Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  Which meant Ziggy would have to travel to America by sea, a six-day Atlantic crossing from Southampton to New York aboard the luxury liner QE2. (He was mercifully oblivious to the small detail that five months earlier the same ship had nearly been sunk, battered by a storm of 100 m.p.h. winds and 50-foot waves.) He was joined by Angie, David’s best friend George and George’s wife, Brigit, but spent much of the voyage alone, too wary to mingle with the other passengers after the first night, when they’d all gone to dinner in the Columbia Restaurant only to be skewered by stares of jewellery-jangling displeasure. And so he passed the hours staring out into the infinite blue, dwelling on his past, nervous about his future, his inner transistor softly flayed by the chords of Jacques Brel’s ‘My Death’ on permanent repeat.

  DeFries had flown on ahead, preparing for Ziggy’s arrival by recruiting staff for a New York branch of his newly christened management empire, MainMan. One word, two capital Ms. (Ziggy couldn’t quite decide if it was hilarious, or possibly annoying, that his boss had branded their business after a phrase synonymous with his rival. Marc Bolan had already claimed it as the rhyming pay-off of ‘Telegram Sam’ and again as a song title, ‘Main Man’, on T. Rex’s latest album, The Slider.) Tony Zee had helped find a suitable office uptown a few blocks east of Central Park and, having helped paint and decorate it, was rewarded for his toil with the title of MainMan company president. DeFries met Pork’s stage manager Leee Black Childers for lunch at Pete’s Tavern in Gramercy Park: by the time the bill arrived, he’d made Leee MainMan vice president. The receptionist vacancy went to Leee’s friend, a member of the original New York Pork cast who’d missed the chance to join the London production. Cyrinda Foxe was a street-sexy glamour magnet, Warhol superstar, Max’s regular and transparently obvious Marilyn Monroe apostle whose previous secretarial experience involved working for an art dealer and running errands for the reclusive Greta Garbo (or ‘Miss Brown’ as she was instructed to call her). Cyrinda was built for many things – most of which Ziggy was about to discover – but she was no receptionist. Nor did she take kindly to DeFries’ suggestion that she and the other staff should all adopt Ziggy haircuts as a badge of company loyalty. Her second day due in the office, Cyrinda never showed up. The job was eventually given to her friend, fellow Pork veteran and soon-to-be Stardust confidante, Cherry Vanilla.

  After almost a week at sea, the QE2 docked in New York on Sunday 17 September. DeFries had booked them into suites at the Plaza Hotel below Central Park, only a few blocks from the new MainMan offices and the same building where, eight years earlier, Stanley Kubrick first met Arthur C. Clarke to discuss what eventually became 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  Ziggy hadn’t long arrived in the city when he found five kindred lonely planet spirits in the Oscar Wilde Room of the Mercer Arts Centre down in Greenwich Village. The New York Dolls were a human pile-up of hair, lipstick, guitars and chiffon chainsawing their way into rock ’n’ roll history with songs about trash, smack, bad girls, jet boys, werewolves, pimps, the Vietnam war and sex with Frankenstein’s monster. Ziggy loved the Dolls, especially the singer, David, and especially David’s girlfriend – shortlived MainMan receptionist Cyrinda Foxe. Angie recognised the desire in Ziggy’s eyes and stood aside, finding her own doll to play with in the band’s drummer, Billy. Being genial hosts, after their gig the Dolls took Ziggy on a tour of their downtown Manhattan – a tour which ended only a few blocks along the Bowery when a truck driver leaned out of his cabin window and shouted at Ziggy, ‘Hey, baby, I wanna eat your cunt!’

  As warm-ups prior to playing New York, DeFries scheduled Ziggy’s first two shows out of town, opening in Cleveland, Ohio; America’s spiritual home of rock ’n’ roll, where the term was first popularised by Alan Freed, the local DJ who pinched the nickname of the notorious New York street musician to call himself ‘Moondog’. DeFries had dispatched Leee as an advance scout to check the venue measured up to MainMan’s twelve specific demands. Cleveland’s Music Hall did, bar one. The requested piano was a few inches too short. When Leee rang DeFries he was told to cancel the gig unless they sorted the piano. The venue freaked. Thanks to Leee and Cherry Vanilla stirring up local press and radio in advance, the hall had already sold out. DeFries stuck to his guns and called their bluff. At the eleventh hour, the piano was changed to one that measured to the exact height. The MainMan power play had begun.

