Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  For the long Reality tour, the stage design placed Slick to the left of the stage (from the audience’s point of view) with Garson just behind him on a riser, which allowed for a lot of eye-contact and communication between them, for example when Garson’s wild inspiration would strike: ‘Every time he would do something insane, which he always fucking did, I would just turn around and smile and go, “What the fuck, where did that come from?”!’ But he would always return to the underlying structure somehow just in time: ‘Mikey could do the most insane shit on the planet, and then all of a sudden, he’s right back to it. Never misses a beat.’

  For ‘Bring Me the Disco King’, Slick was not playing and would watch Garson from the side of the stage: ‘I used to love watching him do that… and always with a different twist, every night.’ Slick says that he had a musical affinity with Garson because he is also less inclined to stick rigidly to parts than some guitarists:

  We take the essence and we work around it. That’s why we’re there – in one way we are there as an anchor, but in another way as loose cannons! Obviously we stuck to the framework, but there would be certain parts in songs where you didn’t know what he was going to do for sure, and sometimes he didn’t know what I was going to do. I would throw something out and look at Mike, and there would be a big smile on his face – and vice versa!

  Slick believes that the band for the Reality tour was the most perfectly configured of any band line-up throughout the years he has worked with Bowie, both musically and in terms of personality. There was no competitiveness or ego issues. They played well, they were treated well and they had fun. He applies this to Garson in particular, and adds that they were always friends on stage, and friends off stage. That remains the case to this day. He says Garson is one of a very short list of people with whom he feels he will always stay in touch, and can rely on to be ‘consistent, honest and straight up. And as for Mike’s musical ability, Christ almighty, unless you’re fucking deaf, it speaks for itself!’

  I mention to Earl Slick that several people have said that Garson is a spiritual person, and ask whether he would concur. He has a refreshingly different take on the word, which he feels is often misused:

  Religion and spiritual have nothing to fucking do with each other. The way I look at spiritual people is that they have their feet anchored in reality, which Michael does. Mikey is one of the most straight-up, realistic people I ever met in my life, and to me, that would be the spiritual part. I call spiritual, honesty. Honest about yourself, how you act, how you treat people. Most people live with their fucking heads up their arse, they lie, cheat and steal, and then they go to church. Fuck that. To me, a spiritual guy is a guy that wouldn’t mistreat anybody or do anything to somebody which they wouldn’t do to themselves, and that’s Mikey. He’s not ever been malicious, he doesn’t hurt people, he does the right thing and he’s a straight-up guy. Now, that’s what I would consider spiritualism!

  He goes on to point out that Garson is very sensitive. ‘Michael, unlike me, can get his feelings hurt.’ If others are dishonest or disrespectful with him, or otherwise mistreat him, he really feels it. This, in turn, makes Slick all the more furious over the handful of times he has seen people act that way despite knowing how badly Garson would feel it.

  Besides being one of the most fucking amazing musicians I’ve ever played with in my life, he is just one of the nicest fucking giving, caring guys I’ve ever met in my life. And he can be one funny guy as well, he’s got a great sense of humour; one thing me and Mikey did a whole lot of when we were out on the road was really laugh, you know, and that’s good medicine.

  Ten years were to pass before David Bowie’s next album after Reality, 2013’s The Next Day, on which Leonard also played and indeed co-wrote two songs. In an impressively efficient publicity coup the new album was kept entirely under wraps during its production, and was revealed to exist to the world only on 8 January with the unexpected release of the single ‘Where Are We Now?’ and the announcement that the album would follow two months later. Gerry Leonard suggests that Garson’s lack of involvement on the album may well be attributable to these extraordinary circumstances: it was recorded in New York under a veil of total secrecy which was assisted by keeping the personnel local (Garson being based in California). In addition, most of the album is in a rock vein with no piano, the only exceptions being the first single released, ‘Where Are We Now?’ and ‘You Feel So Lonely You Could Die’, on both of which piano was provided by New York jazz pianist Henry Hey, who had been previously working with The Next Day producer Tony Visconti, and the synth and keyboard parts elsewhere were picked up by Bowie himself.

