Pretending White City had never taken place, Davies resumed working on a new version of an old concept: Preservation Act 1, a reworking of 1968’s Village Green Preservation Act that had grown out of some new material he had written for a Drury Lane concert in January. It was here that he finally got to perform the show he had been talking about for a year or more, combining the songs of 1968–69 with ones that shared a similar mindset from the here and now, beginning with ‘The Village Green Overture’ and ending with ‘Celluloid Heroes’32. He also, for the first time, used movie footage and photo stills as a backdrop to what was very much a one-off performance. The visual backdrops included pre-war family photos (to accompany VGPS’s ‘Picture Book’), and images of Mary Quant, the Rolling Stones and the Krays (to go with ‘Where Are They Now?’).
But again, Ray felt he should meet the audience halfway. As he admitted to one music journalist, ‘I had to decide whether to present a Kinks show or a theatrical performance. I didn’t want to disappoint people who already had tickets for a Kinks show. So in the end, I made it a combination of the two.’ Not surprisingly, Drury Lane failed to abate those conflicted feelings ‘about playing my hits . . . [and] about writing new stuff [that] people felt . . . wasn’t as good’. Nonetheless, he persevered with this new version of VGPS, and by the end of August he had all but completed the first instalment of this Seventies re-creation of that Sixties idyll. Under duress from label and management, he even penned a mea culpa for his behaviour at White City:
Several weeks ago I wrote a letter to the world; it turned out to be a letter to me. But I do feel I made a decision, whether emotionally motivated or not, to change the format of the band. The White City was not a good place to say goodbye. The sun wasn’t shining, and anyway rock festivals have never held many happy memories for me personally. The Kinks are close enough now to be able to work as a team in whatever they do, and anyone who thinks they are only my backup band is very mistaken. There are still things to extract from The Kinks on an artistic level – whether or not it turns out to be commercial remains to be seen.
*
Like many a celluloid hero before him, Davies discovered the hard way that it was not so easy to get off the merry-go-round or to disown one’s past. The month before Preservation Act 1 appeared – to almost universal indifference – he heard about a nice little royalty cheque he would be receiving from a ‘cover’ version of the first important song he wrote voicing his disaffection with the painful present, 1965’s ‘Where Have All the Good Times Gone?’ It now constituted the closing track on Pin Ups, David Bowie’s album of Beat-era covers, which hit the number one spot the week before Preservation Act’s release. Ostensibly, it was intended to serve as Bowie’s fond farewell to the rock-star persona he killed off at Hammersmith Odeon in July.
Twelve days before Ray Davies attempted a genuine rock & roll suicide, Bowie had successfully, if metaphorically, killed off his own alter ego at the end of an exhausting fifteen months of unrelenting touring, recording and projecting. Unlike Davies’ White City epiphany, Bowie’s goodbye to Ziggy from the Hammersmith stage had made the world sit up and take notice. The symbolic death of Ziggy Stardust was front-page news in the British music press, while the near death of the authentic Ray Davies warranted a single column on page three. Such was the power of Bowie’s all-consuming conceit. And the genius of manager Tony Defries’ strategy.
Unlike Davies, Bowie (and his mentor turned protégé, Lou) had now delivered to RCA a series of albums that were all commercial and critical successes (Mr Reed had even taken a leaf out of Ziggy’s book, creating the concept album Berlin out of half-a-dozen Velvet Underground outtakes and then concocting a storyline to disguise his own creative torpor). In Bowie’s case, RCA had even managed to turn his two Mercury albums, (the rechristened) Space Oddity and TMWSTW, into bestsellers.
This boy from the ‘wrong’ side of the Thames had not only consumed all the A&R energies of the record label to whom Davies had also tied his fortunes, but in the year since his own Carnegie Hall debut had become the UK’s first bona fide rock star of the 1970s. And in the land of celluloid heroes, he had already started insisting on living like one. In the year leading up to Pin Ups, every little trick seemed to work; every gesture assumed a significance, not necessarily the one intended. That the great strategy was a rickety edifice, built on RCA advances and the inexorable necessity of cracking the American market, was a secret Bowie and Defries preferred to keep to themselves.
