Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  It was only as Garson turned twenty, once he was playing in the army band, and seeing the audiences’ reactions, that he saw clearly that his path was to be that of a musician. From about the age of twelve he had started to play at his school, Lafayette High School, for a regular show they held called ‘Sing’, and he was starting to be in demand as an accompanist for local productions of shows such as My Fair Lady or West Side Story. By the time he was twenty-eight, he estimates that he had played for over a thousand singers. It was in those school productions that he first saw and felt the appreciation of an audience, discovering how as a player he would have the power to move people through his performances.

  In discussing at length our perceptions and feelings about the experience of public performance, Garson and I continued to tackle the question of why addictions of various kinds seem to be disproportionately prevalent amongst performers. Perhaps the primary addiction of any performer is to the response of the audience. When the applause fades, the gap needs plugging. Vast numbers of people are unduly reliant on the approval of others to make them happy, but live performers have a unique opportunity for guaranteed regular boosts to the ego. Without special care this can lead them to lose the skills of self-validation.

  This moment in which the young performer first notices the effect they can have on an audience is very significant. It appeals to the performer’s vanity whilst tapping into the core of any insecurity they may already have, forming a potential pact-with-the-devil kind of implicit contract with ‘the audience’ as a generalised concept. This global audience, the sum of all the listeners, real and notional, which the musician will ever have, can quickly become a source of comfort to the nascent performer. I am certainly acutely aware of the ways in which public performance has affected my own development. It is hard to say whether a given type of personality wants to perform publicly, or whether public performance forms that personality. Perhaps there is a reciprocal relationship between the two. Garson interestingly says of his first youthful taste of audience ovation that he recalls ‘it felt a little dirty to me’.

  Acknowledgement and accolades are a healthy part of the social interaction of any performance. But where appreciation crosses into adulation, or the promise and expectation of it, then this ‘fix’ can quickly become one of the most insidious and subtle drugs of all. The musician’s work and creative activity, with their instrument (or voice) as the physical tool or channel, becomes entangled with their need for social validation. This may well prove a key point in the explanation of why other addictions so often follow amongst musicians, as this first process inevitably becomes less able in time to satisfy the need for validation or to plug the gap in that individual’s emotional life. It is easy quite quickly to become accustomed to the otherwise bizarre experience of having dozens or hundreds or thousands of people clap and shout for you on a regular basis. Then, if there is a period without such gigs, you can miss this, or feel low, and seek other substitutes for that comfort.

  The solution which Garson suggests to this paradox is the daily practice of gratitude and humility, meditating on the good fortune simply of being able to bring pleasure to people through music. He has managed to avoid an unhealthy dependence on public adulation (and the substance abuse which often follows from that) by making his interest in audience interaction about what inspiration he can offer them, and not what emotional validation they can offer him. Rather than become hooked on the applause, he became fascinated by the opportunity to move and inspire his listeners as an end in itself, with a sense of responsibility more commonly associated with a teacher or mentor than with an entertainer. He still enjoys receiving a standing ovation, but tries to use that to move forward and strengthen his art.

  On the subject of addiction generally, there is a woeful lack of effective research on the subject, so this is an area deserving of a lot more attention. It blights millions of lives around the world, and yet all of the most commonly touted ways of understanding and dealing with it have proved so far statistically to be a miserable failure. From this point of view, any fresh insight which arises from considering the special relationship of performance to addiction can only be a welcome step.

  A defining feature of addiction is ambivalence. Garson once drove Elvin Jones (his ‘favourite drummer ever’) uptown from Greenwich Village to pick up some heroin. He got back in the car and ‘even whilst he was actually nodding out’, he was lecturing Garson never to use drugs. The ambivalence of the situation is striking, and the conclusion inescapable that no one engaging in these things really wants to be.

  So many rock musicians have stated that as youngsters they got into playing music for ‘the girls’, the lifestyle, the fame or something similar. Garson had an intense passion for music from an early age which married the intellectual and the emotional. Having passed through the jazz scene he joined that first tour with Bowie in 1972 as a young married man with a baby, and he remains devoted to his wife and children over forty years later. Many of the leading musicians of that era have long since renounced drink and drugs, but Garson never seemed to need that escape or hedonism even then. In this respect he again appears as an extraneous presence in the field. He has been something of an outsider at each stage, but has had the confidence to be proud of his individualism. In contrast, despite its pretensions otherwise, the appeal of inebriation or recreational drugs, especially within musical circles, has often been part of an attempted socialisation driven by the fear of standing apart.

  Was Garson a ‘Spider From Mars’? Essentially not, despite playing with the band. His role was different. He came into the band in a different way, he came from a different background and – perhaps most significantly, given the importance of image at that point – his on-stage presentation was not visually part of that tableau. Garson’s long-term friend and collaborator in France, Jérôme Soligny, jokes in this context that Garson was ‘the only one who looked like he actually did come from Mars!’

