All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  If so, he must have left that evening chortling to himself about how Waters was still the same po-faced, uptight control freak he had been back in the day. There are enough clues in Barrett’s few reported words that he was having a rare old time. At one point – according to the other Roger’s version of events – Barrett actually stood up and said, ‘Right, when do I put my guitar on?’ Waters broke it to him gently, ‘Sorry Syd, the guitar’s all done.’ Now what sort of myopic muso can’t see the validation even a scratchy guitar riff from the man himself would have brought such a track? After all, the side-long song had no shortage of Barrettian touches, of which that little four-note guitar riff that introduces part one was the most blatant, self-consciously evoking Syd Barrett’s lead-in guitar phrase on ‘Astronomy Domine’. It seems Waters couldn’t even bring himself to humour Syd by pressing record, then wiping the result from the final master – if it was anything like those recordings made the previous August.

  Further proof that the wise fool still knew how to laugh at himself, and the world of rock, came when Waters played Syd the finished track and wondered aloud, ‘Well, Syd, what do you think of that?’ His response was a peach: ‘Sounds a bit old.’ Been there, done that; try to follow me if you can. By June 1975 Barrett may have lost that understanding for good, but he still had the jump on the leery Waters. He, at least, knew what French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud meant when he had written, a century earlier, high on absinthe: ‘A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless and systematic disorganization of the senses . . . and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them!’

  By now Waters had genuinely come to believe he could ‘aspire to Syd’s crazed insights and perceptions’, a claim he was to finally make in print in 1987 as part of a one-man campaign to denigrate the very notion of the Floyd carrying on without him. At least Barrett probably left Abbey Road knowing they were no longer ‘his band’. They were the answer to every rock promoter’s prayer.

  In 1975 Rock itself was unrecognizable from what it had been in 1968. And although it had travelled a long way it had also lost a fair few of the brightest and the best, and not just those who had taken too much for granted. Of those who had always been enticed by the bright lights, big cities across the pond, some willingly allowed themselves to be whisked away into California’s air-conditioned nirvana where they could indeed be comfortably numb.

  *

  In the period 1974–78, Keith Moon, David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Peter Green and John Lennon would all temporarily relocate to la-la-land. For Moon the Loon, the life of the rock star was just too enticing a substitute for real life, and he had soon returned to his manic ways. A protracted spell in Los Angeles in 1974 convinced him – and not only him – that this was the life. But as the band’s manager recalled to Moon’s biographer, if there was one place Keith Moon shouldn’t be allowed, it was the headquarters of hedonism that was L.A., c. 1974–75:

  Chris Stamp: L.A. was a fucking nightmare. [Keith] was living in one of these expensive, cold Beverly Hills houses. Ringo and Harry Nilsson came around a lot and . . . they were fucked up. And they were good people. Surrounding them were the roadies and the drivers and the dealers . . . [and] they were even more fucked up. So it was madness. The wrong place for him to be – because L.A. is just L.A.

  Moon was hardly alone in finding this Babylon of the West to his jaundiced taste. In the city where it was never winter, they had their own special snow and it got up people’s noses. Moon was delighted to find a rock-solid ex-pat community of would-be hedonists with not a party-poopin’ wife in sight. He had already experienced the tail-end of L.A. rock’s most infamous lost weekend, the 1973 booze-fuelled bender that culminated in the infamous John Lennon-produced Harry Nilsson album, Pussycats – ostensibly contributing drums to two of the more ramshackle tracks (‘Loop de Loop’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’).

  Inspired, if that is the right word, by an album that pretty much killed Nilsson’s career stone-dead and sent Lennon hurtling back to the missus, Moon returned to L.A. the following summer, after a few large-scale Who shows replenished the coffers, to begin his own solo album, Two Sides of the Moon. These sessions would make the Pussycats sessions sound like Please Please Me. Becoming the stuff of legend, they proved once and for all that cocaine, willing chicks and creativity do not mix. The resultant platter would make MCA choke on the bill for an event with hardly any paying diners.

