than aesthetic or artistic communications. He played with the Smashing Pumpkins in Minneapolis Town Centre for their 1998 free concert as part of a charity tour, in front of over 100,000 people – it was the only town which would let them do this – and could not hear himself or the full band, just the guitars, distorted through the hysteria. And yet he found the experience exciting, ‘phenomenal’, as, no doubt, did everyone else there. He ponders the recollection of it. ‘So much was just a continuous hiss… Hiss-teria!’

  In contrast to the Smashing Pumpkins at Minneapolis, jazz concerts are exercises in intimate communication by the participants with each other, as well as with the audience. In some ways the jazz audience respectfully eavesdrops on a tight and thrilling group dynamic between the players on stage, who create a collaborative and spontaneous improvisation. At a rock show, solos might be acknowledged, but only as part of the acclaim for the show as a whole, as personified by the star at its centre. Garson explains that, when playing for a rock star,

  You’re supporting another artist. And there’s not room for two stars, so to speak, so you know the role to take. I was there to support Bowie. I would love playing and I would always play my best when I had a solo, but it was to enhance the song. I would look forward to that, but even then my role was to support the show. And to give him a chance to rest his throat, and get variety… but David Bowie does give people their space; he is very, very gracious on stage. He’s wonderful to work for, just wonderful… It’s his musicality, he’s dead serious about his music.