  In contrast, in 2006 when Bowie made a rare appearance at an AIDS benefit concert in New York and performed with Alicia Keys, it was only Garson who got the call. He has always been happy with this understanding that Bowie will call him if and when that is the ingredient he needs for a given project, and not otherwise.

  On the question of what Garson was like to tour with, Leonard explains how they were often on the bus together and shared various interests, including the quest for good food on the road, enjoying great conversations about music or spirituality over a meal. On days off Leonard would sometimes schedule a gig with his own project, Spooky Ghost, and Garson was happy to play at some of these shows as a guest on one or two tracks, in particular ‘The Palace’, which lent itself to some great piano improvisation solos. The ambient explorations of Leonard’s guitar make a beautiful contrast with the scattered, rhythmic and brittle pyrotechnics of Garson’s piano.

  Bassist Gail Ann Dorsey had never met Garson until she was asked by David Bowie in 1995 if she would join his band. She was aware of his having played some ‘crazy piano stuff’ on early Bowie but she had in any case never been a Bowie aficionado, having been ‘more into Queen and softer rock’. In the band that then started rehearsing for the Outside tour in the summer of 1995 there were two relative Bowie veterans, Garson and Carlos Alomar, and then to a lesser extent, Reeves Gabrels who had played with Bowie in Tin Machine a few years earlier. She felt privileged to be there and had no idea then that she would go on to play with Bowie for many years to come.

  She was soon brought up to speed by Garson with numerous fascinating tales of the early Ziggy Stardust days. At the time she had a girlfriend, Sara Lee, also a great bass player, who played for Gang of Four, B-52s and others. Dorsey later discovered that Sara Lee had called Garson and asked him to look after her as she was so afraid and nervous in this very high profile and exacting new job. Garson still says how touched he was by how caring and lovely this message from Sara Lee had been.

  So he took her under his wing, and she still feels that connection to him even today. She says that both Mike Garson and Carlos Alomar were there by her side to boost her confidence and help her through the first couple of years, which though thrilling were a tough challenge: ‘I was hoisted into this whole new world of music that I could never have imagined!’

  Alford and Garson forged a friendship on tour around their love of good food. Dorsey has a lot of footage she took of them at the time and says that she wanted them to have a television show called the Gourmet Brothers, as they were inseparable and ‘ate their way around the world for two years’, spending all of their per diems on fine food and delicacies which they would discuss and compare notes on. To this day Garson loves cooking, too, and uses that as a way to relax after a long or intense session of composing or other work. Zachary Alford also fondly recalls this mission to explore the cuisine of the world whilst on tour. He says that he and Garson would always ask the hotel concierge for the best restaurant in town, then compete to see who could order most exotically or extravagantly. Finally, they would then adopt the stance of food critics and pronounce their appraisals to one another of every aspect of the meal.

  And this is all before… the whole TV Food Network craze hit… We were dealing with classically trained chefs in restaurants that had been around for years. For u
s it was our education, which we were almost as dedicated to as the music we were playing!

  Dorsey had very little music training; she does not read music and, incredibly for such an extraordinarily accomplished musician, continues to play largely by ear. She pays tribute to Garson’s great teaching skills, since during the time of David Bowie’s ‘hours…’ tour in 1999 she wanted to know more about the music she was playing and had found a piano teacher in her home neighbourhood of Woodstock in upstate New York. He had her buying various books, whereas she had in fact asked him to go from basics as if she had been five years old and had never seen a piano before.

  Apparently, they give a five-year-old a book! I guess they do… I couldn’t get it, and even though I’m a musician, to me it was like… I don’t understand this, I can’t relate these notes to the keys and do all the stuff.