  Into this modern Sodom arrived in early September 1974 a certain David Bowie, halfway through a six-month on–off US tour designed to promote his latest fab waxing, Diamond Dogs, and to put to bed once and for all the alienating androgyny of Aladdin and Ziggy Along for the ride was a BBC documentary crew, and an English director, in Alan Yentob, who wanted to know, what gives? Bowie, caught between rock and a more soulless place, decided in a rare moment of articulacy to come clean to Yentob about all those earlier creations of his:

  David Bowie: One half of me is putting a concept forward, and the other half is trying to sort out my own emotions, and a lot of my ‘space’ creations are, in fact, facets of me . . . [though] I wouldn’t even admit that to myself at the time . . . Ziggy would relate to something . . . [in] me. Major Tom, Aladdin Sane, they’re all facets of me, and I got lost at one point. I couldn’t decide whether I was writing characters, or whether the characters were writing me. [1974]

  In his coke-fogged mind, Bowie thought he was being mighty clever, owning up to a glorious past he was disowning nightly onstage. Already, he had managed to convince himself he had wriggled free of those all-consuming creations. Backstage at his ‘triumphant’ return to Radio City Music Hall, a month later, he told Alice Cooper: ‘It’s easy to get trapped by your stage presentation; the secret is to find a way to move on.’ Yet it was Cooper who had moved on. He had just disbanded the bestselling band of the same name, and begun work on his very own welcoming Nightmare. Whereas Bowie had simply abandoned everything he had ever believed in, even as he sought to present his volte-face as another artistic act of (re)creation:

  David Bowie: About two years ago, I realized I had become a total product of my concept character Ziggy Stardust. So I set out on a very successful crusade to re-establish my own identity. I stripped myself down and took myself down and took myself apart, layer by layer. [1976]

  Once again, Bowie was informing anyone who would listen that he would be ‘concentrating on various activities that have very little to do with rock and pop’. And this time he wasn’t joking. What he didn’t admit was that the change had been forced on him by the economics of touring the States with his lamest collection since he was a denizen at Deram. Two punchy preview 45s culled from Ziggy’s reject locker – ‘Rebel Rebel’ and ‘Diamond Dogs’ itself – did not an album make. And he was being called to account. Lester Bang’s August 1974 Creem review of Diamond Dogs – surely assiduously assimilated by an avid rock-press reader like Bowie – did not sugar-coat the facts:

  Diamond Dogs reaffirms what an incredible producer Bowie is even if most of the songs are downright mediocre . . . He was always weary, and pretentiously likes to think of himself as the prescient chronicler of a planet falling to pieces . . . [but] this is the sloppiest Bowie album yet . . . He really doesn’t seem to care as much as he used to.

  The man was losing even the elements of the American rock constituency he had previously thought he could rely on. As such it was doubly important to his commercial well-being Stateside that he told everyone he had been kidding all along and that, although it had been a helluva ride, it was over:

  David Bowie: At the time that I did Ziggy Stardust, all I had was a small cult audience in England from Hunky Dory. I think it was out of curiosity that I began wondering what it would be like to be a rock & roll star. So basically, I wrote a script and played it out as Ziggy Stardust onstage and on record. I mean it when I say I didn’t like all those albums – Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups, Diamond Dogs, David Live. It wasn’t a
matter of liking them, it was, ‘Did they work or not?’ Yes, they worked. They kept the trip going. [But] now I’m all through with rock & roll. Finished. I’ve rocked my roll. It was great fun while it lasted, but I won’t do it again. [1975]

  What he wasn’t inclined to admit was that his latest gambit, the Diamond Dogs tour – running initially from June through July 1974 – had lost a fair few old fans, while barely winning over an equivalent number of new fans. On the tape of the third show, Toronto (16 June), fans can be heard shouting, ‘Where is Ziggy? We want Ziggy!’ Yet even before the arrangements had found their feet he was recording shows in Philadelphia for a live album, at the insistence of Defries. What Defries didn’t spell out was the sheer necessity of the ruse, in order to recoup some of the huge losses brought on by the grandiose stage show and the ten-piece live band, out of all proportion to Bowie’s pulling power. Bowie, a reluctant participant in the process, later suggested that David Live should have been called David Bowie is Alive and Well and Living Only in Theory. But it had finally been spelt out to him – by his long-suffering record label – that record advances had been subsidizing all three US tours, and the buck stopped here, and now.