  Specifically through his work with David Bowie, Mike Garson found himself at the epicentre of an international arts scene in the early 1970s which was only tangentially connected at all to the Brooklyn of his youth or the Manhattan jazz scene of his twenties. After that extraordinary night at Hammersmith in July 1973 there were no more public appearances for a few months, but in the autumn Bowie allowed one more semi-public outing for the Ziggy character, when he returned to one of his favourite venues from his earlier years, London’s Marquee Club on Wardour Street, for the filming over two days in October 1973 of a heavily choreographed and quite exotic show, ‘The 1980 Floor Show’. This was broadcast only on American television, as part of the late night NBC TV show, The Midnight Special, on 16 November 1973. Garson was there on piano and this show, which prefigured the Diamond Dogs album of the following year with its theme taken from George Orwell’s 1984, was another fascinating and surreal step for the twenty-eight-year-old jazz pianist and music teacher from Brooklyn, taking him worlds away from the jazz trio work in small clubs which he had been doing just over a year earlier.

  There were guest stars Marianne Faithfull, Amanda Lear and the Troggs. The audience comprised a couple of hundred invited guests from the newly formed International David Bowie Fan Club and a colourful smattering of celebrity visitors including songwriter Lionel Bart, acclaimed producer Tony Visconti, his wife at the time Mary Hopkin, Dana Gillespie and Wayne County. Writing in Melody Maker on 27 October 1973, Chris Welch described the scene first hand:

  ‘The Jean Genie’ rocked again and the band developed tremendous power. And although the PA equipment was minimal, there was no doubting the authority of David’s singing. ‘We’ve written a musical,’ he announced, ‘and this is the title song called “1984”. We’ll be doing the show in March next year’… The star, in high spirits, was remarkably patient. For technical reasons, such classics as ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘The Jean Genie’ had to be performed endlessly, often cut short after a few bars…

  Photographer Mick Rock h
as said that ‘Throughout Bowie was very patient, very up. He filled in the intervals between takes rapping with the audience, teasing, laughing. After each song he would disappear immediately, reappearing dramatically on cue for the next one in a new costume’.16 Garson, meanwhile, who still felt quite bewildered by all of this, can be heard more than doing justice to the songs with the great precision and feel of his playing. In the rendition of the piano part for ‘Time’, in particular, he even outperformed his own superb recorded take for the album version a few months earlier. He describes this live take of the song as having been slightly faster with a tighter feel.

  The Diamond Dogs tour saw more of a growth in Garson’s contribution. After Michael Kamen left as musical director the role fell to Garson during the second leg of touring, in which the elaborate staging of the Diamond Dogs show was replaced by the ‘Philly Dogs’ or Soul tour, previewing the Young Americans material. By this stage Garson really started to come into his own and played a key role in the live interpretation of Bowie’s songs, as well as leading the seven-piece soul band which both backed Bowie’s performance and filled the support slot nightly during the tour of North America from September to December 1974.

  Garson’s playing styles, though broad and extremely versatile, may not be thought of as immediately pertinent to the soul period in Bowie’s evolution. Yet when we listen to, for example, his gospel arrangement on the song ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’ (which was an out-take from the 1974 Sigma Sound sessions in Philadelphia for the Young Americans album and which later appeared on various reissues), his soul and gospel credentials are hardly in doubt. He became more relaxed as the 1974 shows unfolded, and the more tightly arranged ensemble this time placed him more in his element.

  He was working now with jazz saxophonist Dave Sanborn, for example, or the funky guitar of Carlos Alomar, to create a fusion in which he could thrive even more than a couple of years earlier. For the album Young Americans, mainly recorded in Philadelphia late in 1974, Bowie rehearsed the backing vocalists with exhaustive precision for many of the songs, with Garson always on hand. The exceptionally hard-working atmosphere of those sessions is well captured on some fascinating footage taken at the time.17

  By 1974 Mike Garson was truly starting to mature into a very rounded and versatile musician with great powers of expression at his fingertips. He felt more at home and more secure. In addition he now had more experience of being on the road and had already become one of Bowie’s more established group members. Certainly, his piano playing on the Aladdin Sane album was both striking and a key part of the sound, but this was still just an exciting splash of unnerving colour brilliantly thrown into the mix by Bowie and executed with sparkling assurance by Garson, as something shockingly alien to the rock genre of the music as a whole. On a song like ‘Sweet Thing’ from Diamond Dogs, on the other hand, the interplay had evolved to the point where Garson’s piano parts were no longer a separate interlude or musical visitor from outside, but had become integral to the structure itself; and this is even more obviously the case on, for example, the piano-led ‘Rock ’n’ Roll with Me’.

  In 1981 Garson was booked to play on a television special called ‘Get High on Yourself’, with various 1970s stars such as Bob Hope and Paul Newman, to encourage young people to say no to drugs. One of the special guests was legendary boxer Muhammad Ali. There was a slightly surreal sing-along about the dangers of drugs, for which Garson was asked to mime on the piano to something which had been pre-recorded by studio musicians, which he found amusing since he could have played it a lot better than what he was miming to. When filming ended, the huge frame of Ali approached the piano. He was charming as ever and asked Garson to ‘check this out’ as he played a blues scale. Garson recalls that it was with a very hard touch and not very well timed, but he did know the blues scale. He gave Garson a big smile and left.