  Like so many misguided piano teachers, he was putting paper and notation first before the interaction between player and instrument. Garson asked how her piano lessons were going and asked her to show him something she had learned, using the little two-octave Casio electric piano she had with her on the road. They put it across their laps, and she tried in vain to think of something she could show him. He then said he would call out the names of some notes for her to play. When she took more than a moment to find a note he interjected, ‘Too late!’ and explained that she ‘had not learned anything’, in that the first priority should have been at least to visually recognise those notes and go naturally to them. This was her first lesson with Garson ‘and from that day on, I took some lessons with him and bagged the teacher!’ She still achieves her amazing performances without recourse to formal notation, but says she was shown a new approach to learning by Garson.

  Dorsey sees him with his grandchildren and also worked with him a few years back on an online teaching project, trying to help young students start from scratch, and saw how open and easy he was with children and students too:

  There’s no time projected, he’s just there with you wherever you are and whatever’s happening. He can just get on any level and relate to someone right away, and that’s rare… It goes back to him having that big and loving heart, really open, to let people be who they need to be. If the world were more like that we’d be in much better shape!

  Garson believes that 1. Outside will come to be recognised in time as being as groundbreaking as Aladdin Sane was twenty-two years earlier. In many ways it was the Bowie project most suited to Garson’s whole modus operandi as it was conceived by Bowie as an improvised creation, which Garson says was first put to him by Bowie as ‘I’m going to do this improvised album, and pull in a lot of my favourite resources’ – including Reeves Gabrels, Eno and Garson himself. Gail Ann Dorsey suggests that Garson’s addition to the line-up both in 1972 and again in the 1990s not only added a jazz aesthetic to Bowie’s palette, it brought an additional expressive spirit into the mix too:

  Nothing David does is just about the technical… all his compositions and the way they’ve been recorded, the arrangements of things on early records and even on live shows… it’s all very, very musical. I didn’t realise that until I started to play them as a musician… when you start to dissect them you realise how musical and incredible they are. So Mike, I’m sure… he’s the perfect person to fit that bill for David, because he’s not the traditional jazz guy but he had the elements that were necessary, I think.

  The styles which emerged on that 1995 album had brought out a very different pianist than the gospel or soul voicings which Bowie had elicited from Garson for 1975’s Young Americans, for example. Garson picks out tracks like ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ or ‘The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)’ as being especially experimental, and ‘The Motel’ is without doubt one of the ultimate showcases of Garson’s elegant fusing of his diverse stylistic threads.

  On ‘Seven Years in Tibet’, from Earthling (1997, co-produced by Mark Plati), Garson plays an organ solo (using a Farfisa sound generated from his Kurzweil) which, he recalls, Bowie told him was one of the best things he had heard him do since Aladdin Sane; that, although totally different in style, it was equally special. Also on Earthling, Garson himself regards ‘Battle for Britain (The Letter)’ and ‘Dead Man Walking’ as being of interest pianistically. The former features a frenetic piano interlude which builds from about two minutes fifty seconds with some absolutely classic Garson expression, with progressive layering and embellishment. In the case of ‘Dead Man Walking’, Garson says, it was

  the first time I ever played jazz on a Bowie album – straight jazz. Then I ended with this funny little Latin thing. It’s hilarious! David doesn’t normally like when I play straight jazz in his music, and I did it at the end of that song, I was just playing like it was a ‘burning’ bebop gig. But, against that kind of feeling beat. And, it was natural – I never thought they’d keep it, because there’s a long fade-out, but it was really great!

  Likewise songs like ‘The Loneliest Guy’ on Bowie’s 2003 album Reality also see Garsons’s contribution evolving in many ways beyond its role on Aladdin Sane, despite the earlier work still receiving more attention.

