I touched on this issue lightly but David just laughed and told me not to worry about it. He obviously thought that I was too conventional in my thinking, and he was probably right. It was obvious to me that David was very bright, had a clear vision of his stage persona, and he was not looking to be moulded into any of the perceived ‘looks’ of his predecessors. In fact, he was clearly not looking to be moulded in any way at all. I had to decide if I wanted to sign this self-determined artist who was going to be very different from the norm and was going to stretch my limited resources.
Please understand, this was not Laurence being a shrewd businessman looking to make an adequate return on investment. This was Laurence worrying how he would pay his mortgage and feed his family if he lost too much money supporting Bowie. I liked his songs and admired his being his own man, a pioneer and all that. The problem was that pioneers tend to get arrows up their arses, and financially it was my arse that was the potential target.
I was somewhat encouraged by David’s reaction to a sign I had on my desk, which read: ‘Art for art’s sake – money for fuck’s sake’. He picked it up and looked at it and I thought that he would disapprove, but he laughed and said, ‘I like that, I’ll bear it in mind.’
David only owed one more album to Philips records and his songwriting contract with Essex Music had expired in June of the previous year. Whilst he was signed to Essex Music, Geoff Heath – who ran the company for owner David Platz – brought David a song he had heard at Midem called ‘Comme d’habitude’. The song had been written and recorded by Claude François, a successful French pop star, who was tragically electrocuted at the age of thirty-nine when an electric heater fell into his bath. Bowie wrote new lyrics and called it ‘Even a Fool Learns to Love.’ It did not really work and eventually Paul Anka wrote new lyrics to the song, now called ‘My Way’, for Frank Sinatra. The song fitted his persona like a glove, but I personally think that whilst the sentiment is wonderful, the actual lyrics are embarrassingly contrived and I find listening to it quite painful. I don’t think my view would bother Mr Anka or indeed the late Mr Sinatra. Incidentally, I feel much the same about ‘Strangers In The Night’, which to me sounds like a pastiche crooner’s song written for a B-movie. Who doobee doobee knew? Certainly not me.
Now to the exciting bit … The end of David’s publishing deal with Essex was a perfect time for a new manager to take over. David was by no means a star at this point in time but there was a slight buzz about him in the industry. I was a big fan of ‘Space Oddity’ and had heard ‘The Man who Sold the World’, another great song that was not about love.
Defries moved into my new offices at Regent Arcade House and on 1 August 1970 David signed a six-year recording agreement with Gem Productions. He also signed a management agreement under which Gem would take 20 per cent of his earnings. A very standard deal. Defries insisted that there was a key-man clause in the management agreement allowing Bowie to walk away if Defries were to leave Gem. I considered this to be perfectly reasonable, as it was Defries who had brought David in and Defries had no contract with Gem to give him security. However, no record company would accept a key-man clause for a recording agreement, so Gem signed David with no protection for Defries if his star ever walked away from me.
Gem also signed Dana Gillespie, a singer who was an ex-flame of Bowie and now a close friend of his and of Angie. Dana had starred in Jesus Christ Superstar and was, I thought, a very talented artist. She was at the heart of the Bowie crowd during the time that I was involved, and has been kind enough to recently meet with me and fill in some background information.
24. THE PLAN TO LAUNCH BOWIE
In 1970 the cornerstone of an artist’s career was a record deal. The major companies provided the money to make records, had marketing departments to exploit them and the ability to distribute the physical recordings to record shops. Remember record shops? They were where teenagers would meet on Saturday mornings, crowding into little sound booths to listen to records through headphones.
Music is still the centre of most teenagers’ lives but of course owning a record is not, which I think is sad because in the olden days, having a record collection was a big deal. The first album I ever bought was in 1956 when I was twenty. It was Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! and the cost was more than my weekly salary of about one pound. I made a label with my name on, which I carefully stuck to the album sleeve so that when I took it to a friend’s house it would not be confused with their copy. All of my friends had a copy or they would not have been my friend.
