Bowie

by Pat Gilbert

  A 1972 print ad for the Stylophone—“the greatest craze since the yo-yo”—plays on the instrument’s link to “Space Oddity.”

  The Ziggy songs would live long in the charts. Among the many singles released around the globe in the mid-’70s are this Japanese picture-disc edition of “Starman” from 1973 and a 1974 double A-side release of “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” b/w “Quicksand.” (opposite)

  In preparation for the US tour that autumn, Defries flew a party of journalists over from the States to watch a return appearance by Bowie on July 15 at Friars Aylesbury, a venue where he was almost guaranteed a rapturous reception, followed the next day by a press conference at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. Defries’s new charges Iggy and Lou Reed were also in attendance at the junket, the latter having made an appearance the week before at a Save the Whale benefit concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall, where Reed—clearly the worse for wear—had joined Bowie and the Spiders for an encore of Velvet Underground numbers. Later that month, Bowie, Angie, and the Spiders’ rhythm section took advantage of a three-week break in the ongoing UK tour to fly to Cyprus for a short holiday. On the return journey, their plane flew through an electrical storm, badly shaking up the passengers—particularly Bowie, who from then on, partly out of genuine fear but also possibly to gain further publicity, decreed that he would never fly again. If the flight had proved turbulent, it was nothing compared to the tempestuous atmosphere the singer and Ronson encountered when they manned the mixing desk for Lou Reed’s second solo album, Transformer, at Trident Studios that August. Reed’s physical and mental state had deteriorated rapidly since they’d first met him in New York the previous summer, but somehow Bowie’s simpatico approach to his hero managed to tease out some of the greatest music Reed ever made, including the tracks “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Vicious,” and “Satellite of Love.”

  Meanwhile, rehearsals for two prestigious Ziggy shows at London’s three-thousand-capacity Rainbow Theatre were taking place. For these performances, Bowie roped in his old friend Lindsay Kemp to choreograph a troupe of dancers, while costumes were provided by the Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto. The production was a lavish affair, with a catwalk, ladders, and projections featuring images of twentieth-century icons including Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, Elvis, Little Richard, and, during “Lady Stardust,” Marc Bolan. With Bowie doing his man-in-glass-box mime routine during “The Width of a Circle,” the show was an exhilarating fusion of dance, rock music, and theater, and opened with a set from Roxy Music, whose self-titled debut album had been released the previous month. The two nights were variously attended by celebrities including Warhol, Mick Jagger, Elton John, Alice Cooper, Rod Stewart, and Lou Reed (who had to be carried out horizontally by several MainMan employees).

  A scaled-down version of the show was taken around the country for ten more dates before Bowie packed for his first-ever tour of the United States. The music critics of the world’s greatest democracy were waiting for him, tantalized by the titillating stories of sexual excess and strangeness that MainMan’s US publicist and former Pork star, Cherry Vanilla, had plied them with. And Bowie wasn’t to disappoint them.

  CHAPTER 4

  1973–1974

  Fame

  When David and Angie Bowie arrived in New York on the Queen Elizabeth II in September 17, 1972, tickets for the US leg of the Ziggy tour were selling, albeit very slowly. Bowie had yet to have a hit in the United States and for that matter had only released two successful singles in the UK—“Space Oddity” and “Starman”—but that didn’t stop Tony Defries from behaving as if Bowie was the biggest British musical export since the Beatles. Instructing the singer and his entourage to “act and look like a million dollars,” Defries proposed to dazzle the United States with an outrageous rock ’n’ roll circus of a magnitude never experienced before. Deciding who exactly was financing the operation was a detail that Defries believed was best left until later—a contentious move with profound consequences in the months and years ahead.

  Defries set up at office on East 58th Street, not far from the opulent Plaza Hotel near Central Park, where Bowie, band, and crew were all booked to stay. With only five days to go before the opening show in Cleveland, the Spiders had yet to find a keyboard player for the US dates but on RCA’s recommendation auditioned Mike Garson, a Brooklyn jazz pianist, for the post. At a rehearsal at RCA’s New York studios, Ronson asked him to play the chords to “Changes,” and when he did so successfully, he was offered the job. Defries then summoned him to discuss terms; Garson suggested $800 a week, which the manager, eager to give the impression that money was no problem, readily agreed to. Little did Garson know that his wage was around ten times higher than the rest of the group’s, with the highest paid, Ronson, still only on £30 a week.