Not that RCA’s ongoing incomprehension always worked in Bowie’s favour – as evidenced by their decision to reissue the anachronistic ‘Space Oddity’ in December 1972. But as long as they didn’t enquire how long was this piece of string, Defries the puppetmaster remained content. It was one of his inspired ideas to purchase Bowie’s two albums from Mercury for the giveaway price of $20,000 each, paid for by RCA, who now leased the albums from Main Man for seven years for an advance of $37,500 each. By the end of 1972, Space Oddity was selling 15,000 copies a month Stateside, TMWSTW half that (probably because Mercury promptly dumped truckloads of ‘cut-outs’ on the second-hand market). In the last week of November both albums entered the UK album charts, where they would resolutely remain for the next six months. Coming hard on the heels of the belated chart-entry of Hunky Dory in September, it gave Bowie four albums in the Top Thirty – every one of them judiciously represented in the live set he was now touting around America.
The Fall 1972 US tour stands as perhaps the most leisurely in rock history. Bowie played just twenty-one shows in sixteen cities across two-and-a-half months, allowing him to settle into his Ziggy persona as he travelled by train between cities. Reporters were now granted very limited access to him and his doppelganger, relying on hearsay to learn that he had popped up again at a Mott the Hoople show, or at a Rodney Bingenheimer-organized private party. With the hype yet to hit hyperdrive Stateside, by the end of the tour RCA were looking at losses of over a quarter of a million dollars. On the coasts, and in traditional rock & roll enclaves such as Cleveland, they rose to acclaim the rise of Ziggy; but in the hinterlands Bowie felt increasingly like an alien who had landed without his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Thankfully, this was the ideal frame of mind in which to start writing songs for the album that would introduce Aladdin Sane to his acolytes.
For the next leap into the unknown, Bowie decided to go yet further into the cracked world of his alter-creation. It was, as he later observed, a necessary ‘process of transforming [oneself] into the thing you admire, becoming it, finding out what makes it tick’. But it was also proving ‘quite easy to become obsessed night and day with the character. [And as] I became Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie went totally out of the window.’ Already, he was leaving certain collaborators behind. Mick Ronson, his nightly foil onstage and mainstay of the Main Man sound, would later inform Tony Parsons, ‘Ziggy definitely affected him . . . He had to become what Ziggy was; he had to believe in him . . . They lived off each other.’ As Bowie began to believe he was a star by right, his trusty record producer, Ken Scott, remembers a much changed David turning up to begin work on Aladdin Sane at the end of 1972:
Ken Scott: He was becoming a different person, and if he had the same people around him they always . . . acted with him the same way as he used to be. But he wasn’t that person any more, so he couldn’t have anything to remind him . . . Bowie began believing that all the trappings of success which Defries provided, the limos and that kind of thing, had to be there. In fact, they weren’t trappings any more, but necessities.
The songs Bowie brought to these sessions had little of the ironic distance evident in the Ziggy songs. Composed almost entirely on his travels through the vast vistas of the new world, the album, like the alter ego, had taken on a life of its own. At least he was seizing the days. Barely was the ink dry on two of his latest crash-courses for ravers than he was in the studio, catching the moment. ‘Jean Genie’ and ‘Drive-In Saturday’, recorded in the Sta
tes at opposite ends of the Stateside trip, were already prepped to become the next two singles. He also now revisited the classic song he had donated to a moribund Mott the Hoople, ‘All the Young Dudes’, a failsafe in case he came up short with the right stuff just as the pop world was at his feet.
‘Jean Genie’, cut in New York before the landmark show at Carnegie Hall, was the intended signature tune to his latest chameleon change. And even if his US record label didn’t feel like issuing Ziggy’s second signpost, ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, they still wanted a single for the pre-Christmas market, preferably one in the American vernacular. Bowie duly obliged (‘Jean Genie snuck off to the city . . .’). Having test-run another testosterone-fuelled classic on his bedazzled audiences he already knew he had a hit on his hands.