  The piano would be tinkled by a new honorary Spider called Mike Garson. Ziggy’s first choice had been a psychedelic jazz priestess called Annette Peacock who’d recently released her own album on RCA featuring a woozy cover of Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’. Peacock declined but recommended Garson who’d played on her album and had an instinctive ear for avant-garde jazz and all the ‘wrong notes’ Ziggy loved. Garson was also an ordained minister of Scientology. ‘Garson The Parson’. Before the tour was over he’d convert both Gilly and bodyguard Tony Frost to a religion based upon the belief that the human race consisted of the lost spirits of aliens blown up in volcanoes seventy-five million years ago by an evil intergalactic dictator. For cosmically obvious reasons, he failed to convert Ziggy himself.

  The rock ’n’ roll heartland of Cleveland was an easy conquest for the Spiders, as was the next stop, Memphis, Tennessee. The King was home in Graceland that day but never came to catch a second glimpse of the Martian Mary shaking up the Ellis Auditorium he himself had blessed many times before. After the show, DeFries emptied the night’s takings in cash on the hotel floor, Ziggy giggling as he kicked green dollar bills into the air like a child splashing through puddles. The truth, better known to DeFries, was that these wading riches were illusory. He’d told them back in England, they were to ‘look and act like a million dollars’. As it stood the tour was guaranteed to make a loss. DeFries’ big gamble – part genius, part maniac – was to siphon the cost from MainMan to their record label, RCA. In the absence of available cash, they would charge everything to account. If all went according to plan, when the tour finished Ziggy would be a star in America and RCA would settle the bill as a justified expense. If it failed, then MainMan was ruined. And Ziggy with it.

  THE MILLION DOLLAR act was well practised by the time they returned to New York. Ziggy was now permanently flanked by bodyguards big Stuey and Tony, both dressed ruckus-ready in matching karate suits. Yet more MainMan smoke and mirrors, as was Ziggy’s ‘sell-out’ show at the prestigious Carnegie Hall. DeFries ensured a capacity crowd by handing out hundreds of free tickets, while simultaneously telling the press the VIP guest list was oversubscribed; just squeezed in were Truman Capote, Psycho star Anthony Perkins and Andy Warhol who, so gossip insisted, was only allowed two places. In the cheap seats, the MainMan gang had successfully spread the word of Ziggy to shake every fashion freak in the city out of their closet in their glitteriest, featheriest, fleshiest, trashiest apparel, the Dolls and Cyrinda included, while outside the hall a giant searchlight rotated its beam directly at the stars as if to remind the jostling crowds and touts of the heavens from whence tonight’s attraction fell.

  Backstage, a TV news reporter asked Ziggy what he wanted his audience to think of him on stage. ‘I don’t want them to think anything,’ he frowned. ‘They’re probably just as confused about my writing as I am. I mean, I’m the last one to understand most of the material I write.’

  And how would he describe himself?

  ‘Partly enigmatic,’ said Ziggy, ‘partly fossil.’

  Fossil?

  ‘Yes.’

  That night New York clutched the enigmatic Martian fossil tight to its breast. Such was Ziggy’s conquest of Carnegie Hall its impact rippled across the Atlantic, into the pages of the British press, where he was declared the winner in ‘an undeclared contest’ with Marc Bolan. It was all the more impressive considering Ziggy had managed the gig suffering from a mild bout of flu, sick enough to bow out of the after-party back at the Plaza and spend the next day recovering in bed, medicated by his new nursemaid Cyrinda.

 
Sex now rushed at Ziggy from every direction, in every audience, in every city. It was silly to deny it. Sex demanded Ziggy Stardust and he was polite enough to yield. Sex whenever, sex wherever, sex whoever, sex whatever. Sex on beds, in baths, on floors, in space. Sex with Cyrinda, with Cherry, with girls whose names he’d never remember. Sex with girls while Cyrinda or Cherry sat on a chair and watched and chatted to Ziggy to help relieve his boredom. Sex out of desire, out of habit, out of curiosity, out of gluttony. Girl sex, boy sex, chick sex, dude sex. Wet sex, dry sex, fast sex, slow sex. Private sex, standing ovation sex, stoned sex, drunk sex. Mad sex, broken sex, Spider sex, Earth sex. Mars sex, second-only-to-God sex, wham-bam-thank-you sex. Sex and sex and sex and sex. And, because he could, because he was Ziggy, still more sex.