  On 2 September, when Bowie resumed touring at L.A.’s open-air Universal Amphitheater, gone were the hydraulic lifts and post-industrial scaffolding that passed for the Diamond Dogs set. They were replaced by a five-piece group of backing singers and Bowie’s idea of sweet soul music. His explanation, proffered to Tony Zanetta after the first L.A. show, was that he wanted ‘the focus of the tour to be on the music and not on theatre’.

  Key members of the band, already soured by a financial dispute over payment for the David Live recordings, began to make their feelings known in private. Michael Kamen, effectively the musical director, was unhappy to find that ‘the stage was [suddenly] full of large black people going “Halleluiah” and shaking tambourines, and poor David was very thin and very white and completely out of his element’. Guitarist Earl Slick was equally unimpressed: ‘David had gone completely in a direction I didn’t like, not to mention it wasn’t the way I play.’

  Nor did the audience hecklers let up. At Radio City in November, one reportedly shouted, ‘We want our money back. We want Ziggy Stardust.’ They, at least, remembered what Bowie had told the US press the day he introduced Ziggy to them at the Dorchester Hotel in July 1972: ‘I’m never gonna try and play black music ’cause I’m white. Singularly white!’ And English. For the diehards, the version of ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ that he recut at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound in a new, supposedly soulful guise – which reinvented the song so successfully that it really was only about dancing – was a form of sacrilege.

  By now the set-list was being nightly overhauled, with Bowie introducing new songs such as ‘Footstompin’’, ‘Can You Hear Me?’ and ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’38, soundalike soul songs that fell largely on deaf ears. Perhaps things would have been clearer if he had introduced into the set another song he’d just cut at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound studio, ‘Who Can I Be Now?’. Yet he still wanted it both ways – all ironic distance as far as his rock fans were concerned, but Mr Sincerity when finally booked to appear on Soul Train, America’s one concession to black music on mainstream TV When he threatened to call his new ‘white soul’ album Shilling the Rubes, though, bosses at his US label put their foot down and said, no way, Ishmael.

  Well, this Ishmael had a whopper to tell. Barely had Bowie unveiled his new sound to the she-creatures of Hollywood than he was telling their daily bible, the L.A. Times, ‘I was [always] trying to put forward concepts, ideas and theories, but this [new] album doesn’t have anything to do with that. It’s just emotional drive . . . There’s not a concept in sight.’ Nor were there any decent riffs in sight. Or at least not any which came from the once-febrile mind of Davey Jones. ‘Footstompin’’ was not a bad riff, but it was one that guitarist Carlos Alomar had come up with, only for Bowie to decide he could cut up a guitar part just as easily as he could a line of lyrics – or coke:

  Carlos Alomar: David had recorded my chord changes and riff, and he hated it. He took out the lyrics and ended up with the music, and cut it up on the master so that it would have classic r&b form. He . . . experiment[ed] with the original tape, running it backwards, cutting it up . . . [The resultant] ‘Fame’ was totally [a] cut up. When he had the form of the song he wanted, he left.

  Having generated the song-form he wanted, Bowie set about writing a new set of lyrics that put the boot in. As he later recalled, what he came out with was ‘quite a nasty, angry little song’. He had recently experienced some ‘very upsetting management problems, and a lot of that was built into the song’. Having finally got around to reading the contract he had signed with Defries back in August 1971, he had no dilemma deciding what he wanted to get off his chest:

  Fame, lets him loose, hard to swallow

  Fame, puts you there where things are hollow . . .

  Fame, it’s not your brain, it’s just the flame

  That burns your change to keep you insane . . .