  The tour kicked off in Cleveland, where the local rock station, WMMS, had been playing Ziggy on rotation, and where a Bowie fanatic named Brian Kinchy had formed Bowie’s first-ever US fan club. The 3,200-capacity venue sold out, and Bowie’s debut appearance in the United States met with a rapturous reception and ended in a stage invasion. The next show in Memphis was also a sellout, after which Bowie and the band took a specially chartered Greyhound bus back to New York, where they were due to perform at Carnegie Hall on September 28. During the journey, Bowie began jamming with George Underwood, along for the ride with his wife, Birgit. The riff to Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” morphed into a new song called “The Jean Genie,” the title a pun on French poet Jean Genet, whose lyrics glinted with images of violence (“slash-black blazers,” “razors”) and coded drug references (“strung out,” “Snow White”). Finished at model Cyrinda Foxe’s apartment in New York, it was committed tape at RCA’s studio on 6th Avenue a week or so later.

  Bowie onstage during the first night of US Ziggy Stardust tour, Cleveland Music Hall, September 22, 1972.

  A pair of posters advertising the worldwide expansion of the Ziggy Stardust tour.

  Meanwhile, MainMan’s team of ex-Pork stars had been busy whipping up sufficient media frenzy for Bowie’s appearance at Carnegie Hall to be another sellout. Among the glitterati in attendance were Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Anthony Perkins, and the New York Dolls, plus a vastly oversubscribed press list of around a hundred journalists. Though critic Robert Christgau dismissed Bowie as an “English fairy,” notices concluded, as they had in Cleveland, that “a star is born.” Certainly Bowie seemed to think so, with the boundary between his “real” self and his Ziggy persona continuing to dissolve. Defries was issuing stern edicts designed to anneal Bowie’s status as a rock messiah but which served only to confuse what was real and what was not. One order was that, like a king, he shouldn’t be touched, another that he couldn’t ride in elevators. His car to and from shows, Defries decreed, had to be a limousine. A wave of Bowie’s hand would summon him a girl, sometimes two or three. After several more dates and a poorly attended show in Kansas, where Bowie invited the 250-strong audience to the front of the stage while he performed cabaret-style, the tour reached Santa Monica. By then, Bowie’s entourage had swollen to more than forty musicians, crew, MainMan staff, groupies, and hangers-on, including Iggy Pop, all of whom were checked into the sumptuous Beverly Hills Hotel, a popular—and expensive—hideaway for the Hollywood elite.

  The Stooges’ Bowie-produced third album, Raw Power, recorded during the fall of 1972 and released the following February

  Here, the Stooges are photographed backstage at West Hollywood’s Whiskey A-Go-Go in October 1973. Clockwise from top left: Scott Thurston, Ron Asheton, James Williamson, Scott Asheton, and Iggy Pop.

  The visit quickly descended into a bacchanal, with even the roadies living off room service, champagne and steaks the sustenance of choice. The total charge came to around $20,000, a phenomenal sum, but with typical insouciance, Defries simply forwarded the bill to RCA, which in turn argued that the label had never agreed to underwrite the tour. Eventually, RCA agreed to settle the bill while a
resolution was thrashed out. The Santa Monica shows—released as a live album in 2002—were another triumph, after which Bowie set to work at the Western Recorders studio mixing Iggy’s debut album for Columbia, Raw Power. The job didn’t take long, since, according to Bowie, only three of the twenty-four tracks available on the tape had been used. Iggy recalled Bowie was “uptight” at the mixing session, though the truth was that the singer’s inability to differentiate himself from Ziggy was taking its toll. “I really did have doubts about my sanity,” Bowie later admitted. “It was much easier for me to keep on with the Ziggy thing, off stage as well as on the stage.” Iggy, meanwhile, was further rattled that the central character in “The Jean Genie” seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to the ex-Stooge and felt that Bowie was using him.