  But Cyrinda was more than sex to Ziggy. She was muse and music, rhyme and riff. She was the shimmying gangster’s moll of ‘Watch That Man’, a song he’d just written partly inspired by his memories of her boyfriend David on stage with the Dolls, partly by the noise and excess of the Carnegie after-party. And she was the leading lady of another new tune which began on the band’s tour bus to Cleveland. The Spiders had made up their own little chant – ‘We’re goin’ bussin’, bus, bus’ – sung to the old blues riff of ‘I’m A Man’, not the steady Bo Diddley original but the brisker version as played by The Yardbirds. It reminded Ziggy of a mental note he’d made seeing Iggy in King’s Cross: next time stuck for inspiration, nick a Yardbirds’ riff.

  And so Ziggy nicked ‘I’m A Man’. He looked at Cyrinda in his Plaza bedroom and sang about Marilyn Monroe. He thought about Iggy and sang about reptiles and screaming and bawling. He thought about the French author and playwright Jean Genet and called the song ‘The Jean Genie’. Before the end of the week the Spiders went into RCA’s New York studio and recorded it as their next single.

  Iggy soon got to hear ‘The Jean Genie’ for himself when the tour skidded on to Detroit. He’d flown back home to see Ziggy and play him the tapes of the album he and his Stooges had been recording in London. They’d already agreed it would be best if Ziggy stayed out of the studio and left Iggy to it. Instead, and sticking to the deal DeFries had brokered for them to get it out on CBS, Ziggy would mix the results, retaining his ‘producer’ credit. The album was called Raw Power and didn’t flinch from its promise. Each song was like a stab of fiendish light, white hot with strange fears and secret corruptions. Songs that made all the more sense now Ziggy could see for himself the metropolitan human smelter Iggy came from. Detroit was a real concrete and clay Clockwork Orange. The afternoon he arrived, he’d taken a walk with Stuey outside his hotel in a billowy shirt, straight into a daggered crossfire of greasy stares from local car plant workers. The sound of Iggy’s album was Detroit.

  He also had the added stress of a gatecrasher who’d first turned up in New York with a bag of cocaine telling everyone he used to go to school in Bromley with David Jones. He’d recognised Ziggy’s face in the papers and flown straight from Colombia where he was now embarrassing all border controls as an international drug smuggler. He certainly looked it, carrying a gun and dressing like a South American bandit complete with Che Guevara beard. Ziggy thought he’d shaken him off only to learn he’d hired a diesel van and followed the tour to Michigan. The anxiety shook a fresh Bo Diddley rhythm in Ziggy’s head. He thought about the drug smuggler from Bromley, about everything he’d seen, heard and smelled in Iggy’s hometown and wrote another new song. ‘Panic In Detroit’.

  From the Midwest the tour dipped south, through Missouri, Kansas and Tennessee, taking a break in Nashville to lend a King’s polish to ‘The Jean Genie’ by mixing it in the same RCA studio frequently used by Elvis. While the Spiders and crew flew or took buses, Ziggy and a small party of friends chose to travel by train. It was, undoubtedly, the best way to see the country, especially from the observation cars. In the panoramic dome of the west-bound Superchief – the aptly nicknamed ‘Train of the Stars’ – Ziggy would sit at nights with wine and his guitar, his muse illuminated by the light of the desert moon. He could feel America was possessing him with new purpose, new music and maybe even the flash of a new identity. One that was still fundamentally Ziggy, but stretched and star-spangled by the way-outness of the West.

  By early October, as Ziggy sped by rail towards California, Marc Bolan was looking forward to leaving it. T. Rex had just ended their less than triumphant US tour at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. In the words of the man from Melody Maker, Marc was ‘repetitive, empty and forced’ and had sadly ‘deflated the illusion’. The verdict from the American press wasn’t much better. Offered the taste of T. Rexstasy, the States had balked. As he boarded his return flight to London, Marc tried to console himself with the fact back home his latest single, ‘Children Of The Revolution’, had spent three weeks at number two while Ziggy’s frisky ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ was ten places behind. But he couldn’t ignore the shadow of the Starman, nor would the press let him. Every interview now brought the obligatory Ziggy question. ‘David doesn’t really know what he is,’ Marc harrumphed at home in Maida Vale. ‘He steals identities.’

  Five thousand miles away, the Superchief pulled into Kerouac’s ‘loneliest and most brutal of American cities’, hissing to a halt in Los Angeles Union Station. The Californian sun burned high and bright as Ziggy Stardust stepped down on to the platform, casting a long grey shadow before him. A silhouette he alone could recognise as the queer creature he’d just invented. The stolen shadow of Aladdin Sane.