  Another song from the later Bowie albums of which Garson is deservedly proud is Reality’s ‘Bring Me the Disco King’. This song had first been sketched out by Bowie as early as the 1970s and had then been recorded for both 1993’s Black Tie White Noise and 1997’s Earthling, but was still not used on either, and only finally made it on to Reality with a dramatic makeover in which the earlier version was reduced to half the tempo (having started life as something of a satirical stab at the 120 BPM45 of 1970s disco). When it was finally unveiled in 2003 it had been stripped bare, leaving just a regal piano accompaniment by Garson and a four-bar loop of Matt Chamberlain’s excellent shuffle drumming (recorded during the Heathen sessions) to create the poignant sense of retrospection which now revealed itself within the song. Bowie’s patience in not using the song until it felt right, on the third album and the third attempt, elicits the exclamation from Garson, ‘Talk about integrity of an artist!’

  He vividly describes the scene as he was asked to play across this drum loop with Bowie on the mic. He was playing on a Yamaha synth which he had given Bowie as a gift (he believes it may have been something like an SY99). Bowie encouraged him to use a chordal progression to build the song rather than any individual notes. For most of the final two minutes he solos using mainly chords. He says he took elements of Brubeck, Shearing and Evans from the 1950s and 1960s and added some of his own sensibility. He felt the desire to give something to Bowie different from what he had delivered for Aladdin Sane or 1. Outside or Pin Ups and ended up going back to jazz chords. He says that Bowie did love some of the jazz he grew up with too, like Charles Mingus or Stan Kenton. On his own recordings for Bowie until now the piano had only ever been at most ‘jazzy’, with a twist (with the exception of the coda discussed above from 1997’s ‘Dead Man Walking’). But now Garson found himself on this one occasion pulling in this resource, and the risk paid off, as Bowie loved it. Garson was not sure whether other instrumentation would be added, but in the end the minimalist treatment was retained, even in terms of the Yamaha electronic piano sound they had been working with in rough:

  Well, here’s the thing. David – talk about integrity – we recorded the MIDI file into Logic, because that’s what Tony Visconti uses. The piano was out of tune in Philip Glass’s Greenwich Village studio46 so David said: ‘Why don’t you just play it on this? Then take the files and transfer it into your MIDI grand piano at home?’ I get home, record it, spend three days with my engineer, and a fortune just to get it gorgeous and right, by playing the synth recording through my nine-foot Disklavier player-piano and recording that with mics. Sent it to David. Guess what? He decided to leave it as the original sound, because he liked the vibe of that Yamaha synthesiser, that I happened to give him as a present a year earlier, and I was freaked out! I actually called him and said something like ‘David, how come
you’re not using this great piano one but that little toy?’ He said: ‘Because I like it.’ You know, you’ve got to love it and you’ve got to respect him for that, because he knows what he wants. He knew the integrity of the magic of that moment, intention-wise, is going on the acetate or on the CD. And, that’s being captured more honestly and sincerely than me reproducing and, maybe, having it more refined on a beautiful piano. And Tony is a great enough engineer that he still made it sound like a piano.47

  Backing vocalist Holly Palmer recalls how Bowie’s shows at the turn of the century would often start with an acoustic version of ‘Life on Mars?’ with just a spot on Bowie, and Garson playing the piano introduction, and how this would transform the space by creating a strongly focused atmosphere and a bond with the audience.

  Palmer’s first encounters with Garson coincided with having to learn the backing vocals for what she describes as ‘song after incredible song that we were rehearsing’. She had released her own album, but this was the first time she had done backing vocals for another artist. Having grown up with his 1980s hits, some of the earlier material was new to her, and she became more and more taken with it. Correspondingly, to realise that Garson had been playing with Bowie in the early 1970s began then to evoke some awe in the sheer weight of experience which his presence brought, knowing that he had been part of that history. She says that she found the whole experience very educational and inspiring.

  When introducing the band in 1999 on French Canadian television show Musique Plus, David Bowie jokes by introducing Garson as ‘Erik Satie on keyboards’ before correcting himself. This appears to have been a very happy period within the Bowie band, with much good humour and smiles all round.