I created space in the shelf above my bed for my record collection and it filled very slowly – it fact it never really filled at all. When I got married and moved my ‘collection’ to my marital home it was not very heavy. In a way, it was one of the few downsides of being successful in the music business that I was gifted almost any record that I wanted by the record companies. I even persuaded some of them to put me on their reviewers’ list, sending me a copy of every release. The result was I gradually ceased to value having an album/CD in my personal collection and didn’t even hold on to them all. If I had kept them for my home I would have had to live in a warehouse.
David Bowie’s own record deal was with Mercury Records and it had expired. There was general interest in him from other record companies, but they were not exactly knocking on my door. My initial interest in David was as a songwriter and I was keen to develop this side of his career. Gordon Mills, who managed Tom Jones, was always looking for songs for the Welshman to record and – with no imminent record deal in sight – I sent him demos of some of David’s songs, but he did not like them. In the meantime, Tony Defries was busy planning gigs to showcase David to record companies and was also dealing with ex-manager Ken Pitt’s claims that David had breached his contract.
The Man who Sold the World was released in the UK by Philips Records in April 1970 and flopped. If anything was to establish David’s casual approach to androgyny it was that album cover, dominated by a large image of a blond-wigged David Bowie lolling on a chaise longue wearing a dress designed by Michael Fish, a fashionable designer of the day. David’s look on the album was frequently referred to as pre-Raphaelite, but now I find it more pre-Grayson Perry. The album was produced by Tony Visconti who, for whatever reason, did not work with David again until Defries was moving out of the picture in 1974.
The album was free for publishing and was about to be delivered to Mercury Records. This, together with the prospect of a deal with a new record company, strengthened our hand with any potential music publisher. Chris Wright of the highly successful Chrysalis Group had just started a new publishing company. Neither Chris nor his partner Terry Ellis knew much about publishing, and they had appointed Bob Grace, a young man with a good background in publishing, to run it. I knew Chris and Terry well, admired them very much and was confident that Chrysalis Publishing would be an active publisher and not just a banker, as many of the larger publishing companies had become. I called Chris to alert him that David would soon be recording a new album and we would be looking for a publishing deal. It is to be remembered that David was by no means a hot artist at this time. Chris was not particularly excited, but I persuaded him to arrange for Bob Grace to meet with us.
Tony Defries went to see Bob Grace and played him ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ and some of the unrecorded songs that David had written. Bob Grace was very interested. Nick Blackburn, Chrysalis’s money-man, called me to talk a deal. Defries and I decided that we wanted five thousand pounds, and Chris was very much against paying such a substantial advance. He had never imagined giving such a hefty amount to an unproven songwriter but he was swayed by Bob Grace’s enthusiasm. Under the terms of the deal that Defries cleverly negotiated in October 1970, once Chrysalis recouped the five-thousand-pound advance, half of the copyright would be assigned to Titanic Music, owned by Bowie, increasing his share of the income from the then standard 50/50 to 75/25 in his favour.
Tita
nic would not be party to Chrysalis’s existing obligations to sub-publish with publishers around the world, for which it would have received substantial advances. Bob Grace was concerned that this was a ploy by Defries to allow Titanic to negotiate separate advances, which if true, was a move that he reluctantly agreed to even though he thought it was immoral. He later said that he was green and allowed Defries to push him into the agreement. Defies always maintained that the purpose of setting up Titanic was primarily to gain David an increased share of his copyright income, not to circumvent Chrysalis’s existing contractual arrangements.
David could have been signed to Chrysalis Records then, but according to Chris’s excellent autobiography, Terry Ellis did not like the material that David had written for Hunky Dory, and Kenny Bell, who ran the record company, thought that David would never make it as a live act. Nick Blackburn is now in the theatre business and I bump into him from time to time. He never fails to rib me about selling Bowie’s publishing for a mere five thousand pounds. It is important to realise that in today’s money that is about fifty thousand pounds, and Gem’s 20 per cent commission at least made a small dent in the money I had laid out on Bowie. David now had four thousand pounds – about forty thousand pounds today – so was now less financially dependent on Gem, and there was now a company other than mine who could give support if needed. David’s obligation to Chrysalis was to write a minimum of one hundred songs of which seventy must be commercially recorded.
Bob Grace, a good music man, worked closely with David and the singer had more faith in Bob’s creative opinion than he did in that of Tony Defries or me. Bob sent David’s song ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ to Mickie Most, who recorded it with Peter Noone as his first solo record after parting with the Hermits. I kept well in the background for this, knowing that Mickie would not favour a song submitted to him that had my thumbprint anywhere near it. I subsequently learned that Bob tried to convince David that Defries and I were unproven managers and that David would be better off being managed by him. Fortunately, at that time, David had absolute faith in Tony Defries’ guidance and resisted Bob’s advances. I had sent David to Chrysalis and it was wrong of Bob to do this, but having been guilty of similar actions myself it would be hypocritical of me to have held this against Bob. There’s no business like show business.
Anya Wilson was now employed by me full-time as a record plugger, and she worked on the singles from the album released in the UK, but ‘Memory of a Free Festival,’ with Marc Bolan playing piano, and ‘Holy Holy’ weren’t successful. ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ was seven minutes long, making it difficult to get airplay. Radio liked a three-minute single and we later always told stations, if asked, that the length of every song we submitted was always three minutes and twenty seconds – whatever the actual length. I even had 3’20” written on the sleeve of the acetate. I will tell you another little secret: A&R men at record companies often felt they needed to contribute artistically and when presented with a record would often say things like, ‘The bass needs remixing.’ We always agreed with them and would then re-submit exactly the same version in a sleeve labelled ‘remix’, thanking the A&R guy for his input. It was important to make the record company feel some ownership of the creative process.
About this time, Anya brought a man called Jon Brewer in to see me. He and his partner Robert Patterson were managing a band called Czar whom I quite liked and I thought Jon, in particular, was bright and personable. They used to drive around in an old hearse that at some point was used by the Belgium royal family – presumably when one of the royals was past driving. They had had some experience of putting a band on the road, something that neither Defries nor I were familiar with. Jon’s sister Liz, a socialite party planner/publicist, was a friend of Penny Leander, Mike’s wife, so I knew that Jon was a ‘real’ person. As part of my ‘Brill Building in London’ ambition, I gave them an office on the understanding that they would offer me involvement in any acts that they signed and help out with Gem acts if needed.
I introduced Jon to Defries, and as I recall, he was indeed very helpful in this area. He booked some of David’s early gigs and David enjoyed being driven around in the ornate hearse, and the two of them became quite close. Robert left the Brewer/ Patterson partnership and Jon devoted a lot of time to helping Defries. He was never on the Gem payroll but has since told me that Defries had promised a financial interest in Bowie’s gigs. Jon claims that he was never paid by Defries but he went on to manage Alvin Lee and Gerry Rafferty, so the Gem experience obviously helped him. He produced and published Rafferty’s huge hit ‘Baker Street’, a smart move. Jon is now a maker of important documentaries on music legends, including B. B. King, Nat King Cole and Mick Ronson. Jon has been very helpful to me in filling in some details of his time working with David at Gem.
Mercury Records took David to America in February 1971 to promote The Man who Sold the World and it is my belief that, although it did not help record sales, it was an important episode in David’s career. Starting in Washington, he toured major cities, frequently wearing one of his Mr Fish-designed dresses. The reactions of outrage from the more conservative press, DJs and public balanced the delight from the thinly scattered outré among them. David finished his tour in Los Angeles, an experience which I believe was pivotal to his career. He was hosted by Rodney Bingenheimer, who at the time was Mercury’s main promoter in southern California. Rodney would become a great fan of David and helped promote his career when he later opened a trendy music venue on Sunset Strip in LA. Rodney borrowed a friend’s Cadillac convertible and drove David on a tour of radio stations. To David’s delight, he was refused entrance to an LA restaurant because he was wearing a dress. In 1973 Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, about the sweet transvestite from Transylvania, was first staged and demonstrated yet again that the younger public was not disturbed by transgender entertainment. So much for my initial concern, when David first came to my office, that openly incorporating gay imagery could affect record sales.
In San Francisco he was asked to pick some songs to be played as a guest host on a local radio station. He was urged to pick a record by The Stooges, Iggy Pop’s band. He had never heard of Iggy but learned that he was the idol of the ‘in the know’ music media for his outrageous behaviour as much as for his talent. This registered with David, himself no stranger to outrageous behaviour. David was then interviewed by Rolling Stone, the hugely influential music magazine. You will read later that it was this article that inspired a group of avant-garde American actors in a play about Andy Warhol to go to see the not-yet-famous David perform in London. They then introduced David to Andy Warhol in New York, resulting in David becoming a gay icon in the Big Apple, which was instrumental in his success.
As The Man who Sold the World did nothing in America, Mercury were clearly not passionate about having Bowie on their label and Defries brilliantly negotiated the transfer of the Mercury albums to Gem in return for repaying the cost. I took a deep breath, wrote a cheque for eighteen thousand dollars and the albums belonged to Gem. I subsequently recouped this when Gem licensed them to RCA as part of the deal for future Bowie product.
When he returned to London, David continued to write material for the album that would be Hunky Dory. The American trip definitely got his creative juices flowing and I thought that the material that he was writing for this album was just terrific. I particularly liked ‘Changes’, ‘Life On Mars’ and ‘Kooks’, the song he had written for his new baby son.
In June 1971, Defries and I agreed that we would make David’s next record without record company finance. Obviously, this was a great risk for Gem, but this would enable us to make a beneficial new deal if the record was great when completed. David wanted Ken Scott, a well-respected recording engineer, to help him co-produce the album. I was a little nervous about this because, whilst Ken had engineered for The Beatles, Elton John and many others, he had not actually sat in the booth as a producer.
I will
overcome my desire to bang on about Bowie not being an artist in demand at this time, but you must permit me to occasionally do so. The golden rule in business is ‘he who provides the gold makes the rules.’ Whilst I never berated Defries or David about my increasing financial exposure, they were very aware and appreciative of the artistic freedom that I allowed them. I had seen the magic that great producers like Mickie Most, Tony Macaulay and Mike Leander brought to a recording, but they were producing pop acts who did not write their own songs and were totally reliant on the taste of their producers to pick likely hits written by others. Bowie was an artist with a distinct view of how the songs that he wrote should be recorded. Tony Visconti would not return whilst Defries was around, so I agreed that Ken could co-produce with David. Ken has subsequently admitted that he was very nervous about stepping up from engineer to producer and that both he and David were both unsure that they could do the job, but the more they worked together, the more confident they became that they had done the right thing. They recorded at Trident Studios in Soho, the most in-demand studio in town because it was one of the few with an eight-track desk.
My relationship with David was very comfortable. We would chat about his business life, but I never attempted to socialise with him. I would not have felt at ease hanging out with the habitués of El Sombrero (a gay-friendly club called Yours Or Mine in Kensington High Street which had a sombrero above the door) or participating in the smorgasbord of drugs that were freely available. I did go to his flat in Bromley. He was very involved in the local arts scene and had starred in the Arts Lab at the nearby Beckenham Recreation Ground – a mini-Glastonbury of its time. Bowie’s home reflected his interest in music and art. He and Angie had no money to spend on decor but it was furnished in a very quirky and eclectic style. They lived in the huge ground-floor flat of Haddon Hall, a large Victorian villa. Until their professional split, Tony Visconti and his girlfriend shared the flat with the Bowies. In later years, when Visconti was in partnership with my brother in Good Earth, he told Roger that both he and his girlfriend were terrified by the bewildering array of bedfellows that David and Angie invited to Haddon Hall. Gender seemed to have little to do with who did what to whom.
Hunky Dory (Who Knew) Page 15