  SO TIGHT WAS Ziggy against his rival’s heels that he checked into the pink Spanish luxury of the Beverly Hills Hotel only days after Marc had checked out. Rocket Reg was also there, inviting Ziggy to his VIP bungalow for an understandably awkward cup of tea, the pregnant pauses between polite conversation and the chink of stirring spoons crackling with the unmentionable ‘Space Oddity’ rip-off.

  The Spiders and the road crew took full advantage of Tinsel Town etiquette and the RCA charge account, drinking dry the hotel’s famous Polo Lounge and baring all Humberside flesh poolside for a Californian tan. Ronno grilled himself an agonising pink, while his golden hair turned an unfortunate shade of green thanks to the pool’s chlorine.

  With a few days’ break in the tour, Ziggy fulfilled his promise to Iggy by mixing the Raw Power tapes at Western Sound on Sunset Boulevard. Time was against them, as was technology. The chunky mixing desk reminded Iggy of a 1950s sci-fi rocket ship, not that the tapes needed a lot of tinkering anyway. Ziggy did the best he could in the tight window they had, focussing most tracks around Iggy’s voice but careful not to douse the heat of its Detroit fire.

  While still high on the heavy fumes of Raw Power, Los Angeles inspired Ziggy’s next song, a dirty howl of Hollywood Babylon marking the corner of Sunset and Vine only a block from the studio. Kerouac described the same spot in On The Road: ‘Now there was a corner!’ Ziggy called the song ‘Cracked Actor’.

  DeFries had since packed Angie back home to London. Despite their polygamous wedding vows she’d still managed to upset her husband after frolicking in a motel pool with a hunky Jamaican bodyguard called Anton. With his wife temporarily banished, Ziggy took advantage by flying Cyrinda over to LA from New York. No sooner had she landed when she took him to pick up strays of both sexes at the nearby Rainbow Bar & Grill. Other nights they’d hit the E Club, a former massage parlour relaunched as a disco meatrack of underage anglophile dreamers and rapacious groupies hoping to bed themselves a visiting English rock ’n’ roll star. Failing that, a Martian one.

  The E Club was the brainchild of publicist and DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, the laughing gnome of West Coast glitter rock christened the ‘Mayor of Sunset Strip’. Fate had already selected Rodney as the first human being to hear the words ‘Ziggy Stardust’ from the mouth of David Bowie when he stepped off a plane in the city eighteen months earlier. Rodney was now a devout Stardust apostle and, through his influence, LA was feverish with expectation for Ziggy’s first shows in the c
ity. The Spiders played two sell-out nights at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the very stage where Marc Bolan had been defeated six nights earlier. The Los Angeles Times declared Ziggy ‘a sort of male Judy Garland of the 1970s’, a symbolic welcome home to his rainbow’s end in the very city where Garland first sang her song of way up high on an MGM soundstage.

  Following the beat of Kerouac, Ziggy moved on to San Francisco. Still entwined with Cyrinda, they’d merged into a frazzled fifties rock ’n’ roll Romeo and Juliet. Jimmy Dean from Mars and Marilyn from Venus. Photographer Mick Rock had taken some portraits of them at the Rainbow bar in LA, a sort of glam-punk homage to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks as a basis for press ads for ‘The Jean Genie’. In Cisco, Mick made an accompanying promo film, Jimmy and Marilyn a pair of hot tramps in blue and yellow windcheaters with furry collars, strutting and rutting on the street outside the Mars Hotel, another favourite haunt of Kerouac’s.

  Their last night in the city was the last night they’d spend together. Cyrinda took a bath in a Lady Godiva wig and a string of pearls. She’d heard an old wives’ tale of how to keep pearls shiny and asked Ziggy to oblige, which he did. The next day Ziggy sped on to Seattle while Cyrinda returned to New York, oblivious to the biological chain reaction deep within her womb.

  From Seattle, Ziggy took an overnight train to Phoenix, Arizona, the new muse of Aladdin Sane inflamed by the glimmer of a dozen or more giant silvery domes moonlit in the middle of an otherwise barren desert. They looked futuristic and slightly sinister. The dormant synapses of the boy David Jones sparked with forgotten fears of the domed alien silo at Winnerden Flats in Quatermass II. Ziggy wondered if maybe this was what cities would look like after a nuclear holocaust: a planet beyond ‘Five Years’; a cancerous terrain of fall-out forcing any survivors to live imprisoned in enormous, isolated bubble colonies; a world where radiation has so perverted human reproduction people have to watch films to remember how to make love, guided by the ancient god called Mick Jagger. By the time he got to Phoenix, Ziggy had another new song called ‘Drive-In Saturday’.