At a handful of shows in November he also gave ‘My Death’ a respite, and instead played an acoustic version of his latest dystopian disquisition, ‘Drive-In Saturday’. Set in a society where people have forgotten how to make love, and have to re-learn the art from watching old movies, it was another disturbing view of the future from someone who had transferred his lovemaking technique to the stage, but had lost his own mojo in the process. Another contemporary song made this transference doubly explicit. ‘Cracked Actor’, appropriately written in Hollywood, was perhaps his most Bolanesque production to date. A Star is Born parable at the expense of a jaded has-been (‘he’s stiff on his legend, the films that he made’), Bowie again seemed content to project a possible future self-portrait.
Despite the huge physical and psychological demands now being placed on the still-starstruck Mr Jones, the above tracks proved that he was still writing strong songs. They just didn’t represent a seismic shift in his interior worldview. If ‘Watch That Man’ crossed ‘Queen Bitch’ with ‘Star’, ‘Panic in Detroit’ – set to a pitch-perfect pastiche of a Motor City riff – vamped on portents of revolution previously test-run on ‘Five Years’. In truth, he had been mining the same vein now for the past four albums. But this time he felt less in control of the process than ever.
Initially, for all his work ethic, he felt he was shy of an album’s worth of singles. His solution was simple: recut three songs already foisted on the UK singles-market: 1970’s ‘Prettiest Star’ (now as relevant to his own persona as his wife’s), ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ (beefed up with the sax sound found throughout Aladdin Sane) and All the Young Dudes’. In the end he omitted the latter two, after writing ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ and cutting his raciest cover to date {though ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ was originally down as a superior album-closer).
Fortunately, whatever his attendant conceit, the songs still retained a certain life of their own. As he duly admitted: ‘I have concepts. I have storylines for the albums, but . . . the actual inspiration comes suddenly, and is written as it comes.’ In fact, the whole album was as raunchy as the recent Ziggy shows. First, there was his almost pornographic retake on The Stones’ 1967 single, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, banned in the US back then; then there was that unnuanced portrait of a faker whose only contact with the opposite sex was his daily blowjob (‘Cracked Actor’); and finally, the one song that directly addressed his nightly stage ritual, ‘Time’, which ‘flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor’.
The hook on which to hang the collection, though, came after he fled America. Only at the last minute did ‘A Lad Insane’ become ‘Aladdin Sane’, Bowie writing the off-key title track on the boat back from America while pondering how many puns his audience could take. The (change in) persona, immortalized by the painted lightning flash that splits his face on Aladdin Sane’s iconic cover, was finally relayed to the media during a conversation between Bowie and NME’s Charles Shaar Murray in mid-January 1973, as he put the finishing touches to the hastily assembled album in the brief respite Defries allowed him before renewing their assault on the new world. When Murray asked who was going to take Ziggy’s place, his unabashed reply was: ‘A person called Aladdin Sane. “Aladdin” is really just a title track. The album was written in America. The numbers were not supposed to form a concept album, but looking back on them, there seems to be a definite linkage from number to number. There’s a general feeling on the album that I can’t put my finger on.’
The unabashed insanity at the heart of his marginally modified creation was supposedly just another case of Bowie as detached observer, using his work as his personal psychiatric couch. In the 1974 BBC documentary, Cracked Actor – made when he really had lost himself in his creation(s) (and cocaine) – he tried to make light of the lad’s schizoid nature: ‘Aladdin Sane was schizophrenic, which accounted for why there were so many costume changes – because he had so many personalities.’ Others realized that the feted star’s split nature was hardly now confined to the clothes he wore onstage. Mick Rock, still snapping away at Bowie’s behest, writing of Aladdin Sane at the time, inadvertently spilled the truth: ‘The grinnin’ madman is Mr B himself, and to him you’re just a pale reflection of some other world, because his look goes so far beyond you, even tho’ he’s looking straight into your eyes.’
That ‘general feeling’ imbuing Aladdin Sane and the shows reflected an outsider’s view of the new world’s vast landscapes seen from the other side of tinted glass in his private carriage/cabin to nowhere, presaging the role he would make his own in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Hence, presumably, why Bowie himself has never been quite sure what to make of the result.