  When the tour moved on to San Francisco, Mick Rock was tasked with shooting a video for “The Jean Genie,” which had been slated for a US release the following month. Bowie’s latest UK single, “John, I’m Only Dancing,” had been deemed too sexually ambiguous for the US market. Rock’s footage included shots of Bowie outside the aptly named Mars Hotel, with Cyrinda Foxe camping it up as Marilyn Monroe. The tour was due to end on the West Coast, but Defries extended it through November, with Bowie sometimes playing to half-full venues and, in Nashville, suffering homophobic abuse. The road trip eventually ended with a four-night run at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia, soon to be a Bowie stronghold. Returning to New York, Bowie took the Spiders into the studio to record another song written on the road, “Drive-In Saturday,” which, just as he had with “All the Young Dudes,” he offered to Mott the Hoople, on tour in the United States at the time. When they told Bowie they weren’t interested, in a fit of pique he got drunk and shaved off his eyebrows, though apparently not before he asked Angie to razor hers off first to see how it looked.

  A posed portrait of the Spiders from Mars, taken around November 1972. From left: Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder, David Bowie, and Woody Woodmansey.

  The striking cover art to Aladdin Sane, devised by Bowie and photographer Brian Duffy.

  Bowie returned to the UK in mid-December on the RHMS Ellinis to prepare for “homecoming” Christmas shows in London, Manchester, Glasgow, and a few other cities. He then booked Trident for a two-week stint in January to record his next album, Aladdin Sane. The experience of touring the United States had left a deep impression on Bowie, and not just in the images of the continent that would spill into the lyrics of songs such as “Cracked Actor,” “Panic in Detroit,” “Watch That Man,” and “Lady Grinning Soul.” Appearing on the Russell Harty Plus Pop chat show on January 17, 1973, Bowie looked ever more alien with his shaven eyebrows, pale skin, and large earring with dangling glass crystals. His attire, “a parody of a suit and tie” combination designed by Freddie Burretti, added to the spectacle of an otherworldly being.

  The original candidate to produce the follow-up to Ziggy was Phil Spector, enjoying a career resurgence producing albums by ex-Beatles George Harrison and John Lennon. When Spector ignored MainMan’s approach, the job went to the ever-dependable Ken Scott, who’d overseen Hunky Dory and Ziggy. Well drilled after a year’s worth of solid touring, the Spiders worked quickly, though there were tensions between Bowie and Woodmansey when the drummer refused to play the straight Bo Diddley shuffle requested for “Panic in Detroit.” Though the theatrical dynamics of “Time” were more ambitious than anything on Hunky Dory, the overriding style of the album was tough, Americanized rock, given a rich texture by Ken Fordham and Brian Wilshaw’s sax playing and Mike Garson’s piano. For the bewitching title track, Bowie asked Garson to draw on his avant-garde jazz background, which resulted in the song’s hypnogogic solo of breathtaking magnificence.

  On the record’s sleeve, Bowie ascribed a location for each track, thus “Cracked Actor,” with its opaque portrait of a drugged-up old Hollywood star, was Los Angeles, and “Drive-In Saturday” was assigned to Seattle and Phoenix. “Watch That Man,” with its mad, sexually charged party scene, was attributed to New York. Around the time of the recording, storied British photographer Brian Duffy was commissioned to shoot the sleeve image: Bowie recruited makeup artist Pierre La Roche to create the iconic flash on the singer’s face, inspired by the lightning streak on Elvis Presley’s “Taking Care of Business” logo and representing Bowie’s fractured psyche, caught as he was between Ziggy and David Jones. All the clues were there in the punning title: a lad insane.

  Bowie and teen fashion model Patty Clark at Union Station, Los Angeles, March 1973.

  The United States was calling again, but before Bowie and the band set off for a tour structured around multiple shows in the key music centers of New York, Philadelphia, Nashville, Memphis, Detroit, and Los Angeles, Defries had some serious ducking and diving to do. The powers at RCA were none too pleased with the $20,000 bill they’d been handed for the orgiastic Beverly Hills Hotel stay. Nor was the total tour deficit of a reported $100,000 looked upon lightly, especially since Bowie’s total album sales in the country hadn’t yet reached half a million copies, and that figure included the reissues of Bowie’s Mercury album, retitled Space Oddity, and The Man Who Sold the World, as well as Hunky Dory and Ziggy. So much for Bowie being the new Beatles. But Defries remained defiant and cut a deal in which RCA, rather than MainMan, had to swallow the costs—though, of course, the money ultimately would be recouped from Bowie’s future record sales.