  Fame, what you need you have to borrow.

  He had already been warned about Defries by, of all people, John Lennon, former client of Allen Klein and drinking buddy of Morris Levy. Lennon’s presence at the ‘Fame’ session, and his suggestion that Bowie add ‘all . . . the high-pitched singing’, would be enough to garner him a co-credit on the track. In the meantime, irony of ironies, the song Bowie wrote as a retort to the one man who believed in him way back when, and had hocked his own (and RCA’s) future to give him that one shot, soared to number one on the American charts in the summer of 1975, turning around his fortunes in the land of the free lunch. It also turned him into a know-it-all, who had all the answers when down-on-his-luck friend Marc Bolan wondered why he couldn’t crack the charts Stateside with the same formula that worked back home:

  Tony Visconti: During the Young Americans days, David told me that he had recently talked to Marc . . . David was already quite successful in America then, which is something Marc wasn’t. Marc’s way was to slag other people off to make himself look bigger, and he tried to have a go at David that night, telling him that he was doing things wrong; and David just put him very straight about where he was at, that he wasn’t going to break America with his present attitude, that he should bend a little and listen more to American taste.

  What Bowie did not tell Bolan directly was that he had achieved his own success by changing his whole vocal style into something as transatlantic – and homogenized – as Half and Half. He had tried and failed to sell the States on a form of English rock as glam as ‘Get It On’, and as camp as ‘Blockbuster’, so it was time to come clean: he didn’t have the patience (or the money) necessary to wait for Middle America’s mall-children to catch up. Meanwhile, a disconsolate Bolan, who back in 1971 had fleetingly had America in the palm of his hand, stuck to his template, even as Bowie was happily boasting that his success, long fought for and hard won as it was, really was a case of ‘shilling the rubes’:

  David Bowie: ‘Fame’ was an incredible bluff that worked. Very flattering. I’ll do anything until I fail. And when I succeed, I quit, too. I’m really knocked out that people actually dance to my records, though. But let’s be honest; my rhythm and blues are thoroughly plastic. Young Americans, the album ‘Fame’ is from, is, I would say, the definitive plastic soul record. It’s the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey. [1976]

  Not everyone fell for Young Americans’ charms. Dylan, who knew a rube when he saw one, reportedly told Bowie he thought the album was terrible. And when Bowie insisted on playing the whole thing to Paul McCartney and wife Linda – twice! – the ex-Beatle snapped, ‘Can we hear another album?’ However, Bowie no longer craved the validation of peers – or mentors. Fame had indeed taken him over. Actually, it had swallowed him whole. As Mick Rock notes: ‘Externally he handled it well . . . [but] internally he w
as having problems.’ Symptomatic of his slide into the swimming pool of his very own rock & roll fantasy was his decision at the end of the Soul Tour to relocate to Los Angeles His wife Angie was soon fearing for his very soul:

  Angie Bowie: [By 1974] David’s whole life [had] changed . . . He started living largely in the dark, in the company of other coke freaks. He visited home only when he needed to, or could be assured that his nearest and dearest, or other non-cocaine people, wouldn’t bother him. I saw less and less of him, and I just hated that. I couldn’t stand watching the David I knew vanishing from his own life . . . [So I found] a beautiful Art Deco house [in L.A.] on six acres, an exquisite property and terrific value at just $300,000. But he took one look at a detail I hadn’t noticed, a hexagram painted on the floor of a circular room by the previous owner . . . and got hysterical. [1993]

  If cocaine had taken over as the drug of choice by the time he played the Universal in September 1974, Bowie quickly discovered that when it came to the Peruvian marching powder, southern California was the land of plenty. One day during the Universal residency, Fran Pillersdorf, production co-ordinator on the tour, was obliged to go past his bedroom door on the way to the bathroom: it was, she recalled, ‘dark in the middle of a bright California day. There were bottles and cocaine from the night before, and there was David lying in the dark room with the door ajar. He was bone tired and freaked out.’