In conversation, he has often been dismissive of Ziggy’s sequel, describing it in the mid-Seventies as, ‘Ziggy Stardust meets Fame . . . Aladdin Sane was himself talking about being a star, and hitting America . . . So it was a subjective [version of] Ziggy.’ He also suggested he had been trying to move on, but failed to remove the mental straitjacket that was Ziggy: ‘I didn’t want to be trapped in this Ziggy character all my life. And I guess what I was doing on Aladdin Sane, I was trying to move into the next area – but using a rather pale imitation of Ziggy as a secondary device. In my mind it was Ziggy Goes to Washington.’ And yet, by the time it turned twenty-five, he had come around to seeing what had seemed ‘almost like a treading-water album [as] . . . the more successful album – because it’s more informed about rock ’n’ roll’.
In part, this is because he had created the ultimate well-oiled rock machine in The Spiders, while Ken Scott was ideally suited to produce the perfect fusion of ‘born to boogie’ pop. And while the songsmith of Hunky Dory is almost lost from view, such is the strength of his creation’s icy grip that one can’t help but share the man’s strange fascination with his latest guise. What was not so apparent to English fans at the time was how much Bowie was distancing himself from the verities that had informed his work to date. Aladdin Sane was not just a ‘souped-up Ziggy’, he was a Ziggy who had found ‘this alternative world that . . . had all the violence, and all the strangeness and bizarreness, and it was really happening. It was real life and it wasn’t just in my songs. Suddenly my songs didn’t seem so out of place.’ All too soon he would call this place home.
Aladdin Sane was Bowie’s idea of a land grab – and the territory in question was America. By June 1973 Ziggy Stardust, even after the year of The Hype, had sold a mere 320,000 copies in the States – perfectly respectable sales figures for an English cult artist, but hardly The Beatles. So the tougher sound and salient subject matter of Aladdin Sane was designed to engage with more Americans. He had even toned down his luv-a-duck accent. And when, on 14 February 1973, he opened his second US tour with the first of two shows at New York’s 6,000-seater Radio City Hall, booked more on faith than sales figures, the whole second half of the show was given over to the live debut of Aladdin Sane (with just ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ being absent). He was evidently determined to get the message across.
But he was also tiring fast. By the end of the month-long tour, the set was down to seventy-five minutes and it was the songs from the new album that suffered. Meanwhile, the reissued ‘Space Oddi
ty’ was still garnering more airplay than ‘Jean Genie’. Shows on the coasts continued to generate Ziggy zealots, but large tracts of the subcontinent seemed determined to remain immune to his camp charms.
Returning to Britain by the start of May – via Japan, where a ten-day April tour was greeted as the return of the rising son – Bowie took another gamble on his mass appeal, opening his two-month UK tour show at the cavernous Earls Court. Although he sold out the 17,000-capacity venue, the show was a disaster, with many fans unable to see the stage or hear the band, such were the dreadful sightlines and even worse acoustics at this sorry excuse for a concert hall. If the reviews the following week were damning, by now he just wanted his life back. As he would later write in Moonage Daydream, ‘After Earls Court, I really did want it all to come to an end. I was now writing for a different kind of project and, exhausted and completely bored with the whole Ziggy concept, couldn’t keep my attention on the performances . . . Strangely enough, the rest of the tour was an astounding success.’
If anything, this is an understatement. Even when he played two shows a night – as he did on no less than eighteen occasions in May and June 1973 – the energy levels were astonishingly high, buoyed by still-ecstatic fans at every venue. He knew the end was in sight, and immediately after the last show of the tour he informed critical confidant Charles Shaar Murray: ‘Those were the final gigs. That’s it. Period . . . From now on, I’ll be concentrating on various activities that have very little to do with rock and pop.’ What he needed most was time to recharge his batteries, and weed himself off the drugs that had become a necessary crutch when he felt all crippled inside. For all his earlier protestations, the pace of his helter-skelter existence and the need to inure himself from a hostile world had inexorably led him – like Syd, Lou and Iggy before him – to artificial uppers. And it was fast becoming a problem:
All the Madmen Page 24