  Bowie and Angie set sail on January 20, 1973, on the SS Canberra, with the band due to catch up with them in New York. For this tour, the Spiders would be augmented by several musicians who’d contributed to the albums sessions, including sax players Fordham and Wilshaw, Bowie’s old school friend Geoff MacCormack on backing vocals, and John Hutchinson from the Buzz and Feathers on rhythm guitar. Hutchinson’s appointment was chiefly so Bowie could perform more freely onstage, without the encumbrance of an instrument. While in New York, final overdubs were added to Aladdin Sane before the tour opened with two shows at the cavernous six-thousand-capacity Radio City Music Hall. Bowie made a grand entrance descending from the ceiling in a cage and changed costumes several times during the show. His wardrobe had again been designed by Yamamoto and included a white judo suit and black PVC onesie, while Pierre La Roche tended to his hair—now grown into a flame-red lion’s mane—and makeup, replete with a white circle on his forehead. Once again, Bowie attracted a raft of famous faces, including Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and Salvador Dalí, who witnessed the unscripted finale of a stage-invader kissing the singer, who promptly fainted and was carried off stage.

  Later at a night club, Bowie met black dancer Ava Cherry, who became his lover and was recruited as a backing singer for the tour—only to be informed a few days later that her services weren’t required. Though Bowie and Angie tolerated each other’s sexual dalliances, Bowie’s friendships with Cherry and Cyrinda Foxe, and his wife’s relationship with the Stooges’ Scott Richardson, were beginning to undermine their marriage. Four weeks later, when the trip ended with two shows in Los Angeles and Bowie spent the night with a pair of notorious groupies, their “open” relationship was severely tested. There were other stresses, too, adding to the dark, druggy strangeness. Mike Garson, dubbed “Garson the Parson” by Bowie, was at that time a Scientologist and had succeeded in converting Woodmansey to the religion. Their friendship brought to light the ludicrous difference in their wages, which prompted the Spiders to mutiny. When they confronted Defries, he agreed to increase their pay to £200 a week but also managed to drive a wedge between them by offering to secure Ronson his own record contract.

  In late March, Bowie’s entourage sailed to Japan for a ten-day tour. The trip provided a sharp contrast to the chaos, bickering, and hedonism of the second US tour; instead of groupies, in Tokyo the Spiders were met by beautifully painted girls in traditional dress proffering flowers and gifts. Bowie instantly fell in love with the culture and attended Nogaku classical dramas and kabuki performances, as well as visited temples and
moss gardens. It was during this time that he became enchanted by the right-wing writer Yukio Mishima, who’d committed hara-kiri after staging a failed coup attempt two years earlier. For the shows, Bowie was personally handed a new set of costumes by Yamamoto, including several kimonos and a white robe with his name embroidered in Japanese characters.

  Bowie was reluctant to leave the country, but he needed to be back in London for a two-month UK tour starting on May 12. His method of journeying home was to prove exotic and illuminating. With Geoff MacCormack, Leee Black Childers, and American journalist Bob Musel along for company, Bowie took a boat to Nakhodka near Vladivostok and then boarded the Trans-Siberian Express for the six-thousand-mile trip to Moscow. The journey through the alien landscape of Siberia and the steppes ended in the grim, colorless, oppressive cities of the Eastern Bloc, still bearing from the physical scars of World War II. The endless checkpoints, suspicious gazes, and needless paperwork gave Bowie firsthand experience of a totalitarian world that would find expression in his next batch of songs. When Bowie arrived home to London on May 4, Aladdin Sane was at No. 1 on the UK charts, and a huge crowd assembled to greet him at Victoria Station—though because he missed the boat train after a late night in Paris, his fans had to dash to his new destination, Charing Cross, to witness his arrival. The following evening, he and Angie threw a party at Haddon Hall, at which one of its estranged inhabitants, Tony Visconti, was a welcome guest. In another gesture of reconciliation, Bowie paid a visit to Ken Pitt, who was invited to the opening night of Bowie’s UK tour at Earls Court.