  In navigating his career in music without recourse to addictive traps Garson’s assets have included his humour and his humanity. Touring with him in the 1990s as part of Bowie’s band, drummer Zachary Alford sums this up perfectly:

  Mike is… a very funny man. He made me laugh so much on those tours with his love of life and his uniquely Brooklynian view of the world. Despite the generation gap between us, we always felt like ‘two peas in a pod’ to use his wife Sue’s expression. I guess because he was so young at heart and I was a bit of an old soul, we met somewhere in the middle. He has a lot of faith in humanity and the goodness of human nature, but he’s not naïve. He’s the kind of person who feels mankind’s suffering and wants to do his part to make it better.

  6 - Supporting their eating…

  ‘The most inspiring musician I’ve ever come across’ – Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails, introducing Garson to the stage18

  FROM THE AGE OF FOURTEEN, Garson started working every summer until the age of twenty-two in the Catskill Mountains, 110 miles north of Brooklyn and otherwise known as the Borscht Belt. There were hundreds of hotels and bungalow colonies there, and it was a popular summer holiday resort with Jewish families from throughout the East coast, with lots of live entertainment. Many of the hotels or chalets were far from salubrious, whilst others were quite elaborate or refined. He progressed through the years from playing at the lower-end venues to playing at the highest. The fees accordingly went from $15 a week to $180 a week by his last year, for a six-night week. There were singers, comedians, dance acts and sometimes even striptease acts for the bands to accompany. He estimates he must have accompanied five hundred singers over these years alone. The range of the singers went from ‘horrible’ to people like Mel Tormé, ‘who was amazing’, and whom the seventeen-year-old Garson was delighted to accompany. Jackie Mason was just one of hundreds of comedians doing shows there in those years and Garson played for him two or three times.19 This period was a real training ground and he accumulated experience playing dance music and learning hundreds of standards, whilst also developing his skills in improvising and in sight reading. They also had jazz jam sessions late at night, where the young musicians learned to refine their art. Friendships were sometimes forged which would last a lifetime.

  It was during this time that he and his school friend, saxophonist Dave Liebman, formed their first band, the Impromptu Quartet. I spoke to Liebman during his week of performances at New York’s Birdland jazz club in August 2014, and he captured that moment:

  We were white middle-class Jewish kids from Brooklyn, which was a densely populated Italian and Jewish neighbourhood. Nobody even knew the word jazz there in those days… we went together to see John Coltrane and Bill Evans and formed the Quartet, we saw ourselves as some kind of budding young jazz musicians…

  A lot of the young jazz players taught or drove taxis to make ends meet, whilst aiming to play as a side-man to one of the great leaders like Coltrane or Miles Davis in order to make their name. Both Garson and Liebman did play with Elvin Jones, drummer to Coltrane, and Liebman later played with Miles Davis. When Garson went for lessons with Lennie Tristano, Liebman followed suit. He recalls how at band gigs they would call on Garson to play Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in full, from memory, to get the audience’s attention:

  Mike was always a very studious and serious musician, a very hard worker, classical and jazz… he could do anything… Mike can play a variety of styles, very expertly – he can switch between a bebop style and a McCoy Tyner style, and he can play pop, obviously, then he can play Chopin and Bach. He is a complete well-rounded musician and the truth is, most piano players are the best trained musicians on the bandstand, because they have to be – because the piano has four to five hundred years of history!

  It was whilst working in the Catskills that Garson met his future wife, Susan. She and her friends were in a bungalow colony just a quarter of a mile from the hotel he was in, Cherry Hill hotel. She was from Long Island though the other girls were from Brooklyn, as was Garson. He was playing Rhapsody in Blue and a little old lady, who was watching Susan watching him, poi
nted and said, ‘You’re going to marry him.’ They started going out together, six years later they got married, and they are still happily married some fifty years later. He points out that ‘in a place like LA, even fifty days of marriage is considered a long time!’ It has been very important to him to make the effort required to balance the life of a musician with his commitment to his family, never having to sacrifice either. He credits his wife with facilitating his creativity, calling her the ‘missing link’ in this story as she ‘holds the fort and makes it possible for this to happen’. I ask Susan how their marriage has flourished for so long, despite the pressures of touring, and she replies:

  Mike is my best friend, and we are always rooting for each other… ups and downs don’t really matter, as we know we will endure as a team. I think the travelling, in some ways (not all!), acted as a bonus for me. When we would reunite, it was always with a shared gratitude for having found this person in my life.

  When the offer came for him to work with Bowie, they were struggling financially, though they were ‘young and happy’. The financial relief the tours provided did, however, come at a price as it meant that she ‘would be alone with a brand new baby’. Both sets of grandparents lived quite nearby and provided huge support, which was a lifeline. Her recollection of the changes which her husband’s new position brought is vibrant and vivid even now:

  We were not even familiar with who David was at that point. But, we found out soon enough. It was a whirlwind. We had a new baby, and our life as we knew it would never be the same. It was a new adventure and we had no idea